Class Warfare Begs the Question

When the war is over, who is the ruling class?

It begs the question.

Change of elites renders beta and gamma risk (high anxiety), not alpha risk.

The more alpha the risk proportion the less anxiety. The more alpha, the more confidence there is about one's fate legitimately self-determined, which is fundamental to consent of the governed and what it means to have a government that governs least.

While conservatives postulate that small government reduces the gamma-risk proportion, it does not. It actually increases the anxiety of what they consider to be illegitimate loss of value--the margin of profit earned by means of self-determination--in the gamma dimension.

Analysis of the risk proportion, as previously discussed, reduces to a philosophical conundrum of legitimate power and the technical indicators that reliably measure and signal its probable direction. If the measures are conflated so that a verification is next to impossible, then we rely on less empirical measures in the dimension of politics. Legitimacy of outcomes becomes a function of validation, rather than verification, in the gamma dimension where war is waged between self-determined classes.

(At the extreme of the gamma dimension, without counter-measures to reduce the risk, the risk becomes so dense, the gamma bursts. The result is the needed distribution, but the stochastic event--warfare--is catastrophic. Analytically, we can refer to this as "critical density of the gamma-risk proportion" to predict, and avoid, a gamma burst. Currently, monetary measures are reducing fiscal-policy density.

Keep in mind that a burst begs the question. Although a distribution occurs, the potential of the risk proportion is conserved because it is still consolidated to fight the war, or manage the risk. What was being fought over--distribution of the risk--is conserved. The empirical--objective--cure for this problem of conserved value is not warfare, which begs the question, but deconsolidation.)

While the outcome in the gamma dimension confers (validates) the winner with power, the legitimacy of the risk proportion is still unconfirmed (not yet verified). Both the winners and losers are set up for a failure of expectations determined by their own devices, which confirms the gamma risk as the "iron law."

With the risk of loss fully assumed, and thus bureaucratically managed to avoid it, even more risk accumulates. Instead of ensuring the power to self-determine, bureaucratic management of an oversized risk proportion serves only to diminish the ability to confirm a self-determination. Evidence to verify the culpability of one's self is subjected to political interpretation rather than its objective reality.

Ayn Rand, for example, postulates an objective reality corrupted by political interpretation, but concludes with an objective reality that serves to validate (or prove) her premise. A capitalist, she argues in true Aristotelian (aristocratic) fashion (in spite of the evidence), economically earns a profit and government politically steals it. Epistemically, however, as any modern (non-aristocratic) logician will tell you, declaration of objective truth without verification merely begs the logical question.

Accordingly, Ayn Rand submitted that the Soviet Union, for example, verified her premise that government is the problem and not the solution (argued post hoc). Both the capitalist model she advocates (her premise) and the socialist model (the evidence that proves her premise), however, operate with an economy-of-scale efficiency. Not only does she rely on a post-hoc argument, but her analysis lacks the objective depth she so strongly advocates to advance an anti-communist sentiment. Both methods of argument are characteristic of aristocratic philosophy and rely heavily on Aristotelian logic to "prove" a premise rather than "verify" a hypothesis.

It is not difficult to understand, then, why conservatives tend to reject science as a legitimate form of knowlege. Instead they rely on arguments structured to validate their principles (typically post hoc) which includes, for example, devalidating regulations that derive from scientific data.

(Remember that a post-hoc argument fallaciously argues a temporal sequence to prove a causal relationship. Rand's argument is: since government provides welfare, government is the problem, not the solution. "After this, therefore because of this" is a logical fallacy, yet Rand maintains it is a verified hypothesis--welfare is a self-fulfilled prophecy that defeats self-determination and predicts low productivity.

Yes, welfare does predict low productivity--what classical economists called overproduction--but it does not cause it. A harvest moon, for example, signals--or correlates with--the time to harvest, but does not cause the harvest.

Remember, when applied to risk, a post-hoc accumulation of error results in a post-hoc fallacy of the risk proportion and punctuated, stochastic events like the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Remember, we have welfare in reaction to the Great Depression, and the overwhelming proportion of the current budget deficit is the result of the financial crisis--application of Ayn Rand's philosophy--and the Great Recession.)

Both a nominally free-market and a nominally socialist state rely on government to manage consolidated risk in reaction to class warfare. If this verifies anything it is that government is necessary to reduce the risk of class warfare (the effect of consolidated power).

Rand argues, nevertheless, consolidation that results from capitalism is a more efficient means of resource allocation despite its natural tendency for class envy (and class warfare, which results in reactionary tendencies--government; that is, her scheme causes the very thing it abhors). Her argument begs the question into oblivion, which gives rise to the conservative argument that perpetuation of class distinction (and warfare) drives a productive incentive that makes capitalism far superior to any model that structures for economic equivalence and thus stasis (lack of a productive, and therefore meaningful, existence). The argument is presented as risk averse, but it is really risk prone; so prone, in fact, that warfare is the likely, verifiable result.

Megadeath (full employment) so that productivity (overproduction and the profit derived from boom and bust) does not die is not exactly the ideal model for a meaningfully productive existence. It is, in fact, dystopic!

To subdue the tendency to violent aggression, Rand proposed that non-aggression is categorically imperative to maintain a meaningful, productive existence. So, we presently hear conservatives aristocratically argue it is immoral to incite class warfare. Rhetoric that advocates raising marginal tax rates, for example, will "loot" the wealth of the nation and deprive us all of a meaningful, productive existence (the absurdity of the argument is only surpassed by its shameless self-indulgence). Despite advocating for a system of incentives that make aggression the likely "reaction" (which demands government authority), Rand's "Objectivism" is but a convoluted, ideological bias created to make the abusers look like the abused--up is down, down is up, left is right, right is left, good is evil and evil is good.

Technically, the practical result of Rand's philosophy is to cause the risk it is supposed to prevent (big government). Since it argues for the efficiency of consolidated power (the tendency to class warfare), the risk proportion must be argued post-hoc to render its "objective" identity (Rand's "A is A" proposition). Technically, however, Rand's objective proposition is but a classic case of fundamental attribution error that twists the technicals into what only appear to be freely random, ontological, stochastic oscillations. Objectively, these stochastics (frequency of the boom-bust cycle that "twists" the position of the risk and turns equity into debt) are really the product of an aristocratic, teleological, predetermination.

Any economic system technically structured with Rand's philosophy of risk (I dare say) cannot expect to be anything but twisted. "Operation Twist" is an apt expression for trying to control the verifiable, risk-prone philosophy of Ayn Rand in political practice.

Objectively, Rand goes wrong limiting politics to government. Her so-called "Objectivist" argument is fallaciously post-hoc and begs the question.

Consolidation of industry and markets out of self-interest is a highly political (meaningfully self-indulgent) activity. It has political consequences--it accumulates risk that must be managed (post hoc) in a political (gamma-risk) dimension or it will deconsolidate under the free-market conditions Rand, for example, advocates. The political and economic realities are objectively the same thing. They have the same objective--consolidation of power, which is the outcome Rand says government wrongly interprets to be inimical.

(Business executives--owners and operators--are politically self-indulgent. Having enjoyed the success of meaningful productivity, aristocratically enjoying administration of power from the top down, altruistic public service is, as Ayn Rand points out, an extension of that self-indulgence, but she wrongly reasons this to be a general, principle motive for a meaningful self-determination. Rand's objectivism characteristically begs the question.

A person that is motivated by selfishness is a slave to appetite and spoiled, emotional disturbances. Eric Cantor is a good example. Such a person does not demonstrate the freedom that is characteristic of self-determination, but is a prisoner of an irrational exuberance that is antithetical to an altruistic existence. This renewed, Randian philosophy of meaningful, objective, self-attribution is inimical to the objective of a peacefully prosperous pluralism that aligns, and confirms, altruistic attributes with the rewards of a meaningful, self-indulgent existence.

Recognizing that a free-market structure is aptly suited for a meaningful, productive, and safely legitimate self-determination does not require trading off attributes, like doing the right thing despite your appetite, that determine the accountability--the identity--to attain it. Saying the ability to defeat the means of self-determination is the measure of its attainment is just irrational, elitist nonsense.

Despite the declared, technical primacy of a self-serving identity (and the tendency to "run with the herd"), it is not at all impossible to serve the self through selfless service. The notion that public service and self service are mutually indulgent is unenlightened. To be intellectually honest, actualizing an identity that is not at the base, but at the height, of a moral existence not only serves the public, but indulges the knowledge of the self.)

While Rand is right that government is the reactionary element, she is wrong to identify it as categorically left-wing. Even the left-wing elements of government react with policies and programs that keep the risk proportion consolidated (conserved).

Rand "axiomatically" postulates we are all selfish, which determines our political fate. Despite how evil selfish outcomes may appear to be, in reality, she says, it is the only common objective, so it is objectively immoral to victimize those that attain the measure of success we all aspire to achieve. Selfishness, then, is a categorical imperative and government should act in priority to protect its attainment rather than interpret, or affect, its otherwise "objective" (Aristotelian), independent reality.

Contrary to the Randian axiom, however, the risk assessments presented on this website do not postulate government is inherently evil because it prevents us from being liberated (creative and productively self-determined). Instead, government authority is the means (Constitutionally endowed) to prevent a dystopic vision that, when pursued, profiles the Randian risk--a philosophy of risk that accumulates the risk to be prevented by liberal pursuit of its practical attainment.

Objectivism is a function of empirical analysis, and having been tested, Rand's vision tests positive for dystopia. Her philosophy accumulates the political risk--the only evil--it purports to prevent. It predicts the objective reality it is supposed to resist. It begs the question because it ignores the risk of loss fully assumed, which selfishly consolidates power (categorically classifies it as a moral imperative) to politically prevent its inevitable objectivity--the common, axiomatic right to self-determine.

Hayek, for example, concluded that the class with the most economic power has the most political power (and risk to be managed to prevent its loss, fully assumed). If we are to use his measure of power (economic power is political power), then, as Hayek argued, it is necessary to keep power diffused (non-exclusive) in a pluralistic (non-elite), democratic (not a republican) proportion. (The more indivisibly alpha the risk proportion, in other words, the more divisibly self-determined.)

Conservative philosophy always begs the question, and Hayek, for example, made it clear that he did not subscribe to it like Ayn Rand, for example, later did. Instead, Hayek suggested there be a minimum, guaranteed income so that everyone has the means (the power) to self-determine.

A minimum, guaranteed income would allow every citizen to logically act with collective, self-determination. Both the means and the ends would be highly divisible, easily verifiable, and directly accountable measures of a free-market process that never begs the question, but intuitively (with an inevitable, rational, ontological legitimacy) provides answers through a naturally occurring, empirical process of continuous improvement.

Such a process of continuous improvement is the means for less government, but not less governance. "The risk" would be redistributed so that it is more self-determined instead of existentially obtained in a high-anxiety, too-big-to-fail dimension. Doing this, however, as we have explored on this website, requires deconsolidation of the risk proportion in priority, which requires government intervention--what conservatives are, in priority, opposed to.

The conservative argument for less government is always post-hoc and begs the question. Reducing government without deconsolidation does not decrease, but increases the need for government; and in the same way, cutting government spending without reducing the need for it just increases the need for more debt. Thus, Hayek, for example, says government is causing debt, but the argument is a post-hoc fallacy.

If, instead of trillions to bail out big (horizontally and vertically integrated) banks, government spends to pluralize the system rather than keep it consolidated, the political means to self-determine increases and the need for government (what Schumpeter described as accumulation of "exogenous errors") reduces. The reason we, instead, allow for continuous consolidation is not because it efficiently (more selfishly) allocates capital, but because it structures power for elite self-indulgence (accumulation of errors rendered unaccountable--or the risk of loss fully assumed), aristocratically identified as the liberty to self-determine.

Hayek agrees that self-determination (the fundamental measure of utility that determines the legitimate use of capital) is not possible if the measure of attainment is its deprivation. Hayek said he is not a conservative because the measure of its utility is fundamentally irrational, which is why his philosophy tends to be "classified" as "liberal."

The more self-determined the process (the more pluralistic the predictive model) the more genuinely legitimate the outcome. We will be more peacefully prosperous (free of class warfare) if "the risk" and its otherwise classified proportion is more fundamentally legitimate.

If the risk proportion is always being divisibly formulated as verifiable hypotheses politically self-determined (pluralistically accountable rather than aristocratically authoritative), the errors naturally reduce. The measurable utility of capital investment can then be "freely" determined without warfare.

In the alpha dimension, in priority, instead of one big, catastrophic correction in which we are all victims of our selves (dystopically Randian) in a too-big-to-fail proportion, change we really need is dialectically fluid and continuous. It is peacefully legitimate in a proportion that is small enough to be productively innovative without being, as Rand described it, "looted" and "victimized."

As Hayek, for example, recognized, the technical aspects of economics presents with a philosophical conundrum that cycles an empirical test of political will (i.e., what this website refers to as accumulation and inevitable, ontological distribution of gamma risk). It is a technical puzzle that analysts cannot avoid being philosophically engaged. It is what gives the discipline of political-economy its technical complexity.

Instead of supporting what is too big to fail, which always begs the question, use the value accumulated to deconsolidate the risk proportion and the war is over.

Kick the Can

"Kicking the can down the road" is a way to describe the accumulation of risk. Both parties say we need to stop kicking the can, but we will play this game anyway to avoid an immediate consumption of the risk.

As discussed in the previous article, there is a disconnection between risk producers and consumers. The people that are supposed to be creating jobs, with incentive provided by the Bush tax cuts and consolidation of the financial sector, predictably produce more risk than jobs. The result, predictably, is a precipitous decline of tax revenue as the need to spend rises. Thus, the Bush tax cuts and financial consolidation have produced a huge deficit and a massive public debt that threatens to deflate our economy into another Great Depression. Save the upper-income class, deflationary risk tends to consume everyone's wealth by design.

Keep in mind that the promise of tax cuts for the rich and financial consolidation was supposed to be the path to prosperity, but it was, predictably, the road to ruin. If we do not at least let the tax cuts expire, which should have already expired, financial analysts have put our debt on watch.

With a full-blown depression looming large, Republican-party strategists have realized that the risk cannot be consumed in the proportion in which it is currently being gamed. Frankly, we need to just say it...this is the result of arrogant, elitist stupidity. The people that claim we are all better off with our fate in their hands are completely disconnected with the realpolitique "We the People" know as the general welfare.

Our currency says, "In God We Trust." This means that "We the People" will take the natural course of action to check the unempirical arrogance of the powerful who think they can exact detriment--cause harm (like debasing the value of our currency)--without liability, and arrogantly try to make us believe that if we do not let them harm us, we will suffer even more. "We" all know this philosophy of risk is completely disconnected from reality and "We" can most assuredly "Trust" it will be corrected. The right thing to do (moral value) is always there--it is categorical, but "We" choose what is imperative by being directly connected to the structure of power, not disconnected from it as the elite would have it.

(Remember that upon default your assets become collateral for much-needed debt. Equity is turned into debt--your net worth is liquidated and borrowed back from the rich at the highest possible rate of interest.)

Elite, conservative philosophy is not the path to prosperity. We can go with what we know we can trust, or kick the can down the road to ruin.

Alignment and Disconnection

Political economists spend a lot of time identifying alignment of incentives and the disconnection of risk from the reward. Analysts spend a lot of time in these dimensions because they are highly predictive.

If we can identify probable incentives to act and the probable techniques used to derive value, analysts are more likely to predict the direction of trends both long and short, political and economic.

As "the direction of trends" descriptively suggests, analysts identify how trends are being directed and why. The incentive to act "directs" a trend, purposefully manipulated toward a predetermined goal. Thus, the "direction" (the manipulation) of the trend.

The current deficit-and-debt-reduction debate provides a good example of trending analysis. In this debate we see policy options to control risk philosophically motivated. Keep in mind that the Tea Party membership adheres to a philosophy of risk that has been thoroughly tested and disconfirmed, yet it insists on it being applied in its pure, unadapted form, fundamentally misattributing its failure to its adaption. Combined with technical means, the risk is predictably directed to a probable outcome that is not necessarily in the self-interest of the actors, their constituents, in the desired direction, or for that matter, philosophically consistent.

The trend can change simply because the outcome does not reconcile philosophically, as in the case of Tea Party activists aligned against both Republicans and Democrats (which was an easily predictable trend modeled in the gamma-risk dimension). Binomially structured, a left-of-center realignment was reasonably expected to firmly follow a strong, recessionary trend. Instead, a strong, populist sentiment quickly realigned with conservative philosophy after so-called liberals demonstrated how illiberal they could be.

Identifying all the risk factors--like the empirical value of your working philosophy--is a function of predicting the future value of the risk (like an otherwise unlikely sovereign-debt crisis). It predicts where winning players should be positioned at any particular time. Ignorance is bliss until it is too late to change your position.

Changing positions determine (indicate) likely trend reversals and, with added complexity, subsequent valuations that appear disconnected. While outcomes may in many respects be unexpected, they are not necessarily unintended, which makes a normative valuation of the risk cognitively tense and complex. Culpability becomes an ambivalent tension between ontology (probable outcome despite purpose) and teleology (probable purpose despite the outcome). It is important to remember here that once outcomes are deemed to have ontological legitimacy, the incentive (the telos, the determination) to act in such a way increases and the trend is highly probable until the legitimacy comes into question (until a de-ontology becomes apparent, like needing government to control accumulated risk that, philosophically, is supposed to be ontologically legitimate--laissez-faire--if it does not accumulate).

Where the deontology occurs is where all the risk has accumulated--where it has been disconnected from the risk takers and assigned as pure detriment to be publicly consumed in the form of public debt which is now, predictably, in crisis.

The risk to be now consumed is in the form of the need to tax. Since the risk takers (the risk makers being falsely described as job creators) largely control the apparatus of power, the risk (the tax, the detriment) will be assigned to those (the risk consumers) who do not have the means (the power) to control it despite having that power (self-determination) being the legitimate philosophy of the risk. Consumers being culpable for assuming risk they cannot control is clearly a false assumption--it is illegitimate. There is, then, a disconnection between risk producers and consumers and the incentives that govern the direction of the risk perversely align to surplus detriment into a cataclysmic, crisis proportion.

Philosophically, the risk is out of proportion. It is a critical, crisis indicator, and despite all the value poured into ignoring it--having accumulated $14 trillion, and counting--the discrepancy cannot be empirically ignored. The disconnection cannot be consensually maintained so it will be validated--reorganized and aligned--in the republican form with the Tea Party providing a semblance of verifiable, Constitutionally consensual, accountability.

Since the risk ontology cannot be avoided, there is an attempt by conservatives to constitutionally endow the detriment through a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The incentives will no longer be perversely aligned--they will be constitutional. The disconnect between political-economic philosophy and practice will no longer determine the probable direction of the risk. Binomially structured or otherwise, risk will be legitimately aligned with (determined by) the Constitution to which every executive of the administrative state swears an oath to protect and defend.

Theoretically, with probability out of the way, what remains is deontological certainty of the risk. Instead of being managed into an ever-larger proportion of debt-to-GDP, the risk is "balanced" (directed) into an ever-larger proportion of consumed detriment. Risk no longer accumulates disconnected from the reward but is balanced (fully accounted for) with the force and legitimacy of constitutional authority. Ontologically, however, with the risk/reward fully accounted for, the probability an amendment will occur that reverses the trend is nearly perfect, which means a balanced budget amendment will not occur and a rising debt limit will.

It is important, critical, to keep the risk disconnected from the reward to maintain continuous consolidation of wealth and power. Accounting for the risk becomes so complicated, so mired in political-economic conspiracy, that culpability always has the shadow of doubt, which is why, for example, no criminal referrals have occurred despite all the inquiry into what caused the Great Recession.

The current means of converting value and consolidating it is reliably routine and effective. Risk-value is effectively derived, hidden and narrated into a complex, technically exclusive knowledge of it, which determines the power to direct it. There is no reason to change it except, being moral beings concerned with the legitimacy of the outcome, there is the incentive to align the philosophy of risk disconnected with the distribution of reward.