Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • The Dystopian Future Of Cities – Concrete And Rubble VS Star Trek

    As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the future of cities, which will even more dominantly influence the future culturally, morally, economically and politically. There is a healthy literature on it. And it’s quite the opposite future that the libertarians fantasized about. Writings on our Dystopian Future: The Feral Cities Paper http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/?tag=content;col1 (Local copy for reference)The Building Blog and Cities Under Siege http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/cities-under-siege.html The Books The Fires by Joe Flood Planet of Slums by Mike Davis Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham Urban Nightmares by Steve Macek The Unheavenly City by Banfield

    Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

    The future of the world is the south american model. It is quite different from the future envisioned by the Protestants, Libertarians and liberals. It certainly isn’t the orderly civility and sterility of star trek – as if the upper middle class ran the world rather than the proletariat.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”

    Be careful what you wish and plan for, if what you wish and plan for is counter to human nature. The approach to Natural Law combined with heroic aspiration is different from the myth of equality and heroic aspiration. We’re going to see the south american model.

  • Losing The Habit: We Will Not Return To The Consumer Economy.

    Loved this little paragraph today on “extend and pretend”. Although I can’t remember where I found it.

    The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent up demand in consumers would grow until it busted out and the recovery would be on – [a recovery] fueled by consumers. What has happened is the exact opposite. This is very serious. We are running into 3 years now, and 4 if you look at what commodity speculation did to consumers starting back in early 2007. …. And so the concern should be whether or not we have a permanent shift in consumer behaviors. Three or four years is plenty of time to break old habits and establish new ones.

    Three weeks and you can develop a new habit. Nine months and you can change your system of habits. Three years and you can forget what life was like in the past. In four years you can even forget a bad divorce, death or tragedy. The bonds that create an economy are perishables. People forget. They forget skills, relationships, ambitions, ways of thinking. They forget.

  • All Costs Are Opportunity Costs. Projections Do Not Include The Alternatives.

    This article by a local democratic group led me to this CBPP article, which is a response to a paper by the Heritage foundation.

    Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years

    Which is another example of pretending that the long-cycle view of the republicans, from the sixties through the previous administration is selfishness rather than a REACTION to the socialist policies and socialist social system that conservatives were fighting for the majority of the 20th century. It was the conservative perception that without reinvigorating business and in particular entrepreneurship, that the american quality of life would perish, as it had appeared to by the 1970’s. If you think the european model is better, go live there for a while. Life in europe is expensive, cramped, dirty and urban. People look, act, and feel poor by comparison. The pretty part of europe seen by tourists was built in prior centuries under the great monarchies. It has nothing to do with the post war model. European cities are vast rings of urban blight, Los Angeles style, around small downtown cores of ancient monarchical elegance. By and large, no matter what social class you live in, america has offered better opportunities to its citizens. People have more choices. Add to their costs the necessity of rearming, and that they have a social problem with muslims on the scale of our post-slavery problem with blacks, and they have tremendous future costs to bear for their model. So go live there. Really. For a while. Life in europe is expensive. An expensive life neutralizes many class status differences. And that’s really the point of those models. But that aside, what bothers me most about the CBBP analysis, regardless of the figures presented by the heritage foundation, is the belief that our country would not endure OTHER costs, often strategic costs, that are NOT expressed in the numbers, if republican policies were not undertaken. We have accomplished much of our ambitions with the wars, which is to neutralize Iraqi expansionism, and punish afghans for hoteling terrorists. that we continue to attempt to create democracies is an ideological problem. It would be cheaper to reduce pakistan and iranian capabilities as we have iraqi and afghani capabilities. But we will not do that because we feel that we must be ‘nice’ to people who attack us, rather than punish people who attack us. But unless we forecast the republican view of the future, which was one in which even worse outcomes existed for the USA’s budget, and in particular, energy costs and decreased entrepreneurship, and decreased competitiveness, The dirty secret underneath our lack of competitiveness is our education system. We are paying vast competitive costs by forcing education into the private sector, and producing inferior goods, because we do not teach disciplined excellence in schools as do the germans. We don’t teach it for political reasons. We’re dumbing down our citizens. And it’s that cost that republicans are trying to fight as well. So most of the forecasts based upon assumptions made by both sides are complete nonsense. All that said, I responded with: I have absolutely no idea how you are coming up with this chart, and what assumptions it’s based upon. But it’s correspondence with reality approaches zero. Our tax revenue problem is far deeper and far more structural than whatever assumptions you’re relying upon. These include the dollar, the world economy, structural unemployment, and demographic changes. Most importantly they involve the class and race issues involved with different occupational distributions, and the resulting difficulty in putting vast numbers of our population (in particular, males) into industries that are permanently lost to us. We have expanded enough of the bottom end of the labor force through immigration, that we cannot push down our existing labor force into less interesting, but certainly productive, jobs. No society can survive 20% of the male population living in frustration. This anxiety will be directed somewhere. The country, as both a domestic and international empire, is too insufficiently homogenous to permit higher taxation and redistribution. It is contrary to human nature. There is no evidence of it in history. There is no evidence of it in behavioral testing. The costs of conducting these poorly managed external wars do not account for the cost of not prosecuting them, which are not insubstantial, and perhaps greater. Our domestic political mythology is a conflict between the erroneous assumptions of the twentieth century, and the expired political technologies of the eighteenth century. Neither side is going to get their desired future. We are headed toward the south american model of class and racial segregation of urban centers and a powerless central government. This pattern is evident in immigration and emigration moving patterns, demographic changes, domestic trade, domestic cash movement, re-regionalization of identity, and a loss of confidence in both the government and the nation itself. Conservatives live in a fantasy that the colonial republic is possible to reinstitute. Liberals live in a fantasy of the homogenous egalitarian society. But democratic republican government cannot function at our current scale for the same reason socialism cannot function at scale – information and incentive problems. Even if politicians want to make good decisions, law and taxes are insufficient tools for doing so. Only credit and banking and provide sufficient granularity of management, and our state is not structured any longer to assist in building the economy, only in resolving conflicts between interest groups. Furthermore human beings do not, never have, and never will operate in an egalitarian fashion across status class and race boundaries because status is more liquid and valuable in-group than extra-group. And because epistemologically, human beings do not possess sufficient perception, information, and intelligence to operate as creatures without status signals to tell them which actions are good and bad for them, any more than they can cooperate in large numbers without pricing signals to tell them what actions are good and bad for them. I am sorry if this is to complex an analysis for a posting on tax and spending policy. But I am speaking to the false assumptions that underly the graph that you presented here. I would love to live in an egalitarian redistributive society. But to accomplish that goal, you will have to fragment the empire into regions, reduce the federal government to banking and military functions, return the legislative control to the localities, and allow the natural preference that people express to associate within race and class. And that is antithetical to the underclass fantasy – a fantasy which is more concerned with status than it is with money. But every society is composed of classes. Not just economic classes, but social classes, and ‘greater and lesser productive classes’. And each of these groups pursues its own interests. And because those interests are epistemological in nature ( people need to know how to act ) they are permanent. And as permanent features, they will, especially under prolonged economic duress, be expressed by citizens. Either openly or in black markets, racism, and corruption. You will never achieve equality outside of a few million people of very similar racial and cultural preferences, with very similar economic interests. Otherwise, The only equality is in poverty. And that set of problems underlies the reason why people will become more conservative. ie: they will express sentiments of group persistence and attempt to implement those sentiments by legislation. So, we are destined to decades of political hostility. Because the US is now an empire, both domestically and internationally. And while internationally the government has lost legitimacy. THat is irrelevant compared to the loss of legitimacy of the government here at home. The only thing we can do is contract the empire and attempt to get our people employed in, while getting the upper and middle classes to try to create jobs and we may have permanently displaced our society by trade policy. THe germans build their society to produce disciplined craftsmen. This is important, because craftsmen can create exportable hard goods. But we have tried to create a service economy. And a service economy must bring people INTO the country in order to serve them. We can create a medical tourism industry. But that is not sufficient. We can close our educational system to foreigners. but that is not sufficient. We can devote vast labor to building nuclear power plants, a new power grid, and electric automobiles. And that might be enough. But we can never put people back into building houses. It creates expensive sprawl. But most importantly, it doesn’t make people ‘skilled’. It’s the intellectual equivalent of ditch digging, and as such it is a vast loss of human capital. Thats the reality of it. So your deficit prediction is based on the assumption that the nation was not at a structural crossroads by the fall of socialism in 1989. It is based upon the assumption that american productivity will continue as it has. But neither the society we call america, or the advantage that was western, or the advantage that was american, persists any longer. We are in for another decade of this economy, and if history is any measure, we are also in for something unpleasantly disruptive in the next generation. And neither side has a plan for getting us out of it.

  • Krugman Watch: Barking Up The Wrong Tree

    Paul Krugman writes, in Permanently High Unemployment

    I really don’t think people appreciate the huge dangers posed by a weak response to 9 1/2 percent unemployment, and the highest rate of long-term unemployment ever recorded

    Paul, You will not get consensus on general liquidity (unbridled credit). You will not get consensus on government spending (expansion of the bureaucracy). You will not get consensus on redistributive infrastructure (city projects). But you will get consensus on investment in strategic competitive advantages if you can identify them. We are going to have long term structural employment. These people are not going to go back to work in their previous careers. You’re right that government can provide a solution. but that solution is to concentrate capital behind investments in competitive production that the market cannot create largely because of regulatory hinderances, or regulatory uncertainty, or regulatory competition. The greatest benefit to the country will be to invest in a new grid, triple the number of nuclear plants, and to convert as much infrastructure from hydrocarbons as possible. There is no mystery why this is a competitive advantage. It will create millions of jobs, especially in skilled trades. You’re just recommending the wrong platform for getting money into the economy. And no one is buying it.

  • “What do you think about China?” I Think You Are Confused About The Virtues Of Political Systems

    Kenneth V. asks:

    I’m curious about your opinion on China’s future. As the democratic empire collapses in the west and power shifts its balance, do you think that the Chinese people will demand more political freedom, especially since libertarian books are bestsellers? Or do you think the oligarchy will be successful in suppressing dissent? What do you think of the demographic trends there? Chinese couples do a trial-and-error with childbirth where babies who are less than perfect are killed. The massive gender imbalance of 40 million more males than females. What do you think of this kind of extreme eugenics? I personally find it abhorrent, but I’d like to ask your opinion.

    Ken, The Chinese are driven by the conflict between northern government, southern trading prosperity, interior poverty, and hostile borders. The cultural tradition is ancient and it’s purpose is to avoid civil wars at all costs, simply because civil wars were so common for them, because they are exposed to what they see as threats (their country needs the china seas open in order not to be starved into submission), and because of natural conflicts between the regions. This history is as important to china as the sense of freedom is to the west. (a sentiment which is in no small part a reaction to the middle eastern model – which westerners considered horrid.)

    [callout]I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives.[/callout]

    Now, to avoid drinking our own Kool Aid, we probably should understand that the west has always had an advantage of being a society filled with craftsmen rather than laborers, not the least of which was the result of widespread metal smithing, easy river trade, and the western agrarian cycle which was very seasonal. The importance of that sentence may not be obvious to you unless you think of the 360 day a year job of a rice farmer. So Romans conquered northern europe because the ‘barbarians’ were fairly wealthy by contrast, and presided over resources. While they exploited the warmer climes for food. But western wealth over the past 500 years, has largely to do with selling off the american continent to immigrants. Not to any particular western genius. IN fact, the continental view of exploiting the continent as they had the islands, by bringing resources back home paled by comparison to the money that could be made by settling, populating, and selling consumer goods to immigrants to the north american continent. In this broader context, our political order is more dynamic, and by that I mean, flexible, and the republican model with capitalistic institutions (for cooperation) is the only one that is effective for mobilizing enough people to accomplish such a task. China by contrast is simply doing the same thing without inventing it: they are selling off apartments, electricity, water, and food to immigrants to the coastal cities. Their model is better for doing their migration under their circumstances. Our model was better for doing our migration under our circumstances. The question is, for them, for us, what will happen when that’s done. Because we are going to have very densely populated cities, and in that model FARMER ETHICS AND MORALS EVAPORATE. Traditional religious principles, ethical constructs, and the ability to manage class differences become very difficult in those environments. The difference is that the chinese have the benefits of monarchy (long term thinking), the capital concentration of totalitarianism (which is very useful) and the institutions of capitalism (banking, finance, accounting, interest and credit, western laws), and they get to profit on the implementation of western technology – without having to have had to discover it. This is a very good model for competing externally. it is not a good model when you’re the ‘winner’. It’s a very good model for when you’re a century and a half behind the rest of the world. I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives. But the damage that they will cause in that transition, to the world in general, if they are faced with uprisings, is substantial. I think your question begs the wrong assumptions: political models are utilitarian goods, not absolute goods. Societies need to concentrate capital in order to compete and cooperate with other societies. Then they need internal institutions for everything else. Complex market capitalism when combined with totalitarian command of large investments, with the least corruption possible is probably the most competitive form of political order. As long as investments are competitive rather than redistributive. Redistribution is the result of competition. Not a replacement for it. There is no inherent value in political freedom on its own. It’s not a virtue. It is an acceptable risk in a homogenous society. But it is a net danger in a pluralistic society. The struggle for power must never be available to factions or minorities. Only the struggle to compete in the market. Political freedom is the freedom to usurp the market. THere is no other reason for it. The only value of political freedom is in reducing corruption, which is an impediment to trade, exchange and capital formation. The problem for a people is suppressing corruption, not obtaining political freedom. People don’t really choose their political system. It’s determined by their circumstances and they are pragmatic in adopting it. They don’t pick idealistic things, and if they do, they fail (Iran). Democracy is just slow moving communism. As Schumpeter said, Democracy will just lead to socialism. Republicanism and oligarchy are rule by the middle classes (trade). Totalitarianism is rule by the upper classes (force). Theocracy by definition, rule by the lower classes (fraud). (IQ and Atheism increase with class structure, although under capitalism moral behaviors tend to emerge with the decline in religiosity.)

  • Review: War by Sebastian Junger

    A work of personal experience by a reporter cohabitating with soldiers in Afghanistan. A work that states the patently obvious. At least, patently obvious to anyone with testosterone: That men fight for the men beside them. That the bond between soldiers is the greatest emotional bond that men can experience. That the platoon is approximately the same size as the maximum survivable hunter gatherer group. That this level of in-group altruism is particular to man. In that sense, the book is perhaps interesting to the common man. In the political sense, it is yet another silly book by silly people, for silly people.

    [callout]Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives.[/callout]

    I explain to people often, universally at their amazement, why it’s so hard to convert people in that part of the world to something on the order of advanced civilization. It’s not a complicated reason. It’s that in a world where farming is so fruitless, the land so barren, and the civilization so lacking in infrastructure, that the comfort, thrill, joy, and sense of success that men can possess as raiders is impossible to replicate elsewhere. Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives. Our boys are captured in prisons we call classrooms. Forbidden to move. Forbidden to compete. Forbidden to display dominance. Forbidden in fact, to be male. Forbidden to interact with the world except with words, like girls. These boys disassociate from society because of these deprivations. They play video games. They play sports. They wear clothing that represents abandonment. They don’t enter college. They just simply give up on society. They don’t ‘own’ responsibility for society any longer. THey don’t want it. And in many respects, they can’t handle it. Because they have been so sensory-deprived that they have no capacity, nor any learned method of how to do so. How many of these boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?

    [callout]How many of (our) boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?[/callout]

    How many of our current soldiers, if told ‘select your team, select your weapons and ammunition, take your time, and kill everyone on the other side you can, while taking the fewest casualties of your own’ would not happily join up in record numbers? It’s not a small number. It’s just surprising that Junger, or anyone for that matter, would fail to understand these basic human traits. That is, unless you’re a member of the church of secular humanism. Where you live an abstracted view of christianity. Where you think that submission and safety are the same as competition, winning and experience. It’s also surprising that any military historian, any military strategist, would fail to understand Kegan’s Thesis: that ‘winning’ is a cultural, and perhaps, civilization-defining construct that has been inherited and reinforced for millennia. And that the western concept of winning is pointless in central asia. Indeed, pointless among any of the Raiding-Cultures. And that in turn, how one could fail to understand just how endemic the ‘Raiding’ concept is to central asian and arab thinking. And how they cannot conceive of any other, just as how westerners can rarely conceive of any other. And once that Tribal-Raider-versus-Heroic-Army is understood, it becomes obvious that islam is a Raider’s Political Strategy rather than a western heroic army strategy, or western ‘religion’ in any sense of the word. Or more strategically, the raider sits and waits until you’re vunlerable to strike, and the heroic army seeks the defining clash. Therefore: 1) We cannot win a war fighting it on our terms. We can only win the war fighting it on their terms. 2) It is enjoyable, and even preferable for many men to live in combat, versus the tedious and boring farming or industrial life. It is only when the benefits of capitalism and trade are sufficient to be vaguely fascinating, and the freedoms are sufficiently broad, competitive and entertaining, that men will, on occasion, for some period of time, find peace all that interesting.

    [callout]… each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism.[/callout]

    Every historian who studies the vastness of human history, for the purpose of learning what is there, rather than projecting upon it what he desires to find in it, will eventually come to the conclusion that each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism. If you don’t know this obvious bit of human cultural development, then its only because you weren’t given any history by the same cadre of pacifists that are destroying our boys minds one package of unexercised neurons at a time.

  • The Obama “Small Business” Speech Impediment?

    I’m watching Obama talk about the new small business jobs bill on the news. And I”m struck by the observation that he has a really hard time saying ‘small business’. While any phrase with the world ‘government’ in it, simply rolls comfortably off his tongue. Freudian. Absolutely Freudian.

  • High Unemployment, or Normal Employment? It Depends On The Scope Of History You’re Considering.

    Over on Questions and Observations, Bruce McQuain questions whether we’re having another “Great Depression” or just a very slow recovery. An unnamed visitor pointed to a graphic from The Atlantic and commented:

    “The median duration of unemployment is higher today than any time in the last 50 years. That’s an understatement. It is more than twice as high today than any time in the last 50 years.”

    Which is a true statement that leads to false conclusions. Instead, how about you increase the period of time you’re considering even further and say, that: “The unnaturally low rate of employment for the past century, and in particular the past fifty years, has been largely do to the combination of selling off north america to immigrants and their children, the increase in consumer products consumed by these people, the collapse of european war economies, followed by the results of the monopolization of the world monetary system. The current unemployment level is the natural consequence of the loss of the US’s temporary economic advantage, as europe caught up, and china, india, russia and other developing countries have developed similar economic models and levels of production.” That’s the analysis that has meaning. Not medium term unemployment. The monetary policy since Reagan was an attempt to revitalize american entrepreneurship and individualism by using the US’s unique position in world history to borrow against future production. However, the winning of the war against ideological managed-economies made that borrowing impossible to maintain. Furthermore, the unregulated use of that credit to fund unproductive investment (housing) rather than relative competitive investment (innovation) led to a bubble, which has now compounded the overall problem. This is not to say that we had an alternative to the revitalization of the country. Or that the european model would have yielded better results in the domestic american empire than it did in the homogenous nation states. But we are now headed toward the south american model : the exact opposite of what both the left and right desired.

  • Straight Dope: Would Communal Ownership Result In Fewer Oil Spills?

    No. But increased liability would. I found the Straight Dope forums and they’re full of fairly good libertarian thinking. So I’m going to add them to my crawler’s roundtable. This is the second or third posting I”ve made there. And in it I’m making a bold claim in response to this statement:

    And I think you’ll find it makes a difference to the wider community, too. It’s hard to imagine a worker-owned oil company, with broad shopfloor participation in decisionmaking, making the kind of decisions that led to the BP oil spill — and got several BP workers killed.

    That’s an interesting statement. The problem is, that such an organization would never be able to exist at any size in order to make that kind of decision, and without that size could not concentrate enough capital to create and combine sufficient technologies to get into the position in the first place.

    [callout]**In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.**[/callout]

    Why? Because of the very reason we have markets, corporations, organizations, political systems: because while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.

    [callout] while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.[/callout]

    The problem isn’t the corporation’s size, or the worker interest, it’s the limits of liability granted to the executives, and the limit of liability given to the insurers. These limits were GIVEN by GOVERNMENT with KNOWING INTENT to these companies precisely to avoid the principle of responsibility inherent in Capitalism, to ensure that we would have oil supplies. In other words, the state became the insurer, and did a bad job of quality control, and the insurer, the state (the people) have to pay for taking that risk. WHen they should have maintained liability of all involved. This would have dramatically increased the costs, and made the drilling unprofitable, and it would not have occurred. We transfer risk all over society. Between age groups, between classes, between races. IN fact, that has become the purpose of 20th century government. Transfer. We grant people all sorts of special rights as a means of mutual insurance. THe most controversial is free speech. Much free speech is theft of abstract forms from one person or another (libel and slander). Much of it is erroneous, deceptive, ignorant or intentionally harmful, for the purpose of transferring property from one group to another (Political). We allow one group rights of expression but deny another group the same expression. (Political) Most news opinion for example, upon analysis, is patently false. (Profitable) Most advertising is targeted at the proletariat and middle class, for the purpose of selling the consumer fantasy by appealing to human status senses. We have not (as an absurd example) sued the Bank Of Sweden for awarding Nobel prizes to purveyors of the use of probabilistic Gaussian mathematics in economic theory, which in turn was used to create this debacle of an economy over the past half century or more. So the Nobel Prize was issued and used as a political lever and caused vast harm. The Academy ‘insured’ these theories, and then marketed them. Yet we do not hold them accountable for this damage to society, as we do any other product like hot coffee or ladders. Because we grant them the freedom to err, under the assumption that we are better off this way than the opposite. Capitalism and markets exist to provide calculative capacity to the mediocrity of human minds. Socialist should focus on redistribution and avoid the fallacy of believing their own opinion. Ignorance is mandatory for all human beings. And it is nothing but a childish vanity to think otherwise, and is demonstrable in all fields of human activity. it is even MEASURABLE in most fields of human activity. (in particular, the horrid errors in academic research.) Property rights allow for accountability, because they require risk in order to obtain the rewards from the use of them. It is when we do not respect those rights and their liabilities, and grant limits to the liability for those rights that we have oil spills. **In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.** That is why the world has adopted capitalism. TOtalitarian capitalism. But capitalism none the less. It’s democracy that’s being abandoned as a goal. Worldwide.

  • Question: “Can you be anti-capitalist and pro market?”

    On Straight Dope, there is a thread on whether one can be anti-capitalist but pro-market. I’ve captured my response below. DEFINITIONS 1) Capitalism (distributed planning and control using the technologies of property and the pricing system). Or politically: a bias toward letting the market solve problems of production. 2) Socialism (centralized planning and control in the necessary absence of the pricing system). Or politically: a bias toward political centralization of solving problems of production. 3) Mixed Economy ( distributed planning and control using property and pricing system, with redistribution of wealth through taxation). Or politically, letting the market solve problems of production, while centralizing some amount of the wealth generated for redistribution and investment in outcomes where the market process is unable to concentrate capital. 4) Market: the voluntary production of property for the purpose of speculating on it’s voluntary trade. The speculative pricing assigned to the goods or services. The reliance upon prices to determine the products to be produced, and the factors of production to be consumed. Implies the regulation of products into the market. and implies the defense of property rights and conflict resolution within the market of goods and services by a third party. 5) Trade: the voluntary transfer of property from one individual to another. (which implies knowledge of the purchaser, and the irrelevance of third parties) DISCUSSION Early Leftist were traditional luddites who confused the necessity of ownership of the means of production (property) with the ability to redistribute the results of that system of ownership: It is not necessary to control the means of production in order to redistribute wealth. While property and prices are necessary for complex production, and incentives are necessary to encourage people to produce, it appears that we can determine rules of property use, and we can determine some level of redistribution while maintaining sufficient incentives to produce. At least, that has been the general course of events over the past century. Contrarily, unstated but implied in that statement, such a redistribution will affect the ability to consume, but not ‘organized control over’ what is produced. This may disappoint some. However, since all groups are led by elites and elites must make decisions on production, the such centralized control creates only the illusion of proletariat control over what is produced. You cannot have a market (speculative production in anticipation of trade wherein prices communicate relative demand) without prices and property. This is logically impossible. While communists have forever posited the opposite, people will not produce excess for market purposes without the incentive to do so (and will resort to black markets, and therefore recreate the market). If what you define as “anti-capitalist” (i suspect) is having a number of people with knowledge and relationships and control of property concentrate resources toward productive ends that you disagree with, then you can indeed be “anti-capitalist”. If you define anti-capitalist as a status-criticism, wherein you dislike the fact that you are most likely a permanent member of the proletariat, which decreases your access to mates and opportunity, then you indeed can be an ant-capitalist. Those are sentimental objections. (Despite the fact that our society is largely run by the middle class and upper proletariat.) But if you mean that you dislike the nature of prices and property, then you’re just illogical, and the result of your beliefs would result in destitute poverty, murder and war. The market evolved because of the limitation of the human mind. We cannot replace it without making the human mind far better than it is. And perhaps far better than it can be. Redistribution is a biological sentiment in the human animal that evolved because it is necessary for group-persistence: to retain competitive ability against other groups, and to insure the group’s survival. Universal egalitarian equality, which is a member of the set of leftist sentiment of “harm/care/nurture” or the sentiment of eliminating the sensation of status differences, or the sentiment eliminating the material differences between people’s access to resources, is simply an illogical construct regardless of which sentiment is being applied: Because we need incentives to produce, and we must over produce and divide our labor to reduce prices. (“We are not wealthier than cave men, everything is just infinitely cheaper due to the division of labor”) Because people will always seek status differences even under socialism. Because the iron law of oligarchy mandates that elites and leaders emerge, and once they emerge they form a self-serving bureaucracy. Because it is impossible for more than a family sized group of people to agree on both the means and ends of doing anything meaningful in a division of labor sufficient to produce low prices. (this last, is the virtue of what we call the market). Participating in the market is also voluntary. One can consume the goods of the market without participating in the market one’s self. Some people, in fact, a majority of people, are not sufficiently competitive in any form of production that they can conceive of, or afford to speculate in the market. So they TRADE their productivity rather than SPECULATE on by producing goods or services for the market. To be a member of a market economy, one only needs to refrain from theft. To be a ‘good’ member of a market economy, once needs additionally to refrain from fraud and deception. But these are the means by which we obtain citizenship in the market, not participate in the market. To enter the market itself, means that you risk capital and compete in the arena that is the market, and are willing and able to accept losses. The problem for the proletariat is that their value-system is predicated on self-production for consumption purposes, and trading for goods that cannot be self produced. People only a century ago would put to market only their over-production, and purchase from the market only for goods that they could not produce themselves. Except there is precious little in modern society that a person can produce himself, let alone, produce for market consumption himself. This necessitates an uncomfortable uncertainty for those people who must speculate in order to survive in the market. Hence leftist sentiments of the family, epistemology of the family, organization of the family, production of the family must compete with rightist sentiments of the market.

    [callout]It is quite likely that the right and left will both fail. That we will instead of succeeding in incorporating all people into the market (the error of the right) or incorporating all people into the luddite familial structure (the error of the left) that we will adopt the european and south american models of a wealthy urban and rural groups, and a ring of abject destitute hyper-breeding poverty around the urban cores, wherein the upper and middle classes pay the permanent proletariat just enough to subsist, and we emerge with a tiered society both geographically, genetically, and materially. [/callout]

    It is quite likely that the right and left will both fail. That we will instead of succeeding in incorporating all people into the market (the error of the right) or incorporating all people into the luddite familial structure (the error of the left) that we will adopt the european and south american models of a wealthy urban and rural groups, and a ring of abject destitute hyper-breeding poverty around the urban cores, wherein the upper and middle classes pay the permanent proletariat just enough to subsist, and we emerge with a tiered society both geographically, genetically, and materially. And this end result will in no small part be due to the christian error of egalitarianism sentiments that deny the productive differences of human beings in the real and material world – the majority of which differences derive from the ability and rate at which one can learn and apply abstractions (IQ) in a dynamic and rapidly moving economy. While neither left or right can achieve it’s idealistic ends, leftism is an attempt to enslave the productive (innovative) class’s attempt to increase production and increase prices for the purpose of status enhancement. But by that restraint doom all people to poverty. This is the strategy behind all monotheistic religions. They are resistance movements that attempt to make status among the proletariat a spiritual rather than material construct. Capitalism (or right-ism) on the other hand is an attempt to keep sufficient productive resources in the hands of market producers that all society benefits, despite the fact that the proletariat feels increasingly left behind and deprived of status because of the accelerating rate at which the productive classes (those who take speculative risks and thereby increase choices and decrease prices) seemingly depart from the lower classes, despite the fact that in all but the rarest circumstances (catastrophic health care) that the difference between the quintiles is one of symbolic status and diversity of forms of entertainment, rather than differences in material well being. As it stands Quantitative Keynesianism is the socialist research program, and Anarcho capitalism is the capitalist research program. The difference between these methods lies in both their ambitions and their methods. By applying 19th century advances in the mathematics of the natural world (closed probabilism) to the aggregate symbols of production of the economy (monetary values), it became possible to try to fulfill some methods of the socialist program by using capitalism for socialistic ends. The problem for the capitalists, and the reason for the failure of the Austrian (qualitative) program’s emphasis on micro-economic behavior, is that they do not have a method of mathematics to provide sufficient explanatory power equal to the left’s program, despite knowing, with absolute certainty, that the Keynesian program must fail. This is because despite the efforts of Poincare, Mandelbrot, Hayek, Popper, Mises, and Parsons, more recently Taleb, and a host of others, there appears to be no symbolic language that can represent the plasticity and organic behavior of the property-pricing system and how it reacts to human knowledge. (This is typically called ‘Hume’s Problem’ of Induction.) It appears, at least at this point in time, that we will need a vast amount of data, on the order of many times that of the Google indexes, to provide us with enough of a basis from which to derive the patterns in that symbolic information. Even if we could find that information, we could find the patterns, and develop a mathematics of economics and the social sciences, the question would remain whether these innovations would have any material impact on the fact that humans are of pedagogical NECESSITY, epistemic status seekers, and that there are those who lead that pack of humanity and those who are forever followers in it, and the envy of the followers, and the arrogance of the leaders mandate that we will remain competitive, and that the problem of human difference is both permanent and valuable to the division of knowledge and labor.