Intense anxiety from tobacco residues.

2:58 PM 3/18/2013

I’ve been doing something that I tend to do while manic, but not at other times: I’m thinking about economics. I was trying to recall Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage last night, but couldn’t remember the name, although obviously I managed to find it online today. It demonstrates why division and specialization of labor produces more than self-sufficiency does.

I’m reading about this now and I saw something else, the law of rent. Something caught my attention just now:

“In contrast to Malthus’s hypothesis of overpopulation, Ricardo explains mass poverty using deductive logic by noting that when there is no rent-free land, subsistence becomes the effective margin of production. Landlords will not charge more than this amount because it would entail no production at all, and thus no rent.”

I’m struggling to understand this. It seems to explain why we are living in a near-subsistence economy, why wages are relatively lower and lower, why everyone can barely afford to live. I can understand the first sentence, but I don’t quite understand the second one.

When there is no rent-free land…. when we live in a local area where every inch of land is already taken… when people, for whatever reason, are reluctant or unwilling to move into the woods as I am doing… when it’s illegal to do so…

Subsistence becomes the effective margin of production. Subsistence is what we would do on the rent-free land. Not quite. We could still do coal mining or agriculture for profit on the rent free land. ? More than this amount? What amount? Charge whom? I would need to write this on paper so I could see the diagram, but for various reasons can’t concentrate well enough to grasp it right now. I know what the word ‘marginal’ means, though.

Margin of production: subsistence. What if it were higher than that? There’s a rent-free spot of land where I could grow crops under the tree canopy. I would produce more than I need, so I have a surplus, so it’s not subsistence. Darn it, and I can’t think right now, and I won’t be interested in thinking about it later on, and I’ll forget about it without ever understanding it. I want to understand this, but can’t focus completely when I’m not alone.

I will have to think about it later. I am very restless and distracted right now and even though my friend is going out on an errand I still feel like I can’t focus. I am having a lot of anxiety. I have a recurring problem: secondhand tobacco residue. It’s causing me to have a lot of anxiety when I am with him. This is going to be a permanent, continuing, recurring problem in the future, and I don’t know what to do about it. I cannot see this person without hugging him, but touching him causes a tobacco residue exposure, which triggers intense and ever-increasing anxiety and irritation. And I know for sure it’s the tobacco residue, because it instantly went away last time when I took a shower. He rolls his own cigarettes, and touches the tobacco directly with his hands, so it’s all over him and his belongings, even though he goes outside to smoke and I’m not getting the smoke directly. It’s not the same as it was when I visited Curtis and his girlfriend and I sat in their apartment getting covered with everybody’s smoke for hours and hours and getting it into my hair – it’s not that bad. But I can clearly and definitely feel it. And I can’t tell him, ‘Go away, don’t touch me, stay away from me, leave me alone forever.’ I like him too much. I also can’t tell him he must stop smoking and stop handling tobacco because of my sensitivity to his nicotine residues all over his body and his clothing. Being around him means that I will, once again, experience perpetual, endless contamination.