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William Gillis has a no-comment policy over at Human Iterations, where it says

• Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

…whatever that means.  At any rate, I wrote the following comment on The Human-Level Implications of Multiverse Models before I discovered the no-comment policy:

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Nothing ambiguous about it.  It’s not slaughtering free will while keeping it alive.  It’s slaughtering free will without keeping it alive.  If the decision tree is a static structure, it is a static structure going forward as well as backward.  Even the idea of consciousness steering itself through the downstream decision tree is utter illusion.  After all, how can alternative future instances of yourself be a person other than yourself?  You are simply a static decision tree within a static decision tree.  Call me religious, but I don’t think a non-mystical explanation for free will is possible.

Consider the following:

The first time I heard about RBE, I immediately got a feeling that ‘this is good’, but at the same time, I couldn’t get it to work in my intellectual analyzing mind. And that’s why I started this blog. I felt strongly that RBE is possible, and not only possible, but the best alternative humanity has ever been able to choose. But I couldn’t prove it. Because I too was totally indoctrinated in my mind in regards to thinking about money and property as givens. As something that’s always been there, like air. It has taken me a couple of years to ‘dedoctrinate’ myself into seeing how RBE can be possible.

From an apparently anonymous writer at the The Resource Based GIFT Economy, admittedly a blog with Zeitgeist/Venus Project tendencies, but with some reservations:

My point and question is; How can/will a resource based economy work on a global scale, without it becoming a ‘totalitarian’ system? For sure, none of us want’s any ‘global machine government’, even though that is what Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project proposes. We all want’s to be able to make our own decisions.

Perhaps the non-surrender of ideals is a trap for the intellect.  But what of the alternative?  I’m one of those people who can’t read an economics textbook without experiencing symptoms of clinical depression.  Perhaps (like Thoreau) I must become more callous.  But is not the history of science/technology/politics full of examples of things THEY said couldn’t be done?  How is it that the dismal science of economics must somehow be exempt?

Surely one of the defining characteristics of anarchism is rejection of human nature essentialism; be it the “human nature is inherently vicious” argument behind statism or the slightly less slanderous “human nature is inherently self-interested” argument behind market ideology.

I wish I spent more time working. I really really wish I could boast a higher working-to-looking-for-work ratio. I know that some people wish they could work less; dealing as they are with mandatory overtime and the like. Some people have the exact opposite problem—an overtime freeze (when they really need the overtime hours) or worse yet, being trapped in part time and/or temporary work. Or worse yet be excluded from the workplace. Or worse still (in the spirit of “kick ’em while they’re down”), being excluded for being excluded. If the overworked have skills the underworked lack, perhaps some OJT is in order. If the overworked would rather guard their trade secrets than apprentice a poor underworked soul, then they should stop complaining about being overworked. If management is skittish about the cost of OJT then maybe it wouldn’t kill them to advertise a little less “will consider experience in lieu of education” and a little more “will consider education in lieu of experience.” At any rate, both the overworked and the underworked get something other than what they wanted. What management really wants is anyone’s guess. They play their cards close to the vest. Libertarian jerks call it personal failure. I call it market failure.

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T as in transparent. How transparent? Transparent enough to satisfy Transparency Extremist:

Every ledger, every account, every transaction held or made by a transparent corporation should be open and auditable by the world. Commercial confidentiality be damned: we have a right to know.

I propose a “soft anagorist” approach, making this level of disclosure voluntary rather than mandatory, since mandates violate other cherished principles. For this purpose, we need only invent a new category of business—a new paradigm in organizational design—which we’ll call the transparent corporation, or T-corporation. An example of such a planned paradigm shift is the B-corporation, or for-benefit corporation. The purpose of the B-corporation appears to be to serve as a platform for triple bottom line accounting. The purpose I am proposing for the T-corporation is absolutely maxing out financial disclosure, all the way down to the transaction level, and disclosure thereof not only to stakeholders, but to the world at large; the public record. One obvious casualty is even the pretense of privacy. I myself consider privacy a lost cause, but when introducing new ideas, objections must be overcome. To that end, I propose a minor kludge in the interface from the journals to the public record. For journal entries documenting cash flows to or from individuals, the name of the party is overwritten with the designation “an individual.” These individuals will not be numbered or otherwise differentiated in the public version, to allay fears of probabilistically inferring the identity of unnamed individuals through pattern recognition. In summary statements derived from the public journals, perhaps the sum total of transactions with individuals could be labeled as transfers to and/or from the “social domain,” which is to say, the world of humans. An example of this concept minus the “privacy policy” would be the OpenBusiness license as proposed by ixnaum. OpenBusiness might be a good way for those of us who are informational exhibitionists to volunteer information.

Once a T-corporation or OpenBusiness has been established, it might adopt a standard operating procedure of seeking out others of its kind and preferentially doing business with them. This incorporates the “closure seeking” property of Angel Economics. With a sufficiently large and sufficiently “tight” network of T-corporations and OpenBusinesses, it should be possible to shed some serious light on large portions of the supply chain.

There are a number of ways in which the establishment of several T-corporations might serve the cause of anagorism. One is by putting the strong efficiency hypothesis to the empirical test, particularly expanding its application to the world of tangible goods, rather than the sterile world of the markets in commercial paper. If price signals are anywhere near as strong an attractor as is claimed, there should be about the same amount of variation in prices among deeply transparent vendors as among conventional enterprises. Even if the results of that experiment turn out not looking good for anagorism, perhaps the cause of agorism can be advanced. If the obliteration, at least locally, of information asymmetry (pdf!) can be effective, the market economy should in theory be more competitive; closer to the agorist ideal.

laura k explains more clearly than I am able, why I hate haggling. Hopefully deep transparency will make the Iron Law of One Price a fact and not just a promise, but more on that in my upcoming post on deep transparency. For now, laura has given me another rallying cry: No bargaining but collective bargaining! Commenter allan adds:

People who are shy or hesitant are penalized for who they are. They may end up paying more for items and also earn less at their jobs.

I refer to this phenomenon as the aristocracy of push.

At the excellent Freeebay blog, Brent Emerson provides four criteria of success for social anarchy (emphasis mine):

1. [Participants] are free from economic oppression and coercion, exercising decisionmaking authority in proportion to the degree they are affected by outcomes [2];
2. survive and are healthy;
3. have equal opportunity to participate in the production & consumption of goods and services and are justly remunerated for their labor;
4. are content and happy.

These are basically the principles underlying my choice of anagorism over agorism; particularly #2 and #3 above. Starting with #2, I regard the difference between survival and health to be one of degree, not kind. Any survival strategy that significantly compromises health strategy should be regarded as at least a partial failure of survival, and any market economy in which the going rate for one’s services falls short of survival or literally uses up one’s life expectancy, should stand alongside Ayn Rand’s straw-man conception of “altruism” as a system that demands the literal sacrifice of individual lives.

Concerning #3 above, the market paradigm itself is predicated on a principle of non-entitlement. With anagorism I hope to prioritize inclusivity over non-entitlement. I am aware, of course, of the conflict between universal inclusion and total non-coercion. Perhaps a no-compromise solution is not possible and we need to shoot for maximally efficient tradeoffs.

The article linked above explores Parecon as a strategy for implementing social anarchy, which may explain the reference to “decisionmaking authority in proportion to the degree they are affected by outcomes.” I’m not sure how this quantity can be accounted for, but I think it’s a more authentic measure of “having skin in the game” than is amount of equity investment, which leads to the “one share, one vote” non-democracy of joint stock companies. The article plots a course from the status quo to Parecon by way of a social democratic state. While I am open to either the immediate or gradual removal of the state, this particular game plan raises some concerns. The role of the state during the intermediate phase is described as follows:

1. Redistributes wealth through transfer schemes working on both ends of the income/wealth spectrum: a truly progressive income tax and a substantially enlarged estate tax, and stateadministered basic income coupons for various essential markets, such as food, housing and health care;
2. Welcomes women fully into the workforce by “reward[ing] family care and promot[ing] gender equality at the same time”, through reforms such as reducing employment hours for everyone to coincide with the hours children spend in school, providing universal preschool, mandating “use it or lose it” paid parental leave for all parents, taxing married individuals separately, eliminating the tax deduction for ablebodied adult “dependents” while providing generous deductions for people actually needing care, extending prorated benefits to all parttime workers, and requiring employment as a condition for benefits coverage [4]; and
3. Promotes and supports worker cooperatives in the economy and encourages decentral protoplanning among worker coops: alliances to collectively complete supply chains, determine efficient allocations, and find opportunities for new firms.

No doubt agorists both right and left will object most strenuously to #1, or denying people of the fruits of one’s labors. More concerning to me, though, is #3; tasking the hopefully now-vestigial state with the coordination and perhaps architecture of decentralized economic planning. This is the one activity which, in my opinion, must be undertaken within the non-governmental sector of pre-anarchist society, if nothing else, to prove that it can be done independently of government—what the non-market, non-state sector needs more than anything else is proof-of-concept.