Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

Politics is just a proxy for war. Markets are superior to political orders because they calculate maximum mutual by reciprocity. The problem as in all things, is producing limits. Capitalism and socialism are both unlimited by reciprocity. Only rule of law of reciprocity produces markets that discover the balance between private and commons. We fuss and fume over capitalism vs socialism, or authoritarianism vs anarchism, but the only underlying difference is rule of law and reciprocity vs rule by discretion and reciprocity. *For, the only purpose of discretion is, and can be, to violate reciprocity*. And the problem heretofore has been the means of limiting markets by the measurement of capital in toto that changes. Why? Because humans evolved in a world that easily equilibrated their consumptions within the band or tribe – because they could only externalize costs onto the natural world. But at current scale, when we cooperate via host of proxies, we can and do largely externalize against others whether kin, polity, nation, competitors, or man. And man retaliates differently and more immediately from nature against those impositions. So politics is quite simple under meritocracy, and politics is quite complicated under irreciprocity. Under rule of law of reciprocity, markets that result from that rule of law (both private and common) are quite transparent, simple and explicable. Under the irreciprocity of politics and rule by discretion, the results of that discretion (and deception) is not transparent, complicated, and largely inexplicable. The principle problem in achieving reciprocity and transparency is the percentage of your population that can survive competition in the market. If a group cannot survive competition in the market because it has too many members that cannot compete in the market, then political discretion, corruption, and irreciprocity evolve out of the necessity of survival. Ergo the only possible means of producing reciprocity is to prevent the expansion and produce the contraction of those individuals that cannot compete in the market given present technology, resources, and competitors. And in doing so prevent the emergence of a body of elites that employ discretionary rule. This brief passage explains almost all of politics. The british system and the current scandinavian was possible because of such aggressive culling of the underclasses, and the economic dependence upon the militia for both offense and defense. The british model preserved tripartism (clergy, nobility, businessmen-farmers ), and thereby produced a government that funcitoned as a market between the ‘able’ classes (aristocracy, nobility, managers of production, and the church (women and underclasses).) The enlightenment seizure and creating of a monopoly rather than preservation of the market between the classes was made possible by the disproportionate returns on the empirical revolution’s increases in productivity. Yet that marginal increase in productivity which allowed for great concentration of wealth has increasingly dissipated due to the anglo-american and less-so european distribution and enforcement of consumer capitalism (markets). Yet most societies have returned to monopoly government rather than market, because of asymmetries in populations and the utility of concentrating capital in the state as a means of projecting military power by which market advantages are gained. This is all there is to politics. There is very little other to be understood. Everything else is just negotiating position using some sort of fiction.