So much for "democracy"

When I was younger, I went through a phase in which I read a lot of espionage/conspiracy fiction (Ludlum, Follet, etc). One of the reasons that phase ended rather abruptly was that I got frustrated with what I deemed at the time an overly used lack of realism: time after time in these books, things happened that the characters got away with some major, obvious lie/conspiracy that I thought they would *never* get away with in the real world. "As soon as any inclination of that got out, those people would be toast" thought I, "the people would not stand for that."

I'm considering going back to the genre: I'm coming to see, over and over, that that scenario is not unrealistic, because I'm watching it play out over and over. The first example where this really hit me was the Iraq war based first on the claims that Iraq had WMD - something I knew was *not* true from information I gleaned while working at the time at a major government facility from whose population some of the inspector teams in Iraq were drawn, and watched in horror as our government baldfacedly lied to our population *and the swallowed it, burped, and asked for more* - and then the so-blatant-even-Joe-the-plumber-could-figure-it-out bait-and-switch that no, it wasn't WMD, it was that Iraq was involved with Al Quaeda and 9-11, yeah, that's the ticket (with a nod to Jon Lovitz' compulsive-liar SNL sketches) (or do I have the sequence of these lies reversed?).

Well, that's old news, but we sure have a whopper staring at us today: President Bush is going to end-around the democratic process and give the automakers the bailout that Congress denied them:

Mr. Bush made his announcement a week after Senate Republicans blocked an automaker bailout that had been negotiated by the White House and Congressional Democrats. The loan package announced by the president includes requirements that are roughly identical to those in that bill, which was approved by the House.

I have my complaints about government even when it is an actual democracy, but ours is not even that any longer: in what kind of "separation of powers" is it possible for more than one branch to do exactly the same thing? That's not "separation of powers", that's "or'd" powers: this thing gets done if branch A wants it done or branch B wants it done...

I just can't see how everyone isn't either going apoplectic or hanging their heads in shame for their own complicity and stupidity. A few short months ago, our populace sat quietly by as our government instrumented an extraordinary power grab, authorizing the staggering sum of 700Billion dollars (estimated by most to really be several times that figure by the time we are done) based on weak and hurried arguments about the eminent collapse of our economy and passed only on the promises to "trust them": that the use of these funds would be specific to the "saving" of the financial industry.

And yet

The money to aid the automakers will come from the Treasury’s $700 billion financial stabilization fund.

Wwwwwwwhat?? That wasn't what we signed on for (to the extent that we signed on at all)! Where is the outrage? How far away are we from just having a system in which Congress just authorizes a huge sum of money for the government to spend on whatever they want, without any debate, due process, accountability, etc?

How the *fuck* do you take extraordinary measures to authorize the partial nationalization of an industry and a huge hidden tax on everyone (that 700 BN dollars is essentially newly minted money, meaning it comes from every one of us by devaluing the money we already have) based only on our trust that you'll do what you said you were going to do with that money and then mere *weeks* later use that money to run roughshod over the democratic process by having the executive branch essentially make the "laws" that congress voted down, and have no one go ape-shit about it??

This isn't theory, this is in-your-face reality, and yet I *still* don't see the outrage that even the most stringent defender of our system should be expressing at this violation of that very system. I don't see how these thing fail to shake the religious belief in "government" or "the state" as our omnipotent, omniscient God. Where is the *thinking*, people?

Doesn't just wanting "change" mean something was seriously wrong?

Much of the rhetoric around Obama's successful election campaign, as well as the economic problems that are facing the country and world, can be summarized in one word: change. To take a representative quote:

Nobody knows exactly what they should, but anything is better than nothing.

This from New York City mayor Bloomberg, discussing government bailout of companies in the wake of the stock market crash, on the September 21 edition of Meet the Press.

Something really bothers me about this line of "thinking", and I think I can explain it with a little mental exercise.

Imagine a game in which the object is to get the highest score on a scale of 1-100. The game allows you to make "moves" when it is your turn; for simplicity, let's just say it's some set of moves numbered from 1 to n. What the moves actually *are* isn't important for this thought exercise. In fact, the moves are completely meaningless to the players: the game does not tell you ahead of time what the relationship between the moves and scores is. The game also does not tell you ahead of time how many moves you will get to make. All you know ahead of time is that each move gives you some score between 1-100, and to simplify the thought process a little, let's assume that the game also tells you that if you just randomly pick rules, your average score will be 50, that is, the distribution of scores is some symmetric curve around 50 (it's probably best to just think of a constant distribution, that is, every score from 1-100 is equally likely).

So, basically, it's a guessing game: you make a random move, you get a score. The game might end at that point; you don't know. Your score in the game is the score of your last move.

Note, however, that you don't *have* to make a different move. If you're happy with the score you have, you can keep choosing the same move and getting the same score.

So, let's consider playing this game. You must start by making some random guess, and you get back a score. When and why would you choose to make *another* guess? Clearly, if your score is less than 50, it is *always* a good idea to make another guess, because the expected value of your new move is higher than your old one, and you'd rather end up on a better score. If your score is already over 50, it only makes sense to guess again if you have some way of predicting how many moves the game might go on; otherwise, if you guess again and get a lower score, you run the risk of the game ending and thus ending up with a worse score. Since the rules of the game dictate that you *don't* have any way to predict how many moves the game will last, guessing when you are over 50 is at best risky, and perhaps suboptimal.

In either case, it's important to note the following conclusion: the *only* time when it makes sense to randomly guess a new move is when you are already below the halfway mark.

Now let's pull this back to "change": according to Bloomberg and the apparent social, government, and MSM consensus, *any* change right now is better than none at all. Any *random* change; IOW, they are advocating that in our game, we definitely should take another move and randomly get a new score. In the context of our game, this implies that the current "score" must be less than 50, must be less than "halfway".

Do you see the dilemma? Assuming of course that our game is a decent analogy for the "economy" and generally for "society" - and it's clear enough from centuries of failures, mistakes, tragedies, rise and fall of ideologies, etc, that the relationship between the "moves" that government can make and their "economic score" is nearly random (this follows mathematically from the highly nonlinear and thus chaotic nature of economic and social systems) - this means that either A) after 232 years of being "in charge", our government is still scoring less than halfway in this game, or B) random change is *not* the optimal move.

In either case, our government is failing us: either they have failed to achieve the halfway score that a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard to run the economy would achieve (the median of our distribution), or they are now embarking on a venture that is going to make things worse on average.

The point really is: change for change's sake is never a good idea unless you are in the total crapper.

I realize that Democrats will be happy to conclude that the economy *is* in the crapper and that it's the republican's fault, and thus random change *does* make sense. Sorry, you don't get a pass: economic momentum spans far more than the term of one president or congress, and includes the consequences (usually unintended: politicians don't have much incentive to think longer-term than the duration of their terms, unlike private parties who have incentives to think in terms of spans of time that are at least their lifetime long and oftentimes the lifetime of their children and children's children) of decisions made many decades ago. The current economy cannot be laid at the feet of Republicans or the Bush administration; it's a bipartisan failure, tracing some of its origins to events such as the imposition of the individual income tax and the creation of the fraudulent Federal Reserve system that go back almost a decade and which had the complicity of every congress and president since, Republocrat and Demopublican.

If I had hired "government" to run my economy and the solution they gave me after 232 years was "random change", well, they'd be fired.

And isn't that what the government is? People that work for us? Doesn't the preamble say "for the people"?

I say we fire 'em, and look for a group of people who has something better to sell us then "change". How about, you know, an actual *plan*?

Greenspan's stock slides further

There is a lot of interesting things to comment on in this article on Greenspan's testimony to Congress in the face of the financial meltdown:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html

Mr. Cox replied, “There’s no question that somewhere in this terrible mess many laws were broken.”

This probably isn't the most important part, but it sits with the theme I've been running with lately: what good are "laws" when the government doesn't actually stop anyone from *breaking* them? We see this problem over and over: the disconnect between "we'll pass a law for X" and "X actually happens." The record is clear: the correlation between passing a law for something and it actually happening is pretty slim. I sometimes think people get confused by social "laws" and scientific/physical "laws", which are entirely different concepts but unfortunately share the same word: physical laws are inviolable (note: there's a much subtler sense in which that isn't entirely true, but that's a subject of some later philosophical note, not a political note), whereas social laws are really just threats: do this, and this other thing will probably happen to you. Like any threat, sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, and sometimes it will have weird, perverse consequences.

In either case, the point stands: we *passed* a bunch of laws that supposedly should have stopped this from happening, but "many laws were broken." So where were our law enforcers? What good is it to pass laws that don't actually do anything? Isn't this just a cheap facade of "doing something"?

Will we remember this when the inevitable call comes to prevent this from happening in the future by passing even *more* laws? It astounds me that when pouring gasoline on a fire doesn't put the fire out, the majority respond by pouring even *more* gasoline in the fire in the thought that *this* time, it's going to work.

As for Greenspan himself, his fall-from-grace in my eyes is falling as fast as what little net-worth I once had. Of course, that started long before it did for most people: for many, he was the wizard of wall street for much of the last 10 years. For me, his fall from grace started long before that, when he went from being a free-market advocate to holding the reins of one of the more vile tools of central government: central banks. I'm hardly alone in that assessment, and so it doesn't add much for me to repeat those criticisms in depth here (short version: central banks are dishonest at best, since they issue fiat money and as such tax the populace in a hidden way via inflation, and at worst they are a contributor to and even a reason *for* pointless "wars" like the Iraq "war", the "war" on drugs, and the "war" on terrorism. It's part of the machinery of the state of fear and control, and Greenspan should *know* better, he was trained in free markets and decentralization and he's become a turncoat to those ideals).

However, it's worthwhile picking on him for the further capitulations he commits in this testimony:

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.

This reminds me of the question illustrating false premises: "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Implicit in this exchange is the patently *false* and absurdly so assumption that what Greenspan presided over was "deregulation ideology". Putting aside the inherent sophistry in the term "deregulation" (there is only *regulation*; "deregulation" is a manipulative attempt to convince people that the norm is "regulation", and that anything different is somehow abhorrent and risky), no system with as much central control as the Federal Reserve system can possibly be called "deregulated". I invite you to try minting your own currency and trading in it to see just how "deregulated" the issue of currency in this country is. The fed owns a monopoly on the production of currency, and it prints more whenever it feels like doing so. The private equivalent would be buying stock in a company and then having them print more stock willy-nilly, without compensating you for your now devalued stock. It would never fly in the private sector, which Greenspan pays lip-service to as a "free marketeer", but he's perfectly happy to pull the puppet strings of a deceptive monopoly.

What exactly is the "flaw" that Greenspan has now had his epiphany about?

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

What bothers me about this is now no longer does Greenspan not stick with the principles that formed his origin, he doesn't even *understand* them any longer.

Free-market theory does not say that institutions in a free market *will regulate themselves*. Any 5th grader can see the flaw in that: institutions are composed of people, and people will in the aggregate do what is in their self-interest (with some asterisks that aren't important in this screed). Of *course* institutions need regulation. Even the hardiest anti-free marketeer wants the majority of its businesses to be private, for the benefits of competition and consumer choice on the quality of those businesses has been displayed over and over (I hear no call, say, for the government to take over the car manufacturing business).

What free-market theory properly applied to the problem of regulation says is not that businesses will be self-regulating, but rather that *regulation itself is a business*, and thus like other businesses, the "regulation industry" will be better as a private industry because of the benefits of competition and consumer choice.

Of course we need regulation of our businesses, but we need a private industry in "regulation". Government would not be good at making cars because forced monopolies have no incentive to be efficient, innovative, etc; the same applies to a forced government monopoly on "regulation". Indeed, the failures of our government system to regulate are glaring at us all in the form of zeros in so many bank accounts and foreclosure signs on so many yards. Why do we give a pass to a system that is clearly not working?

Greenspan was intellectually brought up in an environment of free-markets; that he would make this crucial blunder of understanding is at least as unforgivable as his turned-back at the aspects of free-markets that he does understand.

Bloomberg and Term Limits: Wow

New York City Council Votes to Extend Term Limits

After a spirited, emotional and at times raucous debate, the
New York City Council voted, 29 to 22, to extend term limits,
allowing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to seek re-election next
year and undoing the result of two voter referendums that had
imposed a limit of two four-year terms.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

I don't know if I have much more to say other than "Wow". This is democracy in action?? The hairs on the back of my neck go up when I see something like this, it reminds me of the kings and tyrants of old changing rules on the fly to suit their personal agendas. What kind of "rule of law" do we have when the rulers get to change the laws??

Like the previous post, I put this one down as another black mark against our current system: this is a failure of government.

The government protects us from crime?

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my most abiding passions is the advocacy of "civil society", which is basically an advocacy for what is at least a very different direction in "government" and at its most is an advocacy for an end to the concept of "nation-state" as it has been practiced over the last couple of centuries. This is not the post to go into the detail of all of that, but part of the intellectual process of that advocacy is an honest analysis of our *current* system as part of the process of comparing alternatives and the current system on even ground.

Detractors of my ideas are dedicated to the notion of finding flaws, of finding ways in which the resulting society would be less than perfect. I'm perfectly ok with that: that's part of a rational process of evaluation. What I find very *irrational* is that those same people are unwilling to honestly assess and see the flaws of the *current* system. My contention isn't that the alternatives I'd like to consider and ultimately advocate are "perfect", just that they are *better* than what we have, in large part because what we have now does not, frankly, set the bar very high.

In that line, I find the following datapoint interesting. Supposedly, one of the "failures" of my advocated systems is that they are "weak" on law and order (because most of my suggestions involve much smaller and less powerful governments than what we currently see in the world). The implication is that the current system is particularly strong on law and order, that the government protects us from criminals and other bad doers.

But does it really do a very good job at that? Or have we just become habituated to its failures to the point where we don't notice them? I've read in many places - and largely been convinced by - the notion that in fact, our police force does not actually *protect* us from criminals at all. For the most part, police don't *stop* crimes; they catch criminals after the fact. Is that really "protecting" us from criminals?

I was privy to a particularly poignant (to me, at least) illustration of this notion the other day, associated with etail giant Ebay: out of 15,000 Ebay employees, a full 3,000, or 20%, work in their anti-fraud department. Think about that for a second: fraud is a *crime*, and those that commit fraud are criminals. Isn't it the government's job to protect us from criminals? Then why does Ebay need to hire 3,000 people to *protect themselves* from criminals? This isn't a handful of security guards, this is an enormous overhead on a company. There's basically *no* expectation that the government is going to help prevent this fraud. The police force have basically just said "you're on your own".

The list of failures of the current form of government (and I'll comment mostly on American government since that's what I know best, but the American system isn't different enough from other major western countries - and many eastern countries are worse - to really distinguish. My comment, IOW, are not limited to America) is something that I want to capture here over time, and this sure seems like an interesting place to start.