Theme: Commons

CONTRA DONALD COHEN ON THE PRIVATIZATION OF EVERYTHING:
How to Solve the Problem of State vs Private Competency.
(Communism > Socialism > Democratic Socialism > Classical Liberalism > Empiricism (rule of natural law)
RE: https://t.co/ct1NsM8dJC

You’re discussing the central problem of political economy:

The Problem:
1. the state can raise more capital over longer periods than the private sector for anything that has has returns on a time horizon of returns longer than a decade.

2. The state makes worse use of capital than the private sector.

Why? Here’s why:

3. The state management and employees and the private sector management and employees both maximize their ‘take’ of public and private income. So just as all regional increases in income are captured by housing prices and rents, and likewise, all government increases in spending are eventually captured by maximization of employees, minimization of work and responsibility, maximization of salary, and maximization of benefits.

4. There is no resistance to or defense against this ‘taking’ in the public sector (largely in benefits and salaries for least work with worst results), yet there is resistance to and defesnse against this ‘taking’ in the private sector using the demand for returns by management, investors and the use of the courts as a threat or punishment.

6. We still retain ‘clientelleism’ so that bureaucracies are appointed by each incoming political party. This produces the worst incentives possible, because the staff is in compettiion with rotating management, with political ambitions, that may agree with or be counter to the staff.

7. So the government is not responsible with capital nor accountable for outcomes, and proceeds are captured by employees, while the private sector is responsible for capital and for outcomes. And the proceeds are captured by management and investors.

8. So our legal and political system is not organized to reward good political management, in no small part because the government and government employees are legally insulated from their corruption by privatization of public spending., nor incentivized for good use of capital. And the private sector management of state-mandated production is not responsible for the return of profits to the polity.

9. In other words, public employees should not be granted salary or benefits without the public approval directly by vote for the quality of service and the returns on our taxes.

10. This creates a market for quality behavior. Prohibiton on uninos of state-financed employees would improve it further, because ‘the government is where you work when you don’t want to work, need to satisfy customers, and compete in a market for the satisfaction of customers’.

Claim: (a) things of us need to survive (health, housing, education, broadband etc) (b) we all need everyone to have those things because it’s in all of our interests. (c) then we can only do these things through government (force).

Counter-Claim: (a) *Public goods* are those things that capitalize for the indirect benefit of all, not consume for the direct benefit of each. *Redistsributive goods* are those that the market for private consumption cannot produce at a price point sufficient to serve all. (d) however, this is because the government (or at least the treasury) has given all control to the financial sector, with the government hoping to capture the income produced by ‘hiring’ the financial sector to produce taxes for them. (e) this has produced the most effective investment economy on earth but the least effective government on earth. (Look at how little innovation occurs in europe – it’s *almost* all here). Our government was designed to debate for agreement betweeen producers – this is good in matters of legislation and regulation where the private sector and state governments produce commons and the federal government is limited in responsibility to trade policy, treasury, and defense. Our government was NOT designed to produce common goods beyond the limit of market ability to produce them. (f) our government CAN be organized but not in the european model, but in the monarchical model (don’t misread that) where some aspect of the state (the treasury) primarily functions as venture capitalist, and keeps shares (interest, returns) in whatever it invests in for the benefit of the people, thereby depriving the financial sector of such absurd degrees of capture of wealth. (g) fundamentally, that’s the central problem of our government, and european governments as well.

Example: Universal medicare (a) the state could finance and own all buildings and equipment, (b) leave running the hospital to doctors, (c) negotiate the price of all medical supplies (d) explicitly finance medical research instead of leaving it to the market alone (e) leave the prices (salaries) charged by doctors, nurses, and specialists to the market. (f) this would allow us to have fast service for those of us for whom time is more valueable than money, and full service for those who have more time than money. (g) and it would preserve the incentives (now gone) for talent to stay in the medical field, and remove the insurance companies and financial companies and high drug and supply prices that produce most of the (absurd) medical costs. (h) use the signapore model for medicare not the american or european model as it’s been proven the optimum in the world.

Analysis: While the panel is decidedly relying on the christian ethic, it’s also relying upon pseudoscience originating in the entire sequence of marxist(class marxism), neo-marxist(cultural marxism), postmodern(anti-truth marxism(relativism)), libertarian(middle class marxism), neocon(elite marxism), antifamily feminist , pc(face before truth), woke(race), sophistries and pseudosciences and is dependent upon the presumption of (a) the end of scarcity and infinite surplus (b) the continuity of growth that produces surpluses – this is a false promise (fraud) that violates every single of the four categories of laws of the universe: Physical laws:scarcity, Behavioral Laws: selfishness and acquisitiveness, Evolutionary Laws: group differences, genetic load, regression to the mean, natural selection), and Formal (Logical) laws: truth by realism, naturalism, identity, consistency, possiblity, correspondence, rational choice, reciprocity, and coherence, with full acounting within stated limits.

Criticism: You folks are making a moral case not a scientific, economic, and empirical one.
So your ambition is not a scientific one.
It’s not even a philosophical one.
It is a theological one.

Reality (Science): Only small homogenous rule-of-law ethnostates produce sufficient indifference in wants values and political ambition will tolerate taxation sufficient for maximizing redistribution, because they contain the least status competition and demand for political control.

Recommendation: You want Democratic Socialism then capture the financial sector, convert it to ‘silicon valley at national scale’, devolve the federal government use of proceeds to the states, and let the states make their own choices based on their own culture wants and resources.
The big blue immigrant labor cities will continue their direction(favelas) and the suburbs and rural areas will continue theirs.

Why?

Laws of nature: With density we decrease opportunity costs, but increase housing, labor, and reproduction, costs and we *escape individual responsibility* generating demand for authority. While with decline in density we increase opportunity costs, but decrease, housing, labor, and rerpduction costs at the cost of *bearing individual responsibility* generating demand for autonomy. We aren’t equal in cities and territories because our existence isn’t under equal terms.
That’s why our ancestors in the holy roman empire (the majority of europe for 1000 years) used ‘free cities’ to separate the government of international cities from domestic cities, towns, and rural areas.

The Crisis: (a) We have, over the past two decades, seen the elimination of western economic and technological advangage and are coasting on western genetic, cultural, and institutional advantage. (b) We are seeing, beginning last year, the end of liquid capital for investment with the retirement of the boomers and their conversion from savings to consumption. (c) The postwar experiment with benefis, redistribution, and monetary policy has exhausted it’s potential becaus we have exhausted the possibility of endless growth upon which all the progressive ‘fantasies’ were constructed. (d) And we are entering a period of developed world population collapse, and the inability for a small number of workers to pay for a large number of government employes, programs, and retirees.

The Future: Subsistence farmers don’t produce enough surplus for the production of commons. Developing economies struggle to make investments in basic infrastructure. Average economies don’t produce enough for the production of redistributions. Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea are literally dying off. American immigration ‘fakes’ the numbers, but american IQ is declining such that our 105 prior to the industrial revolution, our 100 in the 20th, our 97 today, and our coming 94-95 will reduce us to a second world economy.

Summary: So moralizing ‘shoulds’ is not the same as practical production of ‘cans’. Grownups who other people put in charge of them, their money, their assets, their businesses, and their lives, only are given power to do so because they work within the limit of CANs.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation