Economic Just-So Stories

(from the Pendleton Book Blather Facbook group, circa 2014)

The capitalist dude:  Bob invents a toothbrush; everybody realizes or is told (by people with lots of resources that enables them to do that) that a toothbrush would be a great thing to have.  I (with all my nice property) build a factory to make Bob's toothbrushes, and...hmm...I have to give Bob something for the idea as well (dammit!).  Then I let everyone (since I have some resources to do that) who wants a toothbrush know I've got 'em.  I sell them as dearly as I can, trying to make sure that I cut out any competition that I can, so as to amass the maximum amount of personal resources for the next big thing.  Never know if another opportunity like THIS will over come again!

I am happy, at least.  I have lots more resources than I started with, which makes me important, and allows me to enjoy some luxuries that less important people can't have.  Bob may or may not be happy; people are using his invention, but he sees my luxuries and may realize that he didn't get as much as he might have out of the deal.  The purchasers of toothbrushes may or may not be happy, either.  Toothbrushes certainly make them healthier, but they have neighbors who are sick or even dying because I didn't want what they were able to give me for my toothbrushes.

[Nowhere, in any of this, is any decision made about whether the resources used for this enterprise might be better used somewhere else, or whether, indeed, if the value of these things matches the resources needed to acquire them.  Until my toothbrush factory has some competition, I could care less whether my toothbrushes are useful or if my new factory in Bum Fuck Egypt will use up all their water.  I don't care!  I have lots of stuff to keep me happy in any case.  If competition does manage to surface, I'll drop toothbrushes like a hot rock and take my toys home.  Maybe I can talk Bob into inventing something else people might want....]

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The anarchist dude:  I know Bob, who invented a toothbrush just for fun.  He gives me one and makes another for himself.  They are cool!  We feel so much healthier!  Other people like the idea, too, so Bob and I agree to make some more for them as well.  People are so much healthier and happier with their toothbrushes we give them that they don't at all mind letting us visit them at the farm for dinner, as long as we pitch in with the dishes.  Rumour of the improvement this invention makes in the lives of people spreads.

Several months later, another person (Fred) hears of a toothbrush, and would really, really like one.  Sheisse, how the hell will he get one?  Bob and I don't even know he wants one!  Bob and I have never heard of the dude!  Fred pulls up stakes, hops on public transportation, and visits Bob and I.  He hangs around long enough to learn how toothbrushes are made.  He notices that we are using way too much water to make them; in his home province, a very dry place, our process would be impossible to duplicate.  He helps us modify our manufacturing process to be much more water efficient.  He moves back home in a month or two, starts making them there.

I, Bob and Fred are all happy; Bob because he is gratified that his invention is useful, myself because I helped Bob and encouraged him, Fred because he able to give toothbrushes to his neighbors AND make them without destroying the water supply in his home district.  The farmer next door is happy, because his family is healthier and he is proud to feed and house the inventor and workers that make toothbrushes.

Lastly, the users of the toothbrushes are happy; they are healthier and the toothbrush cost them little or nothing.  Attentive neighbors notice that some people of fragile health may become sick if they don't have one, and they travel to Bob and I's area to help us make some for them.  No one who needs a toothbrush need go without one for long.

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Other Mullings-over...

(from Pendleton Book Blather, 2014)

"The skein of your life is already woven, your fate is fixed." - Herger from The Thirteenth Warrior

"...a person doesn't die when he should but when he can." - Col. Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude

"...Cassandra didn't get nearly the kicking she deserved." - 'Lazarus Long'

A person who is 'fey' is perceived to have a doom; one cannot choose to be fey, but rather it is a discovery one comes to during the course of life. One such is compelled by the nature of their experience and personality to cause a change in the way of the world, large or small. These are the iconoclasts, eccentrics, marchers-to-ones-own-drums, gadflies. But books only get written about people whose doom encompasses them and...therein lies the elbow room that allows free will to get a grip. Even the most glorious and awful persons of history made conscious choices that made them or broke them.

I got the impression from the attitude of Herger in The Thirteenth Warrior that, although the Norns had already created the tapestry of earthly life, it was NOT predictable or forseeable; there was room for manuever, and that made all the difference. One could not change the manner of one's death, for instance, but one could live one's life badly or well and let posterity judge it.

Buliwyf's (and by extension his companions') destiny WAS tied up in the quest to save Hrothgar's kingdom, but the Norsemen probably did not think that the witch was interfering with anyone's fate by pointing this out, but rather directing their attention to a more comfortable (and honorable?) way to meet it. A real Cassandra would have been extremely unpopular and justifiably so.

St. Augustine used the first half of this argument to explain (away) the apparent freedom mankind 'enjoyed' under God's omnipotence. This led to the poisonous idea that bucking God's will was pointless and ultimately damning... and it also aided the Church in convincing Christians to toe the line. The Jesuits had to come back later and remind Christians that what you do in THIS life is also important, because the Roman Church had been reeling under some pretty bad press and they thought it was probably a good idea to make the Church a little more appealing for people outside their usual clientele (i.e. not ignorant peasants). But nobody trusted them much and everyone figured it was just another cynical Counter-Reformation strategy.

Lastly, we come to Col. Buendia. He alone, of all the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, seems to have realized what the Norsemen believed to be true; that life is what you make of it, and talented people owe the world a debt for their talent. A busy life leaves little time for an orderly death. Did Dante relagate suicides to such a deep circle of Hell because he considered it a kind of betrayal of humanity?

More than bears...and other tales.

Some inspiration from George Winter... 

in 1940 the year i was born
an older cousin of mine buried a jar with a dollar bill
dug it up yesterday
and guess what?
it had the purchasing power
it was worth 17 cents
this explains what give a pile of money
if you don't spend to stay alive
a life of live of its own
a life that produces greed 

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Saw a Pile of Money

 SAW A PILE OF MONEY
coming down the street
was it the wall street parade
the free market economy
celebrating itself

the money pile’s executives, directors
the CEO, managers, stock holders
they were all there
coming along with their pile of money
well they thought it was theirs
but maybe it was the other way around

one pile after another
came down the street
looking for a place to invest
had to be more profitable than the rest
or their organization, their corporation
would weaken, get eaten
get gobbled up by the competitors
or if there was no good meat, no fat
just left to rust, combust, rot
or just to dry up and blow away in the wind

were was this most profitable investment?
who had labor to sell most cheaply?
the best part of the workers day to rape
 Mother Earth to rip wide open
rich resources to plunder
and then market whats been taken from
taken from the earth that was once living
 from your life as well
market every gram of whats been taken
to the point of selling more than is there
oh the consumer doesn’t get it
but that’s part of the take

but, but where is there to invest
everything profitable has been occupied
there’s more of everything than people can buy

invest in the air?
the air?
the water?
the soil?
even the toxics have been put up for sale

the pile of money comes down the street
its owners, its managers
come along with it
look what we own they gloat
the pile of money laughs
“who owns whom?”
but then sighs
“we have to speculate, gamble
build a bubble, trick others into joining us
get their money, boost the prices up
get out quick before it burst
leave them take the losses

by now the pile of money is exhausted
but so are the others
the owners are left where we have been all the time
with nothing
or to much money to invest
with nothing worth buying
nothing but our minds, bodies and spirit
which we refuse to sell
anymore

Thanks, George... 

Y'all;

Time to take this all up again...I've re-activated my 'Wyrdchao Kallisti' FB account again to poach all my 'cognitive bias' posts (see the Pendleton Book Blather group there for the entire history).  I will do my best to repost the comments as well, and invite the people who contributed to join here.

In the long term, I will try to take up where I left off in the cognitive bias list on Wikipedia; I think it all started when I was reviewing "God and the State", a long fragment of a an essay by Mikhail Bakunin, one of the founders of Rational Anarchism.  We miss you, Bob Heinlein....

'Black Lives Matter' Doesn't Matter?

Yes....someday I will just quit talking to people.  My teeth will be much the better for it.  Beer, while pleasant, may not be a good long term solution.  Maybe ranting is better....

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It's repulsive to have to repeat it, but..."any group of people has their assholes."  This is a back-assed way of implying an unfortunately well-abused logical fallacy.  A general class cannot be characterized by an instance of that class...no matter how loud and obnoxious and inflammatory that instance might be.

Which could be said about the Nazis, right?  But that's where the thinking, reading, man can earn his money.  Look at the historical context, the aims, the acts, the means a movement employs to further its professed goals.  Read behind the lines; do the results and the side effects have any relationship to the program?  Look at the long term good and bad!

All of which obscures the smaller, or larger, issue.  Exactly what benefits are our oppressed brothers supposed to be enjoying; or, more realistically, what were they promised, if we agree that they are a member of the class of 'all men'?  What are they being left out of?  What are they missing?

The 'assholes' might retort, caustically:  "Nothing.  Nothing we want from you, anyway."  But surely, if the American Experiment means or once meant anything, it was that our radical version of democracy was supposed to promote (not ensure, certainly not guarantee) a more just, a more civil, a more benign Big Brother.

And the Founding Fathers intended that this idealistic jihad would put a large burden on the citizen..every rational man/woman/hyphen-American has as "obligation to tolerance", a duty to think first and judge later.

To wait for the facts to come in.  For the results to be final.  To be the last person to jump to conclusions.  To detect and ignore the influence of the assholes.  To cut through the facade of rhetoric and respired gibberish to the meat of the honest concern.  To respect the force and inertia of a people's historical experience.

Which is hard.  We are going to bleed.  We are going to hear the sticks and the stones.  We are going to swallow our bile, our frustrated anger at the existence of idiots and loudmouths, whose existence and verbal flatulence obscures the real message and the real issues.

Perhaps the Fathers expected too much of us, or of humanity; should it have taken 150+ years to decide that our not-quite-white cousins are human beings, and acknowledge that 'all men' includes them?  Should we be surprised that they are slightly pissed, and vastly distrustful of us, considering the record of our individual and institutional past behavior, the machinery of which a few of our assholes persist in trying to popularize and revive?

It is NEVER time to stop bitching.  Our distrust in government and the status quo is not an aberration of recent ignorance or stupidity or perversity, but an ingrained attitude of the original charter of our country.  The Constitution, in fact, promised us very little, only that it considered the individual liberties of its citizens its first and greatest concern, if far from its only one.  While this sounds like a license to chaos, They didn't expect us not to exercise our common sense or ignore the facts of nature or hypocritically ignore the intent while pursuing the fruits of liberty.

So whither civil disobedience?  I am not going to trot out statistics and references at this point, but it can be easily demonstrated that peaceful civil disobedience is one of the best ways of effecting social progress; we owe many of the protections and comforts of our present existence to such 'outside the box' efforts.

Nothing ruins the prestige of an action more quickly than avowed chaos and thoughtless and inflammatory public utterance; and nothing lends one more credit than blind and reactionary police oppression, knee-jerk brown-people-bombing, and 'I told about those people' bigotry.

IN our current situation, where our plurality can or has already been purchased by reactionary forces, the usual chain of command is almost useless.  Civil disobedience may be the only way of undoing the erosion of the American social contract, whatever that may be at this late date.

When AIM made the plight of Native Americans impossible to ignore, when Dr. King captivated the world with his eloquence on behalf of its less-well-heard fraction, and now, when Black Lives Matter illuminates the pervasive and continuing existence of institutional bigotry and the tolerance of same...we should use every mental resource, every strand of emotional resilience, every impulse toward common decency, that our Founding Fathers expected us to possess and cultivate.  We were tasked to separate the wheat from the chaff; to do our very best, as citizens, to finally build the kind of society we fought to conceive for ourselves.  To break the cycle of adherence to the oppressive oligarchic systems of Europe that we so despised, way back when.

And yet, here we are...well on our way to creating our own Empire.  Do we want it?

History for Hillbillies

Here in Parochial Paradise, reading books, at least worthwhile ones, is a dependable way to endanger your sanity. There you were, snoozing happily in your puddle of beer, and some loudmouth starts polluting the air with a verbo­fecal ventilation fiasco that just didn't quite seem...*well thought out*, at least in your humble opinion. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that blissful ignorance is not, for you, a worthwhile attainment. So, willy­nilly, you've got some work ahead of you.

You wedge the silly twit's gibberish through a Google search box. After eliminating vitamin supplements, recipes, coupons, and porn, you appear to have a subject of study. You read the Wikipedia article (sideways). You read the bibliographies. You build a reading list. You fantasize about murdering your noisy neighbors and/or family in their sleep.

Finally you've rammed enough facts into your head. You may even delude yourself that, as a result of that effort, you might finally be able answer the question that started the whole goddam thing. Neurosis sets in as soon as you are dumb enough to open your mouth, when you discover that no one else even understands why your subject is (was? might be?) important, or even what it is. They certainly do NOT care what your opinion of it is, although they feel qualified to advance their own.

A surreal revulsion for critical thought sets in: you are vaguely aware that people shouldn't think those awful things, the country shouldn't run this way, the world doesn't WORK like that...and yet it everything bumbles along, day after day, ass­backwards and oblivious. The very nature of chaos seems to ensure that history won't even repeat itself, since how do you know where you are in the cycle in the first place? A universal state of what George Carlin used to call 'vu ja de': the feeling that none of this has ever happened before.

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A few weeks ago, during one of my regular attempts to kill off a few more over­useful brain cells, all of this once again came home to me.  We were talking about the War(s). You know the one(s).

"Cuz, afterall, ya­know dude, the President has messed the whole thing(s) up. We should been out long ago."

I sprayed a bit of my Hef on the bar, then dug in to refute, thus: “Huh?”

Not the best start. Maybe I should spit more of this stuff out, and drink less of it, right off the bat, aye? In any case....

“Um...yes, we probably should have been out of th..those places, long ago. Why is the President specifically to blame, here?”

“Well, he promised to...”

“Yeah, he probably promised to try, at least, I'll concede that, but he didn't start this mess, he was stuck cleaning it up. Let's put this in playground perspective...do you think it's easier to break something, or to fix it?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Sigh.

"When a war is started, my friend, certain forces of human stupidity are deployed:  there exist, in the real world, such things as: compulsive jingoism; compulsive apathy; the partisan echo chamber; political limitations; diplomatic inertia; commitments to allies; commitments to reparation (collateral damage); legal constraints; investment bias; bureaucratic inefficiency; conflicting mandates; emergent issues...blah­di­blah­di....Winding down a war, particularly a [expletive deleted] like this one, is not as simple as starting it...”

“Well, it just shoulda ended when he said it would...”

“...and only naughty boys get mad and take their toys away before others have a chance to finish the game...I believe former President Gas Station Attendant wasn't exactly clairvoyant about that kinda thing hisself...”

“At least HE got Saddam, though!”

“And? So? Did we discover where he was hiding all those terrorist cells and WMD's while he was squatting in his cave? Did I get my cookie? Our current CIC 'got' Bin Laden, right? In schoolyard terms, I'd say we're even there, huh? Sure you want to stick with that answer?”

“Your cookie...­?...b­but Saddam was a bad man....urrrr....”

“...that we put into power in the first place, along with the Saudis, and Diem, and Mobutu, and Guzman, and Somoza, and Pinochet, and Noriega...are you saying that, as a country, we have a special responsibility to depose, preferentially of course, the Bad Men we bankrolled originally?
Is it okay to ignore OTHER Bad Men, who we may or many not be responsible for? Are we a little teapot, perhaps, that has boiled dry on the campstove of....”

“Uhh, okay, okay...damn, we need another beer don't we...where is that book on the Battle of Leyte Gulf you were gonna loan me...”