"Workers of the world, Avakian!"

I finally had a chance to listen to Cornell West's interview with Bob Avakian. (http://www.smileyandwest.com/this-weeks-show/take-em-to-task-from-russia-with-love/#more-4775) I enjoyed it much more than I expected I would. I suppose that is because Avakian stuck to complaining about actual problems, only briefly pretended to care anything about science, and avoided explaining what he thinks the cause and cure of the problems might be, other than "put Bob in charge". If you put the word 'crony' in front of 'capitalism' every time he said it, I could agree with nearly everything he said. I am curious how many police home invasions per day and nonviolent people in prison would be enough to convince him that fascism has arrived.

I suspect that power would corrupt him instantly. He clearly thinks Stalin and Mao got it mostly right, and if he had a chance he would improve on their examples in a way that would never allow those pesky artists, democracy advocates, or entrepreneurs to disrupt his prison world. He has no credible cure for the ills he diagnoses. He worships equality and sees markets as sacrilege, and anyone who opposes him is in for some trouble. I wonder what he thinks of the Scandinavian social democracies?

One thing I should learn from his negative example - don't stick to the same old strategies for 40 years, if they don't work. Of course, maybe they *are* working for him, and he's actually quite happy with the status of his revolution - not enough partisans to start building barricades, but a sufficient number to pay for his lifestyle.

proportional budgeting

What if we switched to a form of proportional representation that put a portion of the budget under the control of each party? When I fill out my income taxes each year, I also register my political party, and the taxes I pay go into a separate budget under the control of my party? People could be entitled to government benefits (or not entitled) depending on their party membership. So the Democrats could produce whatever handouts they liked, and Republicans could build fences. If I'm a centrist, maybe I could start a centrist party, or just split my taxes between R & D.

Other government revenue would be split proportionately among the parties.

Hayek described something vaguely similar in his "Constitution of Liberty" if I recall correctly. I think he had a separate body determining the amount of the budget, and then a parliament could wrangle over how to spend the budget.

Government debts? Okay, I need to think about this a while. Any suggestions?

Individualist Collectivism

If people need to belong to a group, they will group together. Are there instances where someone or something will prevent them? False consciousness? Free rider? Stupidity?

Manipulators can use group dynamics to control others. A knee-jerk individualist responds to this idea by seeking an end to group dynamics, denouncing collectivism, fighting it head on. Perhaps a wiser tactician would use judo, turn the force of the opponent to a different purpose. That is, the individualist should seek a way to use group loyalty and feelings of belonging to resist manipulation and strengthen the status of individual rights.

What would a human superorganism look like, a family, a club, a corporation,  a labor union, the boy scouts, AA, a cult, a tribe?

Can capitalism itself be seen as a superorganism? If so, its immune system stinks.

"Pure" collectivism focuses on the state because it's big and powerful. But the scale is all wrong. People do not find it easy to group together to control cheaters, in fact the cheaters tend to rise. Oppression emerges.

"Pure" individualism also fails to control cheaters and satisfy our groupish instincts.

We can't escape our dual nature, part chimp, part bee (to steal from Haidt). So we need to embrace it somehow. How?

No one embraces the straw man version of the atomistic individualist. Is the straw man collectivist any more real? In my version of the straw man, a collectivist sacrifices the rights of individuals for the benefit of the collective. Whoever gets to define the collective good gains power at the expense of others, by disregarding the rights or opinions of others. But this is arbitrary. To harm a part of the superorganism is to harm the whole, isn't it? No human scale surgeon knows how to treat the diseased tissues of the superorganism. So a real collectivist must take care in disregarding individuals, and we can believe that pure individualism provides one possible answer to the question of what benefits the collective most.

nonviolence

If the popularity of the ideas of liberty and the unpopularity of the government was sufficient that violent revolution could possibly succeed, nonviolent change would be even more possible and desirable. 

fact checking the presidential election

A friend of mine emailed me:
> Whenever I'm confused about what politicians say, I go to the nonpartisan site FactCheck.org:

Perhaps I am too cynical, but I no longer believe anything a politician says about what she/he will do in the future. In 2008, Obama was all about hope, change, closing gitmo, healthcare for the uninsured while not disrupting everyone else, hands off the states experimenting with medical marijuana, transparency, yes we can. I've forgotten, did he promise to do something about "too big to fail?" I admit, some of these goals would be difficult to achieve, and we could perhaps forgive him for trying and failing. But he did not even achieve the ones he could have accomplished with an executive order. Healthcare is the only area where there is any possibility that things may have improved, and only a partisan could feel comfortable with either the process or the product in that case. 

The only reason I can imagine that a democrat would continue to support the president is because he is not a republican. But are we really sure about that? Can you help me think of some issues, in addition to healthcare, where we could not plausibly swap McCain for Obama? If McCain had won in 2008, what would be different today, besides no Obamacare and numerous left-wing groups lobbying to prosecute McCain for war crimes, violations of civil rights, and contempt for the constitution? Maybe McCain would not have treated the UAW quite so politely. It turns out, in this game we play for low stakes.

Skeptical Libertarianism or Skeptical of Libertarianism?

My political beliefs are among my most unusual thoughts (though not unique). Extraordinary beliefs call for extraordinary evidence, so I ought to feel suspicious toward them. But its not easy.

When I look at government, it seems so hidebound, inflexible, non-adaptive. My father-in-law is very convinced that the Scandinavian social democracies have everything licked, so that is evidence against me. My confirmation bias makes me uninterested in actually looking at Sweden, and eager to listen to persons who explain it away with ideas about small ethnically homogenous groups having better tools for dealing with free-riders.

Conventional attitudes seem just as problematic, but they have the advantages of familiarity and popularity.

I need good evidence, but good evidence is scarce in politics. The sample size of government experiments is usually 1, and there is almost never a control group. Supporters love the stimulus and are certain it saved us from far worse. Detractors look at the same outcome and draw the opposite conclusion. There are almost certainly collective goods and coordination problems where the right collective decision could improve significantly over laissez faire, but once the mechanism exists it is vulnerable to serious abuse.

Political events happen at a different scale, what I do about my political beliefs has little/no impact on my life, so weak feedback fails to steer me clear of error.

Market advocates and critics both tend to concentrate their attention on markets. Public choice theorists tried to analyze the government, with varying success. The Chicago guys usually find that government is efficient, despite their association with market advocacy. I'm thinking of Gary Becker. (I of course prefer Bryan Caplan.)

Is there/could there be a Hayek of big government, someone with a deep, relatively optimistic and inspiring understanding of how government can work? There are many kinds of actual markets and actual governments. Hayek explained how markets work and why we need them. Who did that for government, as elegantly? Is it possible? (Update - the Nobel committee seems to be suggesting Elinor Ostrom as a sort of Hayek of the left - I'll have to get her book!)

How is corporate governance different from city governance, or national? Too many variables.
Our theories of the firm are weak, and public choice theories confused.

Could governments use rivalry more? In the US, different levels of government compete in some sense for jurisdiction. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches are rivals in some sense. Different bureaus compete for resources, different legislators compete for influence, votes, and contributions. Could technology, or creativity, take us further in this direction? Would it be an improvement?

Open source software and Wikipedia are examples of collective decentralized non-market non-government phenomena. The gift economy is not the same as government. How can we cultivate it?

Governments vary in size, in democracy, in dynamism, and in centralization. Size consists of scope, budget, revenue, debt, and employment (at least).

Can we also think of government as the stable equilibrium in the big game? Molyneux points out that it is rarely government employees who are the ones that enforce our attitudes toward government, we do it to each other, punishing defection and rewarding loyalty. When I gripe about bureaucrats, its not a buraucrat (usually) that tries to take me down a notch on the internet.

Markets can be thought of as skeptical, as many different approaches can strive, and failure will weed out those corresponding to weaker hypotheses. What is it that weeds out the failures of government? Where could the feedback come from? What are the hypotheses, and how could we test them? Do the various employees and officers of government have the right incentives and information?

Lessig says that code is law. But lately entrepreneurs have used proprietary protocols to add new capabilities to the web, causing concerns about privacy, transparency, monopoly, etc. Diaspora, identica, vs Facebook and google. So in a way, Facebook is writing law. OTOH, I can use diaspora instead.

Is it possible to limit a government with a constitution? Can competition limit government growth? Is government growth inevitable? Can we govern without monopoly? What experiments would reveal the limits of the possibilities, and what would it be worth to know? Is any sort of constitutional change possible in the US now? To what degree has the constitution succeeded in restraining government? The supreme court has guarded certain rights jealously and consistently, abandoned others. Or do I read the constitution with bias?

In my notes I mention that Claude Shannon developed information theory to explain and predict the capacity of noisy circuits to carry information. I've forgotten why I thought that was relevant here. Maybe government is made up of noisy circuits? Or the market is?

Is Libertarianism a Cult?

I don't think so. The liberty movement is too disorganized to qualify. The Libertarian Party? Don't make me laugh. They are terrible at recruiting and retaining members. They are famous for schisms and infighting. Maybe they'd like to be, but if so they haven't done their homework.
To me a cult is characterized by a rigid hierarchical leadership structure, secrecy, an us vs. them culture, and emphasis on recruiting and maintaining members. This varies.
Are libertarians cult-proof? I doubt it. Interest in Libertarianism means that a person tends to be idealistic and interested in abstract arguments. These sorts of things a big part of the bait that cults tend to use. Someone who wants to do the right thing and change the world may be persuaded to join a strange group, sever contact with family and friends, and donate time and money to a worthy cause.

Doomsday cults want to survive the end times. Some will sell you self-improvement (scam). What sort of cult would people join willingly? 7 tactics of coercive mind control