Category: Uncategorized

A big “thank you” goes out to Eric B. and the folkx at Blogging for Michigan for putting the present blog on their blogroll.  Aside from my lifelong and continuing residence in Michigan, I’m not sure what they see in me or my blog (they’re in the non-radical part of the leftie-liberal sector), but I always welcome publicity.

FWIW, I’ve been having a little difficulty commenting at BFM.  Maybe it’s a Firefox and/or Linux compatibility thing, or maybe it’s bugs in their code.  I tend to get cryptic messages (error messages referencing line numbers) when trying to comment there…

Like I say, they’re lefty-liberal, but in a pull no punches kind of way.  Always an interesting read.  And under their new format they seem to have a large number of post authors, who seem to be a quite diverse bunch.

For many of us, it is important to be solvent, but considerably less important to have income well above and beyond that level.  Getting money and being without money both involve a considerable amount of ass-kissing, so it’s sort of a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” proposition.  Of course, according to Christianity (a religion whose founding principle is the crushing of rebellion), the necessity of livelihood, like damnation itself, is part of the punishment for Original Sin.

From one angle, the ideal J.O.B. is one that pays enough to live on, but is not so careerist in orientation as to be mired in politics and intrigue. A ‘Goldilocks job.’ In practice, one finds part time and temporary jobs that aren’t even within striking distance of the so-called poverty line, and salaried positions that pay multiples of the poverty line, and almost nothing in between. It’s as if the Invisible Hand, in its fiendishly brutish omniscience, knows my heart’s desire with methodical precision and therefore knows to conjure up that set of market conditions that most effectively frustrates its realization. It is hard to believe that managerial types are not cognizant of the boundary between solvency and insolvency being a critical point in the money-motivation curve, as dramatized in Schrödinger’s Cat:

If one of the employees in his factories showed initiative or talent, Wing Lee Chee noticed, and that man or woman was quickly promoted to a position of responsibility and solvency.

Enter Ramen profitability; roughly a self-employment analog of the Goldilocks job, but with some caveats:

• It entails becoming an entrepreneur, and all that entails; adding salesmanship, negotiationism, collections, tough-customeritis, etc. to one’s personality. The combination of salesiness and being a tough customer type, it would seem, would put some strain on obedience to the Golden Rule.
• Even the most visible advocate of Ramen profitability, Paul Graham, tell us that “the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time.” Apparently “grow or die” is still an Iron Law of Economics for going concerns, and doing neither is a stop-gap measure, and not something that can be done indefinitely. Growth, of course, requires financiers, who must be kissed up to.

James Alexander Levy introduces us to the concept of “One Person Profitable.” This is the art of taking business partners or co-founders out of the equation:

Single founders tend to end up with a lot more control of their venture once it does become successful. And control, from what I understand, tends to be the most valuable asset to founders who really care about their ventures. Owning all your equity is just about as pro-founder as it gets, and while good seed-stage investors and incubators are pro-founder, I’m not so sure they are pro-founder enough to enthusiastically support the One Person Profitable approach.

I think it’ll be worthwhile to explore the idea of One Person Profitable further. If we really want entrepreneurship to be as accessible as more traditional career choices, I think it makes sense that there should be at least one decent resource advocating the advantages of being a single founder.

I think that, if we want to achieve a sort of agorism which is a reasonable compromise between libertarian and outcome-egalitarian values, then we really do want entrepreneurship to be far, far more accessible than it has been, and I would say far more accessible than traditional career choices have become under the crushing efficiency of our structurally less labor intensive “new economy.” Ideally, entrepreneurship will even be accessible to the meek.  Anagorism upholds the even more ambitious (or more unrealistic, depending on your point of view) goal of challenging the place of entrepreneurship as the price of independence. The agorist belief that economy of scale is an illusion created by hidden subsidy, and that small business is the norm under “freed markets” would suggest that the Iron Law of Grow or Die is a law of politics, not economics. We can only hope so. As Levy tells us:

I find the co-founder as investor argument somewhat troubling only when I consider that investors have no reason to encourage you to reach ramen profitability as a single-founder. You’re more prone to failing or selling at an “acquhire” [?] price, while startups that are five-founders deep at launch time can’t usually be successful unless they’re the type of huge success that investors desire.

It certainly appears that the role of startups in the actually-existing economy is to serve as feeder fish for larger concerns, perhaps basically portfolios of patents, or client lists, or that mysterious “DNA” stuff they talk about in the financial press.

I still haven’t found it.  I’m one of those inveterate nerds who can’t do bodily stuff without the feeling that I’d rather be doing something else.  Maybe I should try audio books.

The only other real welfare reform is true post-scarcity economics. But I see no third possibility.

The essay Real Welfare Reform by David S. D’Amato pretty much sums up my reasons for thinking of the left libertarian movement as 1% left and 99% libertarian. While it is true that “the two narratives are naturally aligned,” the left libertarian and the right libertarian agree on the fundamental ethical principle (the so-called non-aggression principle) and disagree at times on the implications on that principle, with more than a few self-identified right libertarians coming out as anti-intellectual-property and even anti-corporate-personhood.  To my ears the tone of the two tendencies is indistinguishable.  The belief that the interests of the poor will automatically be served by a sufficiently free market is not unique to left libertarianism or even libertarianism. It is a belief embodied in Reagan’s “volunteerism” and his successor’s “points of light.” For me it is still too much of a leap of faith. To me, a plausible outcome to the removal of barriers to competition is a flourishing of the most competitive among the currently marginalized and excluded. Even if there is enough charitable goodwill amongst the public to cover the survival needs of any that might still be left behind, I hardly see it as an adequate solution to the unemployment and poverty problems as charity, like “welfare,” is an affront to dignity. The trouble, as I see it, with counting entirely on removal of barriers to competition, is the glaringly obvious fact that competition itself is a barrier to entry. Being a contributing member of society is either a right or it is a privilege. I have more esteem for the former.  That is why I consider negative liberty an inherently right-of-center concept, along with the market mechanism itself.  Maybe that makes me a statist, although I think a voluntary “covenant not to compete” (or at least, in the final analysis, not to reject any individual from some active role) among all members of a probably small and hopefully at least somewhat self-sufficient community might resolve the paradox. That hope is what keeps me going.  I know solutions that require intentional community are at best inelegant, but what can I say?   I can say what I feel.

I’ve generally sided with those who claim business is more powerful than government; that the present-day nation-state functions basically as a rubber stamp for business, which is where the real Power resides. Admittedly the largest government, that of the United States, has a much larger financial footprint than the largest corporation, whether by financial footprint we mean size of asset holdings, operating budget, gross revenues, size of expenditures, etc. Jason Saul claims McDonalds has a bigger payroll, but I’m guessing that figure isn’t accounting for turnover. As John Pilger points out, pointing out that some companies are larger than some countries is comparing apples to oranges. I claim that whatever advantages come from size are more than overcome by the tactical disadvantages of the deliberative process of government. We are living in times in which legislation is drafted entirely within the private sector, and with such size and complexity that it is passed effectively “sight unseen.” Political leaders are passive players in the Power game, let alone the so-called “elites” in academia and the media.

Disregarding for the sake of argument differences of political maneuverability, and even the size of “de facto” business entities due to interlocking directorates or equity holdings, and looking only at the relative size of the largest commercial and largest governmental entities, what is the difference in size? Certainly less than two orders of magnitude (or a factor of a hundred). Does a 1-2 order of magnitude difference in financial footprint really imply that the public sector is uniquely qualified to create rent-seeking opportunities? Or dead-weight losses? I wouldn’t be too quick to point to “coercion” as the crucial difference. People and other entities get away with breaking laws pretty routinely. Coercion is not an effective means of social control. It is certainly not a determiner of economic outcomes; but at best an influencer.

Internal consistency is an important BS filter; a useful method for ferreting out things that just don’t add up. There can be too much of any good thing. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Perhaps the same can be said of narrow definitions; another useful BS filter popular with those who value clarity of thought over phantom fields or some celestial voice. I, of course, want the best of both worlds; the touchy feely social vision minus the thought-stopping new agey BS. While I suspect the purveyors of broad definitions of subterfuge, I fear the hobgoblins of narrow definitions are trying to corner me into a rhetorical trap. So it is with the “force or fraud” notion to cover the category of “all things impermissible.”

Concerning the “fraud” part of the “force and fraud” mantra, what would be an example of non-fraudulent deception? François Tremblay issues a Prime Directive in three parts: “Do not impose harm. Do not attack free agency. Do not lie to people.” Of course, deception is a large part of the ecosystem, so if economics is modeled after ecosystems (as contrasted with machines) perhaps the caveat emptor economy is the best of all worlds. I’m not quite that pessimistic.

Consider business models built around the exploitation of ignorance. As with so many phenomena, there is no clear-cut boundary between those that are and those that aren’t. Arguably, the market niche of any type of “consulting” practice arises due to the fact that not everyone knows anything. I can live with trading on relative expertise, and I suppose most can, although I wouldn’t entirely mind a world with more teachers and fewer consultants. Anyway, a not-unusual role for a consultant might be helping a client optimize their outcomes within the beaurocratic constraints imposed by the tax system, legal codes, contracts, and other forms of outside micromanagement. While perhaps a cynical trade to ply, I’m enough of an anti-statist to recognize that the micromanagement, to which it is a reaction, is more cynical. What does trouble me is the idea of a business model built on the assumption of gullibility, or dementia, or illiteracy, or even lack of assertiveness (concerning actually reading the contract, for example) on the part of the marktarget market.

Assuming that impairment of other people’s ability to look out for their self interest is your bread and butter, and you’re OK with that because your definition of fraud is sufficiently narrow and precise, is it a livelihood to take pride in? By this I mean describing it without the tone of public relations.

Age is irrelevant. Whether you retire at all is irrelevant. The question is, is your retirement or non-retirement (as the case may be) something you get on your own terms? For that matter, is the life you live well before retirement age lived on your terms? If not, there’s always the future. By retirement, it’s uncomfortably close to game-over and you have every reason to fear that when they close the books on your life you will have been a net liability. How humiliating. If the reason for your retirement is mandatory retirement age or some less forthright form of age discrimination, or worse, obsolescence of skills or failure to keep up with the treadmill due to declining faculties, then you are not retiring on your terms. If the reason for your non-retirement is that even by old age you have not established yourself, and gotten your head far enough above water to breathe, then your non-retirement is likewise not on your terms. The board game called “Life” (at least the 1960 edition that my senescent self grew up on) has two possible outcomes for each player, called “Millionaire Acres” and “The Poor House.” While I think the creators of the game got it dead wrong by stacking the deck in favor of those who choose “to college” over “to business” (higher education being a key part of that postwar propaganda we were swindled into believing in) I think they got the end-game exactly spot-on. At the finish line there is no middle class. In the final analysis, the long trajectory of an individual career is a sorting algorithm. It’s a question of winners and losers. As our formerly-mixed economy develops in a more market-oriented direction (by the conventional wisdom, which might differ from a “freed market”) through risk-shift, denunciation of the social safety net as “socialism,” and global labor competitiveness (you can call it global labor arbitrage, but competition is what arbitrage literally runs on), and of course the emerging attitude that retirement is a privilege rather than a right, the stark contrast between the winners’ circle and loserdom will continue to be amplified, and the percentage of us headed for the poor house will increase.

I’ll share several:

• The fear of being proven wrong. This, of course, is the motivation behind my creation of the present blog. Intellectually, I know I’m wrong. This is my act of defiance in the face of even that.
• The fear of the marketplace. Anagorism is just a fig-leaf term for agoraphobia. Hiding psychology behind philosophy much?
• The fear of failure. What is the market ideology if not a celebration of the freedom to fail?
• The fear of success. For the usual reason. Fearing that I could forget where I came from, so to speak, and start holding people like my present self in contempt.