Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

—“Democracy is stable if and only if it is less costly than violent conflict, to those capable of winning a violent conflict.

But high time preference people discount the future cost of their present demands.

Even if they WANTED to preserve democracy and its boons for themselves by limiting their rapacity (that is, if they understood what is at stake and why) they would still lack the perspective necessary to know how much.

Violence is the only way to provide that, the only way to communicate that.

If they demand death and destruction, we simply prefer to supply it now, rather than later.

That way, they may get what they desire, and we may get what we desire – to go back about our business unmolested.

Win-win.”— Eli Harman

Well you know I don’t think reducing relative equality of material condition is a bad thing. I think that doing it by command at the point of a gun, whether by one tyrant, a tyrannical oligarchy, or a majority tyranny, makes no difference. Most of us will prefer it if we obtain behavioral payment in exchanges, so that our commons both physical and human improves. If one cannot produce in the commercial economy that does not mean one cannot produce in the normative, economy of behavior, nor in the production of commons – which is almost entirely one of casual daily maintenance and care. The Russians didn’t get it all wrong you know. The build a good commons economy with the working and underclass, just like we built a good commercial economy with the working and middle and upper middle classes. But monopoly of economic models makes no more sense than a monopoly provision of commons by majority rule. There is no reason we cannot have commercial, commons, and normative economies, each operating with different members and different methods of compensation. Becuase the normative, common, and commercial all depend upon each other.