Deer in the Headlights

There are those of us at tosoc.org who have had the experience of hitting a deer while driving on a dark interstate highway. The maddening part of it is that the headlights thing is not a myth. A deer does get mesmerized by the headlights and changes lanes with you, zeroing in on you as if trying to make sure that you will not miss.

In some sublime way, the workings of politics seems to parallel the workings of a deer's brain when faced by headlights in the dark. When disaster threatens, political systems often seem to steer right into it like some crazed, suicidal machine. Let us take the recent bankruptcy of Detroit as a case in point.

It is not like Detroit's bankruptcy was a surprise. Detroit's decline has been going on for decades, maybe as long as 70 years. The population was around 2 million in 1950, but has declined to less than half that. The rich auto industry moved away. Unemployment is over twice the national average. And so on, but we will not chronicle the decline of Detroit here, or ask how it came about.

We think the more important question is, if Detroit's management saw disaster coming for decades, tried to take action, and still failed to avoid it, their failure makes us question the financial management of government at all levels. Especially the federal level. When we look at the upcoming financial disasters, are we collectively even as intelligent as a deer facing headlights?

For example, take the federal debt, Social Security, Medicare, and the growth rate of healthcare costs. None of these are sustainable, yet the only actions taken are essentially emergency measures designed to put off disaster for a while. Kick the can down the road. It may be that our society's "deer in the headlights" response to our problems is simply a result of our politicians' desire to put off disaster until they are safely retired.

Another reason may be that the rich have immunized themselves against serious problems in the U.S. economy. As we have said several times before in our blog posts, the rich are free to run away. They move into an area because of financial opportunities and they exploit it for all it's worth. Then when the law of diminishing returns plateaus profits, or when rising taxes does the same thing, they move and take the majority of the wealth elsewhere.

Is that not what happened to Detroit? The auto manufacturers did not leave Detroit entirely, but they invested their wealth elsewhere. There was no significant loyalty to Detroit or its people. The bailouts of GM and Chrysler even with the recent recovery of auto sales has not helped Detroit avoid bankruptcy. When Detroit started into decline, the rich ran away from it, one by one, over a period of decades. Exploitation over. Poverty takes over.

The same thing can happen to the U.S. as a whole, if it is not happening already. Many do not seem to realize it. The international rich have been exploiting the U.S. for so long that the population as a whole still feels safe, economically. Good old American ingenuity and hard work will dig us out of any economic holes.

That feeling of safety is false. Think about it – if it were true, then we would have had sustained growth of wealth for the poor and middle class before the Great Recession. That did not happen even though the rich did have sustained growth of their wealth. The same thing is happening today, years after the official end of the Great Recession. American ingenuity and hard work are failing.

If you have been reading tosoc.org, then you are already aware that the chain holding us down is the U.S. dollar. As our single currency, it forces us to compete on an individual level in the same markets as the rich and it forces us to play by their rules.

One way to look at this is in terms of freedom. The political left has always had a better appreciation for the relationship between freedom and economics than the political right.

Freedom is about options. The more freedom you have, the more kinds of choices you can make and the more options you have for each type of choice. Take for example prisoners in jail. They do not choose their environment or their companions, they cannot choose where to go or when, they do not choose their food, and they have little control over what happens to them. Their freedom is limited by walls, locked doors, and guards.

By comparison, even those who are poor but free have a lot more options to choose from than prisoners. However, the poor have many fewer choices than the rich. In this way, only the rich are truly free and the poor are prisoners in a jail made of poverty. They are told that they can gain freedom like the rich by working hard and saving money. That raises a lot of hackles because it evokes not just the fascist notion that "work will make you free," but it is also a lie, again like other fascist lies. The poor cannot defend what wealth they accumulate, so the rich can take even what they have away from them. As the song says, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

It becomes increasingly difficult over time to accumulate wealth in a society with lots of wealthy people and a competitive market. As the rich get richer, the market becomes unbalanced.

A good metaphor for this might be the game of Monopoly (the Hasbro game). The idea is that all the players start out with the same amount of money, then they roll dice to move their pieces around the board, buying and developing real estate. Players try to acquire money and property until they gain an unassailable advantage and go on to bankrupt all the other players, winning the game. The point is that what starts as a fair game naturally ends up becoming totally unbalanced, with an obvious winner and many obvious losers. After one or two players become dominant, the other players usually quit to start another game. Playing the rest of the game would be a painful exercise in futility, except for the winner. One difference between this and real life is that in real life, you have to play out your losing position to the bitter end.

Real life is also worse in another way. At least things start out fair in the game. In real life you can start out as a loser and never have a hope of "winning." So many lives in human history have been played out to the bitter end in painful futility.

Suppose we changed the Monopoly game to be more like real life. Let us make it a totally unfair game. Imagine that a few "wealthy" players already own the bank and the majority of the money before the game starts. The rest of the players are "poor" and have to skip some turns so they can "work" to earn a little capital to finance their real estate investments. The results are obvious to anyone who has played the game – one of the "wealthy" players would win the game almost every time.

Translating the unfair game to reality, it is like the situation that the U.S. African American community has faced. Yes, they were freed from slavery, but they found that did not mean freedom in the American sense. They had no money and everything was already owned by someone else. The result was a hundred years or more of segregation by law. Even after segregation ended, every African American child brought into the world faced the equivalent of the unfair Monopoly game mentioned above. To be U.S. society's designated losers for centuries has had a profound impact.

This is not just about African Americans, however. Any of those borne in the U.S. without money to support them is in a similar position – but at least without the racial discrimination.

However, let us see what happens if we stretch the "unfair Monopoly" metaphor to cover tosoc.org's proposals. There would be multiple currencies controlled by the government and multiple real estate markets. The poor would work to earn an internal currency that the rich cannot own ... or control. Instead of having to compete on their own with the rich for housing, government agencies would represent them collectively to obtain necessities in the external markets. That is, the rich would have to compete with a government agent that controls all the wealth, advantages, and choices that they do. The government would also regulate the banks. Finally, the government could never be bankrupted in this new game. Despite all their advantages, the rich could never drive everyone else out of the game.

Let the rich bankrupt one another in their external markets if that is their goal. The government has to play the game differently for the sake of the people. The point is for the government not to ruin the people. The government's role is to keep the game going for the benefit of everyone and prevent that final, winning monopoly. In those conditions, the unfair game becomes much more fair.

Without multiple exclusive currencies and markets, however, both the people and the government must buy and sell in the same market as the rich. The government cannot protect the people from exploitation if the people have to buy and sell as individuals in direct competition with the rich. In this unfair game, the poor will almost always lose. The only thing the government can do then is try to help the poor recover from their losses. This is bad for the poor, bad for the government, and even bad for the rich, if they will just see it.

Tosoc.org has said before that the hardest concept to get across is the requirement for multiple exclusive currencies. We hope that this comparison of the fair game with the unfair game has helped. It is important, because the only way we see to change the "deer in the headlights," self-destructive behavior of our own government is to change the game itself and make it truly fair. In the end, there was no real need for Detroit to go bankrupt. If the tosoc.org system were in place, the debt problems of internal U.S. cities would be handled using internal currencies supported by the national government. Health benefits, pensions, and retirement systems would not be at risk like they are today. The people could build wealth and have real hope of keeping it.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

The 24/7 Manager

We touched on the topic of management losing touch with reality in our earlier blog post The 24/7 Worker. Now is a good time to expand on that theme. See the Leslie Scism article on the front page of the The Wall Street Journal, weekend July 6-7, 2013, about 88-year-old Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG.

Decorated war veteran and successful businessman, Mr. Greenberg deserves a lot of praise. He is described this way: "... a commanding presence ... dominated the insurance industry ... one of the most powerful executives ... often-brusque, hard-charging boss known for boundless energy ... impatience with managers, analysts and others who didn't live up to his standards. ... tough boss ... 'I wouldn't ask anybody to do anything I wouldn't do.'"

Making that statement of course raises the question what Mr. Greenberg would and would not do.

The article later continues "At AIG, Mr. Greenberg was legendary for placing phone calls to his managers at odd hours ... He always has been in 'in the business 24/7,' said Howard Smith, a former AIG chief financial officer ..."

It seems clear that one of the things Mr. Greenberg will do is wake his subordinates up at night. Also, he is in the business 24/7 and that is what he demands of his employees. Except that he asks something of them that he does not ask of himself: work the hours of the CEO without the pay of the CEO.

Mr. Greenberg seems to be rich, certainly, but here we think of him as a manager. There are many who consider him the very model of a modern major manager. A lot of managers want to be like him and lead like him.

The trouble is that he is also a jerk. Still fearfully climbing the ladder of success at the age of 88, presumably still waking up his employees at all hours when he feels like it, and still punishing those who do not live up to his standards. It is worth wondering what future his kind of thinking will lead to.

To some extent, we already know. Mr. Greenberg and those like him have been running U.S. companies for decades. All those commanding, dominating, hard-charging managers led us straight into the Great Recession, with bailouts for their rich companies like AIG. The poor lost their jobs, their houses, and their retirement funds, but they will still be taxed to pay for the bailouts.

The following frankly is a somewhat extreme view of management based on our reading and on our personal experiences. Blogging sometimes forces us to simplify far too much in order to get a point across in the space available. Please keep in mind while reading this that we do not believe managers are evil. They are necessary and important, but right now they are agents of the rich and as such, they have too much control over the lives of the rest of us.

The trouble is that U.S. managers buy into the notion that extreme wealth is economic heaven and extreme poverty is economic hell. Between the two are ladders with managers in the higher places and workers in the lower places. Everyone is supposed to try to climb into economic heaven. The competition is to pull down the people above you and keep kicking those lower than you in the face so that they cannot pull you down. The ladders form a hierarchy of economic fear from top to bottom. Managers believe in the use of fear as a weapon against others and try to defend themselves from its use against them.

There is little that managers will not do to maintain their positions. They tend toward sociopathy; see for example Profile of the Sociopath. Glib, charming, manipulative, secretive, ambitious, willing to lie and mislead, willing to take control, willing to suppress their consciences, and unwilling to take blame. This describes a lot of managers we have known. Case in point: managers will frequently tell workers that they need them even if they know that layoffs are planned. That is, they have to lie for the benefit of the company, attempting to keep workers pinned in place until the company is ready to get rid of them.

If you cannot lie convincingly, you should not try to be a manager in the world today. Likewise if you are unwilling to conform your ethics to the company ethics. Likewise if it bothers you to kick people into economic hell. Ask yourself what kind of people are able to do these things. Friedrich Hayek has a chapter in his book Road to Serfdom titled "Why the Worst Get on Top." We were tempted to title this post "Why the Worst Get to be Managers."

If nothing else, lying in the service of your organization loosens your hold on reality.

Beyond that, keep in mind that getting rid of workers is what companies always want to do. They do not exist to employ people, after all. Their interest is in ever-increasing earnings and ever-decreasing costs, and that is what they ask their managers to achieve. Best for them is maximum earnings with zero costs, meaning zero workers. No wages at all, consigning ever-increasing numbers of former workers to economic hell. Increasing the population of hell is not their goal, we will give them that, but it is a consequence of their kind of "progress."

Suppose that we could take away basic economic fear. Suppose that no one could be consigned to economic hell any more. That is our vision at tosoc.org.

We need competition, yes, but we do not need competition that breaks up families and puts people on the streets because of the mistakes of the rich and the pathological and antisocial behavior of the managers they hire.

We do need competition to keep people from becoming lazy. People need goals to accomplish. Therefore tosoc.org does not believe that we should try to make everyone equally wealthy. That is, we do not want to get rid of economic heaven. We want to get rid of economic hell.

People should be encouraged to climb the economic ladder, but they should not be whipped by fear to do so. The lowest level of economic life should be acceptable but not desirable. That way, the importance of staying on the ladder will not be so great. Managers would not be able to threaten workers with economic hell. We think that over time, manager behavior would start to change, with more leadership and fewer threats. That would be good for both managers and workers, with fewer traumatized workers and more humane managers. That is, we want to change the economic hierarchy from one of fear into one of hope.

Read our many other posts for more details how we would go about it. The basic change would be the creation of internal markets and currencies to protect the jobs and wealth of the poor from the economic shenanigans of the rich and their managers. The rich and their managers would be consigned to the external market. On the other hand, becoming extremely rich could only occur in the external markets, because the internal markets must be balanced by government regulations in order to protect them. Therefore the extremely ambitious could still attempt to satisfy their ambitions by going into the external market. The difference is that the internal markets would be the safety nets for the economic ladder. They would catch anyone who fell off. The consequences of failure would no longer include the risk falling into economic hell.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

Tosoc Update

Sorry, there is no regular blog post this week.  There have just been too many distractions.

We are working on 'The 24/7 Manager' as a companion to one of our previous posts, The 24/7 Worker.  The inspiration for this one comes from Leslie Scism's front page article in this weekend's Wall Street Journal about former AIG boss Hank Greenberg.  In it she quotes former AIG CFO Howard Smith saying that Mr. Greenberg has always been "in the business 24/7."

Cooperative Competitors

The ideas of the survival of the fittest and change within a species came long before Darwin and the theory of evolution. Humans have been breeding animals for at least 10,000 years to improve certain species.

Also, in the sense that females try to attract the strongest males as mates, it could be said that breeding for survival traits within the human race has gone on a long time, too – "forever," as it were. Maybe it was not conscious or socially conscious at first, but the case could be made that deliberate human breeding for survival traits and preservation of human "bloodlines" long pre-dated the breeding of animals and the concepts of aristocracy and nobility.

Note however that the competition for human survival takes place in a social context. That is, it is a cooperative competition in which certain acts draw social praise (aiding survival) while others draw social punishment (making survival more difficult). At its best, this helps everyone survive and "fitness" to survive is more about society than the individual.

This is only the background and infrastructure of society, however. Reality is much more complex. The key is that acts are only judged when they are socialized (publicized). That is why secrecy is greatly prized for individuals at the "highest" levels of societies. True honesty and transparency are only encouraged in the "lower" segments of the population. The fact is that power wants the rest of us to "speak truth" to it. "Speaking truth to power" is not truly an act of defiance or resistance, and it is not the issue. The issue is whether power speaks truth to the rest of us. It almost never does. Almost everything we hear from the highest levels of society is at least misleading if not an outright contradiction of the facts.

Pretty much everybody already knows this already.  For example, it seems likely that the more obvious lies of society's leaders are the source of some forms of paranoia and conspiracy theories. We remind our readers that our leaders regularly lie to us only because many people suppress these kinds of thoughts.  After all, what can we do about it?

The trouble is that this issue is important. No matter how little we can do, we have to do what we can about it. Leadership can get caught up in its own lies and slip further and further from reality. If societies can be said to "go crazy," that is how it happens. The leaders lose touch with reality and the people fail to confront them. History shows that tens of millions of people can die uselessly as a result.

This is also not just historical rhetoric. At least two nations seem to be insane and dangerous at this moment. Because of secrecy, it seems likely that there are several more. Insane leadership should be held accountable and changed before it leads its people and others into disaster.

Therefore we should neither quietly accept nor crazily react to our leadership when it loses touch with reality. We believe that both these responses enable the insanity rather than help correct it.

The U.S. has been pretty good at correcting its own insanity over the years, but it is a constant struggle. Today's example is Lois Lerner, who recently in essence told the rest of us "screw you!" during congressional hearings on the IRS scandal. In effect, she claimed that she had done nothing that might incriminate herself, but refused to answer questions on the grounds that she might incriminate herself. That is a crazy and antisocial set of claims. ("Crazy" meaning unworthy of serious consideration and also out of touch with reality.) For self-defense, we must end her public career now on that basis alone.

Without social punishment for wrongdoing, our cooperative competition, relatively peaceful, ceases to be cooperative. It becomes just pure competition. Dog-eats-dog. That is why so many die when societies lose touch with reality and lose leadership accountability.

We have to punish leaders we catch lying to us. Furthermore, we should always be digging for the truth in order to catch them lying to us. The effort must be made, and it concerns tosoc.org that so many seem to have given up on making our leaders tell the truth. "Politicians are liars and always will be," we are told, as if that excuses us from fighting against it.

Just because the world is not fair does not mean that we should not try to make it fair. There is value and good in the struggle. Our vision of the future should be that society will become fairer and more fair as time goes on, even if we know that our struggle will never succeed in creating a completely fair society. Otherwise we risk creating a world that is totally unfair.

Just because there is no objective truth does not mean that reporters and scientists should not strive to be objective. Between deconstructionism and various epistemologies, it appears that today's reporters and scientists have ceased to try to be objective. In fact, we suspect that a story or research paper that does not promote a strong, politically correct point of view will have difficulty being published. There is value in attempting to find the objective truth about any event, however, because failing to do so – lack of concern about the reality of a situation – leads to insanity.

There is a sort of Gresham's law regarding truth. Gresham's law says that bad money drives out good money. A similar law is that lies drive out truths. It is just easier to accept the lies because it takes extra effort to stay in touch with reality. That becomes especially difficult for the individual when society goes mad. Insane societies try to keep their members away from reality.

Therefore just because all politicians lie does not mean that we should accept it when we catch them lying. There is value to the struggle to try to punish them for it. The struggle is the only thing that keeps society in touch with reality. Without the struggle, the lies take over completely. This happened for example in the old Soviet Union until the government became so ludicrous that it lost control. It was replaced. We are fortunate that the process was so peaceful.

Turning now to capitalism, tosoc.org claims that Western capitalism is failing. In the context of what we have already said here, the failure began in the cooperative aspect of cooperative competition. The idea that the "playing field is level," or even could be made "level," by law and regulation is the lie. The competition is not "fair."

The rich would say that sure, the competition is fair. Anybody who can reach their level of economic power can have all the advantages they have. How misleading. The reality is that almost no one can reach that level. The reality also is that the rich are getting richer relative to the poor. That is not cooperation, it is oppression.

The primary difference between economic cooperation and oppression is this. Cooperation allows the rich to reward those who help them, employees and others. Cooperation means that a rising tide raises all boats. The poor do not get left behind.

Oppression allows the rich to destroy their competitors and threaten their employees.  It means economic fear. Oppression means that the rich serve themselves, not society. The poor have to take care of themselves with what is left over after the rich have taken all they want.

The powerful like the idea that they can destroy individuals who oppose them. Not by taking their lives, perhaps, but by taking their jobs, their incomes, their houses, and by putting pressure on their loved ones. We can ruin you, they threaten.

At tosoc.org, our vision is that, if humans ever really needed economic fear for the advancement of society, it is not needed any longer. Economic security is our vision of the future. As we have said many times, we think the primary policy changes that are needed to accomplish this involve multiple exclusive currencies and markets controlled by a government that is paid only in internal currencies.

One of the hardest things tosoc.org has to do to advance our cause is to convince people that trying more of the same old policies is not best. It does not seem to matter that our current policies have failed in the past and are failing now. After all we have done over the last five years to try to overcome the Great Recession, the economy is still just stumbling along. We think that people should be more frustrated with this than they are. We think that they should start considering new and different solutions like ours.

The way things are set up today, there is no way to correct the markets. Attempts to legislate cooperation back into the markets turns into saving the rich at the expense of the poor. That is only natural, since the poor are only needed for votes, not for policy decisions. The politicians lie to get the votes. Actual policy is what the rich control.

We cannot break the control that the rich have over us when we use the same currency that they do. When they pay and hire and fire us directly, as individuals, they have too much control. When they set prices and make monetary policy, they have too much control. They can threaten many individuals, but a single individual cannot threaten them at all.

The only fair way to deal with the rich in a competitive context is collectively. To be treated as equals, we have to combine our economic power until our collective power is about equal to the economic power of the rich. Individuals should only compete in markets that are suitable for their level of economic power. That includes the rich, and their markets should be different from those of the poor.

We need cooperative competition in capitalist markets to make those markets the best they can be. Now that the rich have far more economic power than the poor, the markets are beginning to break down. The rich do not have to cooperate anymore and the markets are powerless to hold them accountable. Legislation and regulation are also failing. Not just economic craziness, but social craziness, is beginning to spread. It is time to renew the struggle against these trends and use new tools, such as multiple exclusive currencies and markets.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

Try and Stop Us!

Soon the U.S. Supreme Court will publicize its ruling on the case involving California's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriages. Most people think this is just another battle between the homosexual agenda and its opponents.

Tosoc.org sees it instead as another "no matter what the ruling, the central government wins, everyone else loses" event. It is another step in the increasing conversion of law into regulation in the United States. (See our post The Law is No Excuse.) The most important aspect of the Proposition 8 case is about centralization of power. That is, we see it as giving those in power (the rich) a reason to take the vote away from the people.

One of us from tosoc.org discussed Proposition 8 with a young country lawyer back in 2008. His view was that the courts can and should arbitrarily change longstanding legal precedents if they want. It is up to legislators and the people to correct them if they do not like it. This can be termed the "What 'cha gonna do about it?" attitude, or the "Try and stop us!" approach.

(These are not the kinds of attitudes that we at tosoc.org like to see in our public officials, by the way. Or in the rich. They have enough power without arrogating more.)

Of course "correcting" the courts was exactly what the people of California tried to do. When their courts ruled that same-sex marriage was suddenly OK when it had never been before, the people passed Proposition 8. The majority ruled.

But did the vote matter? To the minority, the majority voted the wrong way. Now a few hundred people (including the U.S. Supreme Court) are on the verge of overturning the votes of millions of Californians. So much for our young country lawyer's comforting claim essentially that the people are sovereign through their votes.

True, it may be that the U.S. Supreme Court will vote in favor of Proposition 8, and confirm the votes of millions of Californians. The trouble is that even if they do, the collateral damage is still serious. Just by agreeing to rule on the case, they have already established a precedent that marriage is a matter concerning the U.S. Constitution. They have established a precedent that they should review state votes about marriage to make sure that the people voted the right way.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution says nothing about marriage at all. It does talk about freedom and democracy, including voting. But all that freedom and voting only means something if the votes count. To say that they only count after review by the Supreme Court is to say that all decisions are effectively made by the whim of the Supreme Court. Except, of course, that the Court does not have time to decide everything. Until the Court gets a chance to review a decision, the illusion of the power of the vote is a subordinate substitute that will keep the people quiet in the interim.

A few years ago President Obama famously told Republicans that elections have consequences and reminded them that he won. The question now is whether votes make any real difference. The lesson of Proposition 8 is that votes do not decide anything. That may be the source of some of the Obama administration's difficulties.

The main reason that tosoc.org sees the Proposition 8 struggle as a covert struggle between democracy and anti-democracy is that it did not have to be handled this way. There was no real reason to bring the U.S. Supreme Court into it. We have no doubt that at some time in the near future, if not almost immediately, the people of California could be brought to reverse Proposition 8 in another election.

That would not have been good enough for the centralizers, however. Allowing Californians to settle their dispute without federal intervention would do no good for the central government. In effect, the centralizers on both sides worked together to force the issue onto the federal level.

Some of them may not even realize that they are centralizers; they may just believe that nothing is ever really settled until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on it. That is the problem. Perhaps we have come to the point where most people see the federal government as the supreme power in their lives. That of course would be one of the goals of those who are consciously centralizers – to change the story of U.S. society so that the people cease to believe that they are sovereign.

What we need instead of centralization is decentralization – of markets and currencies. We need an end to the use of economic fear against the people. In the case of homosexuals, note that the economic goals of same-sex marriage are to make sure that those who live alternative lifestyles gain the federal benefits that current married couples have. That is, it is not so much the people but the federal government that economically discriminates against homosexuals and others, carrying out denial-of-resources attacks against them.

With multiple exclusive currencies and markets, this would not even be an issue. No one would be denied basic resources even in the poorest markets. Earning more than the basics would be up to the individual, and would not be dependent on any personal preferences. The federal government would not discriminate against anyone.

Thus The Other Side of the same-sex marriage issue is that the issue has been co-opted to gain power for the centralizers no matter which side "wins" the dispute, even though the root is in economic discrimination. Better to bypass the whole issue and maintain the sovereignty of the people by removing the economic discrimination faced by those who live alternative lifestyles. The best way to do that, of course, is with multiple exclusive currencies and markets.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

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Coming Around

Our tax-collectors increasingly take our money in order to pay international interests. As the debt of the United States grows, only part of the increase is owed internally. The rest of the increase is owed externally.

That is why tax collection in the single U.S. currency is in part a matter of U.S. foreign policy. It is not just about domestic policy. In fact, tosoc.org believes that our response to the Great Recession is better explained when we take the foreign policy aspect of the economic meltdown into account (for example, the treatment of AIG). We could not allow certain institutions to fail perhaps not so much because they would have another Lehman-like effect on our domestic economy, but because they might have that effect on other countries (especially in Europe). If we could prevent it, no matter how much it cost our own citizens, we would not allow our economic troubles to bring down the economies of our allies.

This has a bearing on the recent government scandals in the news. Two scandals are about surveillance on reporters and on the general population. The other is about bigoted, prejudicial behavior on the part of our tax collectors based on the perceived political orientation of applicants for tax-exempt status.

Tosoc.org thinks that it is a fairly straightforward and expected behavior that bureaucrats will try to please their superiors, including the President of the U.S. We think this is true even if the bureaucrats oppose their superiors' policies, up to a point. Most bureaucrats seem to favor the political left, but that does not mean that they will refuse to carry out the requests of a President on the political right.

Therefore we were happy to hear that President Obama was deeply upset by the discrimination of IRS employees against his political opponents. He is not entirely blameless, however. The President has not always kept his own and his administration's rhetoric about his opponents under control, so there may well be a similarity to the Thomas Becket story. ("Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") The bureaucrats may have mistakenly put anti-Tea Party rhetoric into action, thinking that it would please their superiors. The President now has a chance to show that he will not tolerate the use of government power for anti-democratic purposes.

We can also imagine that some of the IRS employees with leftish tendencies thought it was funny to torment those they did not like. Perhaps they smiled and chuckled as they put their creative powers to work to find new ways to make the lives of their political opponents more difficult.

It is bad enough when the IRS is involved in this kind of thing, but could this also be happening elsewhere? We will probably never know whether other bureaucrats in the Justice department or the NSA used their information-gathering powers not just to spy on reporters and possible terrorists, but to gather information on groups with Tea Party or Patriot in their names as well.

There is no evidence of this so far as tosoc.org knows, but bad IRS behavior suggests that such a thing must now be considered.

Those of us who are more-or-less on the left should strenuously object to this behavior and never participate in it. We should go out of our way to treat our political opponents scrupulously. Why any of us should undermine our goals and the Obama administration in these ways is beyond tosoc.org. We need to control ourselves and not give in to "the end justifies the means" ways of thinking.

This is not so much a moral or ethical position. Instead it is powerfully practical because "what goes around comes around." Why would we build the tools and tactics that will allow the next right-wing administration to oppress us? Richard Nixon would have loved what our sympathizers have done because they justify his behavior. If we do the kinds of things that Nixon would do, then ultimately the right-wingers will also do them. And it will be difficult for us to complain about the anti-democratic activities that we created. It is hard to express how wrong-headed we think the IRS bureaucrats have been.

However, we believe that there is another aspect to this that goes beyond our domestic political struggles. The IRS is responsible for collecting enough money to pay our international creditors as well as to pay for domestic expenses. The discrimination against Tea Party and Patriot groups may have been motivated by the need to gather ever-more revenue for this purpose. Any domestic groups that make it more difficult to collect the increasing amounts to pay foreign interests could potentially disrupt foreign policy requirements. That is, up to a point and somewhat indirectly, the IRS works for international interests. The suppression of domestic interests in favor of foreign ones could be seen as a natural extension of their work.

It is not a pretty thought that our government takes from U.S. workers to enrich foreign interests, but it is something we have to consider. After all, it should not be hard to find examples where the U.S has done the same to other nations. Again, what goes around comes around.

One of the purposes of The Other Side of Capitalism is to find a different way, a way that is not exploitative and does not encourage anti-democratic behaviors. Multiple exclusive currencies and markets should help.

First, as we mentioned in "The Other Side of Defense," multiple exclusive currencies and markets should make it easier to track terrorists by following the money. That is because enforcing the relationships between markets requires auditing of all transactions. It may well be that patterns of transactions could be used to justify phone and email surveillance, meaning that the need for general surveillance of the entire population could be reduced.

Second, many of our domestic struggles are about money. As tosoc.org has said many times before, single-currency monetary policies that satisfy international interests will not likely satisfy domestic interests. Multiple exclusive currencies and markets will decouple international monetary interests from domestic monetary interests. That should greatly reduce many of our domestic differences and reduce the desire of bigoted bureaucrats to discriminate against citizens based on their politics.

Finally, the question has arisen whether the government that demands our loyalty is loyal to us. That question will remain so long as our international currency is the only currency we have. To the extent that foreign interests influence our currency they also influence our institutions and officials who use that currency. Put that together with the fact that our treaty obligations constitutionally have the power of law and we have a system in which our government's interests could become opposed to our people's interests. If that happens, then there will be pressure on the IRS, the Justice Department, and the NSA to use their powers against the threats that the people pose. That would be a sad and tragic situation.

With the multiple exclusive currencies and markets that tosoc.org has previously described, however, the government's interests will always be in line with the interests of the people. The external currency could be controlled to meet our external obligations and the internal currency (or currencies) could be controlled to meet our internal obligations.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

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The Other Side of Defense

In some ways, multiple exclusive currencies and markets would not affect the security systems of the United States much at all. In other ways, there would be considerable changes. The idea is that as many as possible security-related personnel and contracts would be paid in internal dollars exclusive to internal markets just like government personnel and contracts in general.

Not much would change for the average soldier or sailor (war-fighter, if you prefer). If necessary a separate military currency and market could be arranged, but at this point we do not expect that. It should be enough if they and their families join civil families in a market at a similar economic level. The only differences would be those that are necessary for their additional security needs and for military necessity. All those things should be easier to accomplish with a flexible internal currency – within U.S. borders, at least.

From a social perspective, the lives of citizens in those markets would be more economically like the lives of the military personnel. Healthcare would act much like military healthcare at those market levels. Prices in general would also be similar (because of collective purchasing power). The purchasing power of military personnel should go up because, large and centralized as our military is, it does not have the consumer purchasing power of the equivalent civilian sector. Again, a flexible currency and market targeted for their level of economic strength should help military personnel and their families considerably compared to today.

Multiple exclusive currencies and markets will also help security. As we have mentioned before, individual loyalties will be easier to predict if individuals are not legally allowed to own or control external currencies. It will be harder to bribe or to launder money across the new, controlled currency and market boundaries, especially with the additional auditing that will be required. It will be more difficult for those not loyal to the U.S. to operate in internal U.S. markets. As it stands now, most foreign entities have enough dollars to suborn almost any individual person.

Note that this also means that those who participate in external markets cannot hold positions related to U.S. security, not even as a volunteer firefighter. The reasons for this are noted in our post on loyalties. Those who want to serve in the U.S. government or any position related to U.S. security have to fit in internal markets. That means if they are already in external markets, they will have to exchange their external wealth for internal wealth and join an internal market, perhaps losing a large portion of their wealth in the process. This is because the markets will be regulated so that all participants in a market must be of approximately equal economic strength.

This does not mean that rich people will not be able to serve in the government or in the military. We expect that the wealthiest internal U.S. market under tosoc.org's system will be quite wealthy. In fact, we expect that U.S. Senators, for example, who are quite rich today, would remain quite rich even if they switch to an internal market. The difference is that their economic affairs would be subject to the same regulations and auditing as those of anyone in any other internal market.

The most difficult part of all this is the human interface between internal currencies and external currencies. Some internal personnel will have to have control of accounts denominated in external currencies. In addition, the external accounts will typically be quite large in order to accommodate collective purchases and income. The motives for misuse of the external funds will be quite powerful. For example, we can imagine that an individual could be tempted to grant a large favor (in money terms) to an external entity, then flee the country to a wealthy life elsewhere arranged by that external entity. When dealing with amounts possibly in the range of tens of billions of dollars, the cost of setting up one criminal and family for life is minuscule.

It will require very strong controls to prevent misuse, but at least the number of those with the power to misuse the external funds can be kept small. It is a lot easier to watch a small number of people.

Overall we do not expect that the implementation of tosoc.org's suggestions to have any negative impact on U.S. security. In fact, we believe that our security will increase for several reasons. Our soldiers and their families will have more purchasing power and will live lives more like their equivalents in the civilian economy. The economic welfare of government officials and anyone involved in U.S. security will be tied to the economic welfare of the U.S. as a whole. Finally, it will be easier to track down those who misuse U.S. funds because there will be many fewer who have the power to do it. The vast majority of people will deal only with internal markets and will not have the opportunity to deal privately with foreign entities. We believe that these are strong reasons to try out a system of multiple exclusive currencies and markets.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

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