The Roots Of Political Gridlock? A Foolish Population & Their Options Are Soon Parted

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Definition of a foolish population? One that doesn't listen well enough - or often enough - to enough of it's own, growing spectrum of feedback ..... to know what it knows!

You want yet another perspective?

Control Fraud:

"voters will not get angry ..if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place."

(?? And if they don't realize that national outcomes are being diverted, regardless of how much "money" does or doesn't seem to change hands?)

This is an incredibly long and detailed essay, above, by Francis Fukuyama ..... and yet he goes to all that trouble without making any suggestions for what to do about the challenges he lists!

I find the straightforward approach of OBT&E - or OSCE - to be much more productive.

Quit separating the endlessly emerging challenges from the early and continuous adjustments?

Forget Combinatorial Chemistry. We're undergoing Combinatorial Culture - and have to parse the simultaneous changes the best we can. That ALWAYS means forcing early decisions with insufficient data, but not TOO MANY! We've been doing this for 4.5 billion years, so don't panic. In fact, we've gotten really good at it, and now practice the refined approach called "social species."  No matter the context, social species solve emerging challenges by ... "being social" - i.e., by exchanging, analyzing and quickly (& continuously) acting upon ENOUGH of their own, available feedback to surf unpredictable reality.

Do we have to do that on a larger scale every year, by inventing & testing entirely new and more scalable methods?

Sure. That doesn't mean it's not doable.

What happened to American ingenuity?

We seem to be trying our best to tax it out of existence, with FICA, Medicare and other income taxes on what's left of Jane and Joe Sixpack of the former Middle Class.

We now use the hyper-efficient NSA to detect any sign of public feedback.



Yet if they detect any ... do they just call in the newly weaponized SWAT teams? What's next? Diverting the imaginary Social Security Trust In Fiat Fund to support drones for neighborhood police?

There is a better way, obviously - but we have to select it from current options. We can invest in developing reasonable, reasoning, free citizens ... or we can invest in imprisoning them in their own faux security.





Yes, there's an app for that. We're still working on bullet proof apps for the unborn, all the way to their source ... ovaries and testes. Support the RIGHT TO STRIFE fund! Since that obviously won't be enough, will we encase our brains in impenetrable shielding too? Or just our institutions and their momentum, since that's always tangential to our culture's unpredictable Adaptive Path.

If a shrinking Policy Space and declining Policy Agility is what we think we want, then we're doing a good job. Unfortunately, those goals are incompatible with what we all say we want for ourselves, our kids, our grandchildren, and our 7th generation yet unborn.

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their [methods] cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw

Why Isn't There A Committee Reporting That Our "Corporate Welfare Trust Fund" Is Insolvent?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson - in memory of the writings of Robert Eisner.)





[Committee for Frozen Fiat] REPORT:

ANALYSIS OF THE 2014 SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTEES' REPORT

According to these geniuses, the Trustees show that The Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund is (as they already pre-decided):

* on the brink of insolvency (it wouldn't have mattered WHAT the report said)  

* projected to be exhausted in 2033 (assuming borrowing of more fiat - don't ask how, or why, that occurs either). 

* "Imbalanced" over 75 years -  to the tune of 2.88 percent of taxable payroll, or 1.02 percent of GDP.  (Heck - it's probably out of balance with Ayn Rand and the cosmic background radiation too, and a great many other anomalies, but who's counting?)

* facing a gap between Social Security spending and revenues that will grow from 1.3 percent of payroll (0.45 percent of GDP) this year to 3.9 percent of payroll (1.4 percent of GDP) by 2035 and 4.9 percent of payroll (1.7 percent of GDP) by the end of the 75-year window.

Oh ... my ... gosh! Liars & Innocent Frauds and Perma-DTs, Oh My! Can you visualize these dweebs trying to generate some fiat, and then imagine the semantic difficulties they're saddling future generations with?

They just drone on & on, with endless, invented data irrelevant to context.

How can fiat be exhausted? Don't ask. They have no answer, so they conveniently avoid asking themselves to face reality. They're lost in a crusade to balance what must evolve.

What does an "imbalance" in the fiat mean? Maybe only yodeling political Yoda's can sense that particular disturbance, since a politician's strength flows from the Farce? Curiously, there is no mention of what % of GDP goes to Corporate Welfare, aka "Policy."

Riddle me this Blather Man: why is Social Security the ONLY component of fiat that is [supposedly] funded by a tax on fiat?

So why AREN'T there formal Committees:

a) reporting that Our Corporate Welfare Trust Fund is insolvent?

b) reporting something equally implausible - that our nation's trusty Public Initiative Fund is insolvent?

c) reporting on the mythical gap between fiat "revenue" and fiat itself? [If you have to ask where fiat comes from ... you can't afford it? :( ]

d) explaining how, exactly, a nation generates the fiat revenue that fuels fiat? [Public Initiative?]

You'll never hear the Committee for Frozen Fiat (CFF) commenting on any of those basic sanity checks. Actual thinking does not seem to be in their repertoire, so it's no surprise that they display no sign of Logic-101 either. They have one campaign, and a one-track mind.

At this point any reasonable human should be wondering: "Why don't we just send clowns to Congress, and to staff all federal agencies too?" [Don't answer that unless you're ready to face the answer - it may not reflect well on the voters.]

Meanwhile, this CFF choir seems to have unstoppable momentum - irregardless of reality, or desired outcomes.

An old saying holds that "People will do anything in their power to avoid thinking."

Apparently, shameless politicians will do even more than that, and invoke negative-thinking or straw-concepts, not just lack of thinking. Worse, our foolish electorate will let them! The outcome? If we don't do anything about the real FUDeral Deficit, we might scare ourselves to death with complete nonsense.

The Pink Social Capitalism Elephant In The Room

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



What is the form of Capital which is most neglected by so-called capitalists? Social Capital? Any scientist would likely say so, based upon even a moment's reflection.

Just bring up the topic of social species. That sets the reference point for all definitions of capital, leverage, adaptive rate, success & survival. Also, google the term, and see all the recent articles professing to define the novel concept for clueless economists.

Ever seen an macroeconomist OD'd on orthodoxy and blissfully unaware of their own BO*, policy agility DT's and ideological sclerosis? Denial is a river in academia and bureaucracy, and it drains into the FED.

Next time you're talking with an economist or avowed capitalists, bring up the delicate subject of the pink Social Capitalism elephant, and ask them if they acknowledge it's presence in the room.

Otherwise, the conversations and literature become increasingly obscure. Take the recent missive from royalty,** that ancient enemy and then co-opter of formal capitalism.

Prince Charles: reform capitalism to save the planet

Does that not seem a bit hypocritical, coming from faux royalty? After 1000 years of seeking protection FROM capitalism? Why not just keep evolving Social Capitalism?

I'm waiting for the proverbial lightbulb to go on for Bonnie Prince Charles. That magic moment when he says: "hey; here's an idea: we need Social Capitalism!"

If he was serious, he'd put his silver spoon back where his nether regions are, abdicate, and return the seized lands, possessions and OTHER forms of capital to the citizenry. And then admit that we simply need dynamic tolerance limits on use of EVERY form of "capitalism" as well as all our other tools.

Until then we have more than just pink Social Capitalism Elephants hiding where the sun don't shine.***



* Banking Operations

** Tom Paine on royalty:"A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. However it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right; if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the Ass and the Lion, and welcome."  [Actually, Tom makes royalty sound remarkably like NeoLiberal capitalism.]

*** "Vast stolen silver hoard found when royal Prince moons a tourist."

Is This How The NeoLib "Memirus" Swamps Our Democracy's Adaptive Responses?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Ignorance is our Greatest Public Health threat, social as well as physiological.

Just as HIV hides out in the immune cells concentrating in the gut, a reservoir of the NeoLib "memirus"* hides out among all the IGNORANCE CONCENTRATED IN POLITICS.




* A virus is a stripped down packet of nucleic acid packaged in a protective protein capsule.

  A memirus is a stripped down package of toxic sophism, hidden within a confusing, semantic capsule.

Dirk Ehnts — Survival of the least skilled?

Recently I have been thinking whether intelligence is aimed at finding the truth or aimed at survival. I came to the conclusion that the latter was right, but that we can use reason to build a society where the two coincide. Institutions matter....

...the lesson is to create institutions that bring out the best behavior of human beings. And for those that say that this suppresses freedom: we already have lots of institutions that influence us. Think of school, families and so on. These are not natural, so we might as well think about how to improve those institutions. The result could be a survival of the most social.

econoblog 101
Survival of the least skilled?
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School for Economics and Law

"Survival of the fittest" is about species survival through natural selection, not individual survival through competition as social Darwinism has it wrongly. The most "fit" supposedly have more chances at leaving offspring, hence their DNA, which on balance favors the survival and spread of a species over time through adaptation to emerging environmental challenges.