At 5 pm Friday I found myself in a hotel room watching the latest he-man program to be offered up by The Discovery Channel, something called Gold Rush. The urge to reach through the flatscreen TV and strangle the grizzled mountains of human flesh neutering vast pristine Alaskan landscapes with flat-track backhoes was overwhelming. Instead, I started typing furiously 650 words that I’m now rewriting in case a serial killer targeting land-raping Alaska gold miners emerges and I become a prime suspect. That’s about how upsetting this profoundly stupid series is. Even more upsetting is knowing this program is enjoyed by enough folks to turn a profit for the criminally negligent clowns producing it, no doubt under the firm conviction their audience, and the cast, have the collective IQ of an algae bloom.

The episode I watched opened with some 17-year-old kid named Parker— yes, 17—disemboweling a lush Alaska mountainside in search of an extra 50-ounces of gold that will put “Grampa’s mine” on a paying basis. Some federal agent, belly engulfing his belt buckle, shows up and finds more safety violations than an OSHA inspector training school instructor on exam day. The inspector is almost apologetic when Grampa complains that he’s run the same mine without incident for 23 years. Nowhere in any of this nonsense emerges any talk about the environmental havoc being wreaked for a business that needs to extract another $30,000 to meet payroll. Can anyone doubt how Sarah Palin became governor of this place? The program jumps from Parker’s troubles to another barely break-even miner shut down by the same instructor cursing the job-killing regulations in this country with an American flag super-imposed in the background. I swear I am not making any of this up.

What I hope makes this story worth your time is the irony that found me in that hotel room watching Gold Rush. I had spent the past three days discussing marketing opportunities for a software program that allows one office manager do the work of three. While the software is putting tens of thousands of people to work designing, selling and installing this product, the end game in this industry is to dramatically reduce the ranks of office workers in this country. So I find myself in the unique position of cheering on an overweight government regulator putting miners out of work after three days cheering on software vendors putting office managers out of work, all in the middle of a crushing recession. How in the heck do I reconcile such sentiments and efforts with a general desire to wish the whole of humanity, profoundly destructive gold miners included, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Use of the constitutional clause here is no coincidence. It cuts right to the vision that NBN and a few other brave souls are starting to see for this country. How do we eliminate the tens of millions of jobs that exist solely through destruction of natural resource and/or operational inefficiency—think highway tollbooth collectors—while still guaranteeing U.S. citizens life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? We change the jobs and the hours spent working them, that’s how. Why not ask those gold miners to turn their attentions to mining the resources found in our landfills. How do we make it worth their while? By dramatically hiking the cost of making new plastic cups, glass bottles, metal containers and paper—think cap and trade and instituting an obscene federal gas tax. As far as the work-saving software is concerned, how about sharing the reduced work load among the staff that might otherwise be let go, with all working fewer hours?

Both provisions no-doubt mean that by some measures our standard of living will go down dramatically. But, more often than not those standards will be the sorts measured in miles-per-gallon, cubic feet, and calories. At the same time one standard of living will vastly improve: the amount of free time we have to pursue happiness. I’m not talking happiness al-la Engels, Marx and Mao. If happiness is spending your life working in order that you can sleep in a waterfront McMansion with jetskies and a swimming pool, our Constitution guarantees you that right and it’s a good thing. What the constitution should not guarantee is the pursuit of such luxuries to the exclusion of others, and as natural resources become increasingly scarce that’s inevitable.

Whether it’s through destroying mountainsides of lush Alaskan Wilderness for gold that’s measured in Dixie cups or subsidizing managerial jobs through the use of inefficient operational methods, both result in inflated living standards the planet can no longer sustain. That doesn’t mean you should be denied the right to work 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year in order to be spend the other two weeks in Disney World or Aspen. But with the population of the world growing rampantly is the idea of working 30 weeks a year and spending the remaining 20 weeks, hiking, playing with your children or random internet research in the name of science—think NBN—such a bad alternative? On the other hand, if we still want to waste our diminishing natural resources, NBN kind of likes the idea of being allowed to. However, the cost of doing so must go way up, in order to compensate those willing to not be so wasteful.

_~~~~~~~~~~~~~><((((((((()'>

_Sadly, these days it seems we all increasingly gravitate toward those we agree with, because it’s easier. So, my New Year’s resolution, along with the basement recycling center I’ve hardly started, is to spend more time with people I disagree with. If we’re going to unify our country that’s the only way it will happen. Politicians bribed by corporate interests really want U.S. voters to believe that the world is made of liberals and conservatives and never the twain shall meet. Those two forces met in the hallway of a small house in Massachusetts and hopefully both were better for the brief encounter. I know I was.