The following piece is a tad more conservative than I am - - but the principle of it is sound. I've spoken many times that the neo cons are "risk averse" in that they want to gerry rig the legal system so they can't lose. Mitt Romney knew this better than any politician. Christianity as a religion came into being as a way of covering up the betrayal of a failed Biblical prophecy- - claiming that a deliverer would come to the nation of Israel. When he betrayed his nation, others sought to play this elaborate rationalization game of "blame the victim".
The transparency, fairness and stability offered by this [neo con] system is very compelling: the advantages of a system that transparently discovers the
price of everything while offering roughly equal opportunity to all
participants to seek self-fulfillment (i.e. the pursuit of happiness) via a dogged focus on
self-interest are self-evident.
Looking
out for Number One is thus the foundation not just of personal
self-aggrandizement but of systemic stability and fairness.
But let’s move from ideological abstraction to the pragmatic–what
happens in the real world? What we find in the real world is that participants seek to transfer their own
risk to others while minimizing their productive work and maximizing their
gain/skim.
Risk inevitably introduces the possibility of loss–both fair and
unfair. Let’s
say a participant in the market invests in a scheme to produce the Acme Brand
widget. Unfortunately, the widget fails to find a market and the enterprise
closes its doors. The investors lose their investment: this is fair becauseany enterprise in a market is at risk of
losing favor from changes in fashion or the emergence of more
agile competitors.
Unfair risk is loss incurred through no fault of one’s own. Let’s say an employee of
Acme Widget Corporation gave his all to the company, and was laid off
anyway–not through some failing in his efforts or talents but as a result of
dynamics beyond his control: the marketplace found little value in the Acme
Widget.
The rational, self-interested participant will naturally seek to
offload risk of loss to other participants. Employees of the state
(i.e. the government) transfer most of the risk of being laid off to the larger
group of taxpayers: in a recession, the state can raise taxes on everyone in
the system to guarantee its employees get paid. In effect, the risk of loss
is distributed to everyone
paying taxes in order to guarantee the employment of state
employees.
Financiers have learned that making bets big enough to render
their enterprise too big to fail effectively transfers the risk of loss to the taxpayers. We see the same mechanism
in action: those who manage to transfer the risk of loss to others guarantee
their self-interest can be pursued risk-free.
The rational, self-interested participant will also naturally seek
to minimize his productive contribution while maximizing his income/gain. The state employee will
(for example) game the system to retire early on a fake disability claim, or
manage to evade work, accountability or responsibility with little risk of loss
because the system makes firing a slacker employee almost impossible. A
financier will use free
money for financiers issued by the Federal Reserve to buy
assets everyone needs to live: private water systems, rental homes, parking
meters, etc.–what are known as rentier
assets because the financier isn’t adding or creating any
value in his ownership; he is skimming a fee from those who pass through the
gate he owns.
The rational, self-interested participant will minimize his own
expenses and maximize his income/gain by exploiting the commons–assets shared by all
participants. The rational, self-interested participant will thus let his sheep
out into the common pasture to graze for free, dump his waste into the river
and the smoke from his works into the air, all free of charge. This
dynamic of everyone pursuing their own self-interest destroying the commons was
articulated by Garrett Hardin in his paper The Tragedy of the
Commons.
There is another dynamic at work called tyranny of the majority.
People who identify real problems are Punished in our society. Sean Hannity believes that a majority of Americans would rather throw out all pollution laws, if they think the transcending mantra is 'jobs, jobs, jobs". A majority can be just plain ill informed about an issue because they've been lied to go FOX news. A majority of people believe in some Diety out there for which there has never been any sort of evidence of "His' doing all the things people claim he'll do. A majority of Americans voted conservative in the 1968 Presidential election even though intellectually they knew the war in Viet Nam was not justifiable by any rational criteria. A majority of Americans believe Republicans are doing a better job in congress than the Democrats. A majority of Americans think it's "just not macho" to admit there are a lot of things they just don't know, and therefore Will Not become informed, because it's too much trouble and in the short term- - their "comfort level" is served by not making the effort. They'd much rather plan for the very short term- - then when the fruits of the basic "problem" become plainly manifest - - those who ignored the problem to begin with somehow find some innocent third party to blame for their Own mistakes. Imagine
a ship with 100 passengers and crew drifting down a river that eventually
cascades over a 1,000 foot waterfall. It’s easy to plot the ship’s course and
the waterfall ahead. You might think 100% of those on-board would agree that
something drastic must be done to either reverse course or abandon ship, but
before we jump to any conclusion we must first identify what each of the 100
people perceive as serving their self-interest. If
life on-board is good for 60 of the 100, they may well rationalize away the
waterfall dead ahead. Why risk the treacherous river currents by abandoning
ship? As a result, the majority vote to tweak
the ship’s course slightly (I suspect in a few "show trials" like for Martha Stewart or Blegoiavitch- - and let all the really big fish go) , thus dooming the 40 others who can hear
the thundering cascade ahead but who are powerless to change course in a
democracy.
The
breaking news, presumably from this morning is that a second UN school was
bombed by the Israelis within the past few days, and it’s the sixth UN instelation
that’s been targeted and attacked in the last month. There were multiple targeted coordenates of
this school taken in the past couple of weeks, and this exact site was
expressly targeted within an hour before launch. Now apparently it doesn’t matter whether a
site is actually a military launch site or not- - Israel is going to bomb it
anyhow. But on Meet the Press they had a
poll that 43% of the American population is solidly behind Israel, and another
43% aren’t sure, and only fourteen percent think that Gaza is justified in
their complaints. I find these numbers
disconcerting. But overall the numbers
aren’t encouraging. By a small margin
the people side with the Republicans when it comes to who they agree with in
congress. I find that amazing and
perplexing, and doesn’t offer much hope for Democrats in November. I would assume that nowadays registered
Republicans outnumber registered Democrats.
It used to never be this way all the time growing up and well into
adulthood. Registered democrats
decidedly outnumbered registered Republicans.
Face the Nation had no less than three specific segments on the Ebola
virus. We learn a lot. A lot of the contamination comes from
touching patients in hospitals or touching bodies in open caskets at funerals. But this disease, thank God, is not spread by
air. Valerie Jered is like Obama’s
number two “man” who happens to be a woman.
She is almost the one the President and Mrs. Obama look to to make any
important decision in the White House and has been with them a long time, and
we know so little about her. Michael
Bloomberg was defending Israel. If
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emeritz and Egypt all hate Hammas, one would think
they could be called upon to exert pressure on them. But it makes little sense for Israel to now
say “Well the civilians of Gaza have it coming because they voted for Hammas,
as if they are going to now stop the war to hold a spontaneous election that
Hammas will abide by. It’s like us being
attacked by primarily hijackers from Saudi Arabia, and close friends with the
Bush family, and we turn around and start bombing Iraqi civilians.
On the Mc Laughlin report we had Putin’s
colonial designs on the new world. How
he’s reviving relations with Fidel and Raul Castro and wants to build up Cuba,
and Nicaragua, and also Venesuela and Argentina. Pat isn’t worried. Eleanor isn’t very worried. That British guy is more concerned about US
decline and Russia’s rise. Mort seemed
unusually quiet today, almost as if someone told him to “styfle”. There was talk about Israel and how Saudi
Arabia and Egypt and the United Arab Emerits are siding with Israel in this
current conflict. But John Kerry dumped
the Egyptian proposed treaty in favor of one by Turkey and Yemen. They said that Turkey was now very anti
Semitic, even though they are still a part of NATO. I’m surprised they haven’t been kicked
out. John Mc Laughlin gave the economic
good news a big build-up, which I was pleased to see. But Mort is still Mr. Negativity on the
economy. Of course is you average four
percent and negative two percent, you get an average of an annualized rate of
one percent growth, and seen in those terms it doesn’t look encouraging. But John Mc Laughlin rolled out a host of
other positive economic performance indicators which were also rosey.
It was raining last night and then it began
to rain, lightly at first, and then harder- sitting out on the bench. I guess the weather gods must be smiling on
us. I got to thinking how that Baal
story in the Bible about Elijah praying that it not rain for three years- - or
was it longer? If you’re in a drought -
- you don’t even remember how the drought started- - and if you did you’d want
to stone Elijah. They had been saying
that SC so far has adequate water supplies, but that if we go another year or
so with this drought- - anything could change. This is Monday and there was serious flash flooding in the San Barnadino mountains late on Sunday causing a lot of property damage and messed up lives. I timed it well for breakfast with the
Beatles. I caught the three weather
related opening songs (and Blue Jay Way was the first track played followed by
Fixing a Hole and Rain) and then caught that disco song on the count-down, from
a movie soundtrack. Then there were nine
beatle songs in a row, and in general I was lucky in evading commercials today. I went down to smoke and when I rounded the
corner to go out the door I saw JW Serell there stationed in his wheel
chair. I paused for an instant but saw
he wasn’t rolling and so slipped quickly past him without touching his chair at
all. J W chose to make an incident out
of it saying “Why didn’t you just back up and let me go down the hall
first?” A good answer came to me
later. If I had done as he suggested- -
what’s to stop him as I’m backing out of the hall from just saying “Get out,
you’re in my way?” even if I wasn’t. Had
that happen I would just as readily be saying to myself “I wish I had just
slipped quietly past him when I had the chance.
I must stress that JW was not moving when I saw him - - and if he had
been showing signs of- - movement- - - then of course I would have let him
egress first. But J W’s motto is “If you
can’t say something nasty- - then don’t say anything at all”. Later I went out to the courtyard for two
cups of coffee. There were no
particularly remarkable Beatle songs this week.
They played “Rain Clouds” by Mc Cartney, which we are informed, is the B
Side to “Ebony and Ivery”. Then it was
“Good Bye, my Love” which is a frequent closer song.
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