I sit here typing, and on my body I have some nice wool pants with a hounds-tooth pattern, a charcoal gray sports jacket, and in my pockets various possessions, including my ever present Iphone, that I would prefer to keep. If someone challenged me on whether I “owned” these things, I would be hard pressed to prove it. I did not keep the receipts. Luckily, that is unlikely to happen.

I also own other things that I want to keep that don’t fit into my pockets or on my body. The biggest is a condominium in Brooklyn, which, through novel legal arrangements, actually traces its roots down into the ground so that I legally own the apartment free and clear (minus the huge bank loan), as opposed to a co-op apartment in the Big Apple, where one owns a share of the entire building. If someone challenged me as to whether I actually owned my apartment, I could produce a deed (I  think) and that would show I owned it.

How? Because that deed is registered with the City of New York, which maintains a special registry for such things. These deeds are open to all to see. Curiously, if a property deed is private, there is no proof of ownership. Private property is by definition a public thing.

I go into all this because I come to the Ninth and most final and most important reason in my ongoing series Nine Reasons The Free Market is a False Concept. Property. It is not a simple subject.

I think there is a tendency, before some looking into the subject, to view property as a relatively simple thing, that can be created with an on/off switch. Let There Be Property. You own something or you don’t. But actually there are many different ways to own something, and this is particularly true with land.

In the end, property is whatever the state says it is, and with land, different states, i.e. types of government, have created many different methods of what the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and others called “land tenure.” Owning inanimate objects, like a corporation, throws you into another set of choices.

In my book The Surprising Design of Market Economies, I go into the development of property over history. Owning land in particular has been like a slowly simmering soup that has taken centuries to mature and evolve. There have been ways of tying people to land, but what we think of as a modern method of ownership is relatively new.

One thing that had to develop was standard systems of measurement. Owning something from this tree to that lake gets kind of vague, and it becomes hard to sell something that vague, particularly in what we view as a market. To have a market in land, you need very precise systems of measurement, and you needed them to universal, or at least standard within one country. This took a lot of time. Part of the adaption by Europe of the metric system in the late 18^th century was an effort to create more tradable property. The United States Congress, in its first few decades, went through a lot of effort to create common systems of measurement, which involved an obsessive appointee figuring out what exactly a yard was, and who then distributed exact, precision made versions of this to the various states so copies can be made. The great book, Measuring America by the late Andro Linklater is a text I quote frequently.

The point in all this is that there can be no markets, no capitalism as we think of, without property. And to have property, you need a state. So we should end the long conceptual divide between government and capitalism, which I wrote about here in Bloomberg View, and accept that governments make markets. And then start the public conversation about how to make them better.

As David Carr said so well in this essay a few weeks ago, television is now the opposite of a wasteland. It is instead a lovely Olmstedian park, filled with glorious wonders, shady reclines and scary but usually not too harmful caves and dark forests. It is a Golden Age, basically, for television.

In exploring this Golden Age, Carr and others usually focus on a few shows that are almost invariably “edgy.” They include the late, great The Wire, of which I am a bigger fan than anyone I wager, to lesser but still artfully done shows like Homeland, Justified, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and so on.

I’m as big a fan of naked women as anyone (I’m not a fan of graphic violence, but I’ll leave that point aside for now.) But even conceding the appeal of boobs and butts, dialogue that includes profanity and edgy subject matter, how about a shout out for the great shows on television now that are not edgy, that are not pushing boundaries, at least not in such obvious ways?

Two shows that I have been enjoying are ABC’s The Goldbergs and NBC’s Growing up Fisher. Both are mainstream network shows, so they have a greater challenge being good. They have to appeal to more people. They are family comedies. But despite these burdens, both are really good. They have appealing characters. The Goldbergs is about a big Jewish family in the 1980s, although so far their Jewishness is never mentioned. Growing up Fisher is about a family that includes a blind father, who is gutsy and fearless.

One reason I like the two shows no doubt is that both have a journalistic flavor to them. Both are essentially memoirs, because they are based on the writer/producer’s actual history. This makes it easier for them to explore real social forces and situations. (In the case of Growing up Fisher, the show is set in contemporary times – a mistake in my opinion. It doesn’t square with the show being narrated by the grown-up voice of the kid in the show.)

Enjoying these shows prompted me to think that Wholesome is the New Black. Meaning, perhaps the edgiest thing to do nowadays is not to be edgy. To explore that great middle ground, and to do so with skill.

Both shows have their faults. Interestingly, both fail in my opinion in attempting here and there to be edgy, mostly in matters sexual. Both shows feature a 11 to 12 year old boy as a central character. In both of these shows, the boy is often obsessed with the opposite sex. This provides an opportunity to get into various situations. This bugs me, because boys of that age are not obsessively into girls. They are not obsessing about boobs and butts, which is how both shows occasionally depict their protagonists. Give them two more years. I bet the shows do this because they think it will help them loop in a demographic that is sex obsessed. This may be true, but I don’t like it because it makes the shows false.

But that flaw aside, both shows are really good and worth watching. And both are evidence that today, Wholesome is the New Black.

Okay, here’s number eight in my ongoing series, Nine Reasons Why The Free Market is a False Concept. Reason number eight is Water, and all it represents, which includes public works or infrastructure. If you keep reading, you’ll hear me say what it means to “define infrastructure upwards.”

Imagine yourself in New York City in 1835, the largest and most prosperous city in the country. But if you want a drink of water, you buy it, if you are rich, from a “tea man,” who fills your container from a barrel of water he ports around on the street. You probably don’t risk using a decrepit private water system of hollow logs under the streets. Most people use one of the few public wells, which are polluted, or draw water directly from a dirty stream or pond. There are no sewers, so when you use the toilet, your waste goes into the ground where it blends with the water you will later drink. Devastating epidemics happen every few years.

New York City opened its public water system in 1842. It was a big effing deal. The polity had debated building one for a half century. As today with health care, it was a long and rancorous debate and tortured history. This history includes the fact that in the late 1790s Aaron Burr, before he became vice-president and before shooting Alexander Hamilton, had derailed a previous attempt by the state legislature to create a public water system. Burr got the legislature to grant him a franchise to create a private water system. It was not a very good system even for the rich, because Burr spent most of his energy using a small clause in the bill to create a bank, The Manhattan Company. It is one of the forefathers of Chase Manhattan Bank. When the city and state legislature tried to create a public water system, it was more difficult because it meant buying Aaron Burr’s heirs and partners out. Building the 1842 system from the Croton Reservoir meant constructing an aqueduct the Romans would have envied, including the arched High Bridge. But despite all the difficulties, when the system opened it was an immediate success and the arguments against it dropped away.

Why? Because not only was the city a better place to live, it was a better place to do business. It’s easier to shop or sign a contract if you aren’t as worried about catching typhoid or cholera. The public water system gave New York City a business advantage. Soon, every city had one. Although some were run by private companies, they all followed the principal of clean water for all.

Those who argue that government is some sort of parasite on the healthy body of the market should recognize more the role of government in building what used to be called “public works.” Water, sewers, roads and more are the physical infrastructure that economic actors depend on. That we take it mostly for granted shows it works really well.

Coincidentally, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff today discussed the role of public services in making a nation more prosperous. It was in the context of The United States ranking relatively low in many quality of life issues, which in turn he said hurt the nation’s business environment.

The history of water shows how we move from private to public. I believe our nation has progressed by converting more and more private responsibilities to public responsibilities. And that this holds true around the world. Society progresses, to mangle an axiom from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by defining infrastructure upward.

To repeat myself from post number seven, Adolph Wagner got it wrong. The bigger an economy is, the more complex it is, and the more state spending it requires on all types of “infrastructure” to keep it functioning. It’s not an economy that supports infrastructure (meaning schools, roads, water systems, social security, fire protection, libraries, courts and so on); it’s infrastructure that supports an economy. Over time, we have progressed by converting more and more private responsibilities to public ones. This is turn allows the private sector to become more complex in a virtuous circle.

Generally speaking, the larger the economy on a median or per capita basis, the larger percentage of the economy government has. Today even a parsimonious country like the United States has in modern times spent about 35 to 40 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on state, local and federal government. Before World War I, it was in single digits, in percentage terms. Other countries have gone through similar evolutions.

From my ongoing series. 

Having hundred or thousands of uniformed men (mostly men), ready to stamp out crime or unruly behavior, makes it easy not to know or remember that this is a relatively recent thing. London, under minister Robert Peele, invented the first professional metropolitan police force in the 1820s. These men became known as “Bobbies,” a reference to the first name of their creator. New York City followed suit in the 1840s and 1850s, but not without debate. Badged, uniformed men walking among the citizens were seen as a thread to its status as a citizen’s republic, and at least once the police force was created and then disbanded. During one incarnation the men wore only badges, not uniform. Read more in Chapter 15, Police and Prisons, in my book The Surprising Design of Market Economies.

Before that time, cities generally had only night watchmen, who might occasionally stroll but often just stood in one place and shouted out the hour. Having a permanent, quasi military force on the lookout for wrong doers was a big step, and one with a dark side. Civil unrest and public protests became much more difficult with an ever present police force, as New Yorkers learned during labor demonstrations in the 1870s, and more recently during the Republican National Convention here under Mayor Bloomberg.

Could you have a contemporary market economy without police protection? Maybe, but it would be much more difficult.

That we generally take for granted police protection leads me to discuss Adolph Wagner was wrong in what has come to be known as Wagner’s law. Wagner said that at societies get richer, they tend to spend for more public services for themselves. This leaves out that the relationship also works the other way around. Societies spend more on public services, which makes it possible for them to grow richer. Public investments in schooling, public water and sewer and a police force make possible a more complex economy. New York City found this out in 1841, when its first public water system opened up. A city where you have little risk of dying of cholera is a much better place to do business. You can read more about Wagner’s Law and why it’s mistaken in my book, just out in paperback, The Surprising Design of Market Economies.