Empirical Value and Collective Action

The twist component of a broader-and-flatter burden relates to collective action.

Capitalism tends to focus on the individual because the aggregate value of collective action in the marketplace demands empirically verifiable accountability. In a free market, propriety is measured with market share and the profit margin. A business that provides a product you demand but can't trust is likely to lose market share and suffer a declining rate of profit in the alpha dimension if the consumer has a choice on demand. The marketplace, with the risk of loss fully assumed on demand, is self-determined--fully empowered with pluralistic, deconsolidated, proprietary risk.

It is instructive here to compare the alpha decline with the declining rate of profit experienced in the gamma-risk dimension where risk is consolidated to avoid it.

The alpha presents non-catastrophic, disinflationary risk; the gamma presents a catastrophic, deflationary, systemic-risk proportion that "demands" government intervention.

When the risk goes gamma, government acts with collective authority to affirm the mal-distribution of wealth and power--the detriment to be consumed on command--as legitimately earned with risk in the free market. Collective action is used to scapegoat the liability--the detriment to be consumed on demand--and assumes the risk proportion in the form of a late-order effect with the force and legitimacy of "due" public "process."

The effect is a rising tax burden that Romney and Ryan claim must not be the burden of the "job creators." If we show impropriety and burden the creators, they will retribute the risk in the form of deflation.

To appease the gods of wealth and power, we must be sure and not tax them to minimize the risk of deflation--the declining rate of profit (the retribution) it will surely cause. When the decline occurs (the risk of loss is fully assumed), we apparently have not provided proper tribute. The tax rate, according to the best and the brightest, is not regressive enough--not enough tribute (sacrifice, or detriment in the form of austerity) has been paid to the creators.

Empirically, then, given the evidence of a declining rate of profit, it is unnatural to tax the creators of wealth and power, which we are sure to do in order to keep the capital cycling into accumulation. When the capital fails to recycle, the eternal hope and promise of being on the path to prosperity ends, along with capitalism.

Eventually, along the "Path to Prosperity," the burden becomes evermore regressive--working for free while paying off student loans, for example, which accumulates even more value to be retributed (and collectively consumed, which adds demand for government) in the form of systemic risk. Yes, indeed, objective reality will most assuredly assert itself, and empirically verify our self-determination, despite the perception of it.

(It is important to understand that added demand for government does not add risk. This is a technical error that twists policy analyses into the objective of "risk reduction."

By trying to reduce added risk, programs become a complex mass of temporal fallacies that naturally result in failed expectations. Failure is then corrected for by adding to the complexity, not the risk.

When technical failure occurs, it is not because risk is added, but ignored in the aggregate, having been transformed into a gamma-risk dimension where legitimacy is a function of collective action in a politically post-hoc proportion.

The quantity valued as "risk" is always coefficiently conserved despite that the reward, by hook or by crook, can be added. Accumulated wealth, and power structured to increase the reward with low risk, accumulates risk, it does not add it.

Added value does not have to include added risk. In a free-market, the risk taken is non-catastrophically coefficient with the reward. Value can be added non-zero-sum with a deconsolidated distribution of the risk proportion.

With the quantum "risk" conserved in a non-catastrophic, unconsolidated, alpha-risk dimension, reward is driven by the incentive to innovate and expand the economy to make a profit.)

In the gamma-risk dimension, the empirical value of collective action is consumed in the form of false inductions. A progressive tax burden, for example, is attributed to supporting deflationary risk when it actually resists it, and while government distributions of accumulated wealth keeps capitalism from collapsing into Randian nihilism, government intervention is really the effect, not the cause, of the accumulation and the declining rate of profit.

Technically, with all manner of false induction, policies and programs, public and private, are an inchoate mass of errors that predictably fail expected, normative values like supply-demand and risk-reward. When supply exceeds demand and prices continue to rise, and reward is higher with lower risk, the economy-of-scale efficiency required to achieve these unnatural results are described as "the new normal."

By consolidating the means of propriety and the empirical value of collective self-determination, we induce the risk being avoided.

To avoid proprietary risk (not reduce it), capitalism claims to conserve the value of self-determination while, at the same time, destroying the power to demand it. Destroying demand is counter-intuitive if we "normally" want to make a profit, but modeled with an economy-of-scale efficiency it proportionally increases the power to command the margin by consolidating the marketplace in the name of reducing risk.

(Risk avoidance is not risk reduction. This is a technical error. When Goldman Sachs models to hedge macro risk while Bank of America redlines homes into foreclosure, credit-default-swaps are not a hedge but a profit-making vehicle that derives value from detriment in a systemic, synthetically aggregated proportion. Although it may seem that profiting from the misery of others lacks propriety, what are you going to do about it?

Remember, what is synthetic about the aggregate is the value "created," not the risk. The benefit is derived from the loss, not created--the risk of loss is fully assumed in priority. It is a false benefit that accumulates retributive value in the aggregate, which is empirical value used to synthesize an ontological argument that values the risk as collective action in the marketplace.

Since the aggregate--the sum of the squares--is where the ontological truth resides, from which derives the axiom that the technicals never lie, the truth can nevertheless be synthesized. Truth can be technically manipulated, like when Barklays manipulates the LIBOR.

Lies are derived from the truth. When a bank manipulates rates it produces a technical benefit, but in the aggregate the risk of loss is fully assumed. So, who trusts Barklays to do the right thing with all that accumulated capital anyway?

By allowing banks to be so big they can manipulate the technicals and move markets to produce a surprise premium--which is a surprise only to those who consume the detriment--we are, supposedly, reducing risk with an economy-of-scale efficiency. Remember, "In God We Trust." The trust will be accounted for in the aggregate according to free-market theory, but according to efficient-markets theory markets need to be consolidated to reduce the risk of a declining rate of profit.)

The risk is not reduced. In fact, it is accumulated into the risk being avoided, which accumulates more risk. While Ivy-League, business school graduates consider this to be a clever means of commanding detriment with the appearance of being on demand, it is, in objective reality, a technical failure that demands a political resolution--collective action.

By means of demand destruction (the slow demand we have now, for example), consolidation of capital is supposed to make us more competitive by achieving economy-of-scale efficiency, but it really reduces competition and proprietary risk. It reduces detriment that consumers otherwise exact on the so-called "best and the brightest" in the marketplace, unconsolidated, on demand.

(Capitalists tend to question the value of moral intelligence. They tend to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, for example, in which intelligence is merely a function of taking and keeping power in a free market. Morality is a function of controlling relative value on command, not on demand.

A philosophy of risk that discounts moral intelligence is exactly what the capitalist is looking for, relying on the ontology of the outcome to guide our sense of morality, technically demonstrated in the aggregate. The ontology--objective reality--is not something that can be changed, nor should we try, but just let it be.

While exacting detriment in zero-sum is relatively easy, maintaining dominance in a free market without consolidating the risk requires more intelligence than the so-called best and the brightest have on command. Instead of expanding the economy, and the capacity to self-determine, they spend a lot of energy "creating" a false ontology that excludes the value of moral intelligence, subscribing to Rand's Objectivism, for example. Creating value non-zero-sum requires the incentive--the risk--of moral intelligence on demand.

In a free market there is more to be accounted for than just the self. It requires a level of moral intelligence that efficient-markets theory unintelligently assumes in the aggregate with a post-hoc lack of priority.)

Demand is value that empirically measures the available amount of affective, collective action (retributive value) that determines the probable direction of the risk. While capitalism considers the capacity for exacting detriment on demand to be clever, having to produce a profit with full, market accountability requires a level of intellectual capacity that the best and brightest endeavor to avoid in order to survive.

When capital and markets are unconsolidated, and a free market occupies political space in an economic, alpha dimension, the best and the brightest are determined on demand. According to elite, conservative theory, however, like that of Alexander Hamilton (to which both liberals and conservatives subscribe), turning the power structure on its head is the recipe for political-economic dystopia. (See, for example, the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke.)

In order to be self-determined (like the king), the elite must destroy the capacity to demand propriety. This means, contrary to our American heritage, defeating the free-market mechanism (and embracing a philosophy such as Ayn Rand's Objectivism, for example), and when the critique of capitalism is that the technicals indicate it is operating without a free-market legitimacy, the critics are axiomatically declared to be communists seeking to destroy the soul of our individuality, but consider what it means to destroy demand.