Form and function

Following the class on Early Modern England of the Tudor and Stewart from Yale online HIST 251: Early Modern England which covers the time period of the late 16th century to the early 18th century and is presented by Professor Keith E. Wrightson offers a look at the problems of the mid- to late-16th century, the time covering Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Gray, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I.  This period saw an increase in the population of England, which had been stable since at least the 13th or 14th century.  The records are not good but sizes of villages, towns and cities indicate that coming into the 16th century there were between 2.2 and 2.4 million people in England and by the end of the century that had grown to 3.1 to 3.3 million people.  There was no great advance in public sanitation, medicine or improvement in diet or climate that can be pointed to for this phenomena.  It is possible that the closing of the Monestaries and Nunneries by Henry VIII contributed to this (approx. 25 to 28% of society had been involved with the Church prior to this) which may influence the number of marriages and children being born.  That would be a contributing factor but unlikely to be the driving one.

What happened due to this is classical economic: productivity didn't increase, the land still produced only so much in the way of crops and trade could not increase significantly to off-set shortfalls in food.  Thus with more people and more demand for all goods and limited production basis for goods to be sold and traded, prices rose.  With that poverty increased and a stable work system from the prior century, where individuals worked within 20 miles of where they were born, began to break up.  It was seen, at the time, as a moral problem and that by putting the Crown at the head of the Church of England, that this was some form of moral lack which was being visited upon the Nation as a whole.  That moral view of poverty is one that understood that there were different types of poor.

First there were those who were poor by circumstances.  Widows and those that fell gravely ill and could not work fell into this category.  These people were poor through no fault of their own and it was a moral duty to care for such individuals by families and through charity both through the Church and by civic means through holding special Ales and meals so that the poor could be cared for.  These poor will always be with us: the poor of circumstance.

Second are those who are poor because they lack will to work.  These poor could do something about their problems and deserved perhaps a bit of a charitable hand up at a civil level to at least pay their keep until they could get regular work.  Continuing not to work, after that, was a moral lack of the individual involved.

Those without work in that era faced an economy that would have to expand to employ more people, yet that was not happening.  Thus the poor who lacked work and actively searched for it meant that the old system of working jobs in and around where one was born began to erode, and there were soon people wandering far outside their local environs in the search of work.

In modern times we have added an additional category that has two aspects to this: the cyclical poor.

Cyclical poverty was something seen by those migrant laborers who moved from job to job seasonally, usually with harvest or catch at fisheries.  These individuals were not poor by circumstance or moral character, but by job type and this required different strategies of saving and planning one's life.

The other aspect of this is the rags to riches to rags or shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves phenomena where someone may start poor and find a way to 'make good' then spend their wealth until they are poor again.  This can take generations or it can be with just one individual in a single lifetime.

The forms of poverty in the Early Modern period of England meant hardship, hunger and often rootless wandering in search of work and being able to find a spouse and create a household as I went over in a prior post on this.  Without enough work to sustain a larger family basis and without enough positions available to allow enough work for those willing to do it the economy shifted in ways unknown to prior generations.  The hardship on the poor had effects on the Yeoman and Gentry classes which utilized the necessity for implementing higher land use fees and custom, shortened lease terms and then used funds to buy up lands that the Crown made available as it sold of prior Church land to fund overseas adventures.  The amount of land necessary to rise into the landed Gentry class expanded and number of Yeomen became minor Gentry via consolidating land holdings.

Elizabeth I when she came to power had seen the effects of these changes and took some pages from prior Monarchs in England who had to quell problems in the land that were problematical to the Nation.  Straight out of Henry I she took the idea of revaluing the coinage, which meant that there would be a stable currency with a value that everyone understood.  This is no minor feat during inflationary cycles when the suspicion of adulterated or shaved coinage means the currency value is not respected.  She also took advice to implement the first patent system so that inventors of devices would have a limited term of being sole producers so that some new forms of work could come about to employ more people to the profit of the inventor.  Within the Mercantile Capitalist system this would mean that competition could take place on ingenuity and such law would foster advancement of new ways of doing business to increase the number of people employed in new endeavors.  And for those without enough money to actually invest in creating something new she also put forward a grant system wherein those with good ideas could come to the Crown, outline them and seek to get a minor grant to start up their venture. 

Finally, to deal with foreign affairs, particularly the wars and support for Catholic monarchs by Spain, she had to modernize the Navy while, at the same time, downsizing its utilization of resources which led to lighter, faster and deadlier ships that were hard to target and yet packed a punch above their normal weight class.  There would be some foreign expeditions, yes, and they would be ones that would not have an extremely high overhead and would seek to further support for Protestantism and require Spain to expend resources at a distance which is always a high cost affair.

Of the things that most attracted the Vikings to England during the time of the Danelaw, then under Canute and later under William the Conqueror was that the English people were enormously productive beyond their numbers.  For a period of time between the 7th and 9th century the city of York was the second largest city in Europe, right after Constantinople, which is no mean feat.  Canute left England alone as its vast prosperity was something he did not want to disturb, and he generally left areas under his control to local rule and imposed only a new leadership when it was necessary to assure fealty to him.  Elizabeth I is such a compelling figure in so many ways, perhaps the most intelligent of all the Monarchs of England or at least since Henry I, that it is easy to overlook her understanding of the role of the Monarch in the economy of the Nation as a whole.  She is so appreciated for her enigmatic stances on religion, both re-instituting a Protestant form of Christianity but keeping many of the trappings and forms of Roman Catholicism, that her deep and abiding trust in her own people is often overlooked in the realm of economics.

What she did was to bolster the ability of individuals to be prosperous by their own hand and only put forth limited funds (as they were limited after all the trials and tribulations from the time of her father's divorce to her accession to the throne) to reinforce the economy and shift the Navy from a relatively high overhead affair to one of somewhat lesser overhead.  The Crown could not make the realm prosperous and Elizabeth I put her trust in the people of England to work through inflationary times and use the support she instituted to become far more prosperous which would mean more jobs and productivity for the entire economy.  Before the era of economics she put forth a basic understanding that an economy flows up from its people, not down from the Crown, which was a hard thing to think of coming after the Late Medieval Period.  Plus by taking these measures she would shift the moral case away from the Crown and back to the people, so that they could figure out the best and most moral way to deal with their concerns.

Her wisdom on these matters elude many modern economists who take a very primitive and class oriented view of a Nation and do not understand that a government can only foster prosperity, not institute it.  If her government lacked funds for many things, which it did, by concentrating on the basics of defending the Nation, ensuring the value of the currency, and allowing people to utilize their ingenuity to create businesses and jobs, were in many ways extraordinary and show a keen insight into the basis of a Nation's economy which the majority of modern or modernistic politicians seem unable to grasp.  Her father had, in effect, redistributed the wealth of the Church to fund his Crown ventures and the result was inflation and a slow disintegration of a stable way of life.  With the money spent, the land in the hands of the Gentry and Yeomanry, the Crown could not spend as it did under Henry VIII and, instead, had to find a new way to do much with very little.  In doing this Elizabeth I draws us in on this level as well and demonstrates what an extraordinary woman and Queen she was who placed her faith not in government but in the people of England.  She figured she could handle the government on her own and beguile it and later generations no end, which she accomplished.

We could learn much of how a government that keeps to its knitting and lets the people be free to innovate and protects such innovation for limited duration can help change the economic aspects of the people and the Nation to the benefit of all.  Sadly such advanced learning is overlooked in a more primitive redistribution of wealth and an impoverishing of all to the benefit of the very, very few.  For so much supposed learning of the current crop of Elites, they sure aren't that advanced in their thinking.

Ideology to Eschatology

Ideology

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

ideology
     n 1: an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation [syn: political orientation, political theory]
     2: imaginary or visionary theorization

Eschatology

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

eschatology
     n : the branch of theology that is concerned with such final things as death and judgment; heaven and hell; the end of the world

The modern day Left started with an ideological framework that arose out of the works of Karl Marx and then added to via the International meetings on Marxism and then put through the lenses of Progressivism, Soviet Communism, socialists like Friedrich Engels who had impact on US Socialism via his works with Marx, European Anarcho-Syndicalist movements, the works of Antonio Gramsci and cultural hegemony as seen in the Frankfort School of cultural Marxism, then onto National Socialism and Nazi Fascism.  Taken as a whole, starting with Marx, the ideology derived from this school of thought is one that is based on an end of economic systems and the final removal of the capitalist or owning class of society and the rule of the Proletariat.  As an ideology it has its roots in the post-Classical period coming after John Locke, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, and as a form of response to Utilitarianism.

I have gone over the ground of Marxism multiple times, most recently in What is the value of... anything? and review some of the highlights and problems of Marxism from the time of Marx.  Economically Marxism's problems with defining value, exactly who is being exploited, explaining what alienation of labor is and why its abolition is seen as a historical imperative does not address a part of Marxism that keeps it alive, and that is its sociology.  Within the Old Left (Communists, National Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, American Progressivists) there was a requirement of scholarship for those on the 'inside' of the movements.  You had to know Marx and Engels, at the very least, be able to go through the rhetoric of Marxism via Hegel's Dialectical Materialism and then continue on with how bad those owning businesses were in their exploitation of labor.  Even given misplaced basis for arguments, there had to be a rational structure of argumentation on those points and defense of the critical starting points to assert the end points of the ideology.

This formed a sociological structure within Marxists circles that I got to witness first hand growing up in a family of socialist sympathizers.  It was an old First International sort of adherence, however, and had nothing to do with the Second or Third Congresses dominated by the (so-called as they put it) Communists.  Thus the first divisions were International Congress divisions and they would break out to the 'true believers, the rest of you are wrong' First Congress types and then those seen as corrupt: Communists (Soviet sort), National Socialists (all stripes), Progressives, social hegemonists... basically anyone save the strongly influenced Anarch-Syndicalists who cribbed a lot from US First International followers who themselves cribbed from Engels.  As you can tell by the long list of Marxist derivatives, there was a lot of in-fighting, factionalism and otherwise fierce boundary disputes within Marxists circles based on who you followed and what their form of argumentation was.  This could get broken down inside factions via different argument strains and who followed which form of their own particular brand of Marxism.

What this strongly looks like is a religious movement, and that is due to the fact that human nature (which Marx criticized the Utilitarians for not understanding) is seen as something that will go through a sudden, global transformation amongst the Proletariat.  Basically from nowhere, although the Marxists will point to the evils of capitalist exploitation, etc. but the actual gripes that the actual proletarians had (versus the idealized ones of the Marxists) had more to do with banal things like pay, working conditions, bad bosses and then, lo and behold, abusive Union bosses.  Labor Unions, seen as a first step towards Socialism and this grand uplifting of proletarian thought, turned out to be just another human made and manned system with all the faults of all such systems that man makes.  Instead of uplifting worker education they served to line the pockets of Union Bosses with worker funds and then walk away richer for it and cut deals with the very people they were supposed to protect the workers from.  The First Congress types saw Trade Unions as just another corrupt system and lumped them in the 'everybody else' category of 'not true socialists' right next to the National Socialists.

A strange thing happened from the days of the Old Marxist Left (roughly up to the mid-1970's encompassing the 'New Left' which was just warmed-over Old Left) and today: the grandiose vision of Marx was retained but the rhetoric, the internal logic, the ability to argue based on it all disappeared.  Lock, stock and barrel the current Authoritarian Left no longer has intellectual roots in Marx, Marxism or even logic.  Meet up with a Leftists today and they couldn't even attempt to give a good description of the Labor Theory of Value or to even explain what Alienation of Labor is.  Handwave as much as you like at the Frankfurt School, but they sought a domination through culture and have, instead, reinvented nihilism.

Nihilism

Source: WordNet (r) 1.7

nihilism
     n 1: a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake
     2: the delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal [syn: nihilistic delusion]
     3: complete denial of all established authority and institutions

Given that Marx gave us an Eschatology of end-times, it is little wonder that those seeking a cultural domination would come up with nihilism.  Trying to unmoor past and present, seek to remove objective reasoning and, instead, personalize all political and economic points of view and then enforce those on everyone from some intellectual elite that doesn't have rational thinking as its basis, is it any wonder that you come to nihilism?

The feel-good and warm-fuzzies of Marxism are retained, that workers paradise and everyone getting goodies for nothing and their chicks for free remains to this day the heart of the Left and, in fact, dominates it.  If the Frankfurt School is to blame for its institutional marching to the point where politicians no longer believe in balancing a check book for THEMSELVES not to speak of the governments they seek to run, is it any wonder the rest of us are left scratching our heads asking: just how the hell is THIS supposed to work?

If there is no inherent difference between work and non-work, then why work?

If you hand out a dole to everyone for just existing, then who grows the food and why?  To what end?

Being generous with tax revenue and then some, means that you are taking economic vitality and encouraging non-vitality and asking our children to pay for it.  And if you don't teach them the value of actually earning a living, and they don't repay the debts, then who is going to grow the food?

Mao had the lovely idea of whipping the intellectuals into line, even a good amount of his supporters, by putting them to grow food for others and starve as they did so.  Radical material simplification, as one professor puts it about the Dark Ages: you are poor, hungry and have a short life deprived of the benefits of a civilization that once flourished.

Marxism has always had an eschatological view of the human race: it was always an end time religion because it never got the basics of human nature right and assumed a massive change intellectually that would free the working class and remove alienation of labor.  That's right, everyone would get to do the entire job for themselves!  You would be a fisher, raise wheat and corn, have chickens, read and print books, go hunting, and have the satisfaction of knowing that your labor was no longer alienated!

Unfortunately fishing is not catching.

Unfortunately hunting is not always successful.

Unfortunately chickens get sick, as do pigs, cattle, and you have to care for them as well as yourself.

To keep warm you must chop your own wood, mine your own coal or make your own nuclear reactor.

And then you would have to find the time to write about how grand your life was and how good it was to have unalienated labor.

Because all of it, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, you are going to do it all and even when you do it with your fellow liberated proletarians, you dare NOT divide up labor into different parts because that will alienate your labor from the entire affair.

To support unalienated labor is impossible, but the Left has decided to support the unemployed who should be seeking a job but now get supported for nearly two years and are taught how to live off the money taken by government for them.  Their labor is lacking.  Your labor's wages are stolen via government and given to those who have decided that living on what government gives them from you is better than working for a living and supporting themselves.  This isn't labor that is no longer alienated as their labor is no longer done: that which is not done cannot be alienated as it is never present.

What drives this is no longer an ideology but the belief in the end state of an ideology: the ideology, itself, is no longer discussed or thought about as a thing in and of itself.  At this point there is a belief in Marx that is no longer intellectual and not even rooted in his texts or the body of work of those closely associated with him.  Leftists are atheists because they want to be in the belief that Marx is right, not through reading Marx and understanding Marx, but just believing in him.  Their attacks on those who read religious texts is thus an anti-intellectual attack, no matter how dressed up and how many degrees are held by those going after religion, their own belief structure is based on unread texts and only on assumptions.

The devolution of Marxism from rhetorical premise and argumentative structure that requires thought has been slow, but has become greatly accelerated as the 'March through the institutions' is no longer based on something that has definition, but on the belief that the end result is 'good'.  Yet what is 'good' is never defined in a hard, fast and discernable way: good has no end state to it of limits to how much good any bureaucratic organization can do.  In fact the growth of bureaucracy is an in-bred 'good' in the belief that more of it and more power to it will get 'good' results.  And because human nature is no longer studied, nor the very impacts of it upon prior Marxist ideology and its factionation, it is not understood that a bureaucracy has no intellect, has no fast goal, cannot become an 'expert' no matter how many it hires, and that the Iron Law of bureaucracy is that those that further the ends of the bureaucracy get rewarded as the bureaucracy expands.  Thus the end goal a bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is the expansion of bureaucracy by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy.  Other goals become secondary to that quest for greater power.

Marxist ideology is not, of necessity, nihilistic and was, in fact, seen as something a bit more humanized than Utilitarianism.  Yet the very problems of Utilitarianism are seen in Marxism in its later stages of demeaning the individual, of not understanding the human nature of the individual and not addressing that there is more to the individual than, in the case of Marx, labor not utility.  Yet the very way labor is posited makes it utilitarian, thus the premise of Marx is eschatology within an ideology based on a belief and criticism that is has scant difference from the ones Marx leveled at Utilitarianism.

This cannot be argued to those who follow only the nihilistic eschatology of modern Marxism/Leftism because those inside the belief system don't bother to read and grapple with Marx.  It is always about doing 'good' through government, growing government and never asking if this is good for all the individuals in society.  Yet they speak of the 'collective' but then only want to do better for parts of it, not the whole thing, and thus they even miscomprehend what collectivism is and sacrifice it on the alter of special preferences. 

I never thought I would wish for the day of actual, intellectual Marxists arguing the rhetoric of Marx for policy, but they are not to be found.  The Marxism in the halls of power today, under a Progressivist/Liberal/Left guise is one that is rudely divorced from the ideology of Marx and connected to the end state eschatology of Marx.  Even that doesn't follow Marx as they screw up the Marxist notion of collectivism and replace it with special privileges for a few.  That is a National Socialist conception from Fascism as gone through the form of its German descendent, and this one isn't the one at Frankfurt but the one that got tried at Nuremburg.  It, too, had an end state eschatology that it elevated above ideology, and it was hard to find parsers of Marx amongst the National Socialists who started out as off-shoots of the International Socialist schools.  Gramsci would have his ideas picked up the the West but his body would be killed by Italian Fascists, which demonstrates the allure of special privilege nihilistic eschatology based roughly on Marx.

Too bad those followers of this anti-human form of Marxism don't bother to read history, either, because it is littered with such examples and death tolls attributable to it.  Better to go on pushing 'forward' never looking at where the path gets you and never asking 'just where in the hell are we going?'  The moment you do that you are decried as being against this or that special privileged group, or as someone who is an anarchist, which is strange because that is just another nihilistic eschatology.  Thus point out the bad ends of the road and you are said to be using a nihilistic eschatology by those who are using a nihilistic eschatology and don't want it mentioned that this is what they are doing.  And if you ask where they get these ideas from they just say its because it 'feels good' to do these things and have government do it for them with other people's money.

Lately, though, they are finding out they have to pay for their good ideas by finding out that their health insurance policy has been canceled and that they will have to get a much more costly one that does less for them.  Only once they start to get mugged by their own creation do they realize that there is pain involved to the many for the few with their 'good feeling' policies.  Better that it be a lot of pain, swiftly and deep today, so that more will see this is not good at all so that we can start requiring that people think and work for themselves and help the collective to get out of the mess the privileged got us into with their strange religion based only on good feelings and an nihilistic eschatology.  Ideologues you can at least argue with on the basis of something.  Those with a worldview religion based on someone they never read have belief in nothing and no idea what they are actually arguing about, just that they are always right.  Religious zealots who are unlearned and don't bother to ever think about what they say, you only can argue with and never, ever get anywhere.  I'll take the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, or any other religious sect that at least honestly reads about itself than this strange sect on the Left that just believes it is right because it said so.

Government furlough

So the US government is down to essential personnel only, today.

Note the sky has not fallen.

Note, also, that the Earth continues to spin on its axis and revolve around the sun.

The Nation has not fallen into chaos.

I've been through this in the Clinton ear and was considered 'essential personnel' back in the day.  Which meant I had to go to work for warfighter support.

Who else had to go to work?

Guards, you need guards and the security people.

The people in the boiler room and HVAC, yeah you needed them, too.

Our office manager, although without secretary, which is the first time I actually got to see anyone in management actually have to do, you know, work.  Type their own letters. Get the office mail (what there was of it). Track secure packages.  Sign off on work product.  That sort of thing.

There was someone at the mail room but that is because the loading dock had to be open, and their boss covered the mail room, as well.  The mail room staff, you know the people who package and sort stuff, they weren't there and you had to DIY packaging for any outgoing packages.

Who wasn't there?  Whole cadres of mid-level and upper-level managers, the GS-13 through GS-15 types, save for one GS-15 per Directorate.  The rest?  Gone.  Lights off.

Cafeteria workers were not there.

Nor was the EEO staff.

Or any of the Human Resources staff, except their boss.

Janitorial crew was skeleton, enough to clean the washrooms and any other messes that showed up.

Grounds people were missing.

And anyone who didn't have work product headed to the warfighter, they were not there.

Basically the building I was in was mostly empty save for the rooms dedicated to actually getting stuff made to go out the door, and people to take it out the door to couriers.

I have a suggestion for a CR.

Make it an 'essential staff only' CR and put it in for a few months until everyone can get settled down to trying to figure out what is and isn't needed any more.

The debt will get maintenance payments.

The military will be on duty.

SSA and M&M checks will get processed.

As the Interstates are actually a military requirement during the Cold War, they can get to do repair work on it... give the USACE something to do beyond pork spending.

The border will have people manning it.

USPTO will be open.

USPS too, come to that, as well as USGS, or at least those parts actually making maps and charts.

A few other select places covered by the US Constitution would be open.

It's interesting that while Ambassadors are mentioned in the Constitution, a State Dept. isn't.  Maybe we can get the military to run the rest of it?

Everything else?

Do that for long enough and it becomes the 'new normal'.

Six to eight months ought to do it, and then the GAO which will be open on skeletal staff, can start to shut down buildings and auction off equipment... and then the buildings themselves...

And if President Obama wants to do it his way or the highway on the debt ceiling, then he should be thanked for wanting to run a government on $2.5 trillion/year and not on $4 trillion a year!  Tell him that he will be admired for his fiscal astuteness that the government should only spend what it takes in and that a skeleton 'essential personnel only' government is a good start on that process.

Always give an enemy what they want in a way they will not like and will look duplicitous in refusing.

Works every time.

Ideology of Tyranny

Recently I've looked at how Russia has moved from a Communist State to a Police State run by the secret police.  This shift from totalitarianism via political ideology derived from Marx to one derived from the pure use of power is one that is a direct flow, culturally, in Russia dating back to the early Czars all the way to Vladimir Putin.  The horror of such a regime isn't in its biased enforcement of laws to keep a regime elite in power, but in the violation of the social compact with those that merely try to enforce an equality of law upon all citizens.  That is the End Game Against Freedom article that centers on a film documentary by Andrei Nekrasov who recounted the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Poisoned by Polonium.  Litvinenko attempted to simply put down a moral basis to do his job of law enforcement so that the law could be upheld in a neutral manner.  This was inside the FSB, the secret police organization that traces its roots directly back to the Cheka of the Czars, and he had an entire unit of men who also viewed with horror the things they were being asked to do to keep the regime in power: harass citizens, extort money from businessmen, plant evidence, use blackmail on judges, and even murder those who had the temerity to simply want a common law enforced for everyone.  Not only was the man they were going after inside the police, but he upheld an ideological point of view that Litvinenko's unit was in agreement with.  The men of the unit went on record as to what they had been ordered to do, who ordered them to do it, and why they thought they had been given such orders.  By revealing that the secret police, as individuals and units, had their own, separate funding garnered by extortion and blackmail of businesses, this unit had exposed how a secret police can act secretly even to its own budget to the enrichment of the police officers involved.  From Alexander Litvinenko:

Everyone realizes I don't know any secrets.  The only secrets I know are about organized crime and corruption, and they can't legally be considered state secrets.  Even if I wanted to work for British intelligence, I have nothing to tell them.  How can I be a traitor to my country?

Why are they so angry with me?

Because I have spoken about the one thing that is important, holy to them.  One officer said to me, "You can out all our agents, to hell with them.  We'll recruit new ones.  But you did one deadly thing.  You made public our system of earning money.  Do you want us to use the underground?"

That is why they hate me so much.

In any normal society this would be the activity of organized crime, but in Russia there is a political blending between the FSB and organized crime: between the State and criminals. I went over that in A taste of Oil For Food and its chefs, and it works out like this:  Marc Rich (the man who was on the run from FBI prosecution and who would be pardoned by President Clinton at the behest of Eric Holder) ran in a predatory investment environment so that he was willing to invest in places where there were either sanctions against investing or steep penalties for doing so, so that he could make money off of troubled regions of the world.  Russia, just in the post-USSR period, was very troubled in that it had no foreign cash reserves and its industrial base had no owners and no way to run things.  Organized crime in Russia had cash, and so did Marc Rich and together they were able to get legislation put in place that would allow criminal money to be used for purchasing ex-State run industries.  From that there were three types of owners for these businesses at the start of modern Russia: the State, Organized Crime, and corrupt outside investors.  This is a pattern from Marc Rich of finding raw materials concerns in foreign Nations that have limited access to markets via sanctions, purchasing those goods at a pittance, and then working those black market goods into the grey and open markets.  In Russia this was augmented by a process of 'tolling' which was exchanging goods from the USSR for cash, and not having any taxes to pay for the importation of any other goods.

When dealing with sums involved in such transactions the banking system must be used, and it was (and still is) relatively porous to criminal funds moving through the global financial system. In my article on the Red Mafia and its connectivity, I outline how the Bank of New York was penetrated by at least one organization of the Red Mafia (and because it still has not been thoroughly investigated, no one can say for sure just what the current extent of the penetration actually is nor how many organizations have penetrated it) that was moving $70 billion worth of funds and transactions over a period of years between other Nations and Russia.  Most of that was for Oligarchs, yes, but there are definite tracks that lead to an outfit run by the Chernoy brothers, who used the unique method of not being computerized and having one brother with an eidetic memory to remember where all the paper front companies were.  Literally no one working inside their main front organization actually suspected that the transactions that were taking place were between off-shore companies stood up just for the length of the transaction and then dissolved soon thereafter.  Without a paper trail, no one can be prosecuted, and that unique approach means that just how much illicit money through drug running, extortion overseas, white slavery and murder for hire went through the system is unknown.  What can be said is that one large swindle involving Semion Mogilevich in the YBM Magnex scandal netted $1 billion over its 4 years of operation in cornering the permanent magnet market via illegal trades.  Note that this was the Canadian market that was penetrated by a Russian operation started by a Red Mafia leader in Virginia, USA, with funds then being funneled through the penetrating group of the Bank of New York in NYC and then filtered out to Cypress, where Mogilevich had a holding company, and then filtered into Russia to support his organized crime syndicate that stretched all the way from Moscow to China.

This puts the life and times of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (from Khodorkovsky a documentary by Cyril Tuschi ), which I went through in End of the moral State, into fine focus.  The USSR had no banks, no one had a checking or savings account, nor credit cards, nor owned stock or bonds in companies.  Yet the Red Mafia had been dealing with capitalist regions for decades, faced brutal repression in the USSR and became far more brutal because of the repression.  Khodorkovsky saw the need for a banking system in Russia if it was to make a post-Communist transition, but knew little of what banks were, what they did or how they operated.  Those few with any cash standing up Menatap Bank had to go to Great Britain's banking industry for help on just the basics, and that also led to problems in those early days of keeping track of just where funds were coming from.  Surely funds coming from a well established, well known Western global banking system were secure, right?

Yet that was not the case and Menatap suffered because it was becoming known as a conduit for funds that was not transparent, did not keep open books and was suspected of helping to funnel organized crime funds into Russia.  This was the result as seen from Irina Yasina journalist who worked with Khodorkovsky to help establish his education works and who was the director of Open Russia:

At some point, Yukos was also a non-transparent company.  Minority shareholders were treated badly and no quarterly reports were submitted, like in the West.  That's what it was like in the beginning. After a series of scandals, Khodorkovsky understood:  If you make a company transparent, you attract investment.  He learned from his mistakes and knew this would also make money.  So it was actually a business project.

What happened is that Mikhail Khodorkovsky learned the basis for a capitalist system:  open books and transparency of accounts.  This would wind him up in Siberia, now having his sentence extended by the Putin regime for a third time because he was running an organization that could no longer be extorted for funds.  Both Menatap and Yukos would demonstrate that the fundamental requirement for a working capitalist system is open accounting, transparency and equal application of the law to all businesses with favoritism towards none.  This changed the course of Khodorkovsky's life and businesses from those that were not transparent with few willing to invest, to ones with open transparency and books and loads of investors.  Going from nothing to the richest man under 40 on the planet in less than a decade can be done legally, and Khodorkovsky proved it.  If he had not actually pushed back against the corrupt politicians put in place by the FSB, he would now be the richest man on planet Earth.

What did he run up against?

Again from the Litvinenko film:

In our country, the special services are, in fact, a secret political organization that uses sharp methods, secret methods, not against spies and terrorists, but solely to keep a ruling class in power.  In 1999, for example, to seize power, the FSB used secret methods that are only allowed against terrorists and spies.  If the army were to seize power, they'd roll in with tanks and guns and fly in with jets maybe.  But everyone would notice. The FSB, on the other hand, has secret methods, and nobody noticed anything until chekists made up the government and seized every organ of power.  If the KGB was the armed unit of the Communist Party, then the FSB is the armed unit of – of a caste of corrupt Russian officials.

In the USA, Congress has been willing to hand over more and more policing powers not just to individual agencies (which they are allowed to do) but to larger police organizations which now fall under the Dept. of Justice rubric.  Further the tax collection system has also garnered not only its own policing powers but its own court system, which is run to the interest of collecting taxes, not protecting individual rights and freedoms.  Under the guise of 'financial penalties' Congress has empowered the IRS to use both jail time and punitive fines as coercement techniques and that has now spread via special 'categories' of companies to allow the forceful hand of the elite to put pressure on citizen political concerns.  If the IRS were to seize power by disenfranchisement of individuals through: suppression of freedom of speech,  suppression of freedom of association, intimidation tactics against not just those wishing to start companies but their families, donors and families of donors, discourage the citizen's protected right to directly address government, and then hold the penalty of perjury over any wrong detail... would you notice?

This coercion and intimidation did not start with the election of Barack Obama, no this had started long before that.  Long before Richard Nixon threatened to do this.  Coming from The Federalist #12 (Courtesy: constitution.org) by Alexander Hamilton we get this view on taxation after looking at wartime taxation:

But it is not in this aspect of the subject alone that Union will be seen to conduce to the purpose of revenue. There are other points of view, in which its influence will appear more immediate and decisive. It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation. Tax laws have in vain been multiplied; new methods to enforce the collection have in vain been tried; the public expectation has been uniformly disappointed, and the treasuries of the States have remained empty. The popular system of administration inherent in the nature of popular government, coinciding with the real scarcity of money incident to a languid and mutilated state of trade, has hitherto defeated every experiment for extensive collections, and has at length taught the different legislatures the folly of attempting them.

And then further on:

In France, there is an army of patrols (as they are called) constantly employed to secure their fiscal regulations against the inroads of the dealers in contraband trade. Mr. Neckar computes the number of these patrols at upwards of twenty thousand. This shows the immense difficulty in preventing that species of traffic, where there is an inland communication, and places in a strong light the disadvantages with which the collection of duties in this country would be encumbered, if by disunion the States should be placed in a situation, with respect to each other, resembling that of France with respect to her neighbors. The arbitrary and vexatious powers with which the patrols are necessarily armed, would be intolerable in a free country.

In the modern USA all attempts to garner more and more money for government by taxation has found that after a certain point the increases become detractions to revenue generation, as was demonstrated by Art Laffer.  Yet tax regulation has gone inexorably upwards, more and more power over personal information is vested in the IRS, and it now has an army of agents willing to roam the land to enforce its own form of political viewpoint AND use arbitrary and capricious audits against not just businesses but individuals as well to both garner revenue and suppress speech.  And as the IRS is the agency put in to the role of collecting your medical information under Obamacare, the inroads and reach of the US federal government into the lives of individuals is about to increase many fold.

This, too, was seen by Hamilton:

What will be the consequence, if we are not able to avail ourselves of the resource in question in its full extent? A nation cannot long exist without revenues. Destitute of this essential support, it must resign its independence, and sink into the degraded condition of a province. This is an extremity to which no government will of choice accede. Revenue, therefore, must be had at all events. In this country, if the principal part be not drawn from commerce, it must fall with oppressive weight upon land. It has been already intimated that excises, in their true signification, are too little in unison with the feelings of the people, to admit of great use being made of that mode of taxation; nor, indeed, in the States where almost the sole employment is agriculture, are the objects proper for excise sufficiently numerous to permit very ample collections in that way. Personal estate (as has been before remarked), from the difficulty in tracing it, cannot be subjected to large contributions, by any other means than by taxes on consumption. In populous cities, it may be enough the subject of conjecture, to occasion the oppression of individuals, without much aggregate benefit to the State; but beyond these circles, it must, in a great measure, escape the eye and the hand of the tax-gatherer. As the necessities of the State, nevertheless, must be satisfied in some mode or other, the defect of other resources must throw the principal weight of public burdens on the possessors of land. And as, on the other hand, the wants of the government can never obtain an adequate supply, unless all the sources of revenue are open to its demands, the finances of the community, under such embarrassments, cannot be put into a situation consistent with its respectability or its security. Thus we shall not even have the consolations of a full treasury, to atone for the oppression of that valuable class of the citizens who are employed in the cultivation of the soil. But public and private distress will keep pace with each other in gloomy concert; and unite in deploring the infatuation of those counsels which led to disunion.

The wants of any government can only be met by totalitarian excesses of control of all parts of the economy: and yet even that will not fund it nor will it guarantee security and, in failing that, it will lose respect and support.

In Russia the secret police (Cheka, KGB, FSB) gained control by infiltrating all levels of law, and then moving into politics to control all levels of the economy.  Taxation plays only a small role in Russia where the population has never had a democratic expression of the popular will without the influence of the elite or organized crime, when the two can be told apart from each other.  Vladimir Putin swindled St. Petersburg, Russia of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in what was supposed to be a goods for food arrangement with Western Europe.  The goods went out and he pocketed the cash, and formed a money laundering bank that then reached out to the Colombian cartels.  With that personal money he was then able to help push the FSB forward with political candidates directly FROM the FSB, so that the second generation of laws could be geared towards the FSB and the elite, with the FSB serving not only on the criminal apprehension and prosecution side of things, but also serving as 'advisors' to courts and judges, letting them know who to judge guilty.

In the USA we have a system of politicians using the laws to create an arm of government that reaches into the financial and now health concerns of every American and suppresses attempts by citizens to form organizations to cut all of government down to an accountable size, remove broad powers from unaccountable agencies and their agents, all while trying to keep out of a court system run by and for those same agencies and agents.  On the DoJ side there are abuses of power under the rubric of National Security to wiretap journalists without informing those organizations they are tapping of who they are tapping and why they are tapping them and how long such taps will be used, and for what purposes as is required by law.  Further the DoJ goes 'judge shopping' to find a judge who will sign off on such open-ended, clandestine wiretaps, all to try and find out who the sources for a journalist are when that journalist is exercising First Amendment rights.

That same DoJ is given oversight on running the BATFE and then abusing that privilege by sending unaccountable arms to organized crime across the border and even overseas, without using proper IMEX treaty controls to do so, thus contravening not just federal law but international law as agreed to by the USA and places like Mexico and Honduras.  Those arms then filter back into the USA via those criminal organizations, and has led to the death of Brian Terry and other federal agents inside the USA.  This is only surpassed by the State Dept. running arms to other organized crime organizations in Mexico, moving Libyan MANPADs to 'rebels' in Syria affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda and then not bothering to protect Ambassador Stevens when the same jihadi-based organizations we got to protect him then turned on him, thus obscuring just which arms were shipped into and out of Libya and by whom.

Apparently there is another group of elites in the world who see fit to use the government of the USA and its organs against the people of America and who then create disorder overseas via US federal agencies and organs to their own ends which are neither legal nor lawful in any way, shape or form.

Do note that this is caused by both parties in the USA, over a number of decades and slowly built to control not just the lives of American Citizens, but to bring to heel multiple Nations through different means via the utilization of corrupt politicians with the Ideology of Tyranny.

What is that Ideology of Tyranny?

Raw power for the elites in charge to terrorize the lives of the common man on all corners of the Earth.

You can see it in small scale in Russia.

It is about to be on your doorstep and the doorstep of billions of people across the globe.

The only thing to stop it is each of us being awake, pointing out the outlines of such Tyranny, and continuing the civil discourse until the Tyrants can't take it any longer.  Then comes our Natural Right to protect ourselves, our loved ones, our property and our society against the inroads of such Totalitarianism.

And, just so you know, the best form of attack to bring the Tyrants of the world up short: humor, derision, and just pointing out how damned stupid they are to think that power, control and force actually make THEM safe.  There are plenty of fine examples of elites with lopped off heads, spilled guts, sudden attempts to fly out of 10 story windows, and just plain old numbers on their backs so they can be worked to death by the thing they create.  In their attempts to make everyone heel to them, they always forget to heel themselves to any inner guidance beyond all consuming power.  All consuming power consumes all, including those doing the holding.  Laugh at them for their willful ignorance of history, deride them in thinking that a necessary evil can be given good things to do and not become a pure evil, and that societies are created amongst men and governments mere temporary things used to help sustain society and that when government attempts to become society it becomes its own enemy and will soon be attacking itself.

You can't ask Litvinenko about that.

You might get a word from Khodorkovsky.

And you might just want to physically write down that you will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

Your life is your own.

And smile when you do it.

Tyrants hate those who smile in freedom.

It will make you a target, but soon, very soon, the targets will all be pointing in at the elites.  When everyone else is the target, then you aren't in a good situation because it is you that are the violent one and it is you that are in the 10 ring: target all others and you become the target.

And that day is also coming.

Obamacare train wreck and you

Commentary I left at Hot Air on Harry Reid suddenly realizing that the Obamacare system he helped to connive into being isn't solvent, needs way more cash and won't do what it was purported as its actual points of being... but it is a sinkhole of cash that is vast and black in the budget.  Just like SSA and the M&Ms and other entitlements.  The question is: what to do about it.

The answer is simple and I've repeated it often in many ways, but here it is, again for this question:

Same answer to Obamacare as to the rest of the federal government:

Start in the House… fund by agency… don’t fund some agencies fully or use funding towards other programs and leave Obamacare high and dry.

There are a ton of programs you can kill by not funding them.

Just because a prior Congress wants it doesn’t mean a current Congress is obliged to fund it. There is no law against not funding these things, none at all. This requires a wholesale change of the R party in the House, particularly the sclerotic leadership. Obama can’t stop the House from not funding items, only keep on sending the bills back TO fund parts of agencies. If he wants to kill off some government agencies by killing their funding: LET HIM DO IT VIA THE VETO.

And then THANK HIM to rub salt in the wounds.

Would he really not want to sign off on a downsized IRS? And to put the IRS FIRST to set the tone. Then HHS. Then FDA.

You want this to happen? Then the House Republican ‘we have to fund everything other Congresses started’ contingent MUST GO. There is no law that says they MUST DO THAT. One Congress cannot bind another Congress via legislation and since the House holds the purse strings, it is there that fiscal rectitude must start. Not the Senate. Not the POTUS. Not the SCOTUS. You want to get a smaller government? Start at the US House of Representatives. Want to blame someone for the deficit? Also the US House. And the Debt as well. Surely for $3.2 trillion you can run a minimal government… if the debt service payments don’t EAT IT ALL UP, of course.

That is the Obama goal to collapsing the Nation: create a debt so vast that even current revenue can’t support minimal payments.

Your Nation goes under, your currency becomes worthless, your savings disappear and no amount of POWER from DC can make that better because it CAN’T BE FUNDED ANYMORE. If we are very lucky there are two elections left before that happens. If we are unlucky there is only one. If our luck has run out, you have seen our last election as a free people.

Change doesn’t start in DC: it starts with you, holding DC accountable and telling them to ‘stop the spending’. Yes they aren’t listening there or on the compliant and submissive Left… they want a tyrant, a dictator, a despot… their freedom isn’t in question. Yours is. Act like a free man who expects government to be beholden to the people, live like a free man who expects to be held accountable for his misdeeds, and praise virtue whenever and wherever it appears and support it. You carry through the actions and you just might be able to protect your liberty and join with those who think like you to ensure them.

There is a cost to this, of course.

Your money: gone.

Your savings: gone.

Your property: ravaged and destroyed.

You: free to start over or die trying.

Remember I’m the guy in poor health who won’t survive for long if the system goes south. Yet I’m preparing for those losses as best as I can. Because my freedom is priceless beyond any value, and I am more than prepared to be impoverished to remove this system of petty tyranny of rules above law and those who think they are above any law making the rules for themselves. You can start now by pestering your Congresscritters. It won’t change them, but it will change you.

ajacksonian on May 3, 2013 at 7:11 AM

This isn't about Obamacare.

This isn't about our dysfunctional government of Progressive Elites.

It is all about you and how you live your life.

Want a better government?  Make sure you are a prepared to be a better person, first.  And help society to recover from the insane beliefs fostered by Marx and the Left for over a century about government being the source of your liberty.  It isn't.

Government is instituted amongst men.

Government does not exist first and creates man... sorry that isn't how it works.

And the best government is self-government.

Once you got that figured out, you begin to resent all these other governments trying to tell you how to live your life.  Then your choices start to become obvious and your path, simple.

Freedom vs. Utopia

I've been continuing on with The Moral Foundations of Politics presented by Professor Ian Shapiro at Yale as part of their Open Yale courses and have now gotten into the post-Classical views on politics, leaving the 19th century behind as such propositions as Utilitarianism and Marxism are both seen as so flawed as to not offer a complete nor satisfactory means to remove politics from society.  Indeed, that singular goal of turning science into a means of replacing politics proved to be ill-founded, ill-thought out and when the scientific method is rigorously applied to either they both fall short of their goals of removing politics from the affairs of Man.  Simply put, you can't get rid of it due to the complexities of societies and individuals and the fact that valuations on such affairs cannot be rendered objectively but subjectively.  Both the maximization of social utility and the creation of the bureaucratic self-ending State prove to have so many problems as they are both a threat to human liberty because of the underlying principles involved.  Thus in the 20th century, while adherents to both ideals try to find a way forward with them, their ability to have good outcomes in the world lead to problems that show philosophies of Man that are unable to deal with Man as he is.

From that point Professor Shapiro moves to a late 20th century thinker called Robert Nozick, who proposed the utilization of subjectivity and Man's freedom to analyze just what sort of political system and results one gets starting from just about any point in the political spectrum.  Instead of trying to work through a mechanical system, like both Utilitarianism and Marxism that assert a methodology of approach to render objective means, Nozick proposes a subjective approach utilizing post-Newtonian conceptions in the way of Einstein's 'thought experiments'.  His goal is not to step outside of society and politics but to temporarily put it aside and ask a fundamental question: what is the purpose of the State?

The thought experiment entails having you, the individual, ask yourself what sort of situation you would be in if no State government existed.  Yes, it is an impossible situation but this is a thought experiment, not a real world goal to reach.  If every politician, judge, lawyer and political activist suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke along with every bureaucrat and every tome of laws and regulations they created, why would you need them?  What is their purpose?  And what would your reaction be in this case where the State, as we know it and as has been known to every generation of mankind, suddenly evaporated?  It is a profound question and the answers you get start to show major lines of thought in the 1980's and forward to today, but not in the mainstream of political thought until just recently.

In that Stateless state you would be back to your Natural Rights and Liberties and must rely on self-governance.  But that is no assurance against Man in that State of Nature (red of tooth and claw) and to protect yourself you must actually do that and also protect those things you create that allow you to survive.  Otherwise you would fall prey to Savage Man because that is the state of being you have entered into.  To protect yourself you might band together with others who are like minded with you to help, but then the burden of protecting all of those things you own as individuals and each of your individual lives falls to you, and you have more and better things to do with your liberty than that, don't you?  Thus you may find others who have decided on a division of labor as a means to achieve this end (remember how Marx hated that?) so that they can protect your belongings as you went about doing other things.  You form a Stateless contract with such a group as there is no one to enforce it other than each other, but you can work on a principle of accountability and of one's word being their bond, with proof of that only coming over time.  From that the basis of protective organizations starts and we could liken this to Mafia families or bands of Warlords and their personal followers.

What happens in this state of being without a State?  This is, perhaps, the Anarchist dream Utopia but it has a problem: there is no one to really enforce the contract.  Worse still is that to gain market and expand, as any organization must due to internal needs and requirements of administration and covering ever more people as they become popular, such bands then start to compete for market space.  What happens when rival protection rackets start to go after the same territory?  Conflict.  And that is what happens with these protection organizations, as they may start at a low-level of threats and intimidation to gain market (or go out of existence as stronger organizations prevail) until open conflict ensues.  In this way the more capable organizations will expand and flourish to cover more and more population until they cover a society.  At that point there is a power dynamic change as the legitimizing power to enforce protection can be used against a population, but that population also has some capability to withhold funding the organization at large to hold it accountable.  In either case you get the State. 

From a start of pure Statelessness you get the State and yet it is just that one power and function that has been granted to it: to protect one's life and property from others harming them.  This is a Utilitarian conception of John Stewart Mill and this is the State that protects it: The Night Watchman State.  And who watches these Watchmen?  All members of society.

Such a minimalist State allows maximum freedom to exercise individual liberty, protects all members of society and their property (although you never lose the responsibility, duty and right of self-protection), but otherwise does nothing else and is held in check from expansion by the population at large.  While not a new conception of such a State, it comes with a far different set of underpinnings than Enlightenment or Classical or even Ancient views of it since it is a State in thought experiment only, not a goal nor objective to achieve: this is not a rigorous methodology to create a new realm of morality in politics, but an analytical tool to analyze what is or is not moral in politics.

If one steps away, mentally, from their current society and asks if any idea is good or bad to each individual in society, then they must look at the greatest harm done as well as the greatest good generated on any political question.  This is not a means with an end, but a pure tool to wield in cutting away questions of their normal externalities and get to the actual propositions involved.  Thus something like, say, 'should there be a minimum wage?' or 'should there be unemployment benefits?' can be asked not by pointing out to the 'good' that can be done but also to looking at the harm it can do, and no political proposition or law is harmless.  Passing legislation to say that rabbits are cute is not the same as enforcing a taking of wages to fund the unemployed or to require redirection of resources directly to a minimum wage as a forced part of any contract: there is harm done and to a large number of people and then only to benefit a minority of the population by removing liberty or the fruits of liberty at the direction of government.  That is a moral question and an ethical one that brings home the actual question: is it right to take away money that represents a person's time spent in productive labor to give it to someone who has lost their job?  That is actually not a simple question to ask as it entails lost productivity of not only individuals and a society in an attempt to give temporary recompense to those who have lost a job.  That is a harm.  Anything done to an individual that removes their liberty or its creations is a harm as it is those very things that the State is supposed to PROTECT.  Why?  You just went through that thought experiment and can see that the best and most minimal thing a State is supposed to do is PROTECT your life and the artifacts of time spent with your liberty, not take them and give them to others.

As you are now outside the actual system (with thought experiments) and are not contained within it you also get to ask: how does this effect me without my knowing where I will be in the economic scale once I step back into the active society?  Remember this is a thought experiment and while performing it you have no attributes of the society involved: you have no class, you have no social standing, you have no religion, you own nothing and you are detached in all ways from that society that you can manage so as to try and render a moral judgment on a political activity from all parts of society.  Yes you will have difficulty doing that detachment, which is why such an analytical tool requires rigor in its use and you must self-analyze any bias you bring to the table.  It is a tool that cuts into not just political morality but into your own moral basis as an individual, and when it cuts it can cut deeply.

Now consider a real world example of a famous professional athlete who has put into his contract that every person coming to a home game puts a quarter into a box for the player to watch the game.  This contract is negotiated between the player and the team (as it is a team sport) and they are agreeable to it.  You, as a fan, get to decide if you want to go to those games and see a world famous athlete play in full knowledge that you'll be paying that athlete 25 cents.  This is a Pareto Perfect situation in which everyone gets to decide if this additional cost is worth the result.  It is also a form of promise from the player to play well as if he can get enough people excited with his play to fill the arena every night, then he makes more money over his career.  There is no force to enter into the contract, and yet it is agreeable to the player and the team.  You have a choice as to paying what amounts to a private tax that is a very small cost compared to the ticket price, and 25 cents isn't all that much.  The player makes millions of dollars in this method.  It also has the benefit of being a real-world example as this is what Wilt Chamberlain had in his contract, so you can't say that it isn't possible.

That player gains wealth beyond what he is guaranteed to get from his salary or wages from people just showing up to watch him play home games.  The team makes far more money from the increase in ticket sales and has a strange form of personal commitment from the player to continue playing at top form or even improve.  The fan gets better on-court play that is more entertaining to them from the player.  Does Wilt Chamberlain deserve all that money?  He did earn it after all, by utilizing a freely negotiated part of a contract acceptable to all involved.  Does anyone think that he isn't entitled to that and to be protected from its being seized in order to, say, give it to the poor?

This example is a powerful one as it demonstrates a principle of freedom allowing for the unequal distribution of wealth via freely negotiated contracts.  It is, perhaps, the largest game-changer in the approach to morality in politics that anyone has developed and is one of the keenest tools to pull apart redistributive systems.  Those on the Left would criticize Wilt Chamberlain and say that he did not deserve to have such accumulated wealth and that the State should have some say in how it is used (through taxation, say) even though these are negotiated payments to see an ephemeral activity for the temporary enjoyment of those watching a game.  It is a price paid for enjoyment and the social experience of a game, not productive activity which irks the social moralists even more.  The goal of those moralists is to reach a Utopian end-state (usually a Marxist one as it involves forcible redistribution of wealth) and they have just run into the worst kind of roadblock that can be put in front of them: the death of the Utopian end-state ideal.

With this tool a different Einsteinian 'thought experiment' can progress and it is one that can be used against a Utopian end-state.  Lets make that a State where everyone is exactly equal in material wealth, have all their needs met and contribute accordingly. 

Now put in place the freedom of contract. 

What do you get? 

Unequal results, the accumulation of wealth and the end of the level end-state which disappears in relatively short order as everyone makes subjective decisions on what to do with their freedom to exercise their liberty. 

The great thing is that Mr. Nozick lived to see this come about in the fall of the Eastern Bloc in such places as Poland and Czechoslovakia where State owned businesses were apportioned out by one-share per citizen.  Each citizen had equal ownership in these businesses to do with as they pleased with the shares.  Some put them under mattresses, others burned them, others used them as toilet paper and others started purchasing them.  Within 5 years those firms that actually had any productive capability had gained majority owners, and not through an original wealth imbalance (as was the case in Russia) but through the free play of a free market starting out in an egalitarian starting condition.  It didn't last long.  Nor does any equal distribution system of wealth as human freedom is its death knell when liberty is allowed to be freely exercised.

Any State that violates its minimalist being to redistribute wealth is thus in conflict with human liberty and freedom.  And even if it reaches some desired form of 'equality' across all of mankind, the moment that freedom is allowed back in, then the entire thing will evaporate in short order without the force of the State to back it.

You really can learn a lot just by wanting to find out about abstruse areas of thought like the moral basis of politics.

And, yes, this is also the death knell for any attempt at 'collective' humanity that isn't coercive and authoritarian, despotic in all ways to the individual.  The greatest tool to wield against it?  Individual liberty.

It was once a revolutionary idea.

And it still is.

A purely aha! moment

I've been watching a few different classes at the Lecture Kings site on my Roku Box, and of particular interest has been ones from Yale.  One series that I finished just a week or so ago was on Ancient Greece and it was full of all sorts of interesting information on era of the pre-Polis Greek civilization and then the rise of the Polis and then its fall.  A very good series of lectures that were both entertaining and enlightening, both.

After going through a number of course titles and brief overviews from various institutions, I wound up back at Yale for a series on the moral underpinnings of political thought.  This course starts just at the end of the Enlightenment and during the Classical period and after a brief intro utilizing the Eichmann trial to illuminate what the role of a citizen is in a State and what are the moral boundaries of a State with regards to its citizens.  That, in itself, is a thought provoking set of classes and it will be used as a touchstone to examine how the Classical and Post-Classical formulations of modern political theory play out over time.  This starts out with Jeremy Bentham and the concept of utilitarianism which he pushed as not just a legal formulation (which is to say laws based on a concept) but a moral formulation for society.  Utilitarianism has a core tenet that is called 'the greatest happiness principle' in that man, for any action or decision, will make decisions to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  For a State, then, the goal is to maximize happiness for the majority of its members and that is a standard that follows for all decisions of government.  He put forward that nature gives us these two masters, pleasure and pain, and that we are driven in all decisions by them.

It is fascinating that for a man who declaimed that there was no 'natural law' or 'natural rights' that he has put forward both a natural law (that nature inflicts pleasure and pain) and a natural right (man to choose between them so as to maximize pleasure).  Yes there are some problems with utilitarianism, but it does serves as a basis for other political thought (such as libertarianism) although not through Bentham but through his friend James Mill and particularly through his son John Stuart Mill.  If Bentham would put forward raw utility (which is to say the maximizing of pleasure for the majority in society) to its limits, then John Stuart Mill would shift that towards the maximization of liberty for the individual and out of State control.  Neither Bentham nor Mill saw much from government as being necessary, and Mill shifted the conception from government utilizing laws so that individuals could maximize pleasure to a set based on the harm principle, where so long as someone is not harming others or property, they should be free to live their lives without interference.  Mill also adds in a community principle in that harming oneself or one's property may put the community at disadvantage as a form of intervention particularly for those incapable of self-government.  Otherwise freedom, particularly freedom to discourse, is a necessary precondition in society amongst individuals.

If libertarianism can trace its roots to a strong foundation point, that point is laid by John Stewart Mill.  It is a utilitarian point, however, and one that rests on legal not natural rights.

After utilitarianism under Bentham, Mill and others, comes Karl Marx as the next of the Classical political philosophers and it is in watching the first lecture on him that I received an aha! moment and it is because of the context of the time that Marx lived in that I had not fully considered before.  Marx lived at a time when science was coming to the forefront of industry in that items that had only empirical meaning in the 17th and 18th century were now getting practical application.  Going from theories of pressure to utilizing steam as a motive source of power and a replacement for stationary power sources, was seen as a liberating concept for mankind.  Being able to place real values based upon empirical equations (and through that also note other things going on that were outside of theoretical concerns) meant that areas of learning in the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and astronomy were all moving into practical concerns for industrial design. 

Adam Smith had done a good job in describing how divided labor in a pin factory (one man to move a wire reel to a cart, another to start the unspooling process, another to run the cutting machine, etc.) meant that production for all of the workers involved jumped by orders of magnitude by concentrating on single tasks.  Smith calculated that 18 men could turn out something on the order of 48,000 pins a day (all put into paper, boxed and then put into a shipping crate) while if they all did the entire production of each pin themselves, their production might be in the dozen per person.  Labor reduced to a task process created efficiency, in other words.

Now if you are able to place real valuation on labor, you should then have a Labor Theory of Value in which value is meant as exchange value (a commodity).  There is a lot to go into on the LTV but its setting due to time and place puts it in an era when science was moving to engineering, which is to say that the lovely empirical stuff was getting real nuts and bolts put to it to see if it could work.  The work force of, say, steam pressure was once just an empirical thing, which meant you had so much steam in so much volume at a certain temperature and it could be said to have a force behind it that could be calculated from those parameters.  Hydraulic power would utilize similar equations (pressure, volume, fluid density) which are applied to pneumatics, and those equations (and even some of the meanings of terms) are applied to electricity (the pressure or volume of electricity as an example).  So it should be obvious that if natural laws pertain to such things then it is perfectly natural that man and his activities conform to similar laws for labor and production.

Setting aside the rest of Marx for a moment, the late Classical and Neo-Classical thoughts on political morality (and economics as well) had something else to deal with: it was understood that profits were declining.

Period.

Any school of thought either had to incorporate that as part of its basis or explain it in some way by its process.  This had been an understood phenomena seen across economies.  Profits were declining.  And since that really sounds like a natural function of an economic system, which is to say industrial capitalism, anyone wanting to put forward any sort of theory on politics and the economy had to take this into account.  Utilitarian thought put it at a nexus of individual response and freedom of discourse so as to maximize pleasure... yes, difficult to comprehend in those terms, but you can see at least some glimmer of how that works.  Marx puts it as the centerpiece of the overall analysis of capitalism and how it has the seeds of its own destruction buried within it.  Further there is a natural value of a commodity that is different from its market value and that is the intrinsic value of that commodity.

Given the pre-condition it is impossible not to get an aha! moment out of this sort of thing.  If declining profits are a natural function of industrial capitalism, then there must be something driving that function.  Just as heat creates steam which in a confined vessel raises pressure, so there must be some natural force behind capitalism which causes declining profits.  This is the 19th century, after all!  Why soon man would have everything explained...

As the formulation of socialism that results from this is scientific socialism, isn't the very first place to see if it is well founded is upon its preconditions?  Really, if the decline in profits is due to some other function not directly related to labor or value in a direct and immediately corresponding way, then a LTV will have problems standing.  That is to say that if profits are declining for other reasons outside those of the given system of analysis, then the system of analysis must be revised, re-done or just scrapped... just like scientists do.

Off-hand I can think of a number of analytical basis known in the 19th century and used by scientists and engineers to test out declining profits.  First is to have exactly the same test and experimental baselines and to control the unknowns in an experiment.  This is known as 'repeatability' and if you can't find equivalent conditions or ones with known differences that can be described, then your chances of actually describing a phenomena in a precise way is nil.  You will get different vapor pressures if water has different soluble compounds in it, therefore you test with pure water to find vapor pressure and the amount of energy to move from water to vapor.  Similarly if profits are declining in multiple industries, they must be comparable on an unadulterated basis: changes to composition mix will give you different and non-conforming results.

An observable phenomena is only of note if you can verify the circumstances of each observation and compare the differences between them, especially if you are examining the exact, same phenomena.

After that there are variables to each experimental arrangement, which is to say some of the differences involved in each experiment.  This is related to the first, but in a slightly different way, in that the measurement of profits is one that is performed slightly differently for different parts of the economy.  Within each sector profits will vary on a number of axes based not just on traditional supply and demand curves, but also things like the number of competitors and the efficiency (and productive capacity) of each one.  Profits will tend to maximize when there are few competitors in a given sector or when market share is seen as 'captured' by certain firms.  With that said the ability to open new markets within a sector or expand markets means increased opportunity to build competition which will effect the bottom line.  While one large firm (A) will have maximal profits, when it gains two competitors (B & C) profits for (A) will suffer due to competition and pricing will be changed to reflect that.  The two competitors (B & C) will go from zero profits to the potential of some profits and perhaps even positive profits, which will still be less than (A) alone.  Taken as a whole amongst all three firms (A, B & C) profits have declined and production of goods has increased and prices have adjusted for that.

What is fun is that the amount of labor per object or commodity may have actually increased due to lack of initial experience of the competitors unless they have a way of increasing productivity that the first firm could not implement.  Suddenly declining profits is not a problem of capitalism, per se, but a function of competition, new entrants, expanding markets, market share, and a whole host of other vectors that each must be considered separately for each sector of the economy.  But if you consider declining profits as a principle and guiding effect (like the energy garnered when water flows downhill over a certain grade or the amount of work energy it takes to haul something uphill or hoist it up into a building) then you get a wholly different viewpoint on what sort of economic theory is possible.  When it is made a constant, which is to say a natural invariable, and not something amenable to other functions but part of the guiding of how a system works, you get very different results.

That was the aha! moment of seeing how the confluence of the natural sciences and industry were moving into economic and political thought and morality.

All it took was one sentence about the requirement to explain declining profits and all the rest just followed.  It is that one minor piece that, once added, suddenly makes so much so very clear.

On voting

Yes another piece from my commentary at Hot Air, and it is pretty well self-contained as part of a Quotes of the Day thread, which can meander hither and yon on topics this one post-debate on Biden and Ryan.  I'm good at that hithering and yonning stuff and this time I wandered back to voting.  Again, as with all my commentary, it is in the 'as-is' format:

Just remember all the triumphalism on the Left is because of Joe Biden.

They are happy about Joe Biden, the least serious man in politics, who was sent out to rile them up.

No matter how happy the Left is, remember they are happy about Joe Biden… it is all they have left to show for their support of Obama and ideals that are bankrupting the Nation not just fiscally but morally and spiritually as well.

As Eastwood said – Biden the man who is a smile with a body behind it.

And the best part is that as people begin to see that Obama & Co. are tanking, the economy will improve. Remember what happened in OCT 2008? Gun sales went through the roof and small businesses began to pull back expansion plans, curtail future investments and set down to weather the storm.

The Left will attempt to claim vindication. Yet it is the course of events that the PEOPLE are doing that will change the course of the Nation. Not our freaking government. This the Left will never, ever understand, and they will attack you for the very idea that people should be free, actually CAN be free to lead a better life without the interference of government. Once this course begins to change this time, with the memory of what happened by not backing it fully under Reagan, this time it will start to sweep away all our notions of politics, education, energy, and production like no other time in history. The PEOPLE are about to declare the 20th century over and the 19th century ideas of the Left as done with. The Left wants Americans to be ordinary plebes, yet we hold the eternal truths as self-evident and we will be extra-ordinary citizens creating a better Nation so that all mankind will have a beacon to look up to and a standard to flock to.

That means holding ALL your elected officials to account: from dog catcher to President. We slacked off as a people and let our parties try to run things. That era not only can end but it must end and it is ending NOW. A Romney win is not something to then walk away from, but a reason to hold to your ideals and to keep on pushing at all levels of government to recognize your rights and liberties to be free FROM government and that we, the people, will take care of the rest of the stuff that we specifically do NOT hand over to government: caring for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the young, and our society. That is my job, your job and the job of all our fellow citizens, and we dare not let government even try to do them.

Why? Look where we are NOW that we HAVE let government even try to do them. This is the result.

An election is not an end goal but a statement from you of re-dedication to the cause of liberty and accountable government. It is the start of the process, not the end of it, which means it re-starts with each and every election.

Remember Joe Biden is all the Left has: the laughing spirit of derision against you, against liberty, against freedom, and meant to belittle our fellow citizens and our Nation to say that we are too stupid to lead our own lives freely. The man is an insult to us all.

You can’t get rid of stupid as it is one of the two infinites of the natural universe that Einstein coupled with space, and he wasn’t too sure about space.

But you can, assuredly, vote stupid out of office.

That task STARTS with an election.

And re-starts with each and every election at each and every level thereafter.

I am happy to vote in every election. It is my way to help safeguard freedom and liberty and it is my duty and job to do so. That doesn’t mean I have a light mood at each election and it is usually just the opposite: I keep my eye on the target through all the maelstrom so the deed that must be done is accomplished. Elections are too serious to get emotionally involved in. A duty, a job, and your means to safeguard freedom and liberty… a happy task but an earnest job not taken lightly.

ajacksonian on October 13, 2012 at 9:47 AM

I can remember the few times that I didn't vote, even in an off-year non-federal election, and those times revolved around a few topics.

First is too sick to vote.  I didn't have 'good health' at any point in my adult life and an upper respiratory tract infection could spiral from swollen glands to the awful green things from inner space in about two days and then leave me laid up for weeks recovering under antibiotics.  Other than that, with the onset of my catalepsy I couldn't really claim to track reality all that well, so that gets a hit.

Second is out looking for work.  When you spend the better part of a couple of years not at home, not in your home voting district and way before the Internet and world wide web, there was no way to keep up with what the local issues actually were.  To vote responsibly one must keep up with at least the basics, and distance killed that for me.  Also in my working life, I was in a major project that had so much time spent outside of town that I also lost track of local events as the project consumed my attention and spent my energy.  I was happy to do that project and it was worthwhile.

Third was still learning the political landscape for a couple of years out of High School.  That also was coupled with the first problem, too, and those were not happy years. 

Thus with 30 opportunities to cast my ballot, I have missed 8 of them and for only 2 of those instances can I say I was actually too unfamiliar with the topics to vote, which perhaps isn't good but there it is.

There have been times when I absolutely had no one to vote for by my own criteria, yet I voted on purely local issues and left a blank ballot for those races where nothing was satisfactory and I knew of no one, even myself, who would fit the job to write-in.  If memory serves I have written names in twice on local elections when the ballot system is set up for those things.

On the flip-side there are races when I had no clear idea of which candidate would serve better, because they would both serve about equally in my opinion and I let inspiration guide my hand.  And in one race, only, did I cast a vote that I could not in conscience give to either candidate, but knew that a third-party candidate would harm one candidate over another, and there is no long-form for explaining votes, so the short ballot must serve as a reminder to both parties to get their act together. 

After that I have generally voted down or against local spending of all sorts, save for sewer and water main upgrades: we need those as a civil society and those deserve backing to keep things running.  I've voted against school Olympic sized swimming pools, firehouses where there is already adequate coverage, parks where they aren't demanded by anyone, light rail, and other bits of crony spending that I don't see as gaining anything for the community.  Roads, bridges, sewers, water mains, electrical distribution stations... all of those get approval due to necessity.  New schools due to passing demographics, do not and I've been in schools run out of trailers that have been on-site for decades and see no suffering in the ability to teach in such places.

I am a member of a one-person party, who encourages each individual to be a one-person party and to reach out to all other parties (one and multi-person) so as to build a better way to run our republic by going across party lines.  If we must have parties, then it is best to have a fickle, non-partisan population willing to infest parties and then leave them when the louses show up, all the time stripping party structures of upper level power and prestige and putting power back down to the local and individual level.  Partisanship based on party will be the death of us yet.  I am devoted to my Nation and the liberty and freedom that we require our government to respect at all levels so that man can be free.  Good government has few things to do, short funding and is required to do the very, very few things it does in an exemplary way while staying within its budget which is what the taxpayers can afford... not what our government demands as tribute.  Government is the Punisher, that is its role, and only when that role is delimited to only that, can we keep government accountable to the people.  Anything else waters that down and is the basis for corruption giving the fertile ground of tyranny when it continues too long.

I am always happy to vote.

Yet, somehow, I never have a smile on my face when doing it.

It is a duty and an honor that my fellow citizens entrust this to me and I treat it with the solemnity it deserves because you have asked it of me via the means of Caesar.  If this is the form of which our Caesar takes, this republic with representative democracy to guide it, then I must render my judgment upon it to comply.  It is right and it is asked of me, and that rendering must take place.

I apologize for the times I didn't vote, I am not the best of all people to be sure.

I work hard to retain the recognition that we must self-govern and that your trust in me is not misplaced, even when I do not agree with you on the issues or candidates.

What happens inside that booth is between you and that which is all around us at all times.  Who and what you cast your vote for is only amenable to your conscience and, when all else fails, to inspiration in that solitude and let that be your guide.  You might be surprised that this does, actually, work if you but take the opportunity to listen to how you are spoken to alone with such a decision.

I urge everyone who is eligible to vote.

I ask it of you as a Citizen of the Republic of the United States of America.