Staying With the Technicals

The mid-term election cycle always presents a technical correction with an ideological interpretation. Considering that Republicans are as unpopular as Democrats, if not more, arguing a popular mandate for a Republican agenda strains credulity.

The popular vote is negative. It is a no-confidence vote. It just happens what voters can vote for is a vote against what we have had, including Republican policies and programs, and the latest vote in opposition just happened to be Republican by default.

It is also no accident that the empirical value of the popular vote tends to be a referendum on past performance with extensive limitations. Its value is limited to two possible choices which are ideologically delimited.

Relying on these systematic delimitations (with a fully expected empirical value), Republicans are immediately claiming that voters have voted for "The Pledge." According to Republicans, they will oppose the Democratic executive when it is contrary to the will of The People which they presume to represent (despite an unpopularity that rivals the opposition).

The presumption of conferred power technically confirms an unpopular mandate validated by a binomial default. It perpetrates a fraud that limits the liability to a political sanction that is binomially determined. It is far from the model of self-determination that We the People Constitutionally expect, and is clearly being violated with bogus, partisan mandates.

Technical rigging of the political process is an abuse of process not to be ideologically suffered.

If we stick to the technicals, rather than suffer the abuse for the sake of ideology, the empirical value of the popular vote is more likely to have a positive progression. For example, healthcare reform. Technically, we went from prohibitively high prices to a mandate to purchase--good for the healthcare sector and insurance, terrible for consumers and economic recovery. A negative vote is technically reasonable.

As a popular mandate, the healthcare reform is pure political junk; and if you were legislating it, you wouldn't want voters to realize what was in it until after it passed. Where this process does not lack competence it is deliberately corrupted. The empirical value (legitimacy) of popularity that keeps the Sovereignty of the People from being usurped by elite authority, and the self-satisfied incompetence that often comes with it, is corrupted; and technically speaking, the mandate delivered to the new congressional delegation is this: all the risk will not be mandated to The People without the reward that goes with it.

The unemployment rate went from 7% in 2008 to nearly 10% now. Technically, the people that have jobs have to wonder if "the risk" will be mandated to them. "The Pledge" (the plan) is to cut the deficit while unemployment (the need) continues to rise. Technically, the risk has momentum to the middle and the reward to the top, supporting the deflationary trend, especially if the Bush tax cuts are extended for the top 2%. That extension of the risk to the middle class is ideologically satisfying (i.e., the principle that ensuring the welfare of the rich ensures the general welfare) but technically (empirically) impractical if we want to reverse the deflationary trend, and cut the budget deficit, by increasing discretionary spending of the middle class.

By experience (by trial and error), cutting tax rates at the top margin supports a deflationary trend and budget deficits. Marginal tax cuts accumulates wealth at the top and causes a liquidity crisis, shifting the marginal risk to the middle without the benefit, in every case. Technically, correcting for this requires shifting the marginal risk accumulated in the middle back to the top, which will cause the benefit needed in the middle to reverse the over-leveraged (over-marginalized) risk. Everybody benefits, not just a few at the top who seek value in providing by virtue (the strength) of mass deprivation (in zero-sum).

What we are talking about here is the legitimacy of the risk. While legitimacy is philosophically loaded with value judgments, the distributive value of the risk technically suggests that the capital is too accumulated in the form of wealth.

Wealth is what we want...it is good, it is a virtue, it makes us strong, but when it is too consolidated, growth is slow if not negative. Its accumulation without growth technically results in a zero-sum detriment. While this detriment can be valued as a social benefit (capital for investment) it is technically used to derive value from the risk, not to produce more wealth, but to deprive it.

When capital is too accumulated in the form of consolidated wealth, the risk distributes by fiat of consolidated power. Repudiating the distribution of risk by fiat (the consolidation of risk) is what the American Revolution was all about.

Producing new business ventures, jobs, and growth, in that order, is dependant on the deconsolidation of the risk, just like it was at the time of the Tea Party when the crown consolidated the wealth and exclusively distributed risk at its discretion. That discretion, of course, was used to cause a detriment, depriving The People the full value of their wealth, extending the risk into a crisis proportion (raising the economic rent).

If the risk is distributed to cause a detriment--like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America positioning the customer (the investor and the homeowner) as a counterparty to consume a detriment to their benefit--crisis is the fully expected result. Again, the exculpatory "who could have known" hypothesis expresses incompetence where it is not corrupt...values (vices) not to be encouraged with record profits and bonuses.

Politically, in the same way, the popular vote has been set up as the counterparty to the benefit, "Pledged" to be "the will of The People" in the Tea Party form. It is a game, a hustle, intended to usurp the power of The People in the representative form. Extending tax cuts for the top 2% is not a general benefit. It is a general detriment distributed to The People, financing a benefit to the top 2%. For the top 2% it is a technical success, for everyone else a technical failure.

While it is technically possible for everyone to succeed, it is not public policy because ideology rules the political process. Though the mid-term realignment is being billed as an ideological shift--accepting conservative philosophy, policies and programs that are confirmed failures--we should not continue to suffer a politics of abject empirical fraud with bogus popular mandates if not the technical incompetence of an habitual ideological conviction.