(Commentary Posted by Roger Erickson)
So why not just replace minimum wage with a minimum cultural profit sharing program? Another Automatic Stabilizer? Same effect. Just simpler & more agile accounting. That would be FAR less of a burden than all our existing prison and welfare agencies - which effectively tie people up keeping others tied up.
Why not?
"The fundamental issue in capitalism is capital share versus labor share. The reason that capitalism doesn't work is that capitalists are always trying to increase that ratio in favor of themselves, and [in recent times] they have generally had the power to do so.
Since labor doesn't organize to exercise it's aggregate power, the only countervailing force is government at large. Whenever capital captures government, that avenue is closed." Tom Hickey
Sadly, Tom's statement seems to fit observable events pretty accurately.
If generally true, then the situation of the MiddleClass, and the description of all economics, can be succinctly summarized.
Capitalism as we practice it is merely personal accounting overly applied to social-dissociation, not social-aggregation!
The entire concept of capitalism is one big
Fallacy of Scale?
If one of us hoards, he may be better off. So if all of us hoard static assets, we'll all be better off as a team? What part of "does not compute" do we train capitalists to ignore, as a taboo?
We are once again experiencing a period when the old, local habit of distributed hoarding threatens to undermine and overwhelm the still-emerging, distributed habit of
scalable collaboration. And we are worshiping that taboo as a national mantra! All the while claiming that we worship no false idols. It's a joke.
One could be excused for imagining that social parasites have co-opted our national religions and secular institutions alike, and use them to rule us, from within.
Haven't there been ANY capitalism models which unify
aggregate PLUS personal accounting as
components plus whole? Nothing since
tribal pass-through economic structures themselves, & the Greek
Nomisma?
Is this ridiculously simple hurdle the crux of all micro/macro and currency conundrums?
We need only fuse biology, anthropology, sociology and capitalism - again?
Until then, we remain enslaved to the myth that state-currency has to be obtained from private parties.
It should be self-evident to any thinking citizen that currency, like coordination, is an outcome of interactions and inter-dependencies themselves, and can ONLY exist as something abstract, generated on-demand by real actions.
Where did all our confusion come from, about such a simple topic?
Is it primarily because capitalism began in a time when ultimate
aggregate power was ceded to aristocracy rather than to tribes, aggregates or democracies? Why else would all accounting be addressed purely from the view of
currency_users, and never include
currency_issuers?
It seems that humans really do scale stupidity faster than their collective talents!
Let's make this real simple. The only way for any aggregate to be MORE than the sum of it's parts ... is if it formalizes an accounting method that tracks return-on-coordination itself, as a dynamic asset, and the reference asset for the aggregate.
Aggregate success tracks the quality & utility of our assessment method?
Limiting ourselves to summarizing all the static assets owned by different components of a system leads us away from, not towards that dynamic goal.
Sovereign currency denominates the various forms of return-on-coordination. Regardless of the arbitrary rules of a given regime, state currency is, in short, always functionally "backed" by Public Initiative.
Teamwork -
return-on-coordination - is so obviously what IS done, that we have to go to great efforts to systemically lie enough to convince ourselves that it's NOT what we are doing? Mass stupidity requires massive distribution of taboos? It appears so.
Hence, our diverse,
Innocent Frauds really ARE our worst enemies? The legions of related innocent frauds multiply everywhere. See comments
here, urging citizens to adhere to form, not function - and worse, to give up any attempts to correctly re-state incorrectly stated form.
You couldn't make this up.
Variations on the
Deficit Doves, as Warren Mosler calls them? By hiding behind a twisted facade of morality, they help keep us enslaved to what some fraction manage to formally STATE in key places, rather than what all of us, in aggregate, formally DO?
Why didn't that entire conundrum go away 500 years ago, with spread of the
Scientific Method?
* Is it actually a taboo, to apply operational logic to national policy, and public discourse?
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* Seriously, we could write a social comedy about democracy in America.
If we simply WRITE the form of Idiocracy into our institutions, we can TRY to guarantee that we remain idiots forever - regardless of whatever taboo functions we have to practice in secret ... just to functionally exist.
Should we take the "literalist's" advice to heart, and quit trying to correct ANY bad habit that any of us has ever formed - simply because an excuse for it has been WRITTEN somewhere? That'll fix it! Things will be SO much easier now that that's cleared up. We'll never need to edit or amend ANYTHING, ever again, not a disproved equation or statement, not even the Constitution. We won't even have to use spellcheckers! :)
Isn't that the definition of literalism, i.e., belief in form to the exclusion of function? That's a good way to lead aggregates off a cliff, just because a printed policy clearly says that that's where to go.
When our perceptions of functional facts changes, shouldn't we be honest enough to update minds and theories to fit newly obwerved facts, ASAP? Isn't that the definition of survival, and morality?
The visible danger of literalism is the compulsion to slavishly adhere to stated form, regardless of actual function.
"A system behaves according to its underlying structure...it's behavior is a function of it's topology, period. We can only restrict it." Paul Meli
Paul's words imply the known statistics of development, selection and evolution. The only apparent purpose of all "restrictions" is to pare or tune the statistics of constantly emerging diversity into a lean foundation.
Why? So we can build even more on top of that foundation.
So what do we do with all the accumulating rules & regulations we write, in order to slowly produce better cultural foundations?
The list of legal constraints which we're always using to constrain and tune our emerging options can easily obfuscate the real function of our systems - to serve as additional launch platforms. Most old written policies are just conveniently forgotten. It takes additional effort to recursively review written politicies, if some literalist finds a way to mis-use them.
Functionally, writing out a long list of places we usually shouldn't go leaves a short, UNSTATED list of places where we can go - but both lists have to change continuously, as we discover, by trial & error, where we as a people MUST go next. This reveals responsibility, no matter where we look, but there's no shirking it - if we want our kids to survive and prosper.
What slows us down?
Literalists struggle to see function from our long lists of regulations, while functionalists see only the function, and learn to ignore the regulatory details.
The easy, historically functional solution was to have democracies settle upon consensus goals, and then delegate achievement to explorers and leaders. As a 3rd step, have agile electorates and their leaders continuously TELL literalist accountants where we HAD to go next, so the literalists could then recursively adjust all the long cascades of forms - rules & regulations - to allow us to get there, with agility.
Putting the wrong personality types in the wrong occupations can obviously create maladaptive havoc - like the type of havoc generated when political leadership and policy development offices are staffed with capitalists and lawyers and economists, instead of people who can think about emerging function.
Keep regulatory agencies staffed with literalists, and reserve leadership offices for functionalists? This ain't rocket science.
"Underlying systems are not at all complicated to anyone that can think and solve problems in a systematic manner.
Yet the overlying legal structure gets all of the focus. Thus is where literalists are focused, always missing the evolving forest for the trees.
If we don't understand how a particular system should be arranged, or why, we end up aimlessly puttering around with it's regulatory constraints, based on different stylized visions of how some people think it works...only to be disappointed or worse, injured in some way when it doesn't respond as expected." Paul Meli
Wow! Does Paul nail sociology and economics? Or what? And he's not the first to see this. Without consensus agreement on aggregate purpose, we fall back to squabbling over the narrow purposes of conflicting sub-groups, thereby generating an immense Output Gap as net teamwork is ignored. Some entire countries, no matter how intelligent, no longer let themselves learn!
More to the point, the 320-million people making up the analog network comprising our "Group Brain" never thinks just THIS alone or THAT alone.
Rather, the "Aggregate Perception" of any such large, analog network, is the sum of all the threads waxing and waning in nation-wide Public Discourse - just like what comes out our mouths, or unfolds in our actions, is the result of the trail of conflicting ideas (patterns) running through the billions of neurons in our individual brains at different times.
We only appear to have singular policy points, and even then ONLY when we delegate function to a given, transient form of policy or treaty or other regulation. The timeless reality is that if we do not update our transient forms rapidly enough to stay within striking distance of ever-changing reality, we are actively killing ourselves through neglect!!!
So everything, CONSTANTLY, comes down to RECRUITING proportions of an Aggregate Brain to emerging, adaptive function, rather than to just random (and always soon obsolete) form. No matter how many obsolete forms are simultaneously stated or recorded in other parts of the aggregate, we have to change each and every one of them, sooner or later.
What part of "dynamic, analog networks" were all of our overly anthropomorphic literalists NOT introduced to, early enough in life?
