The Measure of Success

The measure of success is a largely philosophical question.

Classically, the measure of success, as Plato and Aristotle described it, for example, is the approximation to the ideal. So, ideal economic policy is quite different for billionaire hedge-fund managers than it is for restaurant workers. Each party has something to gain and something to lose: each party has a risk differential which probably correlates interactively in zero-sum.

Since hedge funds and service workers apply their time and resources to obtain the ideal in differential, there is conflict. To keep the peace, we have adopted a competitive marketplace to resolve the conflict and give empirical verification (legitimacy) to the outcome.

We immediately see that the theory of organized conflict resolution that we call the free-market system is operationalized with the scientific method. Hypotheses (risk differentials) are tested in the marketplace and the result is, as modern philosophers like Ayn Rand describe it, fundamentally legitimate (verified) and ontologically derived (unavoidable). Even if we try to consolidate the risk into a homogeneous, common self-interest, the elite (the party best able to manage the risk in their self-interest) will always emerge the winner in zero-sum.

According to free-market theory, ideally we should just "let it be," but, of course, we just can't keep our hands off of it; and this is where it gets technically complicated. We arbitrage "the risk" into an instability of valuable proportion that differentiates the risk into a relative value of useful dimension. This is where risk assessment gains its ideological (political) interpretation (dimension), and losing its empirical value of fundamental resolution gains a gamma-risk momentum and proportion.

For example, we hear it said that the government is bankrupting our nation. Does this mean that our fate has reached a high level of gamma-risk momentum with a high order of intention, or a low order of intention? Answering this question determines the extent of the risk in the gamma proportion. The risk is now extended to a liability with a probability coefficient to the reward that is not empirically derived from fundamental free-market means, but arbitraged, or arbitrated, with the force and legitimacy of public authority like it was with the sovereign application of the crown.

Now we have a philosophical problem--a paradox to be resolved, which if not resolved results in cognitive, political dissonance.

To assure hypotheses are not corrupted with ideological bias, it is necessary to devolve the risk to the fundament. The question whether government is bankrupting our nation is reduced to a practical rather than a rhetorical resolution. The question is then a measure of empirical value, legitimately rendered to define the current and future value of the risk. Otherwise, the value is differentiated into the instability of relative values that diminishes the probability of accepting or rejecting the risk that comes with the nation being bankrupt.

Reconciling the way things are now with government by consent is to say we agree and accept all the terms and conditions associated with the government being bankrupt (our liabilities exceeding our assets). The risk, of course, is that you may be assigned the liability. Who decides that?

The liability is assigned with the force and legitimacy of government authority. Without devolution of this power, the empirical consent of the governed is never obtained and the question of whether we are bankrupting ourselves is continuously recycled rather than resolved.

Candidates that argue the government is bankrupting the economy are guilty of the post-hoc fallacy, which gives good indication of what they will do to solve this problem--stick you with the liability. The probability of risk to you goes up with a very high order of intention that is not your own, and because government power has been usurped for an ideological distribution of the risk, your ability to render an accountability and assign a liability to the reward is limited to the election cycle and a two-party binomialism. It is hardly the model of a government by consent. It just does not measure up!

If we are not talking about deconsolidating the risk and ensuring a free-market distribution of income in priority, government by consent is indeed bankrupt.

Limiting the role of government to ensuring a free and unconsolidate marketplace effectively limits the need for it, resolves the paradox, and reconciles the difference (the political dissonance, the existential angst) between the ideal and the practical representation of it.

It is time to turn "what is" into what we all know "should be."

It is time to turn the possible into the probable.