Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: pine on May 11, 2012, 05:17 am
-
Mandatory: Listen to Catgroove by Parov Stelar while reading this FP piece :)
Sauce: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/28/black_market_global_economy
Relevant quote; entire article:
As DPR says, stand tall, you are part of a Revolution.
With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa's most populous country.
It wasn't a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country's electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle's brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David's deal, struck four years ago, was not massive -- but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.
You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.
It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.
Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of System D. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe's throughout the United States. And it's not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi's deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, System D is multinational, moving all sorts of products -- machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more -- around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.
In many countries -- particularly in the developing world -- System D is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. But even in developed countries, after the financial crisis of 2008-09, System D was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated -- in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D -- fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations. Studies of countries throughout Latin America have shown that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial crisis.
This spontaneous system, ruled by the spirit of organized improvisation, will be crucial for the development of cities in the 21st century. The 20th-century norm -- the factory worker who nests at the same firm for his or her entire productive life -- has become an endangered species. In China, the world's current industrial behemoth, workers in the massive factories have low salaries and little job security. Even in Japan, where major corporations have long guaranteed lifetime employment to full-time workers, a consensus is emerging that this system is no longer sustainable in an increasingly mobile and entrepreneurial world.
So what kind of jobs will predominate? Part-time work, a variety of self-employment schemes, consulting, moonlighting, income patching. By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D. There's no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation. Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D.
The growth of System D presents a series of challenges to the norms of economics, business, and governance -- for it has traditionally existed outside the framework of trade agreements, labor laws, copyright protections, product safety regulations, antipollution legislation, and a host of other political, social, and environmental policies. Yet there's plenty that's positive, too. In Africa, many cities -- Lagos, Nigeria, is a good example -- have been propelled into the modern era through System D, because legal businesses don't find enough profit in bringing cutting- edge products to the third world. China has, in part, become the world's manufacturing and trading center because it has been willing to engage System D trade. Paraguay, small, landlocked, and long dominated by larger and more prosperous neighbors, has engineered a decent balance of trade through judicious smuggling. The digital divide may be a concern, but System D is spreading technology around the world at prices even poor people can afford. Squatter communities may be growing, but the informal economy is bringing commerce and opportunity to these neighborhoods that are off the governmental grid. It distributes products more equitably and cheaply than any big company can. And, even as governments around the world are looking to privatize agencies and get out of the business of providing for people, System D is running public services -- trash pickup, recycling, transportation, and even utilities.
Just how big is System D? Friedrich Schneider, chair of the economics department at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, has spent decades calculating the dollar value of what he calls the shadow economies of the world. He admits his projections are imprecise, in part because, like privately held businesses everywhere, businesspeople who engage in trade off the books don't want to open their books (most successful System D merchants are obsessive about profit and loss and keep detailed accounts of their revenues and expenses in old-fashioned ledger books) to anyone who will write anything in a book. And there's a definitional problem as well, because the border between the shadow and the legal economies is blurry. Does buying some of your supplies from an unlicensed dealer put you in the shadows, even if you report your profit and pay your taxes? How about hiding just $1 in income from the government, though the rest of your business is on the up-and-up? And how about selling through System D even if your business is in every other way in compliance with the law? Finding a firm dividing line is not easy, as Keith Hart, who was among the first academics to acknowledge the importance of street markets to the economies of the developing world, warned me in a recent conversation: "It's very difficult to separate the nice African ladies selling oranges on the street and jiggling their babies on their backs from the Indian gangsters who control the fruit trade and who they have to pay rent to."
Schneider suggests, however, that, in making his estimates, he has this covered. He screens out all money made through "illegal actions that fit the characteristics of classical crimes like burglary, robbery, drug dealing, etc." This means that the big-time criminals are likely out of his statistics, though those gangsters who control the fruit market are likely in, as long as they're not involved in anything more nefarious than running a price-fixing cartel. Also, he says, his statistics do not count "the informal household economy." This means that if you're putting buckles on belts in your home for a bit of extra cash from a company owned by your cousin, you're in, but if you're babysitting your cousin's kids while she's off putting buckles on belts at her factory, you're out.
Schneider presents his numbers as a percentage of the total market value of goods and services made in each country that same year -- each nation's gross domestic product. His data show that System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster than the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply his percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn't snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.
In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy. All over the world -- from San Francisco to São Paulo, from New York City to Lagos -- people engaged in street selling and other forms of unlicensed trade told me that they could never have established their businesses in the legal economy. "I'm totally off the grid," one unlicensed jewelry designer told me. "It was never an option to do it any other way. It never even crossed my mind. It was financially absolutely impossible." The growth of System D opens the market to those who have traditionally been shut out.
This alternative economic system also offers the opportunity for large numbers of people to find work. No job-cutting or outsourcing is going on here. Rather, a street market boasts dozens of entrepreneurs selling similar products and scores of laborers doing essentially the same work. An economist would likely deride all this duplicated work as inefficient. But the level of competition on the street keeps huge numbers of people employed. It liberates their entrepreneurial energy. And it offers them the opportunity to move up in the world.
In São Paulo, Édison Ramos Dattora, a migrant from the rural midlands, has succeeded in the nation's commercial capital by working as a camelô -- an unlicensed street vendor. He started out selling candies and chocolates on the trains, and is now in a more lucrative branch of the street trade -- retailing pirate DVDs of first-run movies to commuters around downtown. His underground trade -- he has to watch out for the cops wherever he goes -- has given his family a standard of living he never dreamed possible: a bank account, a credit card, an apartment in the center of town, and enough money to take a trip to Europe.
Even in the most difficult and degraded situations, System D merchants are seeking to better their lives. For instance, the garbage dump would be the last place you would expect to be a locus of hope and entrepreneurship. But Lagos scavenger Andrew Saboru has pulled himself out of the trash heap and established himself as a dealer in recycled materials. On his own, with no help from the government or any NGOs or any bank (Andrew has a bank account, but his bank will never loan him money -- because his enterprise is unlicensed and unregistered and depends on the unpredictable labor of culling recyclable material from the megacity's massive garbage pile), he has climbed the career ladder. "Lagos is a city for hustling," he told me. "If you have an idea and you are serious and willing to work, you can make money here. I believe the future is bright." It took Andrew 16 years to make his move, but he succeeded, and he's proud of the business he has created.
We should be too. As Joanne Saltzberg, who heads Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore -- a business development group -- told me, we need to change our attitude and to salute the achievements of those who are engaged in this alternate economy. "We only revere success," she said. "I don't think we honor the struggle. People who have no access to business development resources. People who have to work two and three jobs just to survive. When you are struggling in this economy and still you commit yourself to having a better life, that's really something to honor."
-
Our modern day mandarins, are finished. We don't need to be violent to change the world, albeit I'm sure that will also happen between both sides. Ultimately the gravity of economics rules the world and it has tilted into our hands one free transaction at a time. The Old World is dying because it has forgotten the principals that made it powerful and strong. It has lost its purpose, its story, its continuity, its ideological soul. The Old World is not a geographical location, simply a broadly accepted way of thinking about the world in many developed countries, and that is definitely going to die. It is simply too apragmatic to live. People would rather die than change their minds. In fact, they do. They will.
The 75% tax of France, the dead children in Norway, they are all merely symptoms of a greater disease, a horrific inertia in the West.
Today, our supposedly capitalist nations are directly controlled by central governments. It is called "managed capitalism" or "the third way". In most parts of 'The West', the government owns at least 50% of the economic output per year and gives next to nothing in terms of value in return. Value is being entirely miscalculated, misdirected on a epic scale. What they are doing is not even Socialism, because it doesn't even come close to spitting distance of the goals of that ideology. What we are talking about, is that most parasitical and bastardized form of that ideology -> state communism.
It is just, that as Hayek warned, it has crept up on us little by little, and most of us haven't noticed it, because it's hard to see what is unseen, what the other possibility to government interventionism that there is. DPR calls this being intellectually lazy, and that is precisely correct. People who think like libertarians are considered unusual today, as being far left wing or far right wing. The great irony is that the word liberal used to mean the same thing as libertarian. Adam Smith was a liberal. Today people like Regan and Thacher would be considered extremists and they would be put under surveillance.
Let us abandon the classical idea of 'right wing' and 'left wing' being at war and band altogether. Because although we are rivals today we have a common enemy. This is a War. Our enemy is *this* Government. It does NOTHING for the business men and women of this country. It does NOTHING for the poor, the sick and the dispossessed. Good intentions are worthless.
Soon huge mobs will pace the streets. The dual hydra of Fascism and Communist haunts us once more. If that is not obvious then I'm not sure what is. Place your ear to the ground, people are getting angry, everywhere.
So what! Do you feel in your heart the urge to take action? What to do? Take up arms and join a popular revolt? Post newsletters and political blog? No... As much as you might empathize with the intentions of Anonymous and Occupy and other political minorities, their goals and their medium of expressing those is hopelessly naive. That is a very quick way to be grist for the mill of the media and government. And in fact most of the time they play directly into the narrative the government is building. Notice for example, how guessing somebody's PIN number (99% of the time 0000, 1234, 4321) is 'hacking'. A word, which itself meant an original, innovative approach to using or making a system, now is classified in the same category as "breaking and entering" or "grievous bodily harm".
Instead, I want people to throw all their weight behind the system until it snaps. This involves not being naive or ignorant. This involves being smart. Standing up to 'The Man' is out of the question. You'd be crushed like a twig. What does work is clever forms of indirect asymmetric warfare to improve your financial situation. Soft power. It is perfectly possible to be the head of a government department, a policeman or the head of a major corporation and be manipulating the system, diluting its powers. The Resistance Movement in the Vichy government is an example.
- Being a model citizen as much as possible so you are 'blameless' in the sight of the law. If you wear a hoodie or associate with known rabblerousers, don't, if you have a criminal record, volunteer in your local community. There is such a thing as social credit and it will stand to you. You are going to be a doubleagent for us.
- Avoiding/evading taxes. Do it right. If Warren Buffet can pay 3% per year for his tax bill, it means he actually pays 0% real tax. It's not what you say that counts, it's what you do.
- Offering certain kinds of free services to speed up our economy e.g. B$ laundering.
- Using cash/traceless forms of credit.
- Investing in the informal economy or in countries which have more of it.
- Remaining anonymous on the clearnet. Social networks are really poison.
- Setting up any anonymous communication networks (thanks wretched!).
- Supporting anonymous networks like Tor by sponsoring relays.
- Using technologies like PGP.
- being an informant
- by this, I mean people like police, lawyers, accountants, programmers, chemists, postal workers.
- these people are very very useful to us, even if they don't realize it. They can give us
- information, tutorials, on how to hack their systems. There are numerous examples on
- this very forum. e.g. JanetReno, a Canadian LE agent and so on.
- coming up with new ideas... <insert your own bullet point here>
Open source intelligence is perhaps 99% of the battle and usually it's not illegal to participate in it ("professional misconduct" is not a crime), it's not just LE that can use informants. They get an informant to snitch on one of us. Great. Big whoop. That person is just going to be replaced by a thousand others in their stead. Guess what. If we know how escape ion spectrometry and x-rays because some dude wrote a whitepaper, then we just got a major upgrade and your numbers suddenly became completely meaningless.
--
This is not just a war of economics, it is a war of morality too. We are pure and they are corrupt. It's a statement of fact and easily demonstrable even if you look at publicly available information in the mainstream press. The DEA cooperates with people who lop off hundreds of people's heads and knowingly sends them intelligence and tools to aid them. The top people in power of the DEA and the heads of the Cartels have cooperatively turned some parts of the globe into abattoirs in the name of the greater good. I find it amazing that many of these men are passionate Christians, because they act like Devils.
They put spies into governments who naively trust in their mission statement all over the world and operate against the interests of those people their sponsors are supposed to protect by destabilizing them to make them weaker. I also know things which even a westerner would find difficult to believe, such as the fact they seed landmines by the ton and have used enormously dangerous plant killing sprays which poison water supplies and put entire district's cancer statistics off the charts. Almost by definition the children and women are the first to die or become maimed.
They get away with this, because it works. Those people are illiterate, have no access to electricity let alone sophisticated communications, have weak governments and they are afraid of the DEA's death squads. I mean, if you were trying to define what the word terrorism really means, you ought to give these men a call. Operation Condor, that infamous clandestine war in which people were disappeared by the thousand and flung alive out of airplanes into the Atlantic to be violently pulverized so hard their limbs flew off when they smacked the water or they drowned, is a tiny drop in the bucket in comparison. The mainstream media *does* know this, but frankly many journalists are either worried for their career prospects or sick of repeatedly telling an audience which has deaf ears, which does not feel remotely culpable despite actually funding these missions with their tax dollars.
I'm not claiming to be perfect here, because even if I were a notorious serial killer I'd rank well above the DEA on moral grounds. I don't particularly remember chopping off people's heads or giving improvised families cancer.
If you fight back, then at the end of it all, you will be more wealthy, more powerful, more intelligent than ever before. You have become more of an individual at every level. To society you present the smiling face of the civic minded citizen. Behind your back you grip the blade to plunge into the heart of the enemy when the time is right. The best part is that you don't need to try to change other people's minds or use physical violence. You just need to be more rational, think more clearly than LE. This is the right thing to do. Not what pine tells you to do, but what you believe to be so.
Individual responsibility. Take it.
-
Intense.
-
Dear Hero Pine:
I so enjoy your prose and agree with much of your worldview vis-a-vis the export of the terror done by the organization known as the DEA. Virtually all of the western world's military has been used to steal resources round the world or force our "forefather's" religious world view on non-christian societies. Its immoral and cannot be justified: just as any war cannot be justified as a moral undertaking.
But, I think you conflate these very bad parts of western governments with the idea that government structures such as the U.S. are irredeemable and basically anti-humanistic. I don't see how the very useful societal tools such as clean water and sewer systems, safe roads and transportation, a basic public secular education system and a generally accessible, fair judicial system could come about without the cooperative creation of government by the people and for the people. I think that more dis-ease and sadness would result if governments were destroyed rather than gradually changed to reflect a more egalitarian meritocracy. I can't tell if you really believe that a system that doesn't have mechanisms for collecting some form of taxes in a relatively safe and fair way to create expensive public welfare systems such as the ones
I've mentioned could make for a happier world. The entrepreneurs you've described represent the type of people who can advance any society that they find themselves in. If they are in despotic, impoverished parts of the world or are being crushed under the superstitious, brutal theocracies then they have no choice but to try to survive and thrive by their wits and entrepreneurial spirit. That doesn't mean we should try to emulate the systems that create the individual's need to go debrouillard.
The creation and use of TOR, SR, open-source software are beautiful and wonderful things. Working to go around the maniacal war on drugs, war on terror and virtually anything that uses the term "war on..." are honorable and morally defensible pursuits for all of us. I think you are a real hero for speaking up on these things and trying to encourage others to work to change whats wrong with the world.
-
Dear Hero Pine:
I so enjoy your prose and agree with much of your worldview vis-a-vis the export of the terror done by the organization known as the DEA. Virtually all of the western world's military has been used to steal resources round the world or force our "forefather's" religious world view on non-christian societies. Its immoral and cannot be justified: just as any war cannot be justified as a moral undertaking.
To be honest I think the idea the West's military incursions throughout the past two or three centuries, right up to the present day, have relatively little to do with resource extraction. It's not that this was not done, or that tying down resources was not an objective. I believe for example, much of the logic behind the operations in Afghanistan has little or nothing to do with manipulating the opium harvest, but gaining control over the world's supply of morphine. This is a highly critical resource that is extremely centralized, something like 90% of the world's poppy harvest comes from Afghanistan, and the best painkillers have always been derivatives of the poppy plant, I don't believe there is a chemical substitute that comes within a country mile of morphine. This is good evidence for this, because the developing world is currently experiencing chronic morphine starvation and has done so since the Taliban were deposed while the United States is hoarding it). That to me is a much more worrisome aspect of this 'War on Terror' than many other things that have got more press. It hints at an isolationist creed, and one directly targeted at preparations for a confrontation.
But no, the main reason for colonization historically began with trade and over a long period ended with ideology. This, is not exclusively a bad thing. I do not view killing people as necessarily being immoral. What really matters in my view is the network effect. What is the sum total, the final result that your actions culminated in? I mean, I have difficult accepting for example, that the invasion of Europe by the United States was morally wrong, or that the British colonization of India was morally wrong. The reason is simply that I think there is excellent evidence to suggest that those events ultimately murdered far fewer people indirectly as a result. So, I guess to pine morality is purely a numbers game. In the case of the 'War on Terror', 'War on Drugs', the positive results of preventing a few terrorist attacks or preventing a couple of thousand people overdosing on impure street drugs are vastly outweighed by the people effected by those operations.
I'm not arguing you necessarily require omniscience although clearly that would help, because there are plenty of situations in which it is a black/white decision which action or inaction will lead to more causalities and which will lead to less. i.e. the outcomes are well understood results of a causality relation by using even primitive inductive or deductive logic.
But, I think you conflate these very bad parts of western governments with the idea that government structures such as the U.S. are irredeemable and basically anti-humanistic. I don't see how the very useful societal tools such as clean water and sewer systems, safe roads and transportation, a basic public secular education system and a generally accessible, fair judicial system could come about without the cooperative creation of government by the people and for the people. I think that more dis-ease and sadness would result if governments were destroyed rather than gradually changed to reflect a more egalitarian meritocracy.
Pretty much all those societal tools you mentioned are extremely badly run and are highly inconsistent. You say that more unhappiness would result if the government evaporated. I agree. Unlike some here, I am not an anarchist. I think government is necessary for capitalism to work in the first place.
Nor am I saying that if we merely had 'good people' in the right places with the right ideas, then that everything would run smoothly and more efficiency. That's a complete cop-out, a short term solution if there ever was one. In the short term highly motivated individuals can change the world, but in the long term the System changes the people.
If I'm not saying "make it work better", then what am I saying? Well it's that the key thing to permanent change for the better, is the structure of the system itself. This is not a Revolution to get rid of The West. This is a Revolution within the West to alter itself. If you're a computer person, you might say I'm talking about updating the kernel.
It's hilarious to me that people keep harping on about 'fixing capitalism'. Capitalism basically works, but needs to become ever more efficient. It is good at that. Capitalism evolves extremely fast in fact. So I am content that that part of the part, the engine room if you will, is essentially operational and adaptive. Karl Marx, incidentally, wouldn't necessarily disagree with that statement, as hard as that might be to believe. He actually said the same thing as I just did.
My problem is democracy. That overly glorified method of alternating between left wing and right wing governments over time. Egalitarianism and Meritocracy are opposites. Socialism is egalitarian and Capitalism is meritocratic. They do not mix. They are oil and water. The great success of Western civilization, is that it managed to more or less successfully alternate between these two forces for the past three centuries.
Democracy is busted, the model is too simple to compete with the power of market forces. It's easy to show this because we have centralist governments in the West, and there are simultaneously left wing and right wing forces surging through the system. Those forces are untapped potential which are unintentionally damaging society.
It cannot evolve no matter how large our populations get. You see, I believe that our political systems are functions of our population size, which in turn is dependent on market forces. Right now, the horsepower of the engine is shaking the rest of the machine to bits, and most people seem to believe the solution is to lower the engine power, which I clearly see as an unsound decision. It's not progressive to retard the power of capitalism, it's the same enlightened thinking that bought us the dark ages in Europe and the stagnation of the Middle Kingdom.
I don't have a problem with the job that a Democracy is supposed to do. My problem is that it's not doing it properly. It's not a simple question of more or less democracy. It's a case of where, when and how much. We have to appreciate that markets are infinitely more complex than they were 300 years ago in terms of both scale and complexity. e.g. there were maybe 10 commodities in use, now they are uncountable. Yet democracy has barely evolved at all since then.
We require a new method to alternate between channeling power equally or unequally over time and space. Again, I think democracy no longer has the precision necessary to make fundamentally sound judgement calls. It is way too blunt as an instrument.
People with vague, uninformed notions of how the world works, in every sphere, are preemptively obstructing people who could improve it. In the market this doesn't matter because people who don't like certain things simply don't pay for them, but democracy is stifling scientific research, objective judicial rulings and much more besides. You could argue for example, that we spend more money on cat food than on cancer research is a market failure, but I would tell you that although that's a possible inefficiency, you couldn't turn around and tell me that we are blockading cancer research full stop. With democracy, whole swaths of intellectual life are permanently stifled without rhyme or reason.
If people vote a certain way, and there is a fuck up. I want them to hurt. I want them to hurt in direct proportion to their error. But for that to occur, they actually have to be conscious that they voted on that thing in the first place. That is the idea I am struggling with, the idea of a democracy that is accountable for its actions, where voters are intimately aware and effected by the consequences for better or worse of their decision making. It can't be done manually, so I'm thinking of how it might be done automatically on the fly.
I can't tell if you really believe that a system that doesn't have mechanisms for collecting some form of taxes in a relatively safe and fair way to create expensive public welfare systems such as the ones
I've mentioned could make for a happier world. The entrepreneurs you've described represent the type of people who can advance any society that they find themselves in. If they are in despotic, impoverished parts of the world or are being crushed under the superstitious, brutal theocracies then they have no choice but to try to survive and thrive by their wits and entrepreneurial spirit. That doesn't mean we should try to emulate the systems that create the individual's need to go debrouillard.
The creation and use of TOR, SR, open-source software are beautiful and wonderful things. Working to go around the maniacal war on drugs, war on terror and virtually anything that uses the term "war on..." are honorable and morally defensible pursuits for all of us. I think you are a real hero for speaking up on these things and trying to encourage others to work to change whats wrong with the world.
Ok. We *are* emulating the conditions that cause debrouillard individuals. Just look at where we're talking! The Silk Road! Boy, that bird has flown a long time ago. Nor do I agree those entrepreneurs exist in society by default, they are simply a reaction to failure. State failure. Not market failure. Not due to a lack of state, but too much of it. Incorrectly fluctuating state/market/society interactions would be a better description, but doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Taxation and it's related problem: the size + expansion of the State isn't the core problem, I'm simply using it as metric and watching the trend line for some frame of reference. I mean it is a crude estimate, a State that uses up 40% of GDP could do more damage by deliberately manipulating the economy more than a State using 50% of GDP but using less manipulation, but the damage range has to be connected to the quantity of ownership. If the state controls 100% of production, then making 1 stupid decision means everybody is affected.
tldr; We, seriously, need some new ideas.
-
That was a blast. Thanks.
I do not want to parse some of the things you have said too finely since much of what you've said is of a piece but I must take exception at one assumption/statement:
"but democracy is stifling scientific research, objective judicial rulings and much more besides." The stifling seems to be coming directly from 1 arm of the two party system in the US anyway: The republican party seems to operate on the twisted morality of a superstition created by goat-herds in pre literate society. This, and the hording of information that some in the uber capitalistic conservative echelons of the very wealthy (no support for a decent public education system) are the true blockers of enlightened progression of western society. For capitalism to not injure those with less resources, information has to be accessible. Buying politicians because one can is a travesty of current capitalism.
More anon. I am so impressed with your facility with many subjects. A credit to recreational drug users and their intellect
-
pine, i wish these forums had more people like you in here. your a real thinker and your posts are never just B/S to get your post count up, you actually have important things to say and very educated statements.
-
anybody want to shorten this down a little, i really cbb to read that much right now aha
-
Pine, you are awesome. System D, however, is even more awesome.
And we're all a part of it. Fuck yeah. 8)