Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • CONDI? Really? Please yes. That would make it interesting. I’d vote for her rega

    CONDI?

    Really? Please yes. That would make it interesting.

    I’d vote for her regardless of ticket.

    She’s amazing. And she loves football too. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-12 21:17:00 UTC

  • is no “we” in USA. The USA is not a superpower country it is an empire in declin

    http://www.gallup.com/poll/155585/americans-confidence-television-news-drops-new-low.aspxThere is no “we” in USA.

    The USA is not a superpower country it is an empire in decline.

    These numbers as well as the loss of confidence in the government are reflections of the loss of common purpose, and the insufficiency of shared reality.

    There is no “we”.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-10 18:07:00 UTC

  • Political Strategy: What Is Being Done To Prevent The Development Of A “cold War” Between China And The Us In The Coming Years?

    The USA is attempting to allow China to peacefully rise by use of commercial power rather than military power. Commerce creates consumption which addicts citizens to consumerism, which then makes it difficult for governments to jeopardize without insurrection.  That is the only strategy. The USA prefers the world consist of good commercial citizens.

    The fundamental problem though, is that China is a populous and very poor country that also contains conquered and rebellious territories, open to insurrection, and the wealthy coasts can be militarily devastated, and driven to starvation by blockading access to the South China Sea. The Chinese are quite aware of this vulnerability, plus they have a ‘chip’ on their shoulders from both british conquest, the failure of Marxism, and extended poverty, and the impact of those events upon the cultural mythology of Chinese superiority as the center of the world.

    Furthermore, their rise is complicated by the fact that they do not subscribe to the western moral code that currently is enforced by the United States on world trade — a code we take for granted but is antithetical to the Chinese.  (We resolve conflicts quickly and rely upon honesty and they wait for opportunity using deception. This difference in ethics pervades both cultures.)

    The USA currently polices the world system of trade (largely the seas) because it took over the British naval bases at the end of the world wars. And petrodollars allow us to fund that policing. We sell dollars to other countries as debt, which they then use to buy oil, and then we inflate away the debt. This is how we ‘tax’ the developed world for our expensive military services. 

    However, this system of abstract taxation which is breaking down, and the USA can no longer count on those advantages because of demographic reasons, competitive reasons due to internationalization of labor and technology, and monetary reasons due to the use of other currencies as petroleum and reserve currencies. 

    General consensus among strategic thinkers is that the USA’s power will decline slowly and that Chinese rise will be moderated at some near point by simple economic pressures.  The more radical thinkers suggest that most empires like the USA do not decline slowly, but very rapidly over a period of less than 50 years, and that the standard of living of the average american will be so significantly affected by the loss in purchasing power, that existing political tensions will be drastically exacerbated, sufficiently so that we will have our own problems of insurrection.

    In other words, both countries are more vulnerable to internal pressures due to China’s rise than they are to conflict with one another.  The alternative school of thought suggests that when empires succumb to internal conflict, then they exaggerate external threats in order to pressure the citizens to stay united (see Iran for example).  So that once the states and china experience internal pressures they will conduct a war over it.  I tend to think this is unlikely because the USA’s citizens will have internalized it’s decline by that time.

    As I understand it, that is the current thinking in as short a summary as I can place it.

    https://www.quora.com/Political-Strategy-What-is-being-done-to-prevent-the-development-of-a-cold-war-between-China-and-the-US-in-the-coming-years

  • How Corrupt Is The U.s. Government?

    Government by it’s nature, because it is a monopoly, and concentrates capital, draws corruption.  In the USA, corruption tends to be systemic rather than individual. Meaning that the system encourages politicians to work for special interests, and government workers to collect extraordinary benefits – on avearage have retirement benefits equivalent to something like 750K in savings, compared to 50K for the average citizen — plus they cannot be fired and unlike the rest of us are insulated from market pressures.  Monetary corruption, meaning, the privatization of public funds or goods, in exchange for favors, is actually amazingly rare in the USA.  Almost all of it is systemic.

    Americans are somewhat unique in their belief that it is possible to construct virtuous politicians and insert them into a system that encourages systemic corruption. We attempt to change the human to fit the system, rather than change the system to fit human nature.

    https://www.quora.com/How-corrupt-is-the-U-S-Government

  • Do Machiavellian Philosophies Carry Over Into The Modern World?

    You’d need to define what you mean by Machiavellian tactics.  Machiavelli was the first political scientist after Aristotle, and arguably the father of politics as a scientific endeavor.  He entreated rulers to move away from ancient traditions, religious or abstract moral principles, to material, logical, evidence based, principles necessary for the state to persist in the interests of its citizens. At the time of his writing, trade was moving north, and the principalities were being both threatened externally and undermined from within. 

    In this sense, almost all political action in the contemporary world is Machiavellian.

    So if you mean some other sense, then state it, and I’ll try to answer.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-Machiavellian-philosophies-carry-over-into-the-modern-world

  • How Corrupt Is The U.s. Government?

    Government by it’s nature, because it is a monopoly, and concentrates capital, draws corruption.  In the USA, corruption tends to be systemic rather than individual. Meaning that the system encourages politicians to work for special interests, and government workers to collect extraordinary benefits – on avearage have retirement benefits equivalent to something like 750K in savings, compared to 50K for the average citizen — plus they cannot be fired and unlike the rest of us are insulated from market pressures.  Monetary corruption, meaning, the privatization of public funds or goods, in exchange for favors, is actually amazingly rare in the USA.  Almost all of it is systemic.

    Americans are somewhat unique in their belief that it is possible to construct virtuous politicians and insert them into a system that encourages systemic corruption. We attempt to change the human to fit the system, rather than change the system to fit human nature.

    https://www.quora.com/How-corrupt-is-the-U-S-Government

  • Do Machiavellian Philosophies Carry Over Into The Modern World?

    You’d need to define what you mean by Machiavellian tactics.  Machiavelli was the first political scientist after Aristotle, and arguably the father of politics as a scientific endeavor.  He entreated rulers to move away from ancient traditions, religious or abstract moral principles, to material, logical, evidence based, principles necessary for the state to persist in the interests of its citizens. At the time of his writing, trade was moving north, and the principalities were being both threatened externally and undermined from within. 

    In this sense, almost all political action in the contemporary world is Machiavellian.

    So if you mean some other sense, then state it, and I’ll try to answer.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-Machiavellian-philosophies-carry-over-into-the-modern-world

  • Is Democracy A Viable System For Everyone?

    Democracy is, at best, a means of peacefully transferring power. If you mean, can representative democracy (a republic) or even a direct democracy (versus an economic democracy), serve the interests of everyone, the answer is apparently “no” for the following reasons.
    a) Majority rule is a means by which a group with similar moral codes and material interests can set PRIORITIES for the use of scarce resources.  It is not possible to use majority rule for groups with competing moral codes and competing material interests to resolve conflicts over GOALS.  Democracy is a means of obtaining majority rule.
    b) the lower, working and lower middle classes are and will always be, the largest pool of potential voters.  Therefore elites with a variety of interests will simply compete for their votes.
    c) the protestant west was unique in that the church managed to break familial bonds by the long term prohibition of intermarriage, and by granting women property rights. Combined with germanic individualism, and the common law, this made possible the fairly low level of corruption in the west, that is endemic elsewhere.  It also gave rise the the universalist ethic, which is contrary to the natural familial and tribal ethic. This is a very long topic on it’s own, but basically the west is fairly unique.  China and India cannot solve the problem of corruption for example from different ends of the spectrum. India remains familial and china authoritarian.
    d) We have fairly good data now, that moral codes vary considerably, and that they are slanted toward the reproductive strategies of the two genders.  Therefore those things that serve one moral code often violate another.  Those things that violate some moral codes (famlilialism) are necessary for democracy to function.
    e) it appears that the philosophers were right, and that a population that can vote itself payments from others will create a fragile economy.  This is a particular weakness of the western model versus say the Singaporean and Galveston models, whereby individual accountability is maintained.
    f) there are dominant cognitive biases on the left and right. the left is victim of the false consensus bias, and the right overestimates threats and risks, and the libertarians overestimate human beings.  These cognitive problems are impossible to resolve by majority rule.

    I have to rush so hopefully this brief outline will illustrate the problem.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-Democracy-a-viable-system-for-everyone

  • What Are The Most In-depth Geopolitical Intelligence Websites?

    The best site, hands down, is STRATFOR. It’s worth the subscription.
    Between STRATFOR, Foreign Policy and the Economist, you’ll get the in-depth understanding.  To go for more granularity you have to pretty much subscribe to the think tanks in each country.  That actually who does most of the talking internationally. Especially between the USA and Asia.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-in-depth-geopolitical-intelligence-websites

  • What Should Be The Rank-ordered Budget Priorities Of The U.s. Federal Government?

    (I agree with Stephan Kinsella’s answer to What should be the rank-ordered budget priorities of the U.S. Federal Government?. But I’m going to try to answer the question so that it’s possible to provide some insight.)

    Let’s look at this scientifically.

    I. The federal government, as constructed, has no vehicle for prioritization, or considering prioritization. So the federal government cannot prioritize expenses. Parliamentary government is constructed as a tactical organization with limits on it’s power, not a strategic one that must prioritize its actions. In theory an executive branch should establish such priorities, and does, but it does so in order to establish a legacy for the executive, rather than to cautiously administer the ‘trust fund’ that is the country. Instead, parliamentary organizations are vehicles for interest groups to request special claims which can then be forcibly extracted from others by means of complex involuntary transfers.

    II. We can observe what governments do when they are forced to prioritize, and when we make that observation, we find that all governments do the following:
    • a) prevent insurrection
    • b) protect their jobs
    • c) maintain the capacity for extracting income from citizens.
    • d) maintain the capacity for accumulating debt.
    They then threaten or improve those things voters care about (police, emergency, fire, school and libraries) or things voters need (roads, power, and sewer) which are operational, in while capturing as much revenue as they can for ideological programs, favored special interests, and additional personal income capture.

    III. Given what parliamentary governments actually do as tactical organizations, it’s not rational to discuss what priorities they should follow. We did not construct government in order to achieve priorities. Instead, we should discuss, what a government that followed priorities would look like, and how it would run, and how those decisions would be made.

    IV. If such a government could be constructed, and if it could survive attempts to circumvent it, then I suspect that the following would be the priority scheme that would be ‘best’ if we assume ‘best’ is something other than arbitrary. In the ase below, ‘best’ means, delivering the prosperity necessary for people to have choices, with the minimum cheating, corruption and rent seeking.
    1. Define a set of property rights (all human rights can be articulated as property rights.)
    2. Establish a geography within which those rights apply.
    3. Establish a judiciary for the resolution of differences according to the property rights.
    4. Establish registries for property (titles to anything and everything).
    5. Establish military, police, and other emergency service services to secure those rights.
    6. Establish and maintain commercial infrastructure.
    7. Establish an educational infrastructure.
    8. Given sufficient income produced from establishing commercial and educational infrastructure, allocate gains to the preferences of the people. (monuments, parks, social programs, etc.)

    In periods of duress, work backward from the end of the list to the top, cutting services such that the public is informed as to the importance of those priorities.

    https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-rank-ordered-budget-priorities-of-the-U-S-Federal-Government