Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 20 of 22

The Role of Violence and Coercion in Saving the World

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On November 9, 2013

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It will be impossible to save the world from climate change without coercion.  The problem of climate change is a problem of common sinks and limited resources: the atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon, the seas only have so many fish and can only withstand us dumping so much plastic and other pollutants into them.  The world has only so many forests, and so on.

These are genuinely limited resources.  Dumping into them, or chopping them down, or overfishing them is an advantage to whoever does it: they can burn dirty (cheap) fuels, they can use plastic packaging consumers like, they can have fish to eat now.

It is rational, in the sense that you receive a benefit, to destroy the world. It is especially rational to do so if you expect to be dead before the costs come to bear, or if you think you can use your money to avoid the worst of climate change.

We have an additional problem: no one has jurisdiction over all of the atmosphere, all of the seas, all of the forests.  If country A decides not to pollute or dump or cut down forests, someone else can do more of that and gain a short term benefit.  And by short term benefit I mean “some of the decision makers and their friends will personally get rich.  Filthy, stinking, rich.”  (This is also one  problem with refusing to have high marginal taxation, capital taxes, estate taxes and corporate taxes.  People are less interested in destroying the world when they’ll only make a little bit off it.  The calculus does change somewhat.)

So how do you ensure that Brazil doesn’t destroy the rest of the Amazon, that Japan doesn’t radically overfish, or that the US doesn’t dump obscene amounts of carbon into the air per capita?

There are three essential approaches.  The first is bribery: we’ll pay you not to do this.  Up to a certain point this is necessary: if Brazilians can make more money chopping down jungle than keeping it around, why wouldn’t they? But everyone has the ability to do destroy the world, everyone can hold you hostage, and once people start, they don’t stop.  Bribery only works if it is short term, if it becomes “we’ll pay for you to transition to a different economic model, but no more than that.”

The second is incentives.  Why are the Brazilians chopping down the jungle?  Because Americans want to eat beef.  If Americans change how they eat, much less reason for the jungles to be chopped down.  If we don’t want plastic to destroy the Oceans maybe we should just forbid most plastic packaging?  It can be done, I grew up with paper bags and glass bottles, for example.  I grew up in a culture where every food worker didn’t wear disposable plastic gloves.  I survived, I guarantee you will too, no  matter how much of a germphobe you are.

The third is coercion.  You will not do this, and if you do we will do bad things to you.  Lock you up, sink your ships, and if it comes to it, kill you.

Now let’s be clear, coercion underlies virtually all social relations.  You pay taxes because if you don’t, somebody with a gun will come along and throw you in jail.  You have property because men with guns enforce your property rights.  You go to school, because if you don’t… well, you get the picture.  No society has EVER existed that did not have some form of coercion available to it.  In many hunter-gatherer societies that coercion was the simplest of all: expulsion.  If you didn’t obey the rules, they kicked you out, and that meant death because no, most people cannot survive alone, and most people don’t want to.

Because there is an advantage to unilateral betrayal: to dumping your pollution on other people and letting them pay the cost, there will always be people who want to do it, and it’s not always worth trying to use incentives to get them not to: it swiftly becomes too expensive.  The best approach is often to unilaterally take certain actions off the table: none of us will unilaterally take each others stuff.  None of us will dump poisons into the air that kill other people we don’t know.  None of us will, on net, allow forests to decrease.  None of us will use plastic packaging.

This is the problem of collective action: if none of us do these things, we’re all better off.  But if one of us or a few of us do it, we have an advantage over other people, and if other people are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.

This brings us to my comment, in my 44 Points Post about needing an armed force to protect the Oceans, a comment which caused much screaming, since people thought it violated my point about not wanting large standing armies.

An army and a police force are not the same thing.  An international “Ocean Guard” is not a navy, it does not need destroyers with depth charges and nuclear submarines with missiles and Aircraft Carriers.  It needs ships capable of find trawlers and boarding them.  Police force.

But the key problem here is jurisdiction: no one has jurisdiction.  No one can say to the US or China or India or Japan, “you will not do this!”

We must create institutions which have the authority to say “you will not pollute, you will not destroy the environment.”  More than that, because we have gone too far, we are going to need institutions which can say “and you will also work to fix the environment.”  Again, countries will want to not contribute, because if someone else does it, and you don’t, you get most of the benefits without the costs.

Now we can create a world economy which is not harmful to the environment and in which everyone is fed, clothed, has shelter and has a meaningful life with a good chance at happiness.  We are going to have to, because people who are unhappy, who do not love, and are not loved, who are frightened, will do whatever they feel they must.  We must drain the swamp of true need, of hunger, of great fear.

But that’s the end point: that’s where we must commit to go.  Along the way, however, bad actors will have to be forced to stop what they are doing coercively.

Failure to do so means death and suffering.  More death and suffering than is caused by coercively, say, sinking Trawlers or trade embargoing countries which won’t stop using plastic containers.  We are in a situation where the median death estimate from climate change is probably a billion people.

We cannot entirely bribe and incentivize ourselves our way out of this problem, some coercion will be necessary.  How much money would you have to pay Wall Street, for example, to stop doing what they do?  As much, or more than they make doing what they do.  How much to stop Big Oil?  Same answer.  We can’t afford it, that money, those resources, must be spent fixing the problem and taking care of ordinary people.  So we must criminalize certain behaviour, on a world scale and then enforce it.

That is policing, if done right, not military action.

There are great big reasons to be scared of anything that looks like a world state.  I have a preference for nations, because a world state that turns totalitarian is a nightmare, and a world state is also likely to lead to stagnation.  My suggestion is to try federalization: specific bodies with specific enforcement, but they must have transnational police powers.  There is no reason these bodies can’t be run by democratic methods, no reasons the courts they run can’t be fair and open. Our current transnational bodies aren’t democratic, indeed are anti-democratic, precisely because our elites don’t want them to be, but that is, again, a social choice.

We figure this problem out, or we fry.  We need institutions for transnational action, institutions with police power, courts and which are democratically constituted.  This isn’t an insoluble problem, either in general, or specific, except that it challenges the people who currently have power and who are currently getting filthy rich by destroying the environment, and in so doing likely killing a billion or more people, and conceivably, risking the future existence of humanity entirely.

Given the stakes, we’d best grow up.  There is only one world, and until we get off it, it is a single point of failure. It must be dealt with as such.

 

Incentives

What is an economy?

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On November 7, 2013

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Perhaps the greatest difficulty I have talking about the economy is that most people don’t understand what an economy is.

An economy is what people produce and the relations that make that production possible.

An economy is not money.  Printing more money does not automatically increase the size of the economy as various episodes of hyperinflation clearly indicate, but also as the giant printing of money in the last five years should have shown to people.

Money is created by printing in a fiat economy, whether it is physically printed or not.  When a bank creates a loan it simply adds numbers to various accounts, and it does not have to “have money to loan”.  The same is true of brokerages offering loans for stock purchases and so on.  There is no direct organic relation between the amount of money in the economy and the amount of economic activity.

Moreover it is quite possible to increase the amount of money in the economy while decreasing activity.  When a huge loan is taken out to buy a company, and then the company has employees slashed and plants closed, real economic activity decreases, even as the amount of money increases.  When you insist on 15% profits and obtain them by refusing to do needed maintainance, firing employees, doing stock buy-backs and so on, real economy activity decreases.

If you measure the output of an economy in money you get a very distorted picture of what is actually going on.  There is less employment in the US in percentage terms than there was at peak, and absolute numbers are only now about getting even, yet people have been blathering on about a “recovery”.

It is quite possible for people to be doing things that are, on net, negative.  Every dollar earned by the financial industry in the 2000s was lost and then more in the financial collapse: real damage to real productive capacity was done.  We were earning more money, GDP was increasing, and (at least) houses were getting built, but the cost was offshoring and outsourcing of jobs and decreased actual wellbeing (it is in the 2000s that American height, for example, began to decrease.)

Money is not the economy, and increases in money do not necessarily mean the economy is getting better or even bigger, let alone actually increasing the welfare of the population.

Now increases in money SHOULD reflect increases in the welfare of the people, or at least in the size of the economy.  Money should have an organic relationship to the economy.  But for it to do so we must want it to.

Take the classic post-war economy (pre 70s.)  You can borrow money if you have a house or a business.  The house is valuable not so much because you can live in it, but because living in it means you are close to a job.  It is the job that allows you to afford the house, and if you lose the job, the house still has value because there are other jobs nearby for someone else.  If you do not believe this, I invite you to look at what happened to housing prices in Detroit when the auto industry left that city.

The house is secondary, though, the jobs come first.  A farm has value because you can grow food and sell it, a business has value because it makes money.  All of these things, presumably, produce goods or services that people want or need, and if you no longer want to run your farm or business, someone else can.  A loan just allows you to take some of the future value of what you own, and use it today.

Economic financialization seems like an extension of this system.  If you have a money flow of any type, why not borrow against it?  Why not borrow against its appreciation? Why not then sell those money flows for money today?  There are three problems: the first is pyramiding. You borrow against a money flow, then you use leverage and buy other money flows and then you leverage on them, and soon the underlying asset is a tiny fraction of the money you have. (No leverage on loaned money is thus the first principle of avoiding problems, loaned money is already leverage.)

The second problem is printing money with no underlying asset at all.  When the Fed is creating 82 billion out of midair every month, half of which is spent on treasuries, there is no organic relation to the underlying economy.

The third is that some people get to borrow money for much less than other people.  Banks get prime (or less).  Large investors get close to prime, ordinary people get Prime ++, if they can get less than 20% on a credit card.  This is justified by “risk”, but the risk is mostly that the person doesn’t have access to essentially free (prime rate) money.  It also distorts the economy, because it favors financial companies since the interest rate is the cost of money, and the cost of money is a cost of business, which means financial operations are cheap even before you get to the fact that financial operations also have access to the highest amounts of leverage.

The problem here is that finance creates NOTHING of worth itself.  It exists (or should exist rather) only to facilitate creating goods and services with actual value: food, housing, entertainment, medicine, art, philosophy and so on.  Those goods and services, or rather the people, equipment and relationships that produced them, are the economy.  Finance’s purpose is only to help allocate money between those activities, and it is only one mechanism of allocation.  The market will not allocate money properly to many goods because it undervalues the future (so, for example, education, especially in the humanities and basic science), cannot account for externalities not embedded in the valuation system (that you are getting sick from my pollution is not the market’s problem), and cannot value anything that is not denominated in cold hard cash (like love, or friendship or a sunny day free of smog or the health of someone who doesn’t make money.)

Any society which makes all or most of its decisions about how to allocate money through the market mechanism will be hell on earth and will devalue those things most important to human happiness and meaning.  It is not an accident that the depression rate in the US has increased by an order of magnitude in the last hundred years.

If you give outsize money returns to finance then, it drives out actual productive investment in the real economy.  If you make the market your primary method of allocating funds, it doesn’t allocate resources to the future or to intangibles and ignores externalities which are key both to long term growth and avoiding negative outcomes (like your kid having cancer, or your spouse dying of cancer, or your sibling having a debilitating case of depression.)

But the problem is worse than this.  Money, as my friend Stirling Newberry has noted, is permission: it is the right to decide what other people do with their time.  Money lets you buy up people who spend all day lobbying government, it lets you create political movements, it lets you buy up think tanks and universities, it lets you create your own mercenary army.  If you are throwing off more money than other industries, it lets you take over those industries. It lets you buy government, and thus control the rules.

If some group, in an economy, has a consistently higher rate of return than other groups over a long period of time, they WILL become dominant in that society absent a reaction by violent men.  Period.  Because they can use that money to decide what other people do.  This is true not just of finance, it is true of any group of people controlling a bottleneck resource (see: oil, among others).

You can solve this one of two ways: you can make sure no one gets these consistent outsize returns in the first place (remember, basic economics, if an industry is making more than average profits, they are not in a competitive market, there is an inefficiency).  Or you can just take their excess profits away from them.

IF you choose not to do so, because they have bought the system and created an ideology that says it is unfair to take money away from people who are given a systemic advantage by being allowed to create money from thin air and/or borrow it at prime when no one else can; or that the people allowed to control oil production should be allowed to keep all its benefits because they created the oil, or some such, then those people WILL come to control your society and they will create it in their image.

I will discuss at a later day happiness and meaning (and even eudomania), which should be the sane goal of any political economy. I will discuss how to design an economy which works for everyone.  But the first thing to realize is that you must want that, and you must believe it is Just that your society be run that way.

If you do not believe that it is moral and right and just to tax people who have a structural advantage in your economy (and that structural advantage can and will exist if you remove the State entirely), if you do not believe you are allowed to redistribute, if you do not understand what the economy is for (creating the good life), if you do not believe in not allowing concentrations of private power based on position, then you will not keep whatever prosperity and good life you have, because those who win the game (and someone always will) will buy up the game and change the rules to ensure their continued wealth and power.  They will do so in a way that will cost you your liberty, your health and your prosperity.

There will always be winners and we don’t want to change that. Let them win, let them enjoy winning in their time, but do not allow them to buy the system, to destroy the actual productive capacity of the system, or to try and make money the sole determinant of how decisions are made.  Doing so, letting market mechanisms work until they don’t, then continuing to use them anyway: refusing to enforce competitive markets and keep markets doing what they do well and only what they do well, is why we had a financial collapse, why we’re in a depression, and why we have a catastrophic climate change episode coming our way which will kill a billion people or more.  It is why we are seeing a long term decline in happiness in market democracies, why we have soaring rates of depression and chronic disease, rising chronic unemployment, and a host of other social ills.

An economy exists to fill the needs of the people in it, material and non-material. It has no other purpose.

44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World

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On October 25, 2013

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1) Ideology is key.  If you like (or were horrified by) my Baseline Predictions post, understand that the next two posts on ideology were about the solution.  Our decisions about what to do are virtually always ideological.  You cannot think about any complex subject without ideology, without idea structures mediating.  You cannot decide what to do without making judgments that are mediated through you world-view.

2) We know much of what must be done.  We know we need to do it.  We have not done it.  That suggests this is not a “practical” problem.

3) The structure of everyday life (job work, regimented schooling for children, passive entertainment, consumer “choice” that isn’t real choice) produces our world-view, our ideology.  We are left passive and accepting of social arrangement, unable to see that there are different ways to live.  We accept the world as it is, and accept systematic injustice, even injustice that directly and clearly injures us.

4) The problem of collective action is one part belief: people must believe they should do things differently.

5) Any social structure, including social structures which seek to change the dominant culture, if it can be bought out, will lose.

6) Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so.  The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological.  Rational people sell out.

7) The forms of the old world must be gotten rid of, and must be seen as anathema. You cannot save the world and keep American style suburbia as it is now.  You cannot change the world so people are happy and healthy and prosperous and keep wage labor as your primary method of distributing surplus value to the commons.

8) You cannot keep profit, aka. greed as the primary driver of social decision making.  Eating is for living, living is not for eating, to paraphrase Socrates.

9) Greed as primary driver leads to sociopathic behaviour being rewarded (read Barkin’s “The Corporation”).  This means you select, systematically, people who act sociopathically or pyschopathically as your leaders.  You get the behavior your reward, and right now our system rewards people for doing whatever it takes to make money, no matter what the costs to other people, to the environment or the future.

10) Most profits today are extracted value, they are not actual surplus value.  Instead they represent destruction of actual economic productivity.  Every cent the financial sector “earned” from 2000 to 2007 was destroyed, ten times over, in the crisis and the depression after the crisis.

11) Actual value is not rewarded.  A janitor or a garbageman or a teacher or a nurse or an assembly line worker or an engineer produces real value.  If the CEO does not come in tomorrow, so what?  If the janitor doesn’t, everyone is complaining immediately.  The people we call value creators today are mostly value extractors: their job is to squeeze hard, to monetize, not to create new products which are genuinely beneficial to the world, not to create workers who are well paid and thus able to provide demand, not to create better paying work, but worse paying work.

12) If you need a job to survive, you are always at the mercy of people who provide jobs.

13) The wage you are paid is based on the tightness of the labor market and how protected  you are by government. It has virtually nothing to do with your personal skillset, except to the extent that skillset is in short supply.  As programmers found out, corporations and government will do everything they can to make sure any specific labor shortage is reduced as quickly as possible.

14) You have power, as an ordinary individual, only if you act as a group and in solidarity.  If you can be bribed to betray other ordinary people, they will play you off against each other.

15) Jobs aren’t a good way to distribute surplus, but if that is how you do it, you will only get surplus in a tight labor market.  Central banks, the rich, corporations and government today all work systematically to make sure that there is no tight labor market.  If there is no tight labor market, you can and will be replaced.  If you can be easily replaced, there is no reason to give you any extra money, even if you are producing more than you did in the past. It is for this reason that for over 30 years now NONE of the productivity gains have gone to ordinary workers on aggregate.

16) The economy must be completely electrified.  Energy must be made, to the largest extent possible, a capital good, this is a specific instance of the next point:

17) Supply bottlenecks cannot be allowed.  Ever.  Whenever one starts to form, it must be broken.  Failure to do so is why the post-war liberal order failed and was replaced with neo-liberalism.

18) You cannot use up sinks (like carbon storage in the atmosphere) faster than they can be regenerated.  Period.

19) You cannot allow degradation of food or environment.  These are major causes of the degenerative and chronic diseases which are epidemic in our society.

20) You cannot allow significant unproductive consumption to be a major part of your economy.  Suburbia, for example, is essentially pure consumption.  All bans on productive work, agriculture, etc… in suburbia must be removed.

21) You cannot allow public goods, like education or health care, to be rationed based on ability to pay.  Paying for schools through property taxes creates an education system which wastes the human potential of millions of people in an attempt to replicate class privilege.  Ironically, the middle class is failing anyway, as the economic value of education has been destroyed.

22) The most important rule of all is this: your elites must experience the same life as ordinary people.  They must go to the same shitty schools (no private schools, no enriched schools, no Ivy League).  They must fly on the same planes and go through the same security (they don’t), they must use the same healthcare and stew in the same wards in the same rooms as the poorest of the citizens.  They must eat the same food, rather than being able to buy high quality food the poor can’t.  If they don’t experience what you experience, they will not care what is happening to you.  And they don’t.  Why should they when they’re the richest riches the world has ever known. The world is great, to the rich and powerful.

23) You have power to the degree you have solidarity, control your own government, and have the ability to support yourself without a job.  If you cannot walk, if you have no ability to say “screw you”, then you are a slave, the only question is who you are a slave to.  The people we feel worst for today are the unemployed who can’t even find a master.

24) People who actually create value must be allowed to keep enough of it.  Right now they aren’t.  Google takes almost all the value created by the people who actually make the web, for example.  Wal-mart crushes its suppliers into the dust.  A few key  pipelines like App Stores, Amazon, and so on take almost all of the surplus value.  Anyone who thinks 30% is a reasonable charge for an app store wants to see failure (this doesn’t mean no taxation, proper taxation takes away unneeded surplus, not needed surplus.)

25) A regular rate of return of 5% is reasonable.  A world in which you have to make 15% or 30%+ to be viable is a world in which most businesses are not viable, and in which millions sit idle with nothing to do because there is nothing to do that can make those sort of returns.

26) Returns of 15% or more can only be made through fraud, exploitation or oligopolistic practices.  Bad or fraudulent profits drive out real profits and real value creation.

27) The network effect is not something which should be rewarded with a 30% commission.  Neither is the railroad effect “nice product you got there, son, but it doesn’t get to market if you don’t pay us our vig.”

28) We can all be prosperous, but we can’t all be rich.  Having hundreds of billionaires is exactly why you haven’t had a real raise in 30 years.

29) Concentrations of wealth are used to protect that wealth and buy up the system.  That is why they can’t be allowed.  The first thing someone does who wins the market, is buy the market, and that means buying the government.

30) Government is either your worst enemy, or you best friend, depending on whether it is controlled by the public, by private interests or running rogue.  But government is also the only major organization which can work for ordinary people.  Every other organization has another purpose.  As such, you must control government if you want prosperity.

31) Government, under whatever name, is needed to do things we must do together for the greater good.  When it does not exist, you get Somalia.  Great cell phone service, but your daughters get pulled out shacks at 2 am and raped, or you buy your safety by submitting to an oppressive set of relgous laws.

32) You cannot have large standing armies and keep liberty.  Period.

33) You cannot give private entities the right to print money without extremely strict limits and not expect unreasonable concentration of money, which means power, which means the government gets bought out and you lose both your liberty and your freedom.

34) Biodiversity is wealth, it is where the great biochemical advances and products of the future will come from. Every time we kill a species, we impoverish our future.

35) We are going to require a transnational body with armed forces to enforce environmental controls.

36) Fines no longer work to control economic activity, we will require outright criminal bans and tough enforcement to stop rapacious corporate behaviour.

37) If you must have the cheapest devices, you are requiring a woman in the Congo to be raped and rivers in China to be polluted.  Fixing this is not an individual action, it is a collective action problem, it can only be fixed by government and by terrible things like, oh “tariffs”.

38) Free Trade is meaningless if you don’t have full employment.  It is a rounding error at best, harmful at worst.

39) Capital flows cannot be allowed to move faster than trade flows and really shouldn’t be much faster than labor flows.

40) The functionless rich cannot be allowed to keep the money they have.  Use it for actual new production, or lose it.

41) Inflation is not a bad thing below about 10% or so.  There is no good evidence it reduces growth, and it does break up concentrations of wealth.  We are terrified of inflation because we know our wages aren’t rising faster than it is.

42) People who make a bad loan, should lose their money.  There is no such thing as free money, and bondholders need to learn that.  Concomittent, bankruptcy must be easy to get: economic cripples, unable to discharge debts are not in our economic interest.  It is especially abhorrent that bankruptcy cannot discharge student loans.

43) An economy in which people are free to do what they love, free of fear of losing everything, is far more economically productive than one in which people are forced to do things they hate to make ends meet.

44) The right thing to do, ethically, is usually the right thing to do economically. Helping the distressed is good for the economy.  Universal healthcare that doesn’t give extra money to insurance companies is good for the economy.  Believe it or not, not dumping pollution into air and not poisoning food… is good for the economy.  Feeding the poor is… good for the economy.

If you’re ever not sure what the right economic policy is ask yourself what the kind thing to do is.  You’ll be right nine times out ten, and the remaining one time you’ll still be doing something good.

 

How to Create a Viable Ideology

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On October 23, 2013

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The most important question about any ideology or social structure are: “Does it win?” and “Can it defend itself?”

Hunter-gathering, if the land-capacity isn’t close to carrying capacity, is usually a pretty good way to live. What we see in the archaeological record is that when the land gets close to carrying capacity, there is ton of violence, the number one cause of death of adult males becomes violence. Enough below the carrying capacity and there is very little violence. This is a generalization, there are exceptions, but the data seem to indicate it is generally true.

Hunter-gatherers are, generally speaking, healthier than agriculturalists and pastoralists. They live longer, suffer less from disease, are taller, the women have wider hips and suffer less from childbirth, they have better dentition and so on. The societies, again with some exceptions, are more egalitarian than most agricultural societies (though very early agricultural societies are more egalitarian than late hunter-gatherer societies, again, in general). They also have vastly more free time than agriculturalists.

Basically, being a hunter-gatherer is about as good as it gets for most of human existence. There are some better agricultural societies to live in for brief periods (certain periods of Roman history, say) but they are rare. Industrial society produces better medicine and goods, but we work harder and have vastly more chronic disease even at the same age, and industrial society includes, as its concomitant, things like the widespread rape in the Congo and African poverty–that’s a requirement of our society, it’s not incidental.

But hunter-gatherers lose confrontations with pastoralists and agricultural societies. It’s a great way to live, but more dense societies were better at violence, so hunter-gatherers were forced to the margins.

Whatever your society is like, it has to be able to win confrontations. However your ideology organizes your society, even if that ideology produces a much more enjoyable society in which to live than your competitors, it must be able to persist in either the long or short term against its competitors. Otherwise, you’ve got a problem.

Time-scale matters. An ideology that produces a society that lasts for 150 years of pretty wonderful life then loses to someone better at violence might look pretty damn good to most of us.

An ideology may also have internal contradictions which doom it. The Soviet form of Marxist-Leninism was vastly successful in its early years, something we forget now. During the Great Depression, the USSR was doing far better than most of the rest of the world (except the fascist bits). The USSR is the only country larger than a city state to industrialize using anything but mercantilism. I am aware of no other exceptions.

But the USSR’s control mechanism could not deal with the information problem. It worked gangbusters at first, but then parties formed who were able to control information flow to the central planners, doomed it. Mancur Olson, in his book Power and Prosperity, deals well with both the rise of the USSR and its fall.

Neo-liberalism has amongst its internal contradictions the complete inability to manage climate change. This contradiction comes from its insistence on short term interest and its refusal to deal properly with public goods. To neo-liberalism, the future exists only at the point a market starts discounting that future. Unfortunately for the world, markets suck at recognizing the future beyond a few years out, and by the time a market notices, the key decision points for heading off an undesirable future may well be long past.

(Neo-liberalism also has a pile of other internal contradictions, but this isn’t an article on neo-liberalism, so we’ll pass them by for now.)

Within an ideology are prescriptions for internal vs. external power relations. So a society must be able to win its fights with outside societies running different ideologies, but it also includes prescriptions for how power is divided internally. In the European Middle Ages, most of Europe was ruled by rapacious nobles, but the Swiss Cantons had male suffrage. This was based on the fact that Swiss Pikemen could beat the pants off feudal noble cavalry. But the requirement for Swiss Pikemen was economically prosperous men who could and would fight, not starved peasants. And men who could fight, and had to fight together, insisted on having power.  There is a direct analogy between this and classical Greek Democracy (made up exactly of the fighting population), and the Roman Republican period, where citizenry is divided into three classes, based in part on how they fought (the Equestrian class, above the Plebes, could afford to fight on horseback.)

Power comes in a number of flavors. You have violence. You have productive capacity.  You have consumptive ability. You have social ties. You have ideological production.  The more of each of these any group has, the more power they have. The more power they have, the more of the surplus production of their society (or, in many cases, the non surplus production) they are able to control.  If you want prosperity, you want power spread as evenly throughout your society as possible. You never want complete equality in outcome, because you do want some competition, it helps drive society forward, but right now our problem is the exact opposite: too much concentration of power, too little equality.

Each of those groups, and they will exist, will compete against each other. Different people have different interests. If one group or a coalition of groups gains more  power, they will also gain more of the productive surplus. Part of an ideology’s job is to make it so that, as much as possible, everyone’s interests in society are similar.

John F. Kennedy once said “a rising tide lifts all boats.” People took that as a descriptive statement, but in a society it is not, it is a prescriptive statement: if you want any increases in production to go to everyone, you have to make that happen, and to make it happen you have to believe it should happen. But the step before that is making sure that power is divided relatively evenly through society, so that it does happen. But, again, that is an ideological choice: many people don’t believe that everyone should have relatively equal power.

To have relatively equal power you cannot allow the means of production or violence to be overly concentrated.  Jefferson was making a profoundly practical statement when he warned that banks and standing armies were dangerous to a republic and democracy. Banks allow people to print money, those who print money make money, it gives them a powerful advantage over people who cannot do so. Those who control violence: well, I’m sure I don’t have to make that point.

It is for this reason, for example, that I believe everyone (male or female) should have military training.  It is not an accident that Switzerland, where every male has an assault rifle and military training, has such a high standard of living or voted on whether to have a guaranteed annual income. It is also why I believe in cadre armies and that no large standing armies should exist.  (The solution for money creation is more complicated, and I’ll go into it at a later date.)

If you want a society, then, which is prosperous and egalitarian, with the proceeds of increased production going to everyone and not just a few, you must have an internal structure of power which gives ordinary people quite a bit, makes concentration of power in private hands difficult, makes the government unable to use too much power against its own citizenry while (and this is the important bit) still being able to defend itself externally, and able to resist internal putsches. Egalitarian societies which cannot defend themselves get overwhelmed by hierarchical societies which are better at violence.

This extends to monetary matters. If outsiders with money can buy up your society and upset your internal political and productive relationships because they are more efficient, or just bigger, or have their capital more concentrated, if you will let them buy you up because some part of your society wants to cash out, then whatever internal relationships you have are vulnerable. This has happened to vast swathes of the third world, where Westerners come in and buy out traditional relationships. NAFTA pushed millions of Mexicans off their farms, made Mexico weaker because those people now needed to pay for food (often foreign, and also less nutritious), and made Mexico, objectively, worse off than before NAFTA. But some Mexicans got very rich by selling out.

This is a particular problem for smaller groups trying to create societies within larger societies. If you can be bought out, if some of you want to sell, take the money and run, you are not viable. Quakers and so on have an ideology which doesn’t allow for selling out this way, thus they are viable in the long-term, whatever one thinks of them.

So, an ideology, a belief system, among other things, tells you what is and isn’t legitimate to sell for money. A stable system says you can’t buy key parts of the social structure. In a functioning democracy, anything that comes even close to buying a vote, for example, is verboten. When we moved from late Feudalism to early industrialization, feudal rights were done away with–including the commons. Enclosure of land took away rights from people who had them before and gave those rights to other people. Serfs, for all we sneer at them, had rights. Those rights were taken away. The ex-serfs who flooded into early industrial cities after enclosure lived far worse lives than they had under late feudalism (this is WELL established). They lived shorter, unhealthier lives, worked harder to earn money which left them living in worse circumstances than when they were back on the land.

So when you’re creating a new ideology, or modifying an old one, you have to consider these points: the relation to the means of production, the ability to generate violence in defense or offense and the effectiveness of that violence, the question of whether the system can be capsized by money or if the key parts of the system are off-limits (due to irrational attachment, absolutely it must be irrational) to capsizing through money or equivalents. If you want an egalitarian prosperous society is power objectively divided up so that the masses have the ability defend their share of surplus production? How will those who do get a little extra (and they will always exist) or who control a little extra, try to capsize that system and seize more? What are the protections against what they will try and are those protections based on strong, irrational beliefs and backed up by a willingness to employ violence? (If you aren’t, and they are, you will lose. Period.)

Note, finally, the use of the word irrational. We think of irrationality as bad, but rational decision making leads to betrayal. If someone’s going to offer me more than I can otherwise earn to betray the rest of my people, a lot of folks are going to take that deal unless they have the irrational belief that it’s wrong, and a rational belief that if they do it, those who have an irrational belief in the system will hurt them, or even kill them.

This is ideology. Any ideological system that doesn’t produce people willing to die and kill for it, will lose to an ideology that does. The question is not whether violence is permitted, the question is when it is permitted. Most of us want to live in a peaceful society; I certainly do. But that peace is always and everywhere under-girded by rules about when to commit violence, a willingness to do so and an ability do it well. Societies and ideologies that do not do violence well exist at the sufferance of those who do, and live under the conditions and in the places that those good at violence permit. Generally very bad conditions.

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Baseline Predictions for the Next Sixty Odd Years

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On October 21, 2013

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Today, I read this article on how the Ocean is dead: How the fish and birds are gone from huge swathes of it. You should read it.

Most people are absolutely lousy system thinkers, they don’t understand break-points: How you get long trends that suddenly break up or down, how self-reinforcing cycles work, and so on.

For some time, my baseline scenario has been as follows: We are so screwed.

We can expect a complete collapse of the ocean’s ability to provide fish. Japan, the worst offender in this, will also be the worst hit. That doesn’t make me happy, but it does make me laugh. This affects the oxygen cycle and, in the worst case, we could kill ourselves off entirely. Assuming we don’t, however…

We are currently seeing a hiatus in climate change. My friend Stirling predicted this years ago, and predicted it would be used simply to double down on stupidity like fracking. And it is being used thusly. If/when the sun warms up, we are fried. Various processes are past the point of no return; we are going to see huge methane releases from Russia, for example. We are going to have worse global warming than the worst mainstream predictions.

Climate change will continue to present itself as more and worse extreme weather events, like the nasty hurricanes we’ve been seeing hitting further and further north. We are going to also see changes in rainfall patterns; these will continue to devastate agriculture.

Aquifers are being drained dry, in ways that permanently damage them. This is happening in China, the US, India, and other places. This water will not come back. Large areas that are currently agriculturally productive will cease to be so, independent of climate change.

We will see huge dust bowls form, including in India, China, and the US.

There will be widespread hunger, because agriculture is going to fail. Period. Right now, hunger is due to distribution issues: We grow more than enough food to feed everyone, we just don’t care about feeding everyone. In twenty to thirty years, this will not be the case. Instead, we will just not have enough food.

Water will be as precious as hydrocarbons, which is, in part, because creating hydrocarbons requires water. Expect much of the world not just to be hungry but thirsty.

All of this is baked into the cake. We are past the decision points on all of these items—they will happen. They can no longer be stopped. Even if you concoct the most optimistic scenarios, we would need to act radically, right now, and we aren’t going to.

Let us now move the social sphere. We are creating an unprecedented panopticon state, one in which various technologies will conspire to make it so that individuals are tracked nearly 24/7, not just online but physically. Linking all the various cameras, RFID tags, aerial drones, satellites, phones that act as spies in our pockets, and so on, with algorithms which recognize our gait, our heat profile, our face, and so on, is a project which is well underway. The NSA may be the best at this, but every major Western government is playing this game, the NSA is merely the worst offender or the best at its execution. Private tracking is likewise ubiquitous: Companies have cameras which link your face to your credit card and purchase as you pay at the cashier, for example. Everything is tied together, and anyone stupid enough to think that these companies don’t share your information is a fool.

The preferred business model today is to make it so that no one owns anything. Everything is unbundled, and instead of owning it, you lease or rent it. The moment you can’t pay, it all goes away.  This is what “cloud” computing is about: a revenue stream. Lose your revenue, lose everything.  Ownership of DNA sequences, ownership of seeds, effective ownership of your intellectual property because it appears in someone else’s pipe (like Google using people’s endorsements without compensating them), you will own nothing, and all surplus value you produce in excess of what you need to (barely) survive will be taken from you.

To put it another way, the current business model is value stripping. All excess value is stripped from the social sphere (as with Google taking almost all of the value that content producers create by taking almost all of the value of ads, and they control almost the entire ad market). People who cannot gain enough of the excess value they create become economic cripples. Because the companies that make almost all the profit today are either financial companies, IP exploitation companies, or are taking value from the environment (like oil companies), there is not enough real economic growth, whatever the GDP numbers show (financial innovation isn’t, and JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs’ profits actually damage the real economy, stripping out value, not creating it).

There is no coherent ideology opposing this, no coherent alternative. Marxism died with the USSR, whether it should have or not. No new alternative to what is laughably called “capitalism” (what we’re seeing now isn’t) has arisen. The closest we have seen is the Pirate Party, but their ideology is too far from comprehensive and has too many holes in it, as they are concerned almost entirely with a set of issues around IP and privacy, which, while important, are not sufficient to create a new society complete with a new, humane, and ecologically sensible mode of production.

So we have runaway asset and value stripping, combined with truly insane damage to the conditions for production of food and energy. And no, photovoltaic solar is not going to save us. Certainly it is better than coal, natural gas, or oil, but most energy use in the world is not electrical, and Solar PV cannot produce the necessary baseline. Thermal solar and improved nuclear power made in breeder reactors are probably necessary for the transition, but the word “nuclear” scares everyone spitless (not without reason), so that’s off the table. And we’re going to burn.

There are always counter-reactions. I expect one when the Millennials come of political age, in the early 2020s. And I expect that the first round will fail, since it will be run by Millenials picked by their elders. The second round may succeed, but at that point we are into the 2030s.

While much of this is unavoidable, the amount of death and suffering is variable. We could lose a few hundred millions over the next eighty years whom we shouldn’t have lost, or we could lose a few billion. We could see billions descend into hunger and poverty, or we could find solutions which avoid most of that.

We will not avoid it if we continue with our current ideology of, simply, Greed. As long as we put ourselves first, as long as we decide that what is good for someone is what they’re entitled to do so long as the courts don’t actually put them in jail (and we don’t even enforce the laws on the book), we are not going to manage this chain of events to come down on the optimistic side of estimates.

We will need to create a whole new ideology, we will need to radically revamp our societies , and we will need to give up much we have cherished. Fortunately, much of what we have cherished has been, objectively, bad for us. People may want to live in suburbia, but it isolates them socially and makes them fat, sick, and unhappy. People may think they want pretty plastic packaging, but it’s why they eventually won’t have fish to eat that aren’t lice infested. People may think they want healthcare, but what they need is to be healthy, and that means healthy food and an environment that isn’t laden with unhealthy chemicals. People may think they want jobs, but what they need, and what they would be happier with, is the ability to produce what they need without working for a pointy-headed boss.

We’re going to run into this wall. Whether we run into it at a hundred miles an hour and go splat or hit it at ten miles an hour and get bruised and pick ourselves up is our choice. So far, our choice has been to run faster, but we can make another choice.

Most people who read this website are middle aged or older. If so, you’ll miss a lot of the worst of this. Your kids won’t. Your job, if you’re old, is ideological: To help create the ideas that are lying on the floor, the ideas that are used when people are desperate. When things change in crisis, they change fast, and the ideas that are used are the ones lying around. If all that’s lying around is neo-liberalism, that’s what will be used. Of course ideology isn’t enough, people can still choose the wrong ideology, the wrong ideas (and often have, don’t tell me otherwise), but if it isn’t there, all they can do is pick up what is there. That’s when you start getting idiots talking about “bending the curve,” as if slow incremental change won’t be overwhelmed by vicious cycles already in play, as if we aren’t already past key decision points, as if we shouldn’t already be in crisis mode and doing not dishwater reforms, but a radical remake of our societies.

We’re going to hit the wall. We’re going to have to fight a dystopic panopticon police state in which ordinary people are not allowed to own anything of real value, let alone keep any of the real value they create. We’re going to do this while the environment comes apart, while we get battered by “extreme weather events,” droughts, water shortages, and hunger.

That’s the baseline scenario. That’s what we have to be ready to deal with, to change as much as we can, to radically mitigate to save hundreds of millions or billions of lives, and to make billions of lives good, instead of meaningless existential hells.

Bin Laden’s insights and the Egyptian Coup

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On August 3, 2013

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This is the sort of post that makes people mad, but in light of what’s happening in Egypt it’s necessary to talk about bin Laden.

Most people who hate bin Laden have never read read his writings.  They’re quite extensive, and they’ll reward your time in reading them. (Obligatory bin Laden is a bad man, just like George Bush Jr. disclaimer.)  Bin Laden was very smart, and and he understood America very well, and had a good take on the world system.  He was not stupid, he was not a coward (he lead troops from the front line against the Soviets), and he was very effective at accomplishing many of his goals.  Along with George Bush Jr, who was his greatest ally and enemy, he was was one of the first great men of the 21st century.  Great men, of course, do not need to be good men.  Hitler and Churchill and Gandhi were all great men, they weren’t all good men.

Let’s start in relation to Egypt.  A lot of people in Egypt and elsewhere see the Egyptian coup (it was a coup, don’t tell me otherwise) as being US backed.  Add to this the fact that they see the defeat of the Muslim brotherhood in the past as being aided by the US, they believe that Egypt is ruled by its current oligarchy (an extension of the Mubarak era oligarchy, and again, don’t even try and lie and say otherwise), because of the US.

What bin Laden said was that despotic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere are backed by America in specific, and the West in general.  That backing is powerful.  In Islam there is an idea that you should deal with your local tyrant, your local problems, first, and not worry about the far enemy.  Bin Laden believed that, in the current circumstance, you could not do that.  Revolution at home was close to impossible because of the far enemy, because of the United States.  Even if you did, by some miracle succeed, as long as the US was the global hegemon, your success would be undermined and destroyed by the US by crippling your economy, escalating, if necessary, to economic sanctions backed by force.  If you don’t believe this, see what was done to Iraq in the 90s and what is being done to Iran today.  A lot of children and adults are dying and suffering because of these sanctions.

Bin Laden’s argument, then, was that the US had to be defeated.  That the evils being done by local regimes (such as the extensive use of torture and routine rape in Egypt under Mubarak) could not be ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime, the US, must be defeated.

This is a pragmatic argument, and it is an ethical argument.  When Madeline Albright said that half a million dead Iraqi children from US sanctions was “worth it”, bin Laden’s response was to ask if the lives of Muslim children were not equal to those of Christian children.  Rhetorically, he asked, “is our blood not red too?”

Whatever you think of bin Laden, this is a powerful ethical statement.

What this leads to is that the US is responsible both for the suffering it causes directly, and the suffering it causes indirectly, by keeping monstrous regimes in power, or, in many cases, helping create them.

This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy.  Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win.  This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power.  (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.)  It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.

So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections.  If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions.  All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.

The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate.  Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well.  The fact that bin Laden’s critique is fairly similar to various left-wing critiques is not accidental.  It is not because bin Laden and the left are fellow travellers (Islamists are strongly opposed to genuine leftists), it is because any set of model that track reality fairly well will tend to look alike.  Of course, that they look the same is used to discredit people by association.  “You agree with bin Laden” they say, and shut down discussion of how the world actually works.

The power of bin Laden’s critique is its accuracy, the elements of it which are true.  What bin Laden added (though I’m sure others have as well), was one main thing: the directive to attack the US.

Bin Laden was, in certain respects, born of the Afghan war against the USSR.  Those of you who are young tend to view what happened to the USSR as inevitable.  Creaky, economically broken, it was going down.  Nothing is so inevitable as what has already happened.  You’re not wrong, the USSR had real internal problems it couldn’t fix, but you’re not quite right, either.  Absent Afghanistan, the USSR might have toddled on for a lot longer.  Decades, perhaps.

Looked at from the outside, even in the 90s (heck, even in the 80s, with some prescience), the US does not look healthy.  It looks economically sick, with stagnation of wages even in the 90s, a gutting of real productivity, soaring inequality, and political sclerosis leading to the creation of an elite detached from the actual economy, but instead playing financial games which do not track real economic power.    It looks, like the USSR did, like a society which, with a push, could collapse.

Bin Laden set out to give the US that push.

Let’s go back to the USSR.  The Soviet military was not a joke.  It was large, powerful, had good equipment (especially compared to Afghan tribesmen).  Even the post Soviet Russian military is no joke (take a look at what they did to Georgia, recently.)  The USSR was POWER.

And in Afghanistan, the USSR was worn down.  All that power died in the grave of Empires.  And soon thereafter, the USSR ceased to be.

Bin Laden was there.  He saw it. He participated in it as a fighter.

He looked at the West, and the US in specific and believed that the US was ripe for something similar.  As with the USSR the US in the 90s had a very scary reputation.  Remember how decisively Saddam was defeated in the first Gulf War.  The US looked undefeatable.  And, in certain respects it was, and still is.

But bin Laden saw, accurately, the US weakness.  He believed that while the US was good at open field warfare, American troops were nothing special at the sort of guerrilla warfare that had occurred in Afghanistan.  He believed that if they could be brought into Afghanistan, and kept there, instead of coming in and leaving quickly, they could be defeated. He believed that the legend of American invincibility, as with that of the Red Army, could be shattered.

9/11 was about getting the US to overreact.  About getting it into Afghanistan.  It succeeded in doing that, but bin Laden must have known some despair, because at first, Afghanistan wasn’t proving to be much of a graveyard at all.  The majority of Afghans hadn’t liked the Taliban, didn’t mind them being blown over, and were willing to give the US and the West, a chance.

Then Bush stepped in, used 9/11 as the de-facto pretext, and invaded Iraq.  And in Iraq, much of what bin Laden wanted to have happen in Afghanistan happened, with the bonus that Hussein (whom, as a secular Arabist, bin Laden was an enemy of) was gotten rid of too.  Win/win.  And meanwhile, in Afghanistan, coalition forces managed to alienate the Afghan population and ensure the return of the Taliban, while destabilizing Pakistan in addition.  Bonus!

(Bush was able to rewrite the unwritten US constitution, however, and his victory in changing the nature of America has been confirmed by the fact that Obama has institutionalized almost all essential Bush policies and extended many of them.)

Now one can say that bin Laden lost (not because he was killed, that’s irrelevant and people who think it matters much are fools), because the US is still around, still powerful, and hasn’t collapsed.

But it isn’t over yet.  The cost of the Iraq war, of 9/11, was huge, both in financial terms and in the changes wrought to the American psyche, unwritten constitution and society.   Those lost years, and they were lost, should have been used to transition the US economy. Instead the money that should have done that was used to fund the Iraq war, and to  keep money flowing a housing bubble was not just allowed, but encouraged, both by the Fed and by actively turning a blind eye to illegal activity.

The US economy has never recovered.  Five to six years out, the absolute number of jobs hasn’t recovered, the actual standard of living for most people is dropping, income and wealth inequality is worse, and unsustainable spending is occurring without any plan to create an economy which can pay for it.  Political sclerosis is worse, not better, the economic plan is to frack, frack, frack (which won’t work in the long run) and the US and the West are doubling down on a surveillance state and continuing to erode freedoms, which not only has much larger economic effects than most people realize, but weakens Western ideological power.

So bin Laden hasn’t lost yet.  The reaction to 9/11 may yet be seen to be the precipitating event that made it essentially impossible for the US to reverse its decline, and made that decline far faster and far worse.

We started with Egypt, so let’s bring it back there. If you’re an Egyptian who believes (accurately) that there was a coup which overthrew a democratically elected government, and that the US was complicit at best, and actively involved at worst (John Kerry constantly insisting there was no coup is not in America’s interests here), then the basic critique still resonates. Even if you don’t want bin Laden’s end goal of a new Islamic caliphate, if you want independence, if you want to be able to defeat your local tyrants, well, the US is your enemy, the far enemy whose existence makes defeating the near enemies impossible. It is not a country you feel you can make peace with, a devil you can ignore because it is far away, but a country whose ability to intervene in your country must be somehow destroyed.

This basic analysis of the situation remains extremely powerful and convincing.

Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century.  George Bush Jr. was the second (Obama is important, but is a secondary figure to Bush.)

And as long as bin Laden’s insights seem to explain the world, someone is likely to act on them.

May God, should he or she exist, aid us.  We’re going to need it.

(Oh, and part of the opportunity cost of the Iraq war may well be hundreds of millions of deaths from climate change. You’re welcome.)

Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return—and so the wheel turns.

 

Snowden, Manning and the role of government secrecy

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On August 2, 2013

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I’ve stayed out of the Manning and Snowden imbroglio because most of what needs to be said is being said by other people.

However there is one issue that is not being made clear enough, but which under-girds all the arguments about their acts: the role of government.

Think of there as being two main ways to view government:

1) Government exists to rule over the people.  The people may have some say in who their rulers are, but once those rulers exist, they make the rules and the people obey.  Government in this view is an independent entity to whom subjects owe their obedience.  Government knows best, and we should do what government tells us to.

2) Government is an instrument acting on behalf of the people. Its position is similar to being a trustee—it is a relationship in which the public gives the government certain powers and resources, and expects the government to act on behalf of the people.  Government, in this view, is a solution to the collective action problem.  How do we act together for the benefit of everyone?

If we are ruled by government, we do not have a defacto right to know what government is doing.  Government knows best, we don’t have all the information, and we should go about our lives, obeying the laws and those who are in positions of power over us.

Imagine that you have a trustee, whom you have given money and the right to make rules to, in order that they might take care of certain of your affairs.  In order to be sure that they are taking care of your affairs, and not their own, or someone else’s who once the money and power is in their hands, is bribing or browbeating them, you must know what actions they are taking.

Transparency, in a democratic system, is predicated on the idea that citizens are the ultimate repository of legitimacy and that citizens have a responsibility and a right to know what is being done on their behalf.  Citizens cannot execute their responsibilities, including voting, volunteering, running for office and supporting primary candidates, if they do not know what government is actually doing.

Thus, in a democracy, the government must be transparent on virtually everything.  Short of actual military secrets, of which there are startlingly few (major deployments are obvious, and often announced), and very specific details like the actual identity of spies, plus personal information not relevant to job performance of government employees, there is almost nothing the government does which should not be available to the public.

Government works for the population. It is the servant of the people.  You cannot supervise your employee, you cannot discipline or fire or even properly reward your employee, if you do not know what your employee is doing with your money and the power you have given your employee.

It is now necessary to talk about the relation of citizens to the government.  The government works for citizens, citizens do not work for the government.  It is not a symmetrical relationship.  Because government works for the people, the people have the right to know what the government does.  Because the people, with the exception of some officials, do not exist to serve the needs of the government, the government does not have a right to know what the people are doing.  Transparency is required by the government, so that its masters, the people, can supervise it.  Again, transparency is not required of the people, except in very specific ways (for example, how much money they made) because they are not in a trustee relationship with the government: it is not their duty to act on behalf of the government.

Every time someone says, “well, if Snowden/Assange/Greenwald/Welsh/ believes in transparency, they should release on their personal emails”, it is a misunderstanding of the relationship between government and the people.  Individuals do not owe government transparency, government owes people transparency because government works for people and has power and money only because it is granted that power by the People.

Now, you can use this argument in support of spying on all the people.  The argument is as follows: “the people have given us the responsibility to protect them, and we believe the only way to protect them is to know everything they do online and as much of what they do offline as possible.  They have given us that grant of authority, and we are using it.”

I am willing to admit that the people could give their government that grant of authority. However, to do so they would have to know that that is what was being done and most people did not know that pre-Snowden.  There would also have to be an election in which “spy on everyone” was the main issue, and there was a party to vote for which was against it.  And, prima-facie, one would expect to at least see polls which showed that citizens wanted to be spied on all the time.

I believe that if such a grant was made, effective democracy would still end (if it hasn’t in many Western countries already).  Once people know they are being spied on 24/7 they change how they behave, and those who have access to that information can easily manipulate them, both overtly through blackmail and covertly by knowing what makes them tick (the exact contents of everything you search online, every email you send, every text you send and every phone call you make, plus in many cities the possibility of a fair bit of tracking of where you go physically each day). Information, in this case, is power.  Once they know how you tick, it’s not hard to figure out how to present information and incentives in such a way that you do what they want.

In this case government becomes the master, the people the servants.  To give full, free democratic consent for a surveillance society, is to sign the death warrant to the type of democracy which is “for the people, by the people”.  Something may remain, it may have elections, it may be called democracy and have all the forms, but it will not be democracy in the essentials.  There are other ways to lose effective democracy, like allowing money to buy the system, of course, and in some countries it appears that has occurred, but the surveillance state is additive (or perhaps multiplicative.)

In the Gilded Age, it was widely recognized that the “Trusts” (that Ages equivalent of our great megacorporations) controlled government. Eventually Americans were able to undo that.  But conditions were different then, there was no surveillance society, and there was still a very vibrant culture of civic association.

If we believe that government serves the people, then we must be way of any government that either doesn’t wish to tell the people what it is doing on their behalf, or which believes it has a right to know everything its people do.

The final argument is the safety argument, the “we need a surveillance society to be safe from bad men.”  I don’t believe this argument, and others have dealt with it, so for the time being, I will simply end with words from Benjamin Franklin:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

And though Franklin didn’t say it, I agree that those who who believe that those give up liberty for safety will lose both liberty and safety—and deserve neither.

Start from common humanity

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On June 26, 2013

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The basic political principle is that we all share our humanity.  Compassion starts from imaging ourselves in other people’s skin, in feeling that pain and indignities to them, are injuries to our common humanity.  An injury, an injustice, to one of us, is an injury and injustice to all of us.  In this sense, we acknowledge differences, such as gender, skin color, age, health, and our individual experience, and we take them in to account, but we do not let them obscure our common humanity.

When you think this way, when you feel this way, right action, right law, becomes much more clear.

The author Lois McMaster Bujold once had one of her characters asked if she loved someone.  Her reply was, “when he is cut, I bleed.”

Injustice to any of us, hurts us all.  I could explain the connections in technocratic terms, I could talk about how loss of liberty for one is eventually loss of liberty for all, how inequality hurts even those at the top, but at the end it is as simple as injustice to one, is injustice to all.

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