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RE: “One way to look at the Bush years is that job growth was lousy so the Fed (and the government policies) subsidized construction jobs by creating a housing bubble. That jobs program abruptly ended. It is now time for a new jobs program. For the longer run, it is time for a different labor policy that will create many more jobs.”

It’s not just a way to look at it, it’s what happened. They wanted to create this ownership society as a means of countering the growth of urbanized socialism, and the diminishment of freedom, and competitive prosperity. This is the most important dimension of the multi-dimensional philosophy that they have been following. (We tend to classify them as having a simplistic philosophy but it is not so. It is not useful to underestimate the thought of your competitors.) The rest of it is essentially a universalist christian concept for the material benefit of mankind, (going back to Alexander) that promotes democracy as a means of exporting control over world resources in order to keep prices low, and maintain military and political power.

The problem is for their philosophy, that in the end, society has become urbanized, and large and dense. And the epistemology of urbanites is very different from the epistemology of farmers. There is more similarity between the evolutionary tendencies of urbanites and slavery economies, than the evolutionary tendencies of farmers, for precisely these epistemological reasons. THis difference has been understood for a long time, and written about extensively. However, our current status of behavioral economics has not reached a sufficient state of maturity to connect this set of tendencies, with density of population, and availability of opportunity cost at the expense of perceptibility of causality. Furthermore, our calculative institutions (accounting and taxation) as they are currently practiced, effectively launder causality from our information systems, and require us to rely on the farmer vs urbanite dichotomy as a religious or political difference, or ‘taste’, or even as a strategy of class warfare,versus relying upon factual information that allows us to analyze our behavior and make judgments about it.

Fortunately we know how to fix these issues, so that the epistemological clarity of farming (visibly of cause and effect) is available to the urbanite.

Unfortunately, we have a form of government that distracts us from solving this problem by individual profiteering on the resolution of conflicts between groups and classes.

Our biological sensitivity to fairness, which compels us to work hard, and endure costs, in order to punish those who steal from us, or treat us unfairly, seeks to commit violence, control, or punishment between groups in order to feel fairness has been satisfied.

However, this masks the underlying problem as one of solving the underlying problem as one of extending human senses, perception, and comparitive and calculative ability such that we can make decisions for collective benefit.

There is an argument that such accountability, which would come from epistemological clarity, would still be avoided by the peasantry, because of necessity we much manage consumption through the pricing system. However, redistribution can mollify discontent as it has in much of europe, assuming that there is anything to redistribute, because the population provides competitive value in contrast to other competing groups.

I have a more benign view, which is that if a sufficient number of people can understand that this is a problem of providing information, on the scale that was provided by double entry accounting, and the inventory process facilitating taxation, and the standardization of currency, a small number of simple policies can be enacted that will provide us with the information we need, and therefore will allow us to cooperate, profit, and redistribute without the necessity of relying upon democratic negotiation for the purposes of resolving disputes between classes.

Capitalism is with us forever as a set of institutions, precisely because humans cannot, in real time, process complexity of information without those institutions. Redistribution is likewise with us forever, since there is a difference between the necessity of incentive and the necessity of calculative power, and the preference for fairness. Likewise, social and economic classes are with us forever, because people requires status differences in order to pursue the mating ritual, and will create them faster than such differences will be redistributed, just as they will create black markets to circumvent anti-capitalist activity.

But capitalism and socialism as biases, are only necessary as biases, because we cannot calculate, measure, and compare, the complexity of society in which we live.

It may seem simplistic that society can be better managed by implementing changes in accounting, taxes, banking, credit, and the scope of lawmaking, but our society is changing BECAUSE of changes in these things. Instead, these institutions are what made our complex society possible, and our social systems, because they require decision and legislation rather than simply relying on evolution of business practices, simply evolves much more slowly. If we simply correct this problem, we can get away from class warfare, and into cooperating between classes for mutual gain.

In other words, we are trying to build a science of economics on testing assumptions because we lack data needed to actually understand causality. We will have a much easier time if we have the data, and we have the technology, in both accounting and record keeping, to maintain causality in our data.

Truth=Causality

There was a great deal of research and discourse on technology in medicine when computing systems began to enter the operating room in the 1990’s. In particular, in the use of anesthesia. The most commonly discussed example was a difference in turning knobs, in which one machine turned right to increase and another turned left to increase, and in confusion the patient was killed. This and other events caused a systemic review of medical equipment and the development of standards. THe emphasis in the medical community however, was just as directed at training it’s staff as it was at the hardware. This has not been the case in IT, largely because costs of risk are more easily assumed, and costs of failure are perceived as more tolerable. However, this tolerance is due in large part to a lack of visibility by executive management, to the breadth and impact of those risks, partly because of a lack of understanding of business risk measure by IT management, and in many businesses a failure of IT and Accounting and Finance to share sufficient information for IT to do so.

The medical and engineering fields attempt to solve the problem of risk and recovery differently. They do so because of biases. Those biases evolved from the methodology and traditions of the culture of the profession. There is a tendency to think that IT has fully commoditized and therefore can be regulated as is plumbing and electricity, but IT is far closer to medicine in it’s complexity than are the more mechanical traditions. And this confusion, or error in philosophy is common within many different specializations or social groups. From technical specialties to the philosophical biases of entire civilizations.

The medical field, especially in surgery and hospital care, includes infinite risk (people die, and there is a high liability cost) and consists of actions are taken by people using tools. This set of properties has made their industry focus on the human element: on improving people, and in particular, on the assumption of failure, therefore improving people.

In medical devices, there is an extraordinary emphasis (due to research papers) on producing tools with very consistent user interfaces that are extremely simple and consistent (such as dials turning the same direction producing similar results) and an emphasis on protocol (scripts that are followed), and lastly on training people to use these tools in order to reduce failure.

But every process is seen as a human problem of discipline and training. Not of engineering at lower cost, or productivity — but as risk reduction. Production costs are far lower than the costs of failure.

This is true for the military as well, where vast numbers of people must work in extraordinarily deadly conditions, under extreme duress and exhaustion, using complex and dangerous tools. Soldiers are taught very simple behaviors, one of which is to speak entirely in facts, rather than interpretations – one of the primary purposes of western basic training. To teach soldiers to separate opinion from recitation of observation.

Similarly, when it was found that different hierarchical social structures around the world prohibited airline crews from communicating effectively and was causing deadly crashes, these crews were taught english and declarative mannerisms by training specifically to overcome these cultural biases and lack of clarity in communication –which is why english is the language of transportation. English contains a spoken protocol of clarity which english speakers do not understand, just assume, and that clarity originated in the western military tradition of enfranchising all citizens in a militia.

Epistemology. This is a word meaning, in practice, ‘the study of how we know what we know’. Every field has an assumed epistemology. Teaching, Soldiers, Politicians, Engineers, Plumbers, and even psychologists, have a means of understanding causality, and a means of testing themselves. Because each field is limited and includes different kinds of risk and failure, people use different testing criteria for planning and choosing their actions.

Teachers for example over rely on written tests rather than question and answer, and therefore test most often for short term memory rather than understanding. This has consequences for all societies, but largely for our political system which relied on rhetorical ability.

Protestant churches in the colonial period were effectively debating forums for local social solutions — something that is required of a democratic system.

Furthermore, another consequence of teaching methods, that attempts to reduce costs, is that of literally destroying boys minds (physical damage to the brain development) by making them sit for hours a day. (Or by the use of drugs to cause similar brain damage.) This destroys society in doing so, because while girls learn to cooperate through compromise, men learn to cooperate through displays of competition and experimentation with dominance, and if prevented from doing so they will not develop a interest in the real world, fail to take responsibility and have little interest in society. All because of the epistemology of teachers, in an effort to perform ‘efficiently’. (And as fathers they will play world of Warcraft, not because they want to but because during their development they were forcibly harmed by these teachers.)

Doctors do not make these kinds of errors. Because the cause and effect of their actions are visible. The cause and effect of political policy, in particular, monetary policy, is likewise opaque, and politicians seek to keep it so.

Fire regulations are fascinating, and building codes in particular, because of how few office building fires we have. The cost of construction is heavily influenced by these codes, and has dramatically risen, and both regulations and costs continue to expand despite the fact that they appear no longer to reduce risk. Conversely, firemen still drill and practice on a regular basis which is good, but we still allow tall buildings to be constructed despite the fact that it is dangerous to put many people in a building of more than six stories, that it creates congestion, and in general, research is conclusive, that people don’t like working in them, and that they are unhealthy environments, and heat dissipators and energy consumers.

Effective military organizations run drills. Lots of them. The US in particular runs them constantly. Some NATO countries (Hungary) by contrast only allow their soldiers to shoot one to three bullets in all their basic training in order to reduce costs. But in practice, these organizations are symbolic in nature and are incapable of fighting. Partly because fighting in adverse conditions is largely dependent upon the relationships between soldiers built through shared experiences.

People are not that smart IN time, but fairly smart OVER time. We can solve problems given time. The only way to reduce the time, which is equivalent to cost, of recovery from failure is to pre-compute, or pre-train people to recover from failure, and in particular in the process of discovering how to recover from failure.

If IT management applied the same discipline, they would, once a quarter, create a scenario where three or more elements of their systems failed within a short period, and the staff had to recover from it. This is the approach most military tacticians take to educating their people.

There is too often an emphasis on the efficient achievement of goals, rather than on giving people goals and inserting ‘lessons’, or hurdles and obstacles for them to overcome.

In IT engineering, risk is rarely stated, because it is rarely visible, despite the catastrophic cost to business. Errors are considered to be functions of the machinery, rather than of the people using and maintaining it. People are considered a cost to be minimized so that more work can be put through them.

If a system cannot be assembled and disassembled and tested at every point in the process, then the people cannot understand how to recover it under duress. This mastery by intentional reconstruction is how Formula One racing teams think of the process of engineering. They constantly drill, because of the value of time in racing.

IT is this value of time, and its lost productivity cost, that is hidden by IT. furthermore, IT does not report on the problems it solved and the cost of those problems sufficiently to keep management informed and educated on risks.

THe converse happens as well, which is that IT is a resistance to change, because the impact of that change is something they don’t understand, because they have spend too little time in drills.

Some companies are constantly fighting this battle. Citicorp for example, was a cluster of different banks under one management system and brand name, but not under one infrastructure (I hope I have the bank right here, I am pulling from memory). This meant that in the financial crisis, it was less able to react, because they kept costs down by keeping risk high, by not developing a common infrastructure, both technologically and organizationally.

Doctors have extraordinary peer reviews post success and post failure. They spread knowledge by discourse and question and answer. (Part of this is the skill of medical students in analytical thinking and rhetoric versus that of the IT population.) However, the concept of improving people thorough discourse is consistent in their approach.

Each patient is a new experiment, having the potential for failure or success and the consequential new learning that comes from either.

Retail shops use secret shoppers to test for shoplifting and customer service. The military uses maneuvers, and even uses it’s own members to test it’s own security. IT rarely conducts planned failures. To see how the staff reacts and to educated them. IT does perform upgrades. And for this reason, upgrades and system maintenance are one of the most important means of keeping the staff trained, because they fulfill as similar function to drills and teach the value of redundancy.

These assumptions, this epistemology, is different for every little field of specialization. But what happens in each field is that they in turn confuse the methods, practices, tools, means of testing, and general operating philosophy then become assumptions about the nature of the real world, and assumptions about human nature, and even human capability, and in particular human plasticity and adaptability, as well as human learning and understanding. WHen in fact, we must first understand the human animal as the maker and maintainer of complex systems, and that the human animal has very specific properties, none of which are terribly impressive without extraordinary role playing, testing and training in real world (versus written or spoken) conditions, where, they must cooperate toward complex ends, in real time, under conditions of duress.

For example, human civilizations are different largely because social orders were initially established by their warriors and their battle tactics. It may seem odd that the east, west, steppe, desert, and mystical civilizations all are caused (Armstrong, Keegan) . It is uncommon that even westerners understand that western battle tactics in europe were heavily based on maneuver (chariots) the required cooperation. Cooperation required political enfranchisement, political enfranchisement led to equality, equality led to debate, debate led to logic, logic led to science and rationalism. This is different from both the tribal raiders, the mystical zoroastrian as well as the chinese familial and hierarchical traditions. An interesting problem for intellectual historians has been why Confucius could not solve the problem of politics and directed the civilization to familial structures instead. Or that the primary difference between east and west is the assumption that our job is to leave the world better than we entered it, that the purpose of man is to transform the word for his utility, that man is the ultimate work of nature, versus the eastern view that our job is to work in harmony with the world, (non-disruption), that humans are somewhat vile by nature, that man is necessarily in class structures, and that truth is less important than the avoidance of conflict (except when it involves barbarians). These differences led to our different concepts of life itself.

In IT there is a cultural assumption that the engineers job is to prevent failure, or, to work with the systems without causing additional complexity that increases the probability of failure, or to repair from failure. However, few organizations are structured such that there are drills, and processes by which to recover from failure for the entire purpose of educating the human element in the system.

This cultural legacy is largely due to the perceived (although not factual) high cost of IT implementations, largely as a remnant of the fact that during IT’s development, a great deal of research and development, in pursuit of competitive advantage, was conducted in-house, with the resulting failure of research and development programs. In fact, IT infrastructure costs were significantly lower than many previous innovative technologies adapted by business. (In particular, electricity as a replacement for steam or water power.) And by comparison, the calculative burden an uncompetitiveness placed upon companies by antiquated accountancy methods, or government taxation programs, or building codes, are often higher than IT costs. In Europe for example (as well as in California) businesses for small networks, rather than more efficiently combine into larger organizations with lower administrative costs, just to avoid these external expenses.

So, this is not only an IT problem, but an executive management problem: the CEO cannot authorize budget for risk mitigation, (nor cover himself by doing so) if the IT management does not understand and quantify the risk, or it’s probability.

( If Executive management does not promote better methods once presented with the information, then the popular revolt is the only real solution (go work somewhere more worthy of your talents that doesn’t reduce it’s cost of doing business by counting on the fact that you’ll live under greater unnecessary stress, and possibly lose sleep and health, or even risk your job, because you were not allowed to engage in preventative activities. Conversely, if you dont provide them with that knowledge, in form and quality at least equal to those provided by sales and accounting organizations then they are not to blame for your inability to do so. They have an epistemology too: which is that they are told many things by many people, and must be able to test these bits of gossip and opinion somehow and only numbers can provide that ability.)

IT management has long been criticized for wanting a seat at the table, but not warranting a seat at that table. (Nick Carr) But in general, these people may understand the craft, but often fail to understand the metrics and management of capital in a business, In other words, executives are included for their ability to postulate theories and deliver results. Customer service internally and externally, Risk (Failure Management), Productivity Contribution by the improvement of competitiveness, and Cost OF SErvices, are all criteria by which IT organizations should be measured. From the “ultimate question” for customer service, to cost of service, all of these are measurable. But you cannot judge that service if the management does not adequately measure it, and report on it, so that the executive management of the organization is capable of understanding and making decisions that support IT’s mission.

Think of how much information the Accounting (history) and Finance (future) organization gives to the CEO. THink about how much the Sales organization gives to the CEO. THink of how LITTLE marketing organizations tend to give by comparison, and think of how much less than marketing, the IT organization gives.

The respect and influence that a function of the company has over the distribution of resources in the company has largely to do with the metrics that it provides the management team. And how much exposure to risk the IT organization inserts into the business by failing to see the management of complex systems as one of engineering rather than one of human development and the testing of humans for failure, and the measurement of humans in their ability to recover from failure.

Just as public intellectuals try to change public opinion to influence policy, by the use of narrative and argument, as well as data and it’s interpretation, because they need to help people think differently who have previous intellectual assumptions and biases dependent upon the methods and tools that they use in daily life and then apply outside of that domain of experience, IT management, and to some degree, the staff, must look at the underlying assumptions both in IT and in general business management and develop the discipline internally to experiment with failure, in order to teach the human component of complex systems, how to react in short time periods, while at the same time, using metrics and measures to inform the policy makers in executive management, so that they can intelligently and rationally make decisions about the allocation of resources for the purpose of creating profit (a measure of our use of the world’s resources), and the reduction of risk, so that all members of the organization, who are choosing to invest in this stream of income and friendships and knowledge at this organization, instead of an alternative stream of income, friendships and knowledge at another organization, can reduce the risk and cost to themselves in the event of failure of those estimates of risk.

It’s all economics after all.

Paul Krugman wrote today, poking fun at prestidigitators in the financial sector. As the most public advocate of forcible redistribution, I thought it was appropriate to poke back.

The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of the financial sector, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it.

The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of public intellectuals, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it.

The understanding that we obtain from listening to business leaders who risk their capital, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it.

The understanding that we obtain from listening to the predictions of common people, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it.

The understanding we obtain from the opinions of all of these groups of people,is the understanding of how these same people react to what they hear, and what actions that they will pursue accordingly.

There is no future determined in advance, only the future that people make because of the information at their disposal, that they can employ to project that future, and the resulting actions that they take in daily life in comparing their needs, obligations, resources, prices, and their anticipation of coordinating the optimum among them.

But when we distort the financial system through credit money, or distort entrepreneurial activity through taxation, or distort public opinion through consensus building in order to gain political control over the levers of power, we distort the evidence that these people use to cooperate in their daily lives, and to build a stable, prosperous economy, especially when a prosperous economy is entirely driven by the willingness of it’s members to take risks in anticipation of reward for doing so.

While it seems that our transition from the theocratic and religious public debate about the will of god to that of the Civic Republican moral debate about the pragmatism of laws and human character, to that of the economic debate about the material benefit of citizens, has been toward practical rationality, and material reward, it also appears, that under all three public debates, only the preservation and development of our institutions of truth, contract, property rights, accounting and division of labor, has had any material impact on our quality of life – and that the ongoing pubic debate, the use of taxation, and the use of monetary policy has done more to distort the information systems people use to build these institutions, and habits, and trade, and division of labor, than has the debate and political policy over these previous religious and moral traditions — because we are not debating the subject at hand, but debating who should obtain power to manipulate the levers of tax, law, and money.

We are, in this public forum, debating power over spoils, not the productivity and prosperity that results from cooperation and trade under our institutions.

Most of our technologies evolve by accident of compounding fractal patterns that increase our ability to cooperate in larger numbers:
1) Restraining the use of violence creates the institution of property.
2) The institution of objective truth and fidelity of contract creates complex trade.
3) The institution of money creates the technology of human calculability and cross-categorical comparison.
4) The volume of trade creates the establishment of prices subject to sufficient stickiness that they become forecastable.
5) Sticky Prices create the ability to lay expectations, and forecast complex uses of property.
6) Credit creates intergenerational cooperation, and the pairing of older wisdom with younger effort.
7) Fiat Money and Credit Money create insurance allowing more risk mitigation at the cost of socializing losses and privatizing wins.

Conversely:

1) General liquidity distorts the pricing system. And people are informed by those prices to pursue unproductive, but price-ballooning ends.

2) Taxes distort entrepreneurial activity, and in particular, distort the accounting process, and distort banking, credit, investment, and employment, to the detriment of each, while entrepreneurial skill, the most valuable asset of any economy, is directed to tax reduction, rather than productivity gains.

Since calculability is the means by which we cooperate:

The state should collect and redistribute interest, not issue taxes. A state based upon interest collected is the only method of political and social calculability currently available to man. The state’s job is as a lender, who redistributes profits to citizens.

Taxes should be accelerating and flat, on those people who collect and coordinate interest, when their balance sheets make them financially independent, and therefore living upon credit and interest, not upon entrepreneurs who take personal risk, and who are penalized by taxation for having done so.

The citizenry should not be enslaved for decades by the use of intergenerational theft and enslavement by involuntary debt.

Class warfare should not be fomented, between classes but cooperation and respect encouraged by a process that rewards politicians not to gain from spoils, but to gain from borrowing from the average person, and returning to him his investments. Under this method a politician can be held accountable but material and calculable methods of measurement.

The state should not be able to enslave it’s citizens through taxation and justify it by moral argument, any more than it should justify it by the will of god, or justify it by ti’s capacity for violence. These are all forms of slavery. Taxation is a product of slave society. If we are indeed rational beings capable of democracy, or capable of independent commercial action, then we have exited slave society. Ownership by an individual or ownership by the state are insignificant differences.

The polibical debate should not be over who controls the levers, but that the only lever should it should use is lending, and the only purpose of the state is to borrow risk from the population and use it to increase production, and thereby distribute teh spoils justly earned by all parties.

In this manner we change the public debate from that of class warfare and the power to conduct class warfare, and distributing the spoils, to the civic republican tradition of generating prosperity.

Law and taxes are products of slave societies.
“Credit and Interest are the ties that binds us. Law and taxes are the thefts that divide us.”

Change the public debate. We have been debating the wrong problem for a century. We should be debating how to make a society free from theft and coercion between classes, and to one of cooperation between them through mutual self interest.

This is “Capitalism v3.” But it remains to be seen how long before it takes hold – or fails to.

Another response from “A Shaky Start” on Economists View

RE: “One way to look at the Bush years is that job growth was lousy so the Fed (and the government policies) subsidized construction jobs by creating a housing bubble. That jobs program abruptly ended. It is now time for a new jobs program. For the longer run, it is time for a different labor policy that will create many more jobs.”

It’s not just a way to look at it, it’s what happened. THey wanted to create this ownership society as a means of countering the growth of urbanized socialism, and the diminishment of freedom, and competitive prosperity. This is the most important dimension of the multi-dimensional philosophy that they have been following. (We tend to classify them as having a simplistic philosophy but it is not so. It is not useful to underestimate the thought of your competitors.) The rest of it is essentially a universalist christian concept for the material benefit of mankind, (going back to Alexander) that promotes democracy as a means of exporting control over world resources in order to keep prices low, and maintain military and political power.

The problem is for their philosophy, that in the end, society has become urbanized, and large and dense. And the epistemology of urbanites is very different from the epistemology of farmers. There is more similarity between the evolutionary tendencies of urbanites and slavery economies, than the evolutionary tendencies of farmers, for precisely these epistemological reasons. THis difference has been understood for a long time, and written about extensively. However, our current status of behavioral economics has not reached a sufficient state of maturity to connect this set of tendencies, with density of population, and availability of opportunity cost at the expense of perceptibility of causality. Furthermore, our calculative institutions (accounting and taxation) as they are currently practiced, effectively launder causality from our information systems, and require us to rely on the farmer vs urbanite dichotomy as a religious or political difference, or ‘taste’, or even as a strategy of class warfare,versus relying upon factual information that allows us to analyze our behavior and make judgments about it.

Fortunately we know how to fix these issues, so that the epistemological clarity of farming (visibly of cause and effect) is available to the urbanite.

Unfortunately, we have a form of government that distracts us from solving this problem by individual profiteering on the resolution of conflicts between groups and classes.

Our biological sensitivity to fairness, which compels us to work hard, and endure costs, in order to punish those who steal from us, or treat us unfairly, seeks to commit violence, control, or punishment between groups in order to feel fairness has been satisfied.

However, this masks the underlying problem as one of solving the underlying problem as one of extending human senses, perception, and comparitive and calculative ability such that we can make decisions for collective benefit.

There is an argument that such accountability, which would come from epistemological clarity, would still be avoided by the peasantry, because of necessity we much manage consumption through the pricing system. However, redistribution can mollify discontent as it has in much of europe, assuming that there is anything to redistribute, because the population provides competitive value in contrast to other competing groups.

I have a more benign view, which is that if a sufficient number of people can understand that this is a problem of providing information, on the scale that was provided by double entry accounting, and the inventory process facilitating taxation, and the standardization of currency, a small number of simple policies can be enacted that will provide us with the information we need, and therefore will allow us to cooperate, profit, and redistribute without the necessity of relying upon democratic negotiation for the purposes of resolving disputes between classes.

Capitalism is with us forever as a set of institutions, precisely because humans cannot, in real time, process complexity of information without those institutions. Redistribution is likewise with us forever, since there is a difference between the necessity of incentive and the necessity of calculative power, and the preference for fairness. Likewise, social and economic classes are with us forever, because people requires status differences in order to pursue the mating ritual, and will create them faster than such differences will be redistributed, just as they will create black markets to circumvent anti-capitalist activity.

But capitalism and socialism as biases, are only necessary as biases, because we cannot calculate, measure, and compare, the complexity of society in which we live.

It may seem simplistic that society can be better managed by implementing changes in accounting, taxes, banking, credit, and the scope of lawmaking, but our society is changing BECAUSE of changes in these things. Instead, these institutions are what made our complex society possible, and our social systems, because they require decision and legislation rather than simply relying on evolution of business practices, simply evolves much more slowly. If we simply correct this problem, we can get away from class warfare, and into cooperating between classes for mutual gain.

In other words, we are trying to build a science of economics on testing assumptions because we lack data needed to actually understand causality. We will have a much easier time if we have the data, and we have the technology, in both accounting and record keeping, to maintain causality in our data.

Truth=Causality

I’m going to say something. It will only take a moment. And my time is at least as valuable if not more so than the state’s, the court’s, or that of the officers’.

You see, I understand something very important.

I understand that the state’s only power is violence. That power comes from its claim to a geographic monopoly on violence. That is what a state is. A group of men who lay claim to a monopoly on violence. All actions which compel a person to do other than he wishes in the use of his property, his body and his time in the peaceful and honest exchange of goods, services, information and affection, are acts of violence. Consequently, there is no action that a state needs to take, and therefore no action a state can possibly to take, by the application of law, that is not an act of violence no matter the form or ceremony the state drapes over such actions. A state is the administration of organized violence. A court and its servants dispense violence.

The state exists, and possesses that monopoly on violence, because men like me, grant their capacity for violence to the state, so that it may dispense it as needed from a judicial bench. By granting our violence to the state we remove from ourselves the daily administrative responsibility of parenting society, defending life and property, and resolving conflicts over property, so that we may devote ourselves to the pursuit of specialization in our division of knowledge and labor, and thereby develop our skills so that we can achieve our ambitions, and amuse ourselves, in whatever way we see fit, while decreasing the cost for others to do the same. By the act of granting our violence to the state, we assume that our violence is justly dispensed on our behalf. That is the term of our agreement with the state. It is what makes a man a citizen by choice rather than a subject or slave.

We are all capable of violence. It can never be taken from us as long as we live. We carry it with us as a constant potential. It grows, it matures, and it dissipates with age. It is not a right, or a privilege, because rights and privileges are things we give to each other. Violence is not given, it simply exists in all men at all times. Some of us are wealthier in violence than others. Some men are capable of very little violence, some men are capable of physical violence, some men capable of organized rabblery and protest, and some of us, men like me, capable of revolution and civil war. As such, we do not contribute our violence to the state in equal measure.

The state’s power to organize society by way of its laws, institutions and processes is an illusion constructed by the accumulation of habits in the citizenry; habits which are perpetuated by the daily use of those habits, and where those habits are reinforced by small and instructional displays of violence by the state, so that it may maintain the illusion of a monopoly on violence, and therefore encourage among the citizens, the retention of those habits. The potential for violence within the citizenry vastly outweighs the limited violence that can be distributed by the state. It is a credit to our habits that so little violence need be distributed at any one time that the illusion of the state monopoly can be preserved so cheaply, by so few people, and using so little violence. The actors in the state, in whatever capacity, who make use of my violence on our behalf, are few and comparatively weak. And the state can only dispense my violence, on my behalf, from a judicial bench, because of the illusion of strength that comes from the presence of those habits, and its promise of enforcement by the grant of violence from citizens.

As long as any agent of the state justly parents individuals to reach their greatest potential, as long as any agent of the state justly resolves differences in property, as long as any agent of the state protects life and property — any agents of the state have my consent to maintain that illusion of strength, and to dispense my violence on my behalf to maintain those habits, and that illusion, so that all men may continue to participate in productive exchange, or in humble amusement in the activity of their daily affairs.

But if for one moment, you seek to treat me unjustly, and you begin to believe your own illusion, and you forget that you are dispensing my violence on my behalf, and you seek to treat me not as a citizen who bestows upon you my violence, to be justly administered, but a subject who must obey rules, and if you believe and act as though the law exists not as a convenient tool for the resolution of differences between peers, but a scripture that I must obey as a subject, then it is not only my right, but my duty to myself and others, to take from you my given violence, and to remind you if I can, and teach you if I must, that the source of that violence is in its citizens; so that the state understands those habits, their cause, and purpose.

If I must remind the state, I hope it is by this simple, gentle oratory. If that will not suffice, I will not resort to the display of petty personal violence, nor to the disorder of rabblery and protest. Because that is not the capacity of violence that I gave to the state. I will instead raise an army and show you what violence it is that I do restrain, so that you are once again reminded that you are an actor on my behalf, and that of my fellow citizens, and nothing more. And if you doubt for a moment that I can do such a thing, I will be only so happy to prove it to you, by starting in this very room, on this very day, if necessary.

This duty is what it means to be a citizen. To grant your violence to the state so that it may be justly administered. And to dismantle that state should it unjustly use your given violence.

Foolish men find comfort in the sameness of life, without understanding that such constancy, and the illusion of control we have over our daily affairs, can be rapidly changed by one small spark, one man’s choice, one seemingly random act. Foolish men believe habits and rules are truths rather than conveniences, that their power is divine or systemic, and that their methods and rules are wise and scientific, rather than the accidental, pragmatic and convenient efforts of simple men fitfully crafting an edifice in anticipation of the turbulent events of an unknown future. These rules and ideas are nothing more than the limited judgements, habits and fantasies of such men, however well their intentions.

And if at any point such foolish men lose sight of the fact that these convenient methods and tools are less important than, and subservient to, the men whose lives are affected by the use of my violence on my behalf, or if such foolish men forget that rules have no wisdom of their own, without the wisdom to interpret them, and that the use of them must result in the betterment of each man, then, they have forgotten the purpose of those rules. That purpose is the perfection of each individual man, and in that perfection, to parent each generation that follows so that it may reach it’s greatest potential. The perfection of man is our only just purpose, not the perfection of our methods and tools, or the ease and efficiency by which we administer them. The man is important, not the rules.

And I will not allow my violence to be misused against any man. And in particular I will not allow the abuse of my fellow citizens or of myself for no other than methodological or procedural reasons, so that another man, an agent of the state, whose only power comes from my given violence, may be absolved of the difficulty and effort expended in justly administering the violence I so entrusted to him. I will not permit men to suffer for another man’s laziness, when it is my violence at the expense of my fellow men, that he wields in order to obtain such leisure.

And when a citizen is abused by the criminalization of administrative rules, of petty regulatory processes and efficiencies, or of manners and disrespect of the court so that it can maintain its illusion and habituation, or when he is abused by prosecutors who are the worst ideological acolytes and to whose advantage these rules are biased, or when he is abused by the state’s staff, composed of common people endowed by procedure with powers incommensurate with their abilities, and the ability to abdicate responsibility for treating citizens with manners and good service, the state engages in the most heinous form of laziness, and the most intolerable misuse of our violence on our behalf.

Revolutions are not made from single heinous crimes, but from the compounded layering of administrative abuses of citizens. It is not only citizens that must develop habits, but the state, for it is the state who must use greater manners when dispensing our violence, whether that violence is dispensed from the court, the prosecution, the staff, the police, and especially when doing so inspires the understandable and desirable disgust and displeasure of those men unjustly victimized because of the state’s laziness and irresponsibility with our violence.

If the state’s ambition is restitution of property, or the collection of collection for contract violations, even social contract violations, or procedural errors, for which such fines are simply a form of restitution, then this is its duty, so granted by us. But if it is punishment rather than restitution that the state seeks to render, then I do not, and no citizen should, permit any man to punish me, and will return that punishment in kind. Restitution is the means by which we correct errors, selfish weakness, and human frailties among peers and is the only reason we give our violence to the state to administer on our behalf. Punishment is the submission of slaves to an authority. If you seek to punish me, or my fellow citizens, rather than to give restitution, you seek to enslave us. And I will not suffer your enslavement, nor tolerate the enslavement of my fellow citizens.

Foolish men have come to believe that rule of law, is likened to the laws of physics: that they are tools that override our wisdom and senses, and which if followed produce scientific results. But this is an error. Laws are principles for wise men to refer to, no different from myths, traditions, and stories, to make use of in resolving conflicts among men, providing restitution in the case of loss, so that we may exchange property instead of violence, cooperate peacefully in doing so, and develop specialization so that we may increase productivity in safety, decrease the cost of goods and services to each other because of specialization and competition, and therefore improve the quality of our lives, at lowest cost and risk.

I say this because I love life. I love mankind. I love my fellow citizens. I love each one of them. Fit or not, wise or not, young or old, wealthy or poor, healthy or ill. And I would gladly give my life in their defense, rather than allow someone, in his foolhardy and misguided illusion, to use my violence against them unjustly. And it is that statement, its passion, and conviction, and its promise of consequence, that makes me a citizen and no other.

So, I ask you to understand this appeal: I do not fear you. And you need not fear me if you are just, and care for my people.

But if you are unjust, and do not understand what I have said, then fear me. If you do not fear me then I must make you fear me. I must teach you the accountancy of the state, and its currency of violence. So that you never forget the origin of the violence you wield on our behalf, and in doing so abuse or enslave me or my fellow citizens.

The state must fear its citizens. It is the duty of citizens to maintain that fear. That fear is fear of violence. I am a citizen by the granting of my violence. The violence that we give to the state, the violence that we possess as men, and is only granted to the state under the condition that it be administered justly, on our behalf, to parent the society, to protect life and property, to resolve conflicts over property, and to administer restitution for conflicts over property. For those reasons and no other.

Curt Doolittle
April 2009

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