Freedom Is Freedom From Abuse, Not Freedom To Abuse

Economic freedom is freedom from abuse and not freedom to abuse others who should be free of your abuse. The primary vehicle that a society has to restrain such abuse is the government. There is almost nothing that can be accomplished by one person alone. To accomplish a goal everyone working on it needs to do their part, and always it comes to one person to make the final decision or there is a contest of opinions that one person wins, or the goal is not achieved.

This job of making those decisions is just a job, it contains power, but is rarely the most difficult, and certainly not the most effort. But in holding that power, the person with the job is the Agent, by some level of assent, of everyone else that is affected by that goal, and how it is accomplished. As the Agent with the power, there is special responsibility to act in the interests of all, and giving one's self all the goodies and dumping all the costs on to others is tantamount to embezzlement, and criminal at least in intent.

Forming a society is one of those group goals, more complicated and spread across generations, but the structure underneath remains. Like many such groups you can only opt out by suicide, or at best distant travel, and you give assent by not doing those things.

One of the decisions in any group goal is indeed the distribution of goodies usually called wealth and perks, and it is a dysfunction of most groups that Agents see themselves as so deserving of that power that they have the right to embezzle all the goodies. They have even spent an enormous amount of those ill-gotten goodies to try and convince their clients that they actually deserve the situation as they have made it.

However any sane person who looks at the situation can see that all that embezzlement has reduced not only the lives of the client/victims but made the entire society more dysfunctional and less capable of functioning overall. Looking back we can see that even Kings lived pretty wretched lives because the freedom they suppressed prevented the accomplishments that would have benefited them as well.

It is hard to see what might be, but you can bet that this society has already fallen short of that, and is falling further as I write this.

Deregulation has been an utter disaster.

The biggest and best of everything used to be in the USA and now no longer
is. Europeans, for example, have had much better and more complex
cellphone service at a single lower price than the US and have done so for
many years.

The reason is that without a force to improve, and a rolling up and
buying out all competition Giant Businesses have taken maximum personal
profit and made minimum investment or innovation. Without that force of
competition the Government alone is left to provide that accountability.

It can only do that by forcing openings limiting monopoly power, or by
forcing a single neutral use of airwaves, that are owned by the Society
Commons in the first place.

By demanding single usable pricing for all wireless connection as per the
European model, only then can Americans have even near World Standard
Service rather than third world standard service.

Musical Chairs, Musical Houses, Musical Dollars

When I was a kid, our kindergarten class played a hateful little game with the Orwellian name of "Musical Chairs". Who knew that the Gang Of Pirates were building recruits even then.

The chairs of course were not musical but ordinary, but the teacher would count to assure herself there were one less than the number of students, and tell the students they had to dance around the circle of chairs until the music stopped, and then everyone would have to take a seat.

It was an innocent enough group of kids, in another place or time there might have been a stabbing or an eye gouged out, but basically the teacher did not care how each child got the seat, only noticing who did not. Anyone who cooperatively shared a seat was told that they were both losers, and sent to sit in the corner and be ignored. Rather like that guy with a sign on the street corner today.

Oh how enlightening this was for the school yard bully , or pre-school Machiavelli, you could do any dirty trick, run any scam, just as long as the authorities (teacher) did not see it, and the only authority around did not look or wish to know or would not have had the game in the first place. After you had out conned, or out threatened all your other classmates, the authority would declare you the great winner, and someone who's leadership skills might make them president one day.

Well the Authorities have stopped the Music again, and all you folk who saw the hand on the needle have taken their dollars to where you can't get at them and many who only had their houses or retirement savings in sunshine promises, and funny money mortgages are out of luck, and those now Post-school Machiavellians are sitting in your house and on your money pointing and laughing and blaming you for the poor decision of letting them play in the first place.

Watch out for other anti Bush types that seem "not right"

As one who very early was involved in the Perot movement when there were equal numbers of folk from across the political spectrum, I got to know well many folk who I would never get to know otherwise and was lead into an "Alice through the looking glass" world of John Birchers, anti-tax, Illuminati conspiracy types and a cottage industry of books, schemes, and scams of a sort and level not seen on the left at all.

I met many who would have been Tim McVeigh, had the circumstances fallen their way, and the loose change folks are a natural there. There are two things that distinguish them in any crowd, both aspects of that looking glass.

One is the Right Wing Authoritarian Pathology with its special Illogic that is well described even if there is some dispute as to its qualities and origins. Even when, like loose change, they support ostensively leftist goals, they carry the RWA nature, that still gives real leftists the hives.

The other is the classic Strong Father view of government laid out so clearly by George Lakoff. Often taken in rebellion against the abusive father in the classic Libertarian fashion, they see themselves like the runaway child, in a brutal world where theft or prostitution are the only paths of survival and raw rage fuels the drive to power by any means, never with good results.

Unable to escape the Abusive Father frame, they see Liberals as the mirror side of their own horror, and cannot imagine the Nurturing Parent model that Lakoff gives as the model of actual Liberal Philosophy.

Rather than accept any point of view it is best to really look at what is said and not accept it just because you would like to agree with the speaker that folk you don't like are the enemy

"Fair" tax is very UnFair

Recently there has been a rash of "Fair" tax proposals (as if the label "Fair" would make them so), mostly around the idea of an across the board flat tax on sales, and the elimination of the Income tax, and the abandonment of Corporate taxes. This is a position favored by many on the Right, but also Senator Mike Gravel who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

How far we have come when it was proposed that a Corporate taxes could be raised to the point that income and sales taxes could be eliminated! If the resulting wealth caused demand to rise to pay for the extra tax so be it, if not then the Paris Hiltons of the world could afford the difference.

In any case the point needs to be made-ALL Sales taxes are regressive! You can game the system to make them a bit less so by eliminating them on Food, Rent and perhaps a few other things, but a Poor person paying 5% tax on a $100 car is paying exactly the same PERCENT tax as a rich person paying 5% tax on a $100,000 car. What they are not paying is the same PERCENT of their total income, as the $100,000 car is likely to be a very much smaller percent of income than the $100 car, and there will have to be many more $100 cars as they will not last well or hold value as the very expensive case.

Encourage the Poor or even Middle Class to save? They cannot, rising prices and stagnant wages leaves most struggling on the edge of disaster, while debt of all sorts chews away at the bit of edge they have. Any preference to save or invest will go vastly to those who already have no financial problems.

Collecting a sales tax also involves hugely more paperwork, and/or will be hugely more scammed, as it already is where there is a state sales tax, and mostly by the rich who can get winks as the do so.

How to do you do a fair tax? it is very easy! Everybody gets zero tax on the first $10,000, no matter your total, add 1% on each of the next $10,000 so 20k pays $100 ( 0 + 100), 30k pays $300 (0 + 100 + 200), 100k pays $4,500 ( 0 + 100 + 200 ...+900) still a total rate of only 4.5%. Only those people with incomes larger than most countries would pay huge taxes as the taxes on the smaller amounts would be taxed exactly the same for everyone who made it to that place.

Corporations might have slightly different numbers but would also be similarly taxed according to the size of the total corporation, that way the smaller corporation would have a competitive advantage in taxes to offset the disadvantage of the power that scale confers. (if you think that scale is efficiency and not power, think of efficiency of scale as a ten acre hamburger stand, and power of scale as McDonalds)

There is no magic market, Money provides power and power provides money, it is a one way ticket to a feudal system. Only by Government intervention to act as friction where needed at the top and oil where needed at the bottom can a balance of real civilization be found. Money at the top is power and needs only to be restrained, it will still prosper in spite of restraint. At the bottom is pent up energy that can explode in creativity if only it is enabled, it is the only place that really good ideas come from, they will never come from the self satisfied.

Another similar take on my basic concepts

In wandering about the Net looking for something else I ran into Robert W. Fuller, Patient Revolution: Human Rights Past and Future which is an hour long video about his self named "Dignitarian" ideology. His elite background shows, and seems to me to be a major difference I have with him. But by talking from the position of the management, and his academic credentials he does provide a place and perspective that can allow managers to create a more humane and profitable system.

Of particular interest to me is the way he, as I have, actively differentiates what he is talking about from the Communist/Socialist unnecessary monopolies that are not different from the same thing that is "privately" held. He talks about managers treating others with dignity because it is ultimately in the manager's self interest, while my focus is to have a method to make sure that he does so, because few people can see their real self interest. He does make a point that social embarrassment is a mechanism of accountability, but history has often shown it weak and assuming the person can be embarrassed.

Focusing On The Reality

It would appear that regardless of any other principals laid out in any part of the law, if there is a democracy, the majority of voters would wish that the majority would prosper. As most of the arguments was not if they would prosper, but how, such would be the wish of nearly all the voters.

It would seem a reasonable guess that few would deliberately decide that they should do worse. Those who have achieved a level of prosperity, and were greedy enough to want to benefit from the impoverishment of the majority however might well work to reduce what the majority had to say about it, and work to convince them of concepts that would cause them to work against their own interests.

Whatever smoke and mirrors, the results are the ultimate judge of reality. That reality is that the power and prosperity of the majority of Americans has been in decline since the '50's with a gain at the top equal in total but divided among very few. Sometimes the pace is slower sometimes faster, but breakneck in the past 6 years. But the result can be seen here.

Thom Hartmann lays it out in great detail in his book and fairly well in his discussion here. As I point out in the basic concepts in the upper corner of this blog, that all group actions need to be seen as the reality it is and how benefits are assigned and how the folk in control are held accountable. It is this accountability that government needs to be the final force, with the elected democracy the final accountability on government.

This is a very different proposal than that the government actually be the unaccountable monopoly, but that there be no unaccountable monopoly of any type. All the Orwellian twisting of this point is no more than fraud and fakery.

A quick thought

Until we reframe how we think about group actions, the Sharpies will continue to rake in the gold and give everyone else with the shaft.

All group actions, Government, global trade, any corporation, etc., have the stakeholders who are affected and shakers who have the operational control of the enterprise. If the stakeholders cannot hold the shakers accountable, they will give themselves more of the benefits and the rest of the stakeholders more of the costs. If they can the shakers will weasel out of what accountability there is. As indeed they have done, till there is hardly any left.

The new Congress has its work cut out for them, I can only hope they will be able to focus on that prize.