“Now why do we need an entrepreneur of the self? That’s because people never know as much as the market, so because we’re a flawed thinker, we must learn to transform ourselves to take in these packets of truth delivered by the market and alter ourselves to respond to them.”—Philip Mirowski
“In his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, Mirowski concludes that neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the ‘real’ economy.”—Wikipedia
“I guess an analogy might be, you’re applying for work in a very New Age sort of environment, where the hiring manager says she can read auras***, and that in lieu of a conventional interview she would just evaluate you on the basis of your aura. You sit in front of her for a VERY awkward five minutes or so while she closes her eyes, goes hmm and ahhh and oh! and oh dear and you have no idea what she’s reacting to, and then she opens her eyes, shakes your hand, tells you she’ll get back to you with her decision, and then leaves. And you are left completely mystified as to what just happened or what she thought of you.”—Lindsay
“In the future, I would also expect it to require an expensive license to even operate a true, general-purpose computer with severe legal penalties for doing so without government and industry authorization.”—quoderat
“I think it’s a crime that these models are opaque and yet have so much power over people’s lives. It’s like having secret laws.”—Cathy O’Neil
“How much climate destruction is best for capital? Probably more than none.”—Out of the Woods
“We don’t need more ambition or more authorities.”—Mel
I’ve dispensed with “the trouble with” in the title for now. I’m troubled enough with the proposal to have deep reservations, but do recognize that Jeff Graubart has thought these things through, let’s say, at least as extensively as I have my pet project anagorism. There is a process at work in this synthesis that deserves respect.
p. 12:
Bringing AFFEERCE to backwards countries will probably require thirty years of communism or restored colonialism first, but I’ll say no more of this for fear of unnecessarily alienating my readers on the right and the left. There will be plenty of necessary reasons to alienate them later on.
I’ve waded far enough into multiculturalism and egalitarianism-in-general to have an inevitable knee-jerk reaction to the phrase backwards countries. Graubart, I’m guessing, isn’t oblivious to the fact that there are any number of ways that could have been phrased. I’m inclined to wager that this choice of words is not an oversight. At this point I’ve read enough to know that provocation is part of Graubart’s rhetorical toolbox. That’s OK. After all, it could be worse. At least it doesn’t say “backward cultures,” so I’ll give Graubart the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a statement about political or economic, and not cultural, characteristics of nations. What I’m doing here is merely pointing out that this is one of my pain points (in Graubart-speak, “the kicker”). Likewise, colonialism is a practice that I see as having no redeeming value. I am, among other things anarcho-communist, but I’m guessing communism in the sense Graubart (who is explicitly a non-anarchist) means here is at least as repugnant to me as colunialism.
If it helps, at the time of the beginning of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, part of the mindless chatter of the talking heads on the teevee kept going back to a certain talking point about “you can’t expect regime change to result in Jeffersonian democracy.” I must confess that once or maybe twice my thoughts drifted to the idea that maybe using military occupation to impose Scandinavian-type social democracy on a country might be an end justifying even militarism as a means. I didn’t entertain this thought for long because I’ve always been far more opposed to hawkishness, including liberal hawkishness or even that oxymoron called neolibertarianism, than I am supportive of sombunall key features of social democracy such as moderately high (by the real world’s standards) levels of economic security and personal freedom.
One advantage I think less wealthy countries might have over, say, the United States (which Graubart seems to be saying is necessarily the starting point for AFFEERCE) is a location where the present value of a lifetime of support would probably be well, well south of the US$600,000 that comes up in the AFFEERCE literature. Another feature that might come in handy would be the opportunity that exists in some countries to “leapfrog” some “legacy” technologies. I’m creeped out, however, by use of less wealthy countries as political laboratories, especially for non-democratic forms of politics, such as the so-called charter cities some ultra-elite interests are trying to establish in Honduras, which is in the aftermath of a coup d’état.
p. 13:
At least, the solution calls for eugenics of the marketplace, and not some horrid racial or ethnic eugenics. And it will be a democracy, so the taxpayers could decide by a super-majority to foot some of the bill for each person’s entitlement, taking some of the burden off parents.
Weed out the weaklings?
Eugenics of the marketplace sounds to me like social darwinism. Hopefully the universal entitlement part of AFFEERCE dulls the cutting edge of this darwinism from survival of the fittest to propagation of the fittest. Still, the market economy is the yardstick of fitness in this particular creepy eugenic agenda, so expect traits selected for to include salesmanship, assertiveness and opportunism. Hopefully the alternative families part of AFFEERCE (particularly if adoptions become the rule rather than the exception), parentage can be statistically dissociated from genetic endowment, and the feerce edge of darwinism can be further dulled from propagational eugenics of the marketplace to “eumemics” of the marketplace. The goal of anagorism, of course, is find non-market metrics for human achievement and progress.
(here ends the intro and begins Chapter 1)
p. 18
One of the less obvious things worth remembering from this period is that due to better environmental conditions and multiple wives, children were disproportionately more likely to be born to wealth and power. Thus our species became hardier and evolution moved forward.
Child labor laws, a great humanitarian step forward, by their very nature served to decrease the value of children as members of the labor force.
David Brin has posted a lot online about the outsized influence of alpha males and their harems on humanity’s current collective genetic endowment. Thing is, Brin treats it as more of a bug than a feature, and I’m inclined to agree. The idea is that much of what some call “rent seeking” consists of attempts by those who are both economically and reproductively successful to “lock in their gains” and pass social advantages on to their descendants. This inevitably makes society as a whole less competitive and, in Brin’s view, less accountable.
I don’t buy that child labor abolition has either the intended or actual effect of decreasing the value of children as members of the labor force. Rather, it is necessary in order to make children a long-term rather than short-term investment. I happen to believe that long-term investment in children is ultimately more lucrative than short-term investment. But perhaps I’m unfairly nitpicking because I’m interpreting “value” above in the sense of “present value.”
p. 23
The result of the conflict between Children=Wealth vs. Children=Poverty is that educated, middle class families are having fewer children and the impoverished are having more, and that imbalance can only grow more acute.
I’m not that Malthusian, which is to say, not that inclined to write off impoverished people as non-agents, or not authors of their own lives. While income and education both correlate negatively with fertility (and of course parental age), so does urban residence, which is trending strongly upward among the poor almost everywhere.
p.27
Free Enterprise means laissez-faire. It means government keeps its hands off business. It means no minimum wage and no inflation. It means no corporate income tax of any kind. It means the marketplace will determine if monopolies should form and the effectiveness of collusion.
It also means no civil rights protection and no right to a job.
Those are scary propositions in today’s world, but in an AFFEERCE economy you will discover they are of no consequence at all. Even occupational safety requirements will be tossed out. However, full disclosure of any unexpected hazards is the law. Violators will see the inside of a penitentiary. Consumers are likewise protected by full disclosure even as merchants are free to sell any products they wish. Honesty is valued above all else in business and law. Merchants, employers, police, prosecutors, and even lawyers will be legally accountable for dishonest practices. Volunteer standards groups will set service and product standards. However, enforcement of these standards beyond disclosure will apply only to children under 14 years of age.
I’ve been influenced enough by Keynesianism to believe that inflation favors debtors and deflation very strongly favors creditors. I’m also “leading edge Generation X,” which means I reached working age during the Reagan years. Reagan, confronted by a particularly cruel combination of economic problems called “stagflation,” very decisively chose to prioritize inflation-fighting over unemployment-fighting. This is an economic policy I considered basically inhumane at the time, and still do. Inflation chips away at a working class person’s standard of living, while unemployment pulls it out from under them in one fell swoop. Now one group of people, in addition to creditors (i.e. bankers), who benefit from low inflation, are people on benefits; on “fixed income.” In America, these are mostly retirees, some fraction of whom were obviously a key Reagan constituency. Perhaps I must keep in mind that in AFFEERCE, everyone is on benefits, so maybe counterinflationary policy is no longer inherently reactionary.
p.28
Regardless of cost, if the parents cannot pay, the child will be placed with a family that can afford the child. Some will consider this tyranny. They should ask themselves who’s freedom are they defending; the parents’ or the child’s.
I’m have admittedly tribal tendencies when it comes to stands on issues. The inventor of what you describe (at least in terms of the politically-aware part of my lifetime) is none other than Newt Gingrich. Can non-tyrannical ideas come from tyrannical people? I have my doubts…
p. 38
(10) Competitive Advantage – Universal entitlement enables family business to compete with big business by making low wages practical.
Can’t argue with the logic. I have a very, very hard time thinking of low wages as a good thing. Universal entitlement notwithstanding, in a market economy, a low wage can only be interpreted as a price signal that’s saying your contributions are nearly worthless; that you’re not a contributing member of society. The complete abolition of wage floors strikes me as a frank acknowledgement of a belief on the part of the AFFEERCIONADOS that some people are “worth more than others.” This is also a pain point for me.
p. 42
The freedom to travel the country comfortably without a nickel to your name, to have a workforce more mobile than any that has ever existed in the history of humanity, to travel without keys, wallet or any physical identification, to not be a target for thieves, to have instant access to your own money and the free entitlements coming your way wherever you might roam, to sign contracts, transfer funds, vote, shop for your family, go almost instantly through security checkpoints, and much more, probably scares the hell out of some readers.
No doubt. Those freedoms aren’t what scares the hell out of this reader, though. Mainly the level of centralization of the VIP scheme. Having separate accounts for entitlement money and money earned (or should I say won?) in the market economy seems accentuate the distinction between contributing and dependent members of adult society.
p. 43
4. The VIP reader will send the voice, iris, and palm information, with VIP identity, sequence, date, and GPS information, encoded with its private key, to the central identity computer. Also in the transmission will be the VIP reader’s public key, encoded with the public key of the central identity computer.
I’d have thought public-private key pairs would mean there is not a need for a central computer. Admittedly I have scant understanding of public-private key encryption, so I’m not sure what the implications might be of using it as the standard protocol in both identification and accounting. I also can’t help but wonder how the currently hot topic of Bitcoin might be somehow relevant to the proposed VIP reader network. Bitcoin seems to be (among other things) intended as a proof of concept that a currency can be decentralized; not under some public or private party’s control. One of Bitcoin’s most attractive features, extreme (or not so extreme, in retrospect) anonymity, is also (to me) one of its most unattractive features—extreme opacity. While my own philosophy is generally anti-market (or at least, market-negative) there’s one feature of market economies that deeply appeals to my sensibilities; that being the so-called law of one price. This, I believe, results mainly from market transparency, although of course market competition (which I see as a minus) is also a factor. One thing that could bring VIP closer to my comfort zone, relative to the status quo or to competing visions of the future of money, such as Bitcoin, would be a demonstration that it facilitates price transparency and other aspects of market transparency.
p. 44
On a less technical user level, a typical grocery store VIP reader session might go like this. Your total will appear on the screen. You put your palm an inch from the glass, look into the camera and speak your magic word and hit the default button. Transparent to you, the retail VIP application will download the food entitlement account(s) associated with your identity. The app will debit the account or accounts for qualified food purchases. If the entitlement has been exhausted, or if there are non-qualified items, the app will download access to your personal spending account (PSA). If the PSA is exhausted, the app will access and move funds from your personal corporate account (PCA) to your PSA. In the process, the 70% flat tax for money moved from a PCA to a PSA will automatically move the taxes from the PCA to the central bank. If the PCA is empty, it will check for a default credit account. If credit is available, money will be moved from there. The store will also collect a 1% (national sales tax) NST on the non- entitlement portion of the purchase. This will go to the central bank via their accounts, not yours. Of course, there will be options where you are in more control of the transaction.
This reveals that the entitlements are (1) earmarked and (2) annuitized, or “doled out.” In short, the food portion of entitlement is, from an accounting standpoint, indistinguishable from the United States’ SNAP (food stamps) program. There seems to be an assumption that there are adults and children among chronological adults, and that the competitive market economy is what “separates the men from the boys” (and of course the women from the girls). This can only beg the question of whether supporting and supported adults have, say, the same number of votes in the government, which has been described in these early chapters as democratic. It also leads me to wonder what sorts of effects the “bragging rights” of competitive economic viability might have on cultural norms, in- and out-groups within society, the presence of pack hierarchy or dominance in interpersonal behavior, etc. I’m at least hoping that this VIP reader rings up purchases in a way that doesn’t broadcast to the room that someone is spending entitlements!
p. 45
AFFEERCE and the VIP don’t work well without each other, but together they are magic. It might be reasonable to consider the VIP a pillar of AFFEERCE, along with free enterprise, entitlement, and reproductive control. However the VIP, fifty years down the road, could be replaced by a far better technology. Free enterprise, universal entitlement, and reproductive control will hopefully remain for eons to come.
Interesting. Perhaps further along in my reading I shall learn if any particular replacement technologies have been speculated.
p. 48
In AFFEERCE, a government agency, The Bureau of Standards, through volunteer standards groups, will coordinate industry standards, and require that industries either adopt the standards of the industry, or display in a consistent way across all industries, those standards that are violated, the VOS. Omission of violated standards from the VOS and failure to properly display or get customer sign-off on the VOS constitutes fraud. The VOS is a legal document that protects against liability, so businesses will pay inspection agencies to certify their VOS. The VOS is covered in greater detail below under Regulation and Deregulation.
I haven’t gotten as far as Regulation and Deregulation, so I’m not sure. As far as standards go, the ISO (perhaps the most authoritative establisher of standards) certainly seems to be an NGO (non-governmental organization). The US Government’s standard-setting agency, NIST, has an operating budget barely over a billion dollars, or less than $4 per American.
In short, it’s just plain scary. AFFEERCE is an invention of Jeff Graubart, described in a free e-book titled AFFEERCE A Business Plan to Save the United States and Then the World which is available (along with other informational writings) from AFFFEERCE.com. So far, I have only read the preface, and there is enough there to fill me with a chilling dread. In a subsequent post, I intend to proceed from the preface to the introduction. The whole book is over 300 pages long. I’m not making any promises to analyze the whole thing, but I hope to do so.
It’s seasteading
Or landsteading. More to the point, it explicitly calls for the creation of nations as a form of private property. From page 9 (emphasis mine, here and in subsequent quoted passages):
AFFEERCE is an idea that hopefully will change the world. Most peoples’ first impression of AFFEERCE will be through this book. That includes the wealthy AFFEERCIANADOS who will start the first land corporations that will create the first AFFEERCE nations. That includes entrepreneurs who will create the technology for our new world. It includes budding politicians, who will advocate for AFFEERCE in the current United States. It will include citizens of other nations who will come up with their own national business plans. It will include countless citizens who will decide on the merits of what we are doing.
I refer to technology creators as inventors, not entrepreneurs, although of course they are often both. That is a small kvetch. My major beef is that starting a nation as a land corporation makes it explicitly clear that polity is to be a business function. This is the privatization (NOT abolition) of government. From page 10:
Of course, the third and fundamental problem of all movements is how do we bring such a society about? There is only one sure way: a business plan. Relying on both the profit motive and the AFFEERCE spirit, AFFEERCE will grow into a corporation so large and powerful, it will swallow Washington whole.
A hostile takeover. Business ranks above politics.
It’s classist
The statement above that wealthy AFFEERCIANADOS will start the first AFFEERCE nations seems to imply that implementation of AFFEERCE is not something that the non-wealthy can accomplish independently of the wealthy. That alone is a non-starter for me. From the preface, page 10:
My friends thought I was nuts and said that if I was so smart, why was I so poor and not out making money in the business world (That’s what people said back in 1980). They were right. Who would listen to a pauper? So I became a software engineer and in the next 25 years accumulated in excess of a million dollars.
No, they were wrong. Being wealthy does not make a person more credible.
It’s Hobbesian
And of course statist, if that’s something that matters to you. From page 10:
Similar ideas are cropping up elsewhere under the banner, “progressive libertarian,” but most of those philosophies suffer from three problems. The first is a tendency toward anarchy, when a government is essential at this point to protect the natural rights of mankind.
Not sure at this point what the author means by “at this point.”
It’s mystical
From page 11:
Today’s physicists don’t have a clue. They have deviated from reality in ways more extreme than the alchemists of old. They hide behind mathematical equations so complex that even they don’t understand them. The fundamental problem is quite simple. They refuse to admit that consciousness is built into the fabric of the universe.
“I used to think Gapingvoid’s social hierarchy/corporate pyramid of losers, surmounted by the clueless, and topped by sociopaths was a joke, only to find it the reality.”—Lord
“I think we should always, when referring to wealth disparity, remind ourselves to consider the proposition that wealth=power.”—Jumper
“How ironic it is that austerity measures everywhere are pushing to raise retirement age and decrease holidays? And this creates more jobs how?”—@ThoughtInfected
“Businesses and economic elites in developing countries left frustrated by incompetent police, clogged courts and hopelessly overburdened judges and prosecutors are increasingly circumventing these systems and buying their own protection. In India in late 2010 the private security industry already employed more than 5.5 million people — roughly four times the size of the entire Indian police force. A 2009 World Bank report showed roughly the same ratio in Kenya. The largest employer in all of Africa is a private security firm, Group4Securicor, and in Guatemala, private security forces outnumber public police 7 to 1.”—Gary A. Haugen h/t David Brin
“If one is contrasting the results of natural events (e.g., storms at sea) on the one hand to deliberate and direct human action on the other (the proverbial gun to the head) then I think the argument has some merit. However I think it breaks down somewhere in the middle ground where the chain of causation from human action to circumstances is more indirect and obscure. There are lots of examples of clever humans able to keep their own hands relatively clean while arranging things so as to be able to make others offers they couldn’t refuse.”—Frank Hecker
I’m turned off to libertarianism, including left-styled libertarianism, mainly because of the claim that non-coercion is a necessary and sufficient condition for freedom. I’d describe it as a bare minimum criterion for a barely acceptable level of freedom. This leaves open the possibility that there are higher levels of freedom for us all to aspire to, hopefully together. Perhaps we can progress from mere liberty to thick liberty. Perhaps we can evolve from the merely voluntary to the thickly voluntary (or the “euvoluntary”). Once theft is eliminated, perhaps we will be able to attack minor variants, exploitation and manipulation. Even if government can be abolished, there would be many additional steps on the way to a reasonably non-dystopian existence for humans. This begs the question of whether market anarchism makes sense as an intermediate stage between non-anarchism and freedom, and the related question of whether anagorists should ally with the nominally left-wing faction of market anarchism, or even market anarchists (i.e. anarcho-capitalists) in general. Two important questions must be addressed:
Is there no way from the status quo to a significantly less dystopian existence that doesn’t pass through market anarchism?
Would market anarchism be stable enough (remember, the market itself is extremely effective at equilibrium-finding) to have “end of history” properties and therefore be change-resistant enough to make advancements of freedom beyond mere economic freedom nearly impossible?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then the prospects for human happiness are indeed grim, and the best thing I can say about myself is that I am child-free.
C4SS has been serializing a work on class analysis by Wally Conger. I don’t know much about this Wally Conger, but when I first began exploring the range of left libertarian thought via portals such as ALL and BLL, Conger was among the people identified with that movement. I subscribed to Conger’s blog for a while; finding the tone of almost every post to be, essentially, “not being self employed is for suckers.” Needless to say, it’s not hard to find any of a number of people and organizations whose message is essentially that. I don’t normally associate that opinion with the left (and do strongly associate it with the right). I have also found it to be the punch line of every sales pitch for multi-level marketing (MLM) arrangements. My working definition of MLM is the application of salesmanship to salesmanship. I don’t know whether Wally Conger is involved in MLM. One code I live by is giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll assume not.
The point of Congerian class analysis (which is derived from Konkinite class analysis, and a repudiation of Marxian class analysis) is that entrepreneurs (particularly black market entrepreneurs) can come from any social class (e.g. people ranging “from tax-dodging businessman to drug-dealing hippie to illegal alien to feminist midwife”), and that the interests they have in common have nothing to do with class and everything to do with keeping an eye out for the “the fuzz/pigs/flics/federales/etc.”
I myself haven’t constructed a class theory, but here I will give a rough outline of what I perceive the class structure of present-day American society to be. I arrived at this theory of class about the time I started reading a fair amount on the subject of finance about a decade ago. That, combined with observations made in the course of pseudo-career as just a temp, largely formed the basis of a tentative class theory. I identify three distinct classes that are actively involved in production. I call these (from top to bottom) financiers, proprietors and wage-earners. For what it’s worth, I tend to use the terms proprietor and entrepreneur interchangeably, which I suppose may be an abuse of terminology. For the purpose of this analysis, by “proprietors” I mean proprietors of businesses other than financial institutions. I’m operating with the assumption that financial institutions normally operate in the black while businesses other than financial institutions normally operate in the red. I got this idea from James Van Horne’s book Financial Market Rates and Flows. To that I added some of my own observations and came up with a class theory in which the role of wage earners is to kiss up to proprietors in hopes of being offered jobs, which is to say, being given permission to play an active role in production. Proprietors, in turn, kiss up to financiers in hopes of securing working capital, which is to say, being given permission to play an active role in production. Financiers are by definition people who operate in the black, so for them access to money is a given. This is where my pet theory of class intersects with my pet theory of money. Some say money is a storehouse of value. Some say it is a medium of exchange. Based on views attributed to sombunall (some but not all) characters of Robert Anton Wilson’s Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, I have adopted the view that the role of money in present-day American society is to function as permission slips:
In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of
individualistic third- and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery
had grown so repugnant that it was formally “abolished” within a
century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through
inertia in the form of “wage slavery,” which required that all
primates not born into the sixty families that “owned” almost
everything would have to “work” for those families or their
corporations in order to get the tickets (called “money”) which
were necessary for survival.
A theory of business organization that strongly parallels financier/proprietor/wage-earner is psychopath/clueless/loser, to which I was clued in by the (much recommended) writings of Michael O. Church.
In addition to the three classes I identify above as actively involved in production, there is a chronically if not perpetually unemployed underclass. Most leftists identify this as a subset of the working class, which consists of people who are not independently wealthy and therefore don’t have the option of not working. Unfortunately, working class people, understood thus, don’t necessarily have the option of working, either. The trouble with lumping the wage-earning class with the economically failing class is that it requires one to ignore a certain elephant in the room: Unemployed worker is an oxymoron. As long as paid work is classified as a privilege rather than a right—and it is by virtually all pro-market ideologies, including left-styled libertarianism—employed people are a privileged class relative to unemployed people. In all but the very least developed economies, the chronically unemployed do not normally starve—a fact that conservative and some other pro-market ideologues never hesitate to point out. Their punishment for failure to market themselves (which is NOT the same thing as failure to work) is the humiliation and subjugation of being dependent on others, whether that is family, friends, taxpayers or organized charity. In developing countries this unemployed underclass, this reserve army of the unemployed (one feature of Marxian analysis that left-styled libertarians, to their credit, do generally acknowledge) tends to be a large fraction of the adult population; sometimes a majority. This (as well as the fact that I’m allergic to anything that even smells like nationalism) is why I’m very fed up with populist (i.e. demagogic) slogans along the lines of “the Indians/Chinese/Mexicans (or other scapegoat of your choice) are taking our jobs.” Assuming for the sake of argument (as a devil’s advocate) that they are doing this, they certainly aren’t stealing them quantities anywhere near large enough to effect or approximate full employment in their country. Get a clue. The copper bosses killed you, Joe.
Anyway, my working theory of class (which is a work in progress) consists of four main classes. There are subclasses within classes. Within the wage-earning class there are the gainfully employed (defined as someone with a permanent full-time job with benefits) and the marginally employed (the precariat, or casualized workforce). There’s also an upper crust within the working class that might be called the “professional class.” Within the rejected underclass there are the sometimes-employed and the “unemployable.” Within the proprietor class, which I also call the entrepreneurial class, there are also subclass distinctions. The most important, I think, is the distinction between successful entrepreneurs and unsuccessful entrepreneurs. This tears a bit at the structure of my class theory edifice: If failed entrepreneurs are considered entrepreneurs then perhaps failed workers should be considered workers. One thing I cannot stress enough is that to me, class is functional, not quantitative. Some wage-earners have higher income than some entrepreneurs. It may even be the case that some entrepreneurs have higher income than some financiers, but finance is one area where small-time operators seem to be a thing of the past. Sometimes self-described entrepreneurs (who happen to be politically conservative or perhaps “libertarian”) delight in calling talk radio shows bragging about how many hours they work (or did in the founding stage) and how little they got paid (“below minimum wage,” they brag). Their reason for doing this is of course to stir the class conflict pot a bit by characterizing the wage-earning class (or at least those in it who don’t sit down, shut up and stop complaining) as having a sense of “entitlement.” The key difference between the proprietor/entrepreneur class and the waged working class as I understand them is not a difference in income, but in function, or role in the economy. Broadly speaking, the wage earner is expected to play a relatively passive role in the economy. The subclass tiers within the entrepreneurial class, as I understand them, are also based on how active or passive a role they play in the economy. Obviously, the upper tier of the proprietor class are the CEO’s in the non-financial sectors. An example of a relatively passive proprietor might be a franchisee. An even more passive one might be the proprietor of a business with one customer, although I tend to think of single-person businesses of this type as de facto wage earners who are de jure proprietors due to the technicality (in the case of Americans) of getting a 1099 instead of a W2. It’s one of the business world’s many strategies for shifting risk to workers.
The idea of a risk shift (or at least that terminology for it) comes from a book by that title by Jacob Hacker. The risk shift is real. The proprietary class (very likely under orders from their financier class puppet masters) is waging war against the working class; specifically attacking the gains they have made in terms of economic security. This is why I can’t go along with Wally Conger’s assertion that risk is “purely entrepreneurial.” Risk is everyone’s problem, and while I won’t say (here) that the wage-earning class is shouldering more than its fair share of it, I will say here that the trend is toward wage earners eating more risk, and there seems to be no end in sight for that trend. Obviously the risk shift has induced some working class people to try their hand at entrepreneurship:
George was an associate partner at one of the world’s largest technology and consulting firms until he lost his job last year in a wave of layoffs. For months, George knocked on doors but got nowhere because of the deep recession.
Finally, his old firm got some new projects that required George’s skills. But it didn’t hire George back. Instead, it brought him back through a “contingent workforce company,” essentially a temp agency, that’s now contracting with George to do the work. In return, the agency is taking a chunk of George’s hourly rate.
Technically, George is now his own boss. But he’s doing exactly what he did before for less money, and he gets no benefits — no health care, no 401(k) match, no sick leave, no paid vacation. Worse still, his income and hours are unpredictable even though his monthly bills still arrive with frightening regularity.
The nation’s official rate of unemployment does not include George, nor anyone in this new wave of involuntary entrepreneurship.
I think this trend reflects not an embrace of risk, or even an increased level of risk tolerance on the part of such people, but a loss of the risk management features of employment to the point where they literally have “nothing left to lose” in that department. Entrepreneurs (as opposed to those thrust into a form of pseudo-entrepreneurship) are active takers of risk, and as such are a class.
It is my belief that in a freed market or stateless society, the independence differential between entrepreneurs (should we make the mistake of working with them) and workers will translate to a power differential and ultimately a de facto authority differential. I say “belief” because I don’t know this would happen. I don’t know because nobody knows. Nobody knows what will happen in a freed market or stateless society because it is an experiment that hasn’t been tried yet. This is why actual libertarians (such as the ones at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians website) constantly prod left-styled libertarians with the question of whether they’ll stand by the non-aggression principle even if it doesn’t end up producing “socialist ends via market means.” I make no such promises, because I make no such predictions. This is where I think American individualist schools of anarchy miss the point. Liberalism is a bourgeois (proprietor class) ideology. Anarchism is not simply liberalism taken to its logical extreme. Like all genuinely leftist tendencies, it is a bottom up movement, not a middle up one.
“Algebra II is an especially [weird] class because it’s advanced enough that most people will never use it in their every day life, but it’s basic enough to have almost nothing in common with what real mathematicians do.”—charlie
“Traversing an environment built for the automobile in anything other than an automobile, sucks.”—Andrew Price
“We are sliding towards a ‘market’ solution in so many areas of our public life. Schools, prisons, healthcare. So many areas where the perverse incentive of the market is the opposite of the public good. Remember the lesson of Monopoly (the game). One person ends up w/all the money, the rest… bankrupt.”—James Housel
“One issue I’ve long been bothered by is the libertarian fixation on the state as the source of coercive power. The strong form version is that the state is the only party with coercive power (and please don’t try denying that a lot of libertarians say that; there are plenty of examples in comments in past posts). Libertarians widely, if not universally, depict markets and commerce as less or even non-coercive.”—Yves Smith
“The American press are wholly owned and operated by those who seek to shift power from political to economic.”—Arthur Silber
“There is simply no way to maintain your dignity when unemployed for a prolonged period. Not in this society, at any rate.”—voxcorvegis
“Pain, exploitation and death were the attractor states for a billion years. Mr. [Stan] Larimer and other cyber transcendentalists ought to bear it in mind.”—David Brin
“There’s a country music classic titled ‘Take This Job and Shove It.’ There isn’t and won’t be a song titled ‘Take This Consumer Durable and Shove It.’”—Paul Krugman
“Having a market society automatically carries with it an undermining of solidarity. For example, in the market system you have a choice: You can buy a Toyota or you can buy a Ford, but you can’t buy a subway because that’s not offered. Market systems don’t offer common goods; they offer private consumption. If you want a subway, you’re going to have to get together with other people and make a collective decision. Otherwise, it’s simply not an option within the market system, and as democracy is increasingly undermined, it’s less and less of an option within the public system.”—Noam Chomsky
“From a purely data obsession point-of-view, it’s interesting how 1+1=3 when it comes to data. This is what makes it so hard to convince people they should care about privacy.”—David
“Allowing labor markets to clear more efficiently does not imply that their clearing price should plunge toward zero.”—Jim Haygood
“To punish the alien worker for the sin of the native capitalist is like the man who struck the boy because he was not strong enough to strike his father.”—Jewish textile worker
“When pushed about this issue, some Bitcoin enthusiasts irritatedly say “nobody’s stopping women from joining”. ‘Nobody is stopping you’ is the classic articulation of negative freedom, and its problems are best exemplified by the moshpit.”—Brett Scott
Minagorist is to anagorist as minarchist is to anarchist. I hate mixing latin prefixes (prefices?) with Greek roots, so I was thinking along the lines of a Minimercatus Center, but that seems to suggest a miniature Mercatus Center rather than a center that is minimally mercantile (or mercenary). The minarchists get away with mixing Latin and Greek elements, therefore I should also have that privilege.
Just as minarchism (it would seem) concedes the point that humans, left to their own devices, will slaughter each other, minagorism concedes the point that humans, bereft of incentive, will probably “[spend] most of their time drinking booze, smoking weed, engaging in primate sexual acrobatics, and watching wall TV.” Just as minarchists view coercion as at least as evil as it may be necessary, minagorists view non-entitlement of survival (and in more advanced stages of minagorism, independence and solvency) as at least as evil as it may be necessary. The question is how to minimize the role of the market in society to a level just barely sufficient to light a competitive fire under the buns of the population that is just barely hot enough to incentivize just barely enough Gee-Dee-Pee to supply 100% of the population with three squares a day and a roof over each head. If people want to compete harder to obtain luxury goods, the minagorist position is that they’re entitled to their choice of lifestyle, as long as it doesn’t cost the rest of us any leisure time.
Is is just my imagination, or has PBS (perhaps along with some other public television organizations in the US) been taking an editorial turn in a decidedly neoliberal direction? Detroit Public TV (i.e. WTVS, or “Channel 56”) just last week handed one of its DTV side channels (56.2) to something called The World Channel, which I have taken to calling “the entrepreneurship channel,” largely based on their first week in Detroit having the lion’s share of the airtime occupied by a seemingly endlessly repeating three hour loop of Free to Choose Media‘s documentary Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives, followed by To Catch A Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks On America. As I write this, DPTV’s main channel is airing Unlikely Heroes of the Arab Spring, narrated by “award-winning economist, author and property rights activist Hernando de Soto.”
An extended slate of documentaries from Bob Chitester, the producer who introduced Milton Friedman to public TV viewers in 1980, will bring libertarian perspectives on contemporary issues to public TV stations. The Free To Choose Network, a production house founded by former pubcasting producer and station manager, has eight new programs in the works, several of which are to be released for public TV broadcast next year through Chicago’s WTTW and NETA.
World Channel does carry Bill Moyers and Company, so it’s not a total loss. Local, USA‘s editorial agenda seems to be a curious 50-50 mix of multiculturalism and social entrepreneurship. I’m so far on the fence on that one.
One Korean protestor group with slogan written in Hanja. Photo taken by Wrightbus. The slogan literally means: “End Neoliberalism!” “DOWN! DOWN! WTO” Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
David Brin, in a recent blog post, proposes that web browsing software be the locus of implementation for micropayments:
But back to my own obsession. Micro-payments. I have been poking at ideas with others, that boil down to this: we need a way for internet browsers to empower surfers pay a nickel for an article they want to read online. A one-cent or five-cent or ten-cent button that would let any of us hand over a small increment of value for something we choose to use for short time. (I wrote about this in The Transparent Society in 1997.)
Browser-resident payment sounds kind of creepy to me. I’m guessing (but only guessing) that implementing this is inseparable from including digital restrictions management (DRM) in the HTML standard. Unfortunately W3C seems to have caved in to Netflix (among others) and it appears some kind of DRM support will definitely be part of the HTML5 standard. Maybe my knee-jerk suspicion (actually rejection) of DRM makes me one of those clueless cypherpunks, but my cause here is open standards, not encryption (more DRM, of course, means more encryption). I don’t know how developed this idea of browser-based micropayments is. I’d be interested to see a run-down of how it’s supposed to work or an outline of its current state of conceptualization, if nothing else to (hopefully) disconfirm my suspicion that this is yet another attempt to write DRM into the protocols.
I think the future of journalism, if it is to have one, rests not in a more robust business model, but in self-removal from the business sector. Some use the term “intelligentsia” to refer jointly to journalists and educators. The education community (or industry, if you want to call it that) has traditionally straddled the public and nonprofit sectors. This is true of primary, secondary and post-secondary education. In the case of primary and secondary schools, the public school districts are essentially tax-collecting units of local government and the private schools are essentially non-profit organizations. Post-secondary institutions blur the lines between public and nonprofit sectors, as public universities rely on charitable donations for a large share of revenues, and are not generally tuition-free, while private universities rely in large part on taxpayer support in the form of student financial aid and research grants from governments. Recent years have seen aggressive incursions by the for-profit sector into both childhood education and collegiate education. I see this as a bad thing, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I view the body of human knowledge (“the literature,” if you will) as a shared heritage that must never become a commodity. While as a rule I see business as a lesser evil than government in some areas, the intelligentsia-related pursuits of education and journalism are on my short list of exceptions to that rule.
What then of journalism? A lot of the justification for the commercialization of education has exploited the widespread belief that the public financing model of education has failed, by leading to inefficiency, lack of accountability, civil service arrogance, and other supposed ills. The thing is that the for-profit business model of journalism that inevitably boils down either to selling a work product to an audience or selling audience eyeballs to advertisers and marketers, is in a state of failure, and no longer generates enough revenue to support serious journalistic pursuits. So far, the ideas on how to fix this have rested on the assumption that news will be distributed via websites and that like any web content, the key to profit will be monetization. The schemes currently on offer for monetization all appear to me to be pretty shamelessly opportunistic and cynical. To the extent that they involve advertising, it is increasingly the low rent variety, which in online advertising tends to the “weird old tip” genre of ad copy. Since ad blocking is pretty easy in the online world, monetization rests more and more on data mining in service to market research, which I find a little creepy, even though I accept that privacy is a lost cause. The thing that I find most diabolical about website monetization, at least in the case of hobbyist and other otherwise noncommercial websites, is the horror stories I’ve read about the revenues generated amounting to mere pennies, inevitably accompanied by a revenue floor below which the pennies can’t be claimed by their earners.
A better place for journalists, I think, is by emulating the role traditionally played by professors, described a few years ago in some admittedly somewhat cynical TIAA-CREF ad copy as “the greater good.” The problem with monetizing news stories is that in the digital age what you’d be monetizing is not copies of news stories but access to news stories. Once news is DRM restricted or otherwise monetized, there is a question of whether the receiver of the news is somehow bound not to share the text (or audio or footage) of a news story. In the days of printed newspapers, a copy could easily pass through many hands in the course of its date of publication, with portions sometimes living on for decades or even centuries as clippings. Whenever anything digital is monetized, the business model assumes payment on a “per use” basis. This is why many periodicals charge higher subscription rates to libraries than to individuals. If a DRM-restricted reader refers others to a news item, one assumes it will be as a link, probably parsed as a “teaser,” like the aggressive linkspam with text ending in ellipsis(…) that has absolutely swamped Facebook over the last two weeks or so. As Alex Tolley comments on the above-cited blog post (Wikipedia link mine):
One consequence if a micropayment model works, is that we may see more clickbait content as the economic driver is similar to the advertising model from the publisher’s perspective.
One thing I’ve always admired about the academic community is “publish or perish.” It’s an idea that is often criticized because research careers can perish for lack of publishing, which can have the negative consequence of people being drummed out of the profession for what may be political reasons, although it probably also has positive consequences of being a rough approximation of a performance standard. I endorse applying the “publish or perish” concept not (only) to the researcher, but more importantly to the research. I’m of the opinion that unpublished research (classified and/or proprietary research, as some academic freedom activists have correctly framed the issue) is either not real research, or is research that, instead of advancing the level of knowledge of humanity, turns the history of art, science and technology into a disinformation matrix. In extreme cases it might conceivably lead to a future in which the public is mystified by technologies it isn’t allowed to understand, making of society a cargo cult or perhaps something like Aldean culture.
News is history in the making. If there are not news providers of record (which to me means news content eventually being treated as part of the public record) then society possesses a memory hole. Not just the history of science and technology, but history itself, becomes a disinformation matrix.
