[W]ell, I can’t quite do that without a whole book. But I think some people are beginning to understand the whole package I’ve put together, and why I’m criticizing feminism, postmodernism, ghetto libertarianism, left libertarianism, and even to some degree, conservatism: because the moral codes of all these groups advocate are predicated on assumptions about the nature of man, our common interests, and our economy, that are a mix of agrarian, industrial, and marxist thought dependent upon assumptions about our equality of reproductive value , equality of reproductive organization, our equality of value in organizing and participating in production, and organizing and participating in the production of norms that facilitate production at low transaction costs.
All advancement of productivity and therefore wealth in civilization requires advancement in institutions that assist in creating ‘calculability’: the means by which we cooperate in a division of labor while suppressing the ability for anyone in that division of labor to conduct free riding. [callout]…we must also compensate people outside of the production process for their diligence, labor, and construction of the normative commons that makes an elaborate division of labor in a high trust, low transaction cost society possible.[/callout]
Outside of our direct perception, which is very limited, we can only know anything else about the world if it is calculable – and therefore reducible to analogy to experience. Otherwise we cannot sense or perceive it. And we are notoriously bad in our perceptions without instrumentation and calculation to assist us in judging even the most trivial of things.
Prices for example are calculable. Our imagination of people’s lives in different parts of the world is not. The evidence that someone is wiling to trade with us, is proof that we have calculated the use of resources and time correctly. Just as their failure to do so tells us we have wasted them – or consumed them as entertainment. Science is a discipline entirely devoted to using instrumentation to sense what we cannot, then reduce it to analogy to experience, where we can use our limited faculties of deduction by employing our various fascinating tools of logic to ensure that what we sense is both internally consistent and externally correspondent.
So whether we are talking about science, technology, production, money and accounting, cooperation or law, we are still talking about various forms of instrumentation that assist us in performing calculations on what we are not able to perform without relying upon those tools.
Now, because productivity was so important in the past, we assumed that our relative equality of value in production, organizing production, reproduction, organizing reproduction, investigation and discovery, were all the same, and we limited our concept of moral life to attempting to create universal rules and incentives for each of us to follow.
But that turns out to not make any sense. Because one must have the incentive to follow rules. And if we are marginally different in what we value, and in what we NEED to value as reproductive organisms; and we very clearly demonstrate that we are different, then the incentives that we have are quite different. And if the incentives are quite different we must construct alternative means, other than a MONOPOLY definition of human morality, that provides the incentives for us to act with common interests, despite the fact that we have uncommon interests.
That is the job of institutions. The market allows us to cooperate on means even if we cannot cooperate on ends. But the market assumes that the primary value we each provide is our productivity in the market. (Which was true during the formation of market towns, and when human labor was necessary for production.)
However, if we take into consideration, that in fact, only some of us have value in organizing production, only some others have value in participating in production, and still others only have value in organizing the norms such that production is possible, then we are all simply participating in a division of knowledge and labor. And therefore the rewards of production would be earned by those who prefer and are able to engage in production. But we must also compensate people outside of the production process for their diligence, labor, and construction of the normative commons that makes an elaborate division of labor in a high trust, low transaction cost society possible.
As such these people who are outside of the production process, but who facilitate the creation of the high trust society by suppressing free riding in all its forms: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and statist behavior, therefore must be paid for their services (or not paid if they fail to deliver them.)
Furthermore, every individual who eschews criminal, immoral, unethical, conspiratorial, (statist) behavior, pays a cost with every opportunity he forgoes. Respect for property rights is costly for each individual. Every time an individual suppresses another’s ability to conduct free riding on others: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial (statist), it is a cost to him. To ask someone to obey these rules which facilitate the voluntary organization of low transaction cost hight trust society, when they are unable to participate in production or the fruits of it, is to ask them to conduct security guard work, and to exert restraint without compensation. Producers are nothing without consumers. Producers must compete for the attention of consumers. The more successful producers gain greater rewards, which in current civilization means little more than greater status signals and associations with others who likewise possess greater status signals, for more successfully satisfying the wants of consumers.
This argument is entirely consistent with property rights theory.
I will get to the criterion for compensation in one of my next posts.