6 thoughts on “Letting Capitalism Out Of The Bag”

1. Yeah, I’m pretty pissed with the US electorate these days. This is what happens when you’ve got a universal franchise and a universally liberal-stupid public school system.

   When I found a new colony on Venus I’m seriously considering basic literacy in statistics, economics, public choice theory and Greek argument as a precondition to having the franchise. It’s nothing that a 10th grader couldn’t learn if educated properly.

2. Robert Heinlein had an idea – everyone should enlist in the “Federal Service” or whatever he called it, and sacrifice for their beliefs. No one could be turned away – maybe you would be counting fuzz on caterpillars if that was all you could do. But you would do something and earn your right to vote, hold office, etc.

   On a related topic…

   It bothers me that people talk about the value of assets that have “disappeared” as though the inflated value of an item had any real significance. Enron was a billion dollar company on Monday with its stock worth money – and on Friday its stock was worthless. The energy they were trading had not disappeared! The Tech Stock bubble was the same way – you could say that an artificial valuation is value even if it is not backed up with real assets (buildings, resources, etc). But you better not depend on that! Now we have returned to common sense and people have seen the value of their stock (etc) decline – to closer to what it is actually worth. The artificial “value” that went away never existed. People just get upset when they foolishly do not follow basic investing advice and spread out their risk. I am very sorry that they did not take very basic steps to protect their assets but I also think we should not take tax money to prop up their investments.

3. Well, this is why officials should be chosen by gladiatorial combat of some sort, and not elections. Strip candidates for Congress naked, give them a knife and book of matches, and drop them all by helicopter on a South Pacific island. When the number still alive stabilizes after a few months, harvest the survivors and swear them in. A small group is kept aside and trained as assassins, and paid for every government official they knock off. This keeps the rest on their toes.

   I’d favor a similar process for earning the franchise, or really any license. For example, cars should be designed so that at random intervals the AI brain tries to kill the driver — brakes fail at precisely the wrong moment, doors open while making turns, lights suddenly go out when huge WIDE LOAD trucks approach from the opposite direction, et cetera. Perhaps the DMV should also license a small fleet of robot cars on the highways that randomly target other vehicles. The surviving drivers would be very skilled.

   Same thing with immigration. No laws, no border checks, if you arrive alive and unmaimed on American soil poof you’re a citizen. However, the half-mile wide strip of soil just inside the unfenced border is where we try out booby traps and killbots for the military. You can download the schematics from a government Web server, but the accompanying text is written in ancient Greek. Et cetera.

4. My hope (fantasy?) is that continued improvements in decentralized, inexpensive energy production will render the central government less relevant to us. I hope THAT leads (in my lifetime) to a decentralization of government power back to where it belongs… into the corrupt hands of state level party bosses.

5. Yea I just don’t get people’s irrational fears of truly free markets.

   I got into a rather heated debate with a friend of mine about limited gov’t versus a government in control of everything. He was a teacher so I think you know which side he was on. He couldn’t really ever say exactly why but just always went with this assumption that business left to his own devices will always try and take advantage of the workers as much as possible — work them to death, pay them very little, and discard them when they are done. Basically, the communist manifesto crap. He continued that the rich owners are going to horde all the money and keep it for themselves and never give it back to anybody.

   I tried to tell him that competing factions drive improvements and innovation in employee standards, pay, and business product offering. If an owner rests on his laurels then eventually another business will come along with a better performing and cheaper product and transfer workforce and profits away from the existing company. He just stared and gave me this admonishing look like I was naive enough to believe in Santa Claus or something. He told me that I was foolish to believe that free markets would just automatically always do the right thing. He insisted the government, which has officials that we elect, is responsible for keeping greedy business owners from taking advantage of the poor.

   My friend, like a lot of people, is forgetting the number 1 axiom of business management, “The customer votes with their feet”. In fact, we as a customer get fair more direct input to the free market society than we do with one that strictly depends on government officials that we get a chance to vote on a handful of times through out our life. Every dollar we decide on when and where to spend is essentially a vote of confidence as to whether we approve of the actions of a business. If you don’t like how Nike treats Chinese kids in sweat shops, don’t buy their shoe. Don’t like that GM insists on making cars with cardboard interiors, well don’t buy it.

   It is one thing when a car manufacturer goes under or a bank folds. It is a completely different thing when a government collapses. With one people may lose their 401k, history has shown that with the other, people often times lose their heads — literally.

6. “Well, this is why officials should be chosen by gladiatorial combat of some sort, and not elections.”

   “Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.”
   Frank Herbert

   Offered without further comment.

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