Friday night was quite the letdown.
I met up with some high-school friends from Alabama at an all-night diner. I'd hardly seen any of them in the last few years, but now they're all finishing engineering degrees.
For the most part I'm happy for them, but I found myself shocked by some of their politics.
These kids aren't idiots - they obviously took harder maths than me, right?
Still, they were wrong about a lot of things. I don't mean they saw things differently; I mean the evidence they cited was flawed.
For example, they oppose universal healthcare on the grounds that it lowers the quality of treatment everywhere it's implemented, and especially in feckless France.
But in 2002, nearly twice as many people died of treatable illnesses in the United States as did in France.
Also performing better than the States were Canada, Britain, Scandinavia - the bogeymen of socialized healthcare. This from the January/February issue of Health Affairs.
Of course, the engineers at the diner argued healthcare in the United States is fine, provided you can afford it - and if you can't, that's probably your fault anyway. Yes, someone really did use the words "survival of the fittest" here.
Now, I contend that a poor man's life is more important than a rich man's wallet, no matter who works harder.
But even if we ignore the complex reality that poverty isn't exclusively a failure to capitalize on opportunity, the fact remains that such opportunities are shrinking, according to data aggregated in the New York Times' series "Class Matters."
Further, anecdotally, a good friend of mine is uninsured. The daughter of drug addicts, in college on student loans while working, I knock on wood just writing about her because until she graduates she simply can't afford to be diagnosed with much more than indigestion.
In other words, survival of the richest punishes all those still struggling to get there, and that is un-American and unacceptable.
Still, the guys I went to high school with argued capitalism is the ideal system, even when the chips in play are human lives. One said it's "worked the best so far."
Define "worked the best," friend!
Before civilization, our ancestors worked only a few hours a day, and lived that way for aeons without ever once bringing Earth to the brink of ecological collapse.
But oops, there again is a sticking point - after all, the guys argued, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.
Mankind isn't to blame for global warming, they continued, and even if the temperature is increasing it's too late to change anything.
Never mind that the United Nations says global warming not is not only "unequivocal" but "very likely" caused by humans.
In fact, even the Bush administration has acknowledged its reality, after an entire first term of procrastination veiled as skepticism.
Bush, the guys argued, is a tool.
Finally, we agreed on something!
Still though, I think it says something about a person's politics when George W. Bush holds a view that's ahead of theirs on the curve.
Anyway, even if we throw out my argument that our species is bound for unimaginable catastrophe within our lifetimes depending on our actions, civilization is still a mistake.
This is because our entire culture is predicated on chasing the carrot on a stick known as profit, and profit is purely illusionary.
Profit occurs when someone selling something externalizes a production cost.
To borrow from the short film "The Story of Stuff," which you can watch online for free, an example of an externalized cost is workers who, with no other option, go to work in factories full of toxic chemicals.
Of course it would cost the company to protect workers from these chemicals, but it doesn't matter - They externalize the cost instead.
That is, the harmful consequences these workers suffer from dealing with such chemicals becomes their own problem, so consumers can enjoy a cheaper product.
Another example occurs when the factory is outsourced overseas, so those toxic chemicals can ravage someone else's ecosystem, and thus externalize that cost as well.
Those clowns I graduated with were the ones to point out that profit essentially can't happen unless someone down the line is shortchanged.
Maybe they're OK with that, but I'd hardly say it's what works best.
Anyway, the evening ended with me writing down my e-mail address so one of them could send me proof of WMDs in Iraq.
He hasn't written yet.
Daniel Potter is a senior journalism and Spanish major.
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