There are a lot of things about the way Japanese people are brought up that bother me. My husband is Japanese, and I told him that while I would love for our kids to live there for a while to learn the language and all that, I can’t really stomach the idea of sending them to public school. Sure, they would learn a lot, but I fear it would suck the souls right out of them. That is possibly hyperbole.

I’m not sure that the bureaucracy itself in Japan bothered me so much; it was more the way everyone was brought up to think like a bureaucrat that was the problem.

The bureaucracy in Japan did not bother me very much, although probably because I didn’t have to deal with it all that much. I’m not so foolish (probably) as to think that we’re ever going to live in some magical world where there are no bureaucrats at all. The unthinking and self-replicating nature of bureaucracy, though, is concerning. How are people not concerned about it?

Noam Chomsky once wrote a kind of Pascal’s wager for freedom: believing that people want to be free costs you nothing and allows you to act in such a way as to promote human freedom, but not believing encourages you to act in a way that ultimately promotes tyranny. So, I try to believe. But I’m not really good at this faith thing.

…which they do by, like, lionizing Joyce Carol [expletive deleted] Oates (just to pick a long-time un-fave of mine out of the air) and stuff? Yeah. Of course. I wish mass taste favored different authors, too, but my passing social acquaintance with publishers gives me no confidence that they’d do better than the market.

Speaking of the market….

Julie:
“When you open a business doing something you’re not really good at, and word gets around not to ever buy flowers from that crappy florist who does not know the name of the secretary of agriculture, isn’t that called ‘the market’ or something like that? It seems to me I’ve heard that term used…? Or perhaps it was something like ‘freedom’…?”

I know what you are: one of them ANARCHISTS. Today, you think it’s okay to be a florist without knowing who the state secretary of agriculture is. Tomorrow, what’s it going to be—support for the unlicensed dreadlock-braiders Virginia Postrel profiled in The Future and Its Enemies? Championing the defunding of AmTrak? I mean, really, there’s a slippery slope here, and at the bottom is fewer jobs for bureaucrats. You don’t want to start slidin’ in that direction, do you?

I get the impression that Sarah similarly does not have sympathy for the editors’ sense of superiority. Comments like hers could cause serious damage to what are undoutedly very overinflated egos. They may rupture altogether.

When you open a business doing something you’re not really good at, and word gets around not to ever buy flowers from that crappy florist who does not know the name of the secretary of agriculture, isn’t that called “the market” or something like that? It seems to me I’ve heard that term used…? Or perhaps it was something like “freedom”…?

Uh oh. I’ll shut up now.