Political Theory

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:53:41 GMT

z1235:

Of course. I submit that the risk/reward ratio for the IA (initiation of aggression) option for any human is (slowly but surely) becoming prohibitively unattractive, as the superiority of VA propagates through the social norms and gets discerned by human minds. Only humans who deem IA inevitable are the ones who find its costs acceptable. Delivering IA onto a population which rejects its inevitability will be prohibitively expensive to the parasite.

The thing is that whatever you call IA, it is not a fixed set of strategies.

The known means of aggression change as technology and other factors change.

And usually many new aggressive strategies remain concealed as long as its possible, since they are generally most effective in the shadows.

But I agree almost entirely with you that any given strategy of aggression which is effective at the time of its inception tends also to loose its competitive edge with time, once counter-measures become available and widespread.

The revolutionary tactics of political violence Lenin and his gangsters used to take over Russia could, for a while, be reproduced with similar success by a bunch of other similarly inclined totalitarian thugs in Europe and elsewere. At a time the scourge of Lenin-wanabes spread like a disease. However, they would be hardly of any practical interest today given that its primal targets can rapidly identify the strategy and prepare themselves accordingly.

If you track record the intensity of use of any given strategy you may see their ascent, and then decline and extinction happening after a while.

That, by the way, also happens with non-hostile and "positive leverage" competitive strategies. Once they are known and widespread, they too loose profit margin and disappear.

And in high "harmony societies", the prospective profits for aggressors tend to increase since the protective measures are reduced due to the low perceived risks of aggression given the recently recorded history.

So this whole net balance between aggressive and harmonious patterns of interaction is not so easy to predict, and depends on a lot of technological discoveries and other random changes in a number of factors.

If, for instance, the advances in nano-robotics drone espionage, genetic engineering and eugenics, weaponized bio-agents and population control, internet surveillance, data mining and analysis, judicial activism and constitutional dismanteling, classroom and broadcast propaganda, financial disruptive targeting and banking totalitarism and many, many other police control tactics can alter this balance drastically in favor of the organizations trying to enslave you.

And they know, as Goethe once said, that the best slave is the one who thinks he's free. Make no mistake here. I beleive these elite organizations don't even use the "slave" word. They see us as something even less dignified. Cattle, perhaps.

Evil never dies. He sits there, lurking, awaitng the hour of reprisal.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:00:31 GMT

z1235:

Except hostility is not the common practice at all. If it was, there'd be no society and humans to debate about this stuff today.

For several things people do, many forms of hostile dispositions are useful and also the common practice, either to be used as negative leverage in negotiations, or as a crime-and-punishment incentive mechanism, or as a direct means to inflict an amount damage on a counter-part in order to push them to surrender their claims or, in extreme cases, to get them completely annihilated.

Of course not everyone needs to have first-hand experience in international brinksmanship tactics or to attend the signing of a peace treaty or a secret meeting of a military alliance's chiefs-of-staff to understand all of that.

Negative leverage, for instance, is used in many everyday transactions, and it's so common place and automatic, that nobody cares whether or not they are able to justify it using some abstract set of ethical ground rules.

Who said we're solving anything? Humanity's existence and flourish over the long run are facts. Social norms that are conducive to said flourish survive, the ones that are not, don't. On top of this genetic inheritance (of both biological and social sort) humans can also use reason and logic to discern which phenomena and social norms are conducive to humanity's existence and flourish, and which are not. It's a long process, and the night is still young.

I don't think you've understood my remark.

I've said that whatever they call State, or any other common pattern of aggression for that matter, is not some institution designed to advance human condition or guarantee humanity's existence.

To say that humanity flourishes may be a delightful metaphor given a context, but if you expect that anybody is seriously concerned with this "flourishing of mankind" as a whole, my suggestion to you is to ask them to be psychiatrically examined.

These "big social problems" are so big and so vague that they cannot be understood or treated as a problem by anyone.

Real people and also organizations that act coherently have attainable goals with respect to their characteristic resourcefulness.

Despite of what they might talk. Anyone can say they are trying to save the world when what they are doing is protecting their own asses.

There is no State. What we have is a complex ecology of organizations, like the legion of tax-funded bureaucracies created by politicians, themselves creatures of political parties or other kinds of political machines, which are funded in many ways by their constituencies, lobbies and other political allies.

Each one of these organizations and individuals may declare their selfless mission statement in terms of their perceived roles in some bigger State scheme, helping society cope with some particular problem.

But everyone knows that's just some show. Some sort of cultural ritual.

What everyone is really occupied doing is in guaranteeing their own continuity and advancing their positions as players in this game.

There is no "big social problem" being solved by anyone. What we have is an arena of players solving the problems they need to solve in order to survive and "flourish".

So yes, you are right, humanity doesn't need the State to create a lawful environment where she can survive and flourish. But that's not the reason why we have political activity in the first place.

The reason why politics exists is because politics are useful strategies to solve the real problems they are invoked to solve by the real political organizations, i.e. the problems of tax-funded bureaucracies, politicians and political parties, non-profits, lobbies, and all other self-aware political machines and entities trying to get ahead.

Have you ever heard the phrase: "Bureaucracy is increasing to meet the needs of an increasing bureaucracy" ?

That's it.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

Torsten — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:58:38 GMT

I'd say it's 50%.

I'd like to be the first to point out that this scheme would immediately cause the end of the world to come. Jussayin.

I think he's asking whether government has to be measured by it's cost or by it's contribution. And I should add I do not mean real economic contribution, but contribution in terms of power it exercises.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:14:18 GMT

Jon Irenicus:

How do you propose to quantify it, then? You may dislike the notion that some things are simply not quantifiable, but hey, the world doesn't revolve around the egos of people with scientistic beliefs.

z1235:
Values are subjective, ordinal (as opposed to cardinal), and not amenable to aggregation, hence not quantifiable. They are not just hard to quantify -- they are not quantifiable.

If you disagree, go ahead and start quantifying and comparing the two govs from my previous example:

"Say, Ruler 1 taxed income at 0% but imposed laws which allowed him to bed with any female and to order anyone to give him massage whenever he saw fit. Ruler 2 taxed income at 50% and pretty much left everyone well alone beyond that. What's the point of polling which of the two may be "bigger gov"? If you were a guy without hands (unable to give massages), without a wife, sister, mother or a daughter, Ruler 1 may as well be "almost perfect rule of law" to you. If you were a pretty girl, not so much. "

How much gov is Ruler 1 and how much gov is Ruler 2? I'm all ears.

I don't need to propose anything new.

The Heritage Foundation Index for Economic Freedom, as Whelyous suggested, is a good start.

It may have many limitations and shortcomings, but it would be a very hard case to defend that it consists only of nonsense.

I'm not saying here that you should not be suspicious of statistical modeling and other techniques of hard data analysis, that are sometimes deployed before people take their time and understand what they're trying do.

Some people can indeed get away with a lot of BS if they put it in some graphs and tables and scientific looking equations.

And I'm not saying that mainly verbal explanations schemes that are not amenable to very precise and simple verification procedures are worthless.

But it's not because a problem depends on subjective evaluations of quality that it is not tractable via quantitative methods.

Take the recommendations systems used by websites like Amazon and Netflix as an example.

These systems are based on statistical learning algorithms, i.e.., a lot of math. They analyze the patterns of correlated decisions by users and make suggestions based on the analysis.

And they produce a service that depends on qualitative tastes that are nonetheless "hard to quantify".

They are not definitive solutions of course. They can be continuously perfected, because the problem they solve is to vague and complex.

But they are solutions, in the sense that they result in something useful.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:32:32 GMT

Jon Irenicus:

The state is not a market entity. It is not self-funding. It is coercively funded by theft. That is what makes it a non-market entity. Call it "market" if you want, sure, but you are playing a terminological game that is irrelevant to its actual nature.

I don't see why a larger notion of self-funding must necessarily exclude funding by theft or by other forms of coercion.

If the organization is in a given position so it can effectively sustain its present operations with the results generated by its previous operations or expected by its future operations, for all that matters this organization is self-funded.

Even if the operations use coercive tactics.

It can be a couple of small time crooks, or a large gang of drug dealers, or a political party or an international investment behemoth.

These organizations make many rational decisions that involve some form of deceit, threat or aggression; and apparently they can get away with it, at least in the net balance. Otherwise they would have been shut down by themselves and cease to exist, as many of them are.

You can say that people learn how to defend themselves from these exploitations, so these operations are doomed to disappear or to take some other form.

But every single market operation is doomed to disappear. Once its competitive advantage is gone, once the edge that creates its margin disappear, it needs to adapt to a new set of opportunities. Change or die.

Well, you can say that a market is any pattern of resource allocation that does not seem to take any form of violent interaction into consideration.

But that would be a very restrictive definition of a market, and probably it wouldn't apply to any real case of interest.

In the real world, market participants are paranoid creatures that spend most of their time hedging their risks of being attacked and considering their strategical situations as to make hostile moves against other participants.

Anyone who thinks differently would benefit visiting a real-life trading floor or a corporate meeting of any kind of business. But I must warn that most academic-type fellows would not feel very comfortable in those environments…

There are many other ways to leverage threats and to effectively apply violence, other than resorting directly to its most primitive form of physical attacks.

And no set of moral principles with any practical use can exhaust all these possibilities so to create a society deprived of purposeful violence.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:23:48 GMT

Jon Irenicus:

Humans are capable of expanding their circles of empathy to animals, even. Hell, even plants. So what is to stop this advance from eventually obliterating the state?

So what?

Human beings are also apex predators that reign in terror and feast in blood.

What else could be the case for a race of warrior apes that learned how to coordinate complex attacks on preys and enemies with abstract language and technological skills that enable the manufacture and operation of artificial weapons?

Civilization and peaceful markets are just the occasional unintended consequences of this advanced dominance strategy.

Don't bother lecturing me on economics, I do understand how free and peaceful markets can generate more global prosperity to its participants, and so create a steady pressure that propagates and solidifies the institutions of peaceful exchange in the long run.

But these institutions are thin veneers covering the otherwise hostile, deceitful and ruthless nature of Man.

They are patterns of relative moral passivity that may sometimes emerge and persist for a little while, until the winds of change blow them away.

And I know what you're thinking.

You think that I'm writing evolutionary biology platitudes and their enigmatic, perhaps meaningless, implications on human nature, and painting it all with dark undertones, while driving no point home.

Well, think again. But try to think in terms of real scenarios.

Think of compulsory school attendance in every country.

Think of the rise of totalitarianism in Russia, Germany, Italy and other countries.

Think of eugenism and population control tactics.

Think of television, mass media and its effects.

Think of the patterns of political violence in post-colonial Africa.

Think of the industry of hatred going on in the Middle East.

Think of the systematic effort sutained by many political fronts to dismantle and abolish the Constitution of the United States of America.

Think of the financial takeover of the economy.

Think of the active promotion of cosmic public hysteria, like global warming.

Think of the current trends of several international organizations testing many control grid strategies for a global police state.

Yeah, of course, we live in the age of the scientifically designed silent genocide, but meanwhile there's a whole lot of empathy all around.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:53:39 GMT

Jon Irenicus:
What happens when a good deal of the population realises it is being mobilised against it?

Hummm… Let me take a wild guess here: nothing happens.

And that's because a "good deal of the population" is not an ball player in this game, or any game. A "good deal of the population" can not act nor do anything coherently as "a good deal of the population". So it doesn't matter if they have the same collective mind-blowing realization.

I mean, the thing is, they already realize that!

Your point is that politicians are parasites who use power to look after their own interests at the expense of everyone else… well that's old news, white boy. You don't need to read some ethics treatise by Rothbard to get it... Every cab driver in this god damn world understands that already…

This sort of "mass realization" is completely meaningless unless it provides concrete incentives for some sort of organized, sustained and consequential action out there, in the real world.

There's no revolution going on on the minds of people. I used to believe in that too… but this is nothing but woo woo new age hippie shit…

The age of aquarius my black a**…

You have to look into the real situation and try to understand what's your position, how deep is your stack, what are your cards, what are the stakes, who is playing in the hand and what they are representing and what they might have. And of course, you need to pay attention to who has dealt the last cards and what your opponents may be hiding inside their sleeves.

Keep close track of all those variables and you might survive for the next round. There's no other way around.

And if it's not clear already, let me state it in plain words... Survival of the fittest, that's the name of the game.

Somethings will never change.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

Andris Birkmanis — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:22:14 GMT

Well, I don't disagree entirely with that theory, but the simple fact that this scheme succeeds shows that in reality the disorganized majority of people is not capable of defending itself from the actions of organized minorities dedicated to propagandize their ruling

It may well be that this meme is only capable to preserve the status quo, but not to return to it if perturbed.

In other words, "the disorganized majority of people" may be capable of defending themselves, but not of freeing themselves.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:18:59 GMT

cab21:

there are different kinds of wealth redistribution

there is va

there is ia

the cost of va wealth redistribution is admin and the benefit is mutual trade.

so a business is set up and people donate 10% of their wealth to that business, the business takes 1% of that for admin, and 9% gets distributed to those on a list of requirements.

if its 50% that gets donated, admin costs can stay at 1% or whatever percent is chosen as the business model, the larger the wealth, the lower the percentage of admin costs need to be.

if someone donates 1000 pounds of food to a foodbank, and admin lived off that food at 20 pounds a week, it would be able to stay at 20 pounds a week if 10000 pounds were donated, so the larger the opperation of distribution, the smaller the costs for admin as a percentage. then it depends on the infrastructure costs for delivering the goods, with more complex systems costing more money in a curve most likely

Well, I wasn't talking about the inner workings of a full voluntary system of wealth redistribution.

I was talking about one enforced by a small State.

Which in the end is not so different, because such a system would only be viably enforceable by a small state if the populace financing it was in reasonable accordance with it.

And that seems to be the case in advanced economies that run proportianly large wealth redistribution schemes.

Probably due to their relatively small population of racially and culturally homogenous peoples, these schemes can be maintained with somewhat low operational costs. But that's only my speculation.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:07:43 GMT

z1235:
The majority of productive humans is perfectly capable of defending itself from this parasitic minority by organizing itself through voluntary (inter)action. Not only that is IA not necessary for protection from IA, but the very suggestion is so self-contradicting that it hurts the mind.

If they are so able, why don't they?

Wait, I know the answer. You gonna say something along the lines of some "meme of statism" or some "creed of social contract" that the parasites use to legitimize their parasitism.

Well, I don't disagree entirely with that theory, but the simple fact that this scheme succeeds shows that in reality the disorganized majority of people is not capable of defending itself from the actions of organized minorities dedicated to propagandize their ruling, at least not "perfectly", whatever you mean by perfection here.

Propaganda and indoctrination are only two of the many successful patterns of mobilization of political violence.

You may believe they'll go extinct some day, but it's not so clear why they should.

z1235:
EDIT: And violent "bargains"? "Market" in violence? Please.

I know it's weird, and you may feel more comfortable saving the word for context where there are no hostile exchanges.

But the material, knowledge and human means and also the general will to violence constitute important economic resources, whose patterns of production and consumption follow rational principles that are to a large extent analogous to what for other scarce resources we call markets.

Battles aren't usually fought for no reason, but when the prospects of its results are favorable to those responsible to make them happen.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

z1235 — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:08:15 GMT

ToxicAssets:
No people don't see things through these abstract grand schemes of moral philosophy. Only amateur philosophers crave this kind of distinction. People understand simple rules of thumb and common practices and that's what they use to guide their decisions. And if hostility is the common practice, that's what they'll do.

Except hostility is not the common practice at all. If it was, there'd be no society and humans to debate about this stuff today.

Look, I'm not saying that the State, the government or any kind of Initiation of Agression is essential for humanity's existence.

Since nobody is trying to solve the problem of humanity's existence or looking to improve human condition as a whole, this kind of reasoning is entirely absurd.

Who said we're solving anything? Humanity's existence and flourish over the long run are facts. Social norms that are conducive to said flourish survive, the ones that are not, don't. On top of this genetic inheritance (of both biological and social sort) humans can also use reason and logic to discern which phenomena and social norms are conducive to humanity's existence and flourish, and which are not. It's a long process, and the night is still young.

What I'm saying is much simpler.

I'm saying that sometimes, some people and some organizations perceive they can solve their problems through violence, threat, hostility, coercion, compulsion, IA, it doesn't matter, call it whatever you want. The thing is that that's the way it is.

Sure. Some people rape and murder too. That's the way it is, too. What's your point?

And their job is not to make the world a better place "as a whole". That's nobody's job.

Of course. So what?

But it's the job of every person and every organization to look after their own interests, because that's how they can survive .

And they will deploy strategical violence whenever it seems fit. Call it parasitic and predatory behavior if you want, that doesn't change how things are.

Of course. I submit that the risk/reward ratio for the IA (initiation of aggression) option for any human is (slowly but surely) becoming prohibitively unattractive, as the superiority of VA propagates through the social norms and gets discerned by human minds. Only humans who deem IA inevitable are the ones who find its costs acceptable. Delivering IA onto a population which rejects its inevitability will be prohibitively expensive to the parasite.

Some means of aggression may get antiquated and old-fashioned given the changes of the environment, but that doesn't mean aggression will be extinct some sunny day. I'm sorry about that.

Sure. IA will never be zero but societies with higher VA / IA ratios will keep out-flourishing the ones with lower VA / IA ratios. Though I still fail to see how all this is related to whichever point you were trying to make in the OP.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 15:47:12 GMT

z1235:
The majority of humans already understand and enjoy the superiority of voluntary action (VA) vs. initiation of aggression (IA). If that wasn't so, humanity would have gone extinct a long time ago, much less be able to communicate thoughts like these over a communication network today. The problem through history has always been a small parasitic and aggressive minority which has managed to find ways of convincing the productive majority (through memes such as god-ordained kings, mafia, "democratic" government, etc.) that initiation of aggression is inevitable and essential for humanity's existence. You've swallowed that story hook line and sinker.

No people don't see things through these abstract grand schemes of moral philosophy. Only amateur philosophers crave this kind of distinction.

People understand simple rules of thumb and common practices and that's what they use to guide their decisions.

And if hostility is the common practice, that's what they'll do.

Look, I'm not saying that the State, the government or any kind of Initiation of Agression is essential for humanity's existence.

Since nobody is trying to solve the problem of humanity's existence or looking to improve human condition as a whole, this kind of reasoning is entirely absurd.

What I'm saying is much simpler.

I'm saying that sometimes, some people and some organizations perceive they can solve their problems through violence, threat, hostility, coercion, compulsion, IA, it doesn't matter, call it whatever you want. The thing is that that's the way it is.

And their job is not to make the world a better place "as a whole". That's nobody's job.

But it's the job of every person and every organization to look after their own interests, because that's how they can survive .

And they will deploy strategical violence whenever it seems fit. Call it parasitic and predatory behavior if you want, that doesn't change how things are.

Some means of aggression may get antiquated and old-fashioned given the changes of the environment, but that doesn't mean aggression will be extinct some sunny day. I'm sorry about that.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

z1235 — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 15:21:46 GMT

ToxicAssets:

There's only one problem though. This whole "non quantifiable" stuff is just plain philosophical obscurantism.

Some phenomena maybe harder or easier to quantity, but the notion that thet are not quantifiable, in the sense that any attempt to quantify them is non-sensical is usually preposterous.

Values are subjective, ordinal (as opposed to cardinal), and not amenable to aggregation, hence not quantifiable. They are not just hard to quantify -- they are not quantifiable.

If you disagree, go ahead and start quantifying and comparing the two govs from my previous example:

"Say, Ruler 1 taxed income at 0% but imposed laws which allowed him to bed with any female and to order anyone to give him massage whenever he saw fit. Ruler 2 taxed income at 50% and pretty much left everyone well alone beyond that. What's the point of polling which of the two may be "bigger gov"? If you were a guy without hands (unable to give massages), without a wife, sister, mother or a daughter, Ruler 1 may as well be "almost perfect rule of law" to you. If you were a pretty girl, not so much. "

How much gov is Ruler 1 and how much gov is Ruler 2? I'm all ears.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

Jon Irenicus — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:57:10 GMT

How do you propose to quantify it, then? You may dislike the notion that some things are simply not quantifiable, but hey, the world doesn't revolve around the egos of people with scientistic beliefs.

Re: A view on wealth redistribution

ToxicAssets — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 11:16:02 GMT

Wheylous:

TA - there are two answers to your question.

First off, you can't quantify the size of government. If I tried to before, then I was wrong. There are several dimensions to government, as you have shown. The Heritage index tries doing this, but even then it's not "the" answer.

Rather than just looking at taxes, you have shown that regulation and other interventions are also important.

To get a better understanding of the size of government (and not an actual number, as you have shown), you ought to look at the amount of property that the government has control over. That is why regulations and interventions also increase the size of the government.

Unfortunately, control cannot be quantified, so we can't pin a number on government. Perhaps I will write on the VR about this.

You seem to have understood the point I was trying to make.

There's only one problem though. This whole "non quantifiable" stuff is just plain philosophical obscurantism.

Some phenomena maybe harder or easier to quantity, but the notion that thet are not quantifiable, in the sense that any attempt to quantify them is non-sensical is usually preposterous.