--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: rah@shipwright.com Delivered-To: clips@philodox.com Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:28:27 -0500 To: "Philodox Clips List" <clips@philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> Subject: [Dgcchat] Totalitarian Force Monopoly and Geodesic Capital (was Re: [Clips] The Economics of the Rise of Ahmadinejad) Reply-To: clips-chat@philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces@philodox.com --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: rah@shipwright.com Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 12:38:31 -0500 To: Dgcchat@dgcchat.com From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> Subject: [Dgcchat] Totalitarian Force Monopoly and Geodesic Capital (was Re: [Clips] The Economics of the Rise of Ahmadinejad) Sender: dgcchat-bounces@dgcchat.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:50 AM +0000 2/25/07, Darren Rhodes wrote:

The note below assumes that Republicans and Democrats are not different wings of the same party; similarly for Conservatives and Neu Arbeit in the UK. In other words the West is ruled by one party states.

As has been pointed out many times before on this list fiat currency is the enemy.

Apparently, the source of the article didn't completely confound your abilities to reason clearly about its content. ;-) The point of the article, to me, was that more access to capital increases freedom. That single party states (for some definitions of "party" :-)), decrease the availability of capital, and that that the availability of capital decreases exponentially with the totality of control, eventually resulting in famine, suffering, and war. By the way, I think we're in reasonable agreement, to the extent that I think this applies to western countries, as well, since we're, currently, in the process of increasing government control on more and more things in general -- but, in particular, for this list, and in light of very recent events, the very flow of capital itself. In the interests of lively discussion, however, :-), I'll chum the water for the flame-sharks out there by noting Jeanne Kirkpatrick's distinction between authoritarians, like Augusto Pinochet, and Lee Kwan Yew, who didn't brook much political dissent but allowed freedom in most other spheres, particularly economic ones, and totalitarians, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, (or Fidel Castro, the Kim dynasty, and, now, apparently, Hugo Chavez) who insist on literally controlling the totality of their citizen's behavior, with varying degrees of "success" in doing so. Note that currently, government of all stripes, using information technology, both financial and otherwise, is trending toward totality of control, because, like the lewd joke about dogs, they can. Authoritarians, paradoxically, make money and can be pretty safe for capital. Totalitarians, are, of course, unsafe for just about everyone, sooner or later. In the same way that psychiatric disease is increasingly diagnosed by which psychopharmacological substance changes which undesired behavior, the article seems, to me, to point to capital and access to same as the definition of the distinction between the two. Which leads me to some interesting thoughts about force monopoly in general. To the extent that armies are designed to kill people and break things, states, too, are *exactly* about force monopoly and nothing else, and literal mayhem results when they are used for any other purpose. To look at both extremes of the continuum, authoritarians are about maintaining their force monopoly, political power, pretty much to the exclusion of anything else. Totalitarians, on the other hand, are about using their force monopoly and political power to control everything around them. In so doing, they not only fail in their objectives, they *destroy* everything around them. That leaves vote-market controlled force, because I think that voting, democratic (small-d) and republican (small-r), systems work better than totalitarians or authoritarians in allocating the use of monopolistic force, and have been ultimately desirable as places, in the modern world, to build, and conduct markets for, capital. The United States, pretty much since the original Anglo-American colonization until the advent of automated central records processing with Hollerith cards in the early 20th century, was a splendid example of democratic and quasi-democratic, even anarcho-capitalist, force control. Capital flowed in, prospered, and eventually the US became the largest capital market on the planet. Even the Civil War was, mechanistically, at least, proof that industrialism and capital and obviated the need for slavery itself, a peculiar totalitarian "institution" with a history at least as old as the wild-grain sedentiarianism that preceded agriculture in the Levant some 17-12,000 years ago. Automated records processing, coupled with the first light-speed telecommunications, eventually enabled an increase of the span of control, and it's no surprise that it was first used in the "enhanced" censuses of the time, and, ultimately, on the constitutionally-amended re-introduction of the income tax itself, both of which are impossible without that technology. Modern book-entry transactions are, of course, another result of this, producing an increasing totality of control, and institutional gigantism, until well into the 20th century, before, eventually, Moore's Law and microprocessors started to disassemble that process and create actual dis-economies of scale. I cite the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, the apparent conversion of China from totalitarian to authoritarian control as reasonable examples of this process. And thus, I think, as always :-), that reality, literal, physical, reality, is not optional. Technology, not politics, software, not legislation, is the only solution to this problem of the universally increasing government trend towards totality of control. A phenomenon that, to me, at least, is more a symptom of the end of such behavior, than it is of the beginning. The sale of totalitarian indulgences as a precursor to a possible geodesic reformation, if you will. To me, the thin edge of the wedge is enhancing the free flow of capital exclusive of the still-increasingly totalitarian, but nonetheless inertial, trends of the modern nation-state. Financial cryptography as the printing press of geodesic capitalism. Cranking out heretical "tracts" of capital as quickly as modern financiers can dream them up and "publish" them in free markets. I don't say that the solution is easy to execute, but we do have to tools to reverse this trend, to eventually free finance from government control, to convert "economics" -- which, in the same way that "theology" is actually philosophy (natural and otherwise :-)) as applied to religion, is essentially finance as applied to nation-states -- to the same level of intellectual exercise that religion now holds in the modern mind. Something one does, in civilized countries anyway :-), in the quiet solitude of one's own mind, exclusive of the wielding of violent force. Force which, ultimately enabled by this new, geodesic capital, will become less monopolistic over time until auction markets will prevail over monopolistic ones, everywhere, and for *all* markets. Perhaps then, like it did for slavery, technology will finally liberate us from the "peculiar institution" of force monopoly. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.5.3 (Build 5003) wj8DBQFF4cmQw/EfyN/eiFoRAsqeAJ0YDdXEXIceEZPfRyGWg+STeZEtwgCg5EaA zi6fu0IyNOqYr6eRslPvf50= =ZV/d -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Dgcchat mailing list Dgcchat@dgcchat.com http://mail.dgcchat.com/mailman/listinfo/dgcchat_dgcchat.com --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips@philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'