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.

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:

=====8<-------------

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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