War and Welfare

The Dictates of Our Natural Existence


By observation, human history reveals an organizational utility (analytically described as political-economy) that mitigates between war and welfare.

War and welfare is a dominant feature of the human, historical record. Proceeding from what we anthropologically know, based on the evidence, humans have organized from tribal to more complex, civil societies. Although warfare is considered to be categorically evil, it is often considered by civil society to be a necessary condition to secure the general welfare (the public good).

In the same way, the welfare state has emerged as a product of modern, civil society that is categorically evil (inherently dependent and unproductive) yet considered to be a necessary condition to prevent war and revolution.

Both political-economic dimensions provide public goods despite the perception of being inherently dysfunctional and unproductive. War distributes capital and provides employment despite the destructive loss of blood and treasure, and the subsequent, post-war recovery is an economic boom (a corrective trend of the K-Wave, long-cycle distribution).

War is an impulsive wave of the long cycle, and despite its inherently evil aspect, it yields benefits from the associated costs. It is a form of welfare with both economically physical and politically psychological effects. It provides for economic expansion from the destruction and psychologically anchors the benefit to a relative public good measured by the impulsive, destructive wave of the cycle. "Happy days are here again."

Since war perennially erupts form "happy days" of relative peace and prosperity, entropy appears to rule our fate (and absolve us of liability). It appears that we are cyclically bound to a recurrent, algorithmic, dialectical determinism. To trump entropy (detecting logarithmic measures representing the increment value taken in against the absolute value at which it is absorbed) and assert our freedom (assuming some liability), reaction to the K-Wave recurrence of the risk proportion tends to produce a new priority.

The impulse to war is resisted by providing public goods, and the welfare state emerges with the risk of loss fully assumed in that recognized, and systematically reorganized, priority. Capital held in accumulation tends to be distributed by means of public authority, confirming the need for political-economy in the form of progressive tax and subsidy (the risk of loss fully assumed--or the absolute value at which the risk is absorbed) to secure the general welfare and the domestic tranquility (that tends to a global dimension).

Government (whether a republic or a monarchy), instead of acting only to support economic expansion in priority (which will always grow to a global dimension in order to share the wealth non-zero-sum and avoid a retributive value--the absolute value at which the risk is absorbed, and tends to be ignored, by technical means like monetizing debt), gains a legitimate utility (whether by war or welfare) for reducing the accumulated surplus. (Government, then, assumes the liability; and since there is no higher authority, as Ayn Rand points out, for example, the risk rises in proportion to suffer the tragedy of the commons. If everybody owns it, then nobody owns it and, therefore, no one is liable. Collective assumption of the risk means there is little incentive to reduce the risk and every incentive to accumulate it in an ever-larger, unavoidable, entropic, gamma-risk proportion.) Government, rather than the private sector, by means of its public authority gains a determining economic role, securing the general welfare by providing public goods and services from the surplus, which supports economic expansion and free-market innovation in posteriori.

Although the expanding need for public finance (the recent bailout of the financial and auto sectors, for example) disconfirms "government does not create jobs" and "government is the problem and not the solution," these hypotheses are nevertheless ideologically conserved. Dogma is fused with pragmatism, deliberately conflated with the exigencies of adaptive, practical modeling without ever conceding its practical legitimacy. So we see, for example, the Obama administration being pragmatically bi-partisan and, thus, extending policies and programs that caused the Great Recession. While his administration did not cause the crisis proportion, it is acting to extend it. His policies and programs are pragmatically designed to stabilize the system, thus conserving the exigencies. By accommodating partisan opposition through a compromised, political settlement, the problem is pragmatically conflated with the solution (providing the entropic value that presents as an absolute, risk ontology, appearing to be a product of our probable, natural existence).

Despite the confirmed need for practical modeling adapted to accommodate unavoidable, entropic value, the exigencies are pragmatically operationalized with political dogma. Exigent policies and programs are pragmatically replete with ideological, evaluative measures to absorb the retributive value of the absolute risk proportion.

Mostly in the form of moral hazards and imperatives, dogmatic evaluative measures narrate a normative expectation of loss by misattribution of the cause. These fundamental misattributions (like saying high fuel prices are fundamentally derived, or that the Obama administration--"liberalism"--has wrecked our economy, for example) keeps the measures in a state of constant adaption and distraction. This allows the value of the risk proportion (the benefit derived from the cost--the increment value taken in against the absolute value at which it is absorbed) to accumulate with a pragmatic, exigent but dogmatic narrative. Facts are systematically operationalized (absorbed) into the symptomatic treatment of accumulated errors, ideologically argued post-hoc within the narrative to manage the absolute proportion of value to be retributed (probable by the value economically taken in against the total value actually consumed in a political, entropic proportion).

The risk of loss is fully assumed, being operationalized with a dependency that is politically determined. What can be given can be taken away, and that which has been bestowed rather than earned is always insecure, politically anxious and subject to ideological patronage.

Welfare reduces the risk of war (including "class war"), but does not eliminate it. Private wealth and power transformed into public goods provided by public authority is strongly resisted. The result is, for example, the emergence of a global, power elite.

As capitalism matures, and the welfare state emerges to mitigate its distributive deficiency (which correlates more with the accumulated power to deprive than the diminished capacity to provide), a power elite emerges to "globalize" the economy. While claiming to relieve the world of chronic poverty and shortages (having won the Cold War), the new elite endeavors to expand its power worldwide, not only accumulating great rewards but also accumulating the value (the risk) of capitalism's distributive deficiency, mitigating welfare with general instability.

The distributive deficiency, and the risk it accumulates, is much less the problem to be solved against the immediate and constant threat of international terrorism. The case of Osama Bin Laden, for example--a wealthy Saudi who endeavored to exercise power on a global scale. Literally--strategically--a man without a country, he built a transnational, organizational network that caused a capital distribution of approximately two-trillion dollars to counter his exploits of militant, high adventure fueled with ideological, dogmatic inspiration.

Accumulating riches is not enough. There is a point at which it is just the same old thing. Systematically accumulating profits by organized economies of scale is boring. It is a lot more exciting, if not more self-agrandizing, to exact detriment and get away with it, like being king.

Berny Madoff, for example, didn't execute a ponsy scheme because he needed the money. It was a high-stakes adventure full of detrimental value. When the systematic means of accumulating wealth matures, it becomes less a function to provide than the power, the self-satisfaction, to deprive with impunity. In order to counter the terror of consolidated wealth and risk, it is necessary to keep it deconsolidated (thus the American Revolution).

Keeping wealth, and power, distributed in priority--preventing economy-of-scale accumulations and detrimental debtor-distributions of an equal risk-proportion--keeps us pluralistically peaceful and prosperous. It keeps us on a path of innovatively sustainable economic growth--a low debt-to-equity ratio--that mitigates against a zero-sum, crisis proportion.

Sustainable economic expansion is necessary to mitigate the zero-sum, retributive value of the risk/reward proportion. Securing high reward by assignment of the risk--by transferring it rather than actually taking it--accumulates retributive value (like hedge-funds and banks do when, for example, distributions are made from deposits that are net-long on commodity futures and, thus, net-short on the economy, effectively rigging the market to make a profit by causing general detriment, making the rich richer and the poor poorer). Its accumulation results in the probable, entropic value accounted for and managed with fundamental misattributions (like supply disruptions), requiring a technically skilled, managerial elite employed to operationalize the interests of the power elite with public authority. Detriments that benefit the elite and make them powerful (like determining prices and thus non-elite incomes) are technically rationalized with the public good (like the incentive to add supply, reduce prices and unemployment by increasing prices and reducing employment--so-called "supply-side" economics, for example).

Achieving a distribution without actually sharing wealth (and power) requires constant expansion to absorb the value to be retributed. The value is efficiently organized into an economy of scale, networking the externalities, absorbing the endogenous risk into organized technologies that characteristically rely on a power elite to manage its accumulated, exogenous proportion. The accumulation inexorably extends into a global dimension, the externalities networked to avoid the unavoidable risk of retributive value, relying on the diplomatic skill of a global, power elite to manage the value accumulated to the brink of redemption (war or welfare).

Most notable among today's power elite is the neo-conservative element who advance a strong military-industrial complex and a global, military-diplomatic program that stresses the budget and provides distraction as pressure mounts to mitigate the emergence of the welfare state.

The elite, being traditionally best-equipped for diplomatic endeavors, are protecting us from the threats to "our" freedom (the angst that undistributed accumulations of wealth and power are sure to cause). International politics cannot be left to the passions of the masses always in flux and, by nature ignorant and unsophisticated, anxious about the future. Thus, it is up to the power elite to preserve freedom by conserving the accumulated value of the risk (reducing the welfare state--reducing debt and exacting austerity--to provide for the public good).

War and welfare are mitigated against each other, binomially determined by political settlement of the risk proportion. A conflation of costs and benefits are carefully calculated and applied by the elite to exercise power. Public process is utilized for a system of realignment and compromise deliberatively organized to secure elite benefits by distributing the costs to the non-elite in the name of the general welfare. (All of this, keep in mind, largely plays off the angst inherent to the perceived risk of loss fully assumed by both the rulers and the ruled in priority--an Ayn Randian dystopia of so-called "rational" self-interest in which everyone irrationally believes gaining a benefit by causing detriment in zero-sum is in everyone's self-interest. Eventually, of course, we come to realize the entropic risk proportion. War and welfare is the natural result of mitigating the inherent anxiety of not knowing what is rational and what the empirical measure of self-interest is. While neo-conservatives, for example, fully embraced Ayn Rand's natural philosophy, keep in mind that the result was the Commodity Futures Trade Act, the Great Recession and a monumental debt proportion that empirically indicates an irrational, but deliberate, accumulation of risk. According to neo-conservatives, the outcome is both rational and empirically confirmed by the distribution of income. The benefit accrues to the natural winners at the expense of the natural losers; and with both parties anxiously anticipating what nature rationally confirms our objective, self-interest to really be in its total, risk proportion, angst is confirmed as the common divisor of our natural existence. War dystopically mitigates against the probable risk of welfare, elevating the risk of loss, against the probable gain, to the principle of a moral existence.)

It is important to note that neo-conservatism is not limited to global expansion of capital to consolidate value in emerging markets and to engage in worldwide military diplomacy. Neo-cons emerged into the 21st Century to conserve the value of the risk proportion by also monetizing the debt. Chaney's famous words that "deficits don't matter" is an essential part of a successful, neo-conservative program that includes the distribution of capital globally.

Global distribution of capital not only serves to bust the labor unions of developed nations, but also diminishes the political sentiments of a growing, non-elite, middle-class population. Losing its sense of elite status, having lost income and net worth to the upper class, and with more losses to come, we have a middle class that now fully expects welfare to be the permanent alternative to what Seymore Mellman, for example, in the Cold War era referred to as "The Permanent War Economy".

While the welfare state is preferable to the warfare state, both, especially in America, are considered to be negative externalities of a civil society. They are necessary evils in which the risk of one is mitigated against the other to form a macro-risk proportion, and today Americans politically and economically mitigate these two variables on a global scale.

Spending trillions of dollars on military-diplomatic operations worldwide, for example, allows America's allies to expend more of their budgets on welfare. The record, to date, suggests a natural coefficiency between war and welfare that is a dictate of our natural existence, suggesting an inherent, economically endogenous tendency to organize for existential angst (thus economics being the "dismal science" of mitigating the endogenous risk proportion with exogenous, politically organized means). Instead of organizing for utopia, we tend to organize to avoid dystopia (the risk of loss fully assumed). For analytical purposes, we will call this tendency the "angst-principle" which is essentially derived from intentionally organized tautologies that seem to be ontologically determined and largely beyond our control.

The current call to "root out any evidence of fraud and market manipulation" to control the price of gasoline, for example, provides a current case for exploring the angst-principle built into the modern landscape of political-economy.

Current market volatility is premised on both the prospect of war in the east and the prospective extent of welfare states in the west. In the middle ages, before what we now call capitalism, it was a high crime to "gross" commodities because it is highly destabilizing. Grossing (cornering the market and driving up prices, today accomplished by grossing futures contracts with a massive accumulation of capital, made possible by the Commodity Futures Trade Act) could result in being hung or beheaded by order of the king. It not only robbed the sovereign of his god-given wealth but the divinely (or naturally) endowed power to control We the People who, by natural right (law) of revolution (war), became the sovereign power to determine our self-interest (welfare). It was clear then, as it is now, that the economic dimension can and will determine our natural, political existence. It is also apparent that the level of angst associated with it demonstrates (measures) the extent of power (the ability to morally self-determine).

To prevent sharing power, the king had to make sure the wealth was consolidated into his control, much like today as we see the corporate, collective body evermore consolidated to exercise power as the de facto, if not de jure ("Citizens United"), sovereign body. In terms of the American, revolutionary spirit, however, (the intellectual promise of The Enlightenment and the realpolitique of "American exceptionalism"), consolidation of power is the measurable risk--the evil--to be avoided.

As the corporate increasingly gains the natural right of the sovereign, the political and economic dimensions of power have fully converged. The productivity of capitalism is successfully conflated with the angst of its distributive demonstration of power. Society is relieved of chronic shortages by adding the productive incentive of its systematic overaccumulation. High productivity is conflated with its systematic deprivation, resulting in a cyclical crisis proportion in which war mitigates with welfare.

The emergence of capitalism and the modern, corporate body allows for legal engrossment of economic value. What was once a high crime that shared the divine-right power of the sovereign has become the means for consolidating it to limit the power of the natural sovereign--We the People.

Consolidation of power by natural right serves to delimit a legitimate ascendancy to power among equals. The elite, having the tested capability of competitive processes, ascend to power, and keep it, "by natural right." A power elite emerges endowed by nature to organize and command the natural, pluralistic tendencies of power. Order is rationally organized (in self-interest) from irrational chaos by consolidating the capital (which otherwise tends to a natural distribution).

Consolidation, the elite explain, achieves the utilitarian ideal (providing the greatest good for the greatest number of people). As John D. Rockefeller once explained, "competition is wasteful and inefficient." The mergers and acquisitions that occur following cyclical events, like the Great Recession, are regarded as a natural tendency achieving an economy-of-scale efficiency that naturally ensures repetition of the cycle. The efficiency thus algorithmically (predictably) accumulates, derived from the detriment (the austerity, the deprivation) that "naturally" occurs. The detriment forms the capital (the reward) to reinvest, add supply, and achieve the general welfare. All of the speculative manipulations, like the high commodity prices we have now, accoucheurs the efficiency, deliberately ensuring cyclical trending that delivers consolidation of the capital.

Speculation is considered to be self-interest rationally pursued. It naturally achieves the greatest social value without the need for government intervention which tends to diminish the effect of cyclical trending and the efficiency of markets to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Each recurrent cycle (continuous consolidation that affords an increasing command-and-control, economy-of-scale efficiency rationally derived from self-interest) naturally brings us closer to the utilitarian ideal (what the classical critique of capitalism called communism).

(Keep in mind that the "efficient-markets theory" used to support the argument for unregulated speculative demand is supposed to provide optimum liquidity and avoid liquidity crises. Despite the Commodity Futures Trade Act, however, we experienced the greatest liquidity crisis since the Great Depression. Although the efficiency thesis has been disconfirmed in every case, it is nevertheless continuously validated by arguing the utility of the derived benefit: Each recurrent crisis of insufficient liquidity--consolidation of the capital--forces us to consolidate industry and markets into more efficient enterprises, producing the highest productive value at the lowest possible labor cost. Describing the problem as the solution, of course, is why the thesis relies on tautological validation rather than empirical verification.)

Classical economists not only predicted Rockefeller's description, but according to the classical critique, consolidated management of the risk would, naturally, become the preferred means of distribution over warfare. Classical economists also accurately predicted the emergence of "stateism."

Capitalism survives with a complex regulatory regime--anti-trust laws, for example--and an extensive bureaucratic authority to control the risk. The value accumulated from the risk is conserved (protected) by administering both a war machine (a military-industrial complex) and a welfare system. Both (war and welfare) are maintained with an always-expanding debt proportion monetized by the state. Instead of developing into communism, capitalism is maintained by the state. Thus, we have "state capitalism."

(Remember that communist theory postulates a classless society. Equitable distribution of wealth and power ideally renders government authority obsolete. It is the same ideal of avowed capitalists--government governs best by governing least; but without having to maintain the risk proportion of overproduction, equitable distribution renders obsolete the need for public debt--war and welfare. It is also important to note that the shared, common element of both is an absolute value which, according to natural observation, tends to an entropic probability of the risk. Free-market economics ontologically fits management of this probable risk proportion, but should not be confused with "efficient-markets theory" that advances continuous consolidation, rather than deconsolidation, of the risk, overaccumulating value and surplusing it into a crisis proportion.)

Since capitalism surpluses value by overproducing it, it is necessary to manage and maintain the surplus without distributing its value (which would distribute its power). It is necessary then to organize toward a stable, political settlement of its constant accumulation into a retributive-risk proportion (i.e., the angst principle in which the risk of loss is fully assumed in priority to prevent dystopia rather than achieve utopia).

Our founders recognized that where once the accumulation of economic value resulted in political power, economic value can also be derived by organized political process. The democratic-republic then emerged and much of what we argue about today is over deriving economic value through political rather than economic process, mitigating the risk of war with welfare.

Although welfare is derived from surplused value that otherwise exists in a crisis proportion, there is still the vestige of measuring who is and is not powerful, and this is manifest by applying systematic means of deprivation (for the general welfare, of course). These means are largely an argument for conserving the middle-class values of revolutionaries who removed the barriers to wealth and power by natural right and self-determination. (If we are all pursuing what makes us happy in our self-interest, we are not likely determined to wage war, thus the utlility--the welfare--of being self-interested. If we are consumed with acquiring wealth, and that enterprise consumes the amount of wealth that can be divisibly acquired without expanding it, we never have the opportunity to acquire power and deprive wealth, which requires political conquest--merging and acquiring--rather than economic expansion.)

Monarchies (as well as elite, post-industrial, merging-and-acquiring plutocrats) stand between the middle class and "the pursuit of happiness" (the utilitarian pursuit of wealth and power). If we are always in debt to monarchs by extension of property rented from the crown (the ruling class), we can never be wealthy or happy; and with little productive incentive we are plagued with chronic shortages (which likely leads to war to secure the general welfare). The cure for chronic shortages is to allow everyone the opportunity to be wealthy and happy in the free pursuit of one's self-interest.

Individual pursuit of self-interest is supposed to crowd out the probability of war until, of course, by the "naturally endowed" right to pursue it, wealth becomes so consolidated that welfare is reduced to the angst-principle. The endowed ability to surplus value by determining its deprivation demonstrates power and determines status. Angst dominates our existence and leaves us vulnerable to elite power and authority; and with more wealth accumulated than needed, there is ample opportunity to demonstrate power.

In the struggle for dominion, welfare is easily sacrificed for warfare, distributing wealth that was efficiently consolidated to achieve the greater good for the greatest number of people. For "The People," the greater good is horribly bad, and the angst reduces to a profound sense of hopelessness. Moral sentiments are reduced to raw demonstrations of power and your very being is reduced to a sense of self naturally determined only by the endowments of others; and since you have only yourself to blame for a fate that is largely out of your control, being devolves into a profound sense of nothingness, confined to the dictates of a natural existence that is anything but self-determined.

World War I, for example, following the industrial revolution, presented the first modern case of a classic, worldwide distribution on the accumulation. While it retained the value of classic distribution by means of war (the process of creative-destruction Schumpeter described, for example), it also marked a philosophical, existential, humanistic leap into the concept of "being and nothingness."

Even with all the productive capacity of capitalism, it seemed we still had to go to war to cause a distribution. So much for the utopian promise of capitalism as the product of the Enilghtenment and 18th Century utilitarianism. Individual pursuit of happiness always reduces to the angst-principle rather than the general welfare. The only salvation for classical economics would then be its classical criticism--communism--which evolved into an even higher level of classic distribution we called the "Cold War" with an even higher (literally MAD) level of existential angst (Mutually Assured Destruction).

Following "the war to end all wars," President Wilson established the Federal Reserve Bank system to control the means of distribution and end all wars. Central banking and the League of Nations would be the controlling authority to mitigate the accumulated risk and the probable, unavoidable, catastrophic distribution of the reward (what I refer to as the fully assumed, gamma-risk proportion).

Despite the obvious need to control the over-extension of the risk proportion, and strong union sentiment within the industrialized world to avoid its accumulation, World War II erupts within the depths of The Great Depression. The fear of communism had been fused with the promise of capitalism to form the new rich--the new, modern elite to alleviate us of our angst and lead us into a new millennium of peace and orderly prosperity, achieving unsurpassable welfare that can only be described as utopian, but not without waging war first, of course. Utopia, once again, is reduced to risk fully assumed in priority--unavoidable, untranscendable, in the gamma-risk proportion. The fate of humanity once again reduced to the angst of preventing dystopia--with the risk of loss fully assumed--as the measure of a meaningful existence, and the general welfare as best can be derived by the dictates of nature.

What dictates our natural existence ponders what is good and what is evil. War is evil, yet WWII is considered a good war to destroy evil. It also caused the distribution on the accumulation necessary to bring us out of the Great Depression.

Subsequently, we emerge into the 21st Century with a huge military budget, and a burden of debt, that secures the welfare of our allies mitigated with the angst of their devalued currencies and downgraded government debt. It appears, no matter what we do, we cannot avoid the angst of a natural tendency to default on the debt.

As America grapples with the call to be austere or default, making us not so exceptional, but more like our allies, we feel the angst of the risk of loss fully assumed. We detect the limits of our natural existence fully appraised by the founders of this great nation and firmly established as the natural, inalienable rights of man. The angst-principle indicates having reached the limit--the fullest extent of the risk proportion in which liability is to be fully assumed.

The current call to "root out any evidence of fraud and market manipulation" to control prices (and the distribution of income), combined with the call to balance the budget (or risk default), delimits an historical inflexion of the angst-principle. It not only provides a good example of the principle built into the modern political-economy, but serves to indicate the probable risk going forward in the gamma dimension of war and welfare.

What appears to be apocalyptic vision is merely a convergence of technical indicators with expected values of impulsive and corrective waves. These technicals indicate the extent of our "animal spirit" as Schumpeter would describe it, delimiting the impulse to power with the corrective tendency of our natural, pluralistic existence.

The unrest in the Middle-East region is a naturally expected value of the angst-principle. Monarchies impulsively give way to pluralistic tendencies. While it is being used as an excuse to raise fuel prices and support the recessionary trend, pressure to reduce the proportion of debt at the same time will tend to have a depressionary effect, and that tendency does not favor the welfare side of the equation.

We see then how economy-of-scale consolidation of the risk proportion enables a self-fulfilled prophecy. Analyzing this, rather than apocalyptic vision, is a critique of pure and practical reason that delimits our moral intelligence to the imperatives of our natural existence.

Close, philosophical examination does not reveal angst to be the entropic value of our natural existence. The elusive, entropic value that plagues natural existence and that we anxiously anticipate in the form of fully assumed loss is but the moral value missing from the Randian-Sartyrian self-concept of the universe. Reducing our being to nothingness leaves an empty, self-interested receptacle prepared to receive the MAD moral imperatives of mindless monocrats!

The unavoidable, entropic value of our natural, probable existence is the equivalent of our moral existence.

We can choose what is categorically good, or we can choose what is categorically bad, like war.

We can choose freedom, or we can choose the tragic chains, the angst, of a constantly changing elite authority.

It's time for the change "We the People" really need!

Let's choose freedom for a change...it is our natural right...it is the moral imperative--the dictate of our natural existence.

Like Jefferson said, "the Revolution isn't over yet."

We fought the war. Now it is time for the welfare.