Theme: Crisis

—“How can we most effectively and probabilistically get as much of our civilization to actually conform to Natural Law as much as is necessary to prevent the collapse inevitable on its current trajectory as quickly as possible?I think answering this question in practice rather than theory will very likely to require us to be pragmatic, not idealistic. Having said all of that, what do you offer the average man to motivate him to discipline himself sufficiently to take the responsibility required to fight the war you propose and win? Intellectuals alone does not a revolution make.”—Joel

(CD: Actually, as far as I know, intellectuals providing solutions for a small number of angry and frustrated young men, always a revolution makes.)

Curt Doolittle An interestingly phrased question.

1) i think you are applying the following biases:

– false consensus bias

– group attribution error

– illusion of transparency

2) There already are more than sufficient numbers to revolt. they only need a plan they think can succeed and leadership.

3) The question isn’t how many can we get to revolt, but how many can we encourage not resist the revolt.

4) I don’t put forth belief systems, but institutional recipes that are *easily* operationalized. I put forth criticisms of anything that does not survive deflation into the grammar of incentives which all cognition, emotion, and langauge exists to justify. In other words, I have the direction of causality correct.

5) What I am offering to the people who might resist revolt is de-financialization, and de-deception, and a rough redistribution of the 20th century’s malappropriation by the upper 1% to the middle and working classes. The full consequences of this redistribution will make it almost impossible for them middle and working classes to dismiss it.

6) The cost of this is the loss of ability for the media, the public intellectuals, the activists and the politicians both right and left to engage in lying; and the ‘cost’ is that they must take action to prosecute ‘liars’ (for compensation); and then, the other ‘cost’ is the market demand that they gradually learn how to express their middle and working class ethics in rational and reciprocal terms. (which will evolve normally as did rational, statistical, and scientific speech).

7) Voluntary disassociation as well as association, which will allow people with lower incomes to live near their kin instead of pushing our kin down into mixed neighborhoods where they obtain bad behavior and create class conflict. Right now people associate by tribe (neighborhood) by the cost of homes and the cost of local education. This creates a caste system and low trust rather than a kinship system and high trust.

The optional costs with extraordinary benefits are:

1) withdraw copyright protection and replace it with creative commons protection alone (profiting from use). This will destroy the hollywood sector’s ability to produce propaganda.

2) replace the patent process with whether the produce required extra-market R&D subsidy or whether the patent is purely defensive at the expense of consumers.

3) vast restructuring of the academy but most importantly, that the academy must carry the student loan debt (direct from the treasury), and can only be paid out of future earnings over ten years.

(This set of optional changes is quite long. I wont’ go into them.)

The radical changes are more important:

10) the devolution of federal (central) powers to the resolution of conflict over property between the states, and repeal of the civil war amendments.

The preservation of the military, treasury, and insurer of last resort functions. In other words, reducing the federal system to a utility shared by the states or regions.

11) voluntary secession of any region at the neighborhood level in exchange for assuming their portion of debt in the original currency, including any territorial assets.

Etc.

CLOSING

This is a pretty libertarian solution to the problem. It says ‘you may go your way as long as I may go mine’, while preserving the ONLY value of scale: insurance via military, treasury, ‘insurance’, and judiciary.

What it does not do is recommend anarchism, but micro-nationalism.

AFTERWARD

Markets are the only way to defeat all other method of order – because the higher the velocity of trial and error the greater the retained advantage.

You can catch up to markets by authoritarianism – that’s evidence.

Because you can use existing information discovered by trial and error.

You can spend down accumulated advantage with social democracy – until no more advantage remains to be spent.

But you cannot defeat markets. Particularly INSURED markets.