Financial Reform: Support and Resistance Indicators

Analysts discern the practical model being used for the development of public policy by identifying patterns and relative levels of support and resistance.

As the congressional debate proceeds on financial reform following the crisis in 2008, both parties are predictably poised to define the problem as the solution.

Democrats argue their reforms will end the too-big-to-fail organizational ontology that commands government bailouts. The Republican party, in faux opposition, contends proposed reform will "institutionalize government bailouts."

Equity valuations for large banks are getting support because the probability that any reform will end the too-big-to-fail model is virtually none.

While the Republican critique is correct, the party's solution to the problem is to stand in opposition to reform. The overall effect is to support the problem (and the associated equity valuations).

The entire reform process is in a prima facie state of regulatory capture to conserve the economy-of-scale modeling that consolidates wealth and power.

It is no coincidence that Wal Mart, in the midst of the recessionary trend, has now surpassed Exxon-Mobil at the top of the Fortune 500 list of largest companies. Consolidation into economy-of-scale "efficiencies" both precipitates the recessionary trend and validates the value of the efficiency.

As long as the means of consolidation is conserved, subsequent measures to counter its negative effects and support an economic recovery, like a more progressive tax code by letting the Bush tax cuts expire, for example, are rendered ineffective. The recessionary trend (unemployment) and equity values get support while a less accomodative monetary policy is resisted. Cheap money is available to the too-big-to-fail banks through the discount window to finance mergers and acquisitions (the economy of scale efficiency). The problem is supported, the solution is resisted.

A persistent recessionary trend will then be blamed on a progressive code and a value-added tax will be installed to finance the deficit in Hamiltonian fashion (with a regressive tax burden).

Since the tax on the value added is included in the consumer price, the tax increase will be regressive and deflationary (reducing demand), supporting the recessionary trend and the budget deficit while resisting higher interest rates.

The type and strength of support and resistance strongly indicates a persistent stagflationary trend that supports an arbitrage economy with high volatility, expertly engineered to favor firms that are too big to fail and a system of finance designed to generate profits without employment or economic growth.

While the reform debate correctly identifies the problem to be solved as organizational, it critically fails to identify that being "too big" is the determining variable. The practical model in operation is decidely, then, not pluralistic.

If analysts and policymakers rely on the pluralistic model for a predictive utility, the model will predictably fail.

Being organized "too big" will predictably fail the model of pluralism.

Government bailouts are necessary to avoid the catastrophic consequences of conserving the Hamiltonian model in a post industrial society.

The solution is to finance a more pluralistic model, not a more consolidated one.

Pluralistic Coefficiency of Markets

Enlightened self-interest is a term that essentially refers to distribution of risk and liability.

Even absolute monarchs realize they cannot rule without limiting risk and controlling liability.

The easiest way to limit risk and control liability, without the enlightened self-discipline (self-determination) of a free-market pluralism, is to consolidate. King George, for example, prior to the American Revolution, commanded all products from the colonies be shipped directly to England for distribution. This consolidation (centralization) of power not only set the price of tea for consumption, but whatever the King decided the labor was worth to produce it. A "tea party" ensued, and the rest is history.

The King was unreasonably sure of his risk and liability being as absolute as his royal classification. He thought for sure he could control the risk and liability to him by consolidation of the value into his divine authority to govern without consent.

He found out it is a free market afterall (accumulation and distribution of a gamma-risk ontology) and the result of resisting the natural distribution of risk and liability is conflict (accumulation and distribution of a retributive-value ontology).

(The ontology refers to risk and liability that cannot be eliminated or reduced. It can only be managed and/or avoided. The probability it will occur has a coefficiency of 1.)

The probability of risk is coefficiently constant. It is more visible (measureable) if it is allowed to accumulate. It is also possible to then structure a regime of incentives that legitimize the distribution of risk into a probable liability correlative to its accumulation, actuated by the "level of probable risk."

An economy of scale, for example, affords a low level of probable risk. The risk "maker" (actuator of the risk) is not the risk taker. Anyone that tries to compete with the economy of scale is "taking" a big risk. The risk is not likely to be taken (a negative incentive that results in an adverse selection). Thus, the low probable risk, and the level of risk, accumulated and distributed, is coefficiently conserved.

Recent health care legislation, for example, is being sold as an economy-of-scale efficiency. The pluralistic coefficiency is largely reduced to an adverse selection for both insurers and consumers to "spread the risk."

Actually, the risk is being accumulated in a non-pluralistic manner to be managed in a too-big-to-fail capacity.

Insurers will consolidate even more than they already are to absorb the rising cost of health care providers, whose prices are in support, and the increased cost of mandatory coverage. The entire system, both public and private, is a too-big-to-fail economy of scale. It is a non-plurlistic organizational modeling that verifiably consolidates risk into an extreme detriment (transforming a small, beneficially weak force into a big, detrimentally strong force) with minimal accountability of process. It is the problem, not the solution.

Rather than focusing on consolidation as a model that progresses us toward efficiency, let us look at the differential much like our founders did toward a practical coefficiency.

The American Revolution combined and mitigated the positive and negative effects of elitist and pluralist models with a representative form of government. Free-market economics would provide the larger pluralistic aspect to the ultimate and arbitrary power of public authority (the gamma risk).

Without a fully empowered free-market pluralism and, therefore, limited government with a strict constitutional construction, as Jeffersonians argued, the Hamiltonian model of political economy would result in a tyranny from the private sector relying on a false pluralistic legitimacy in which bankers rig the system to favor accumulation and privilege (like we have now). Distribution of power would "determine" from the top down, not the bottom up. Self-determination would be the "privilege" (a coefficient) of accumulated wealth and power and not a pluralistic pursuit endowed by a constitutional constant (a natural right) with "liberty and justice for all" (legitimate distribution of risk and liability).

Jefferson's prescient critique of the Hamiltonian model should sound very familiar. Now, as it was then, the wealthy elite claim that supporting a stable aristocracy in priority, from the top down (like bailing out Wall Street), is the right thing to do. It is the right-wing moral imperative that always trumps the "moral hazards" (adverse structural incentives) of welfare whether it be for the rich or the poor. By this logic, however, it is only a hazard for the non-elite, categorically defined by measure (the coefficient constant) of income.

The moral hazard refers to what economists call, the hierarchy of incentives. It essentially refers to the distribution of risk and liability that is the power structure. The distribution of power is euphemistically referred to as incentives. The structuring of these incentives suggests an ontology that if defied creates a moral hazard, with the inference being, of course, that the hierarchy is naturally moral and adherence is categorically imperative. The "given" structure is then neither immoral or a hazard. It is also not surprising, then, that economic predictions are often full of surprises and uninetended consequences of an exculpatory, ontological import.

If, for example, by means of a cyclical crisis, people find the value of their debt to be more than their assets (like we have now), the differential then has an adverse incentive. Having a declining income enslaved to a rising value of debt has a non-productive incentive, contrary to the value of the moral imperative with a coefficiency of economic expansion.

Also consider that a recessionary trend is inherently non-productive. The incentive to be highly productive results in overproduction and a cyclical, recessionary trend. Unemployment is not especially productive and does not fit a coefficiency of economic expansion. The hierarchy of incentives does, however, fit a structural model that supports prices and resists employment--the opposite of a pluralistic coefficiency.

While Hamiltonians are quick to argue the non-productive incentive (the moral hazard) of taxation, they argue the productive incentive a recessionary trend has because it readjusts costs and forms capital for reinvestment which is the fuel for economic growth (the trickle-down coefficiency). With the affect on income being the same as taxation, the effect of cyclical trending is nevertheless considered to have a positive value that fits the hierarchy of incentives (the elitist model of power).

The differential between the effect of taxation and the effect of the business cycle is actually complementary. According to the Hamiltonian model, the elite buy the debt and the non-elite pay it. The power structure is thereby stable (conserved) and the debt is secure (its value coefficiently conserved with the enduring value of a categorical, moral imperative).

The coefficient of the Hamiltonian model is to secure the debt. According to Hamilton, the trickle-down economic model of finance (like bailing out too-big-to-fail banks in priority) is the formula necessary to build and maintain the wealth of a nation: the formation of capital to be trickled down to the non-elite mass of "The People" just enough to keep them productive while, at the same time, exercising the cyclical means of accumulative crises to consolidate their wealth to pay the debt in the future.

Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed Hamilton's top-down model for structuring power (the hierarchy of incentives).

Since non-elits struggling to achieve the category of elite status is, supposedly, what productively expands the pie into a surplus (the declining rate of profit), it is morally imperative not to eliminate the incentive with a distributive justice imposed by government authority (the gamma risk).

Diminishing the capacity for gaining a surplus and gaining capital diminishes the general welfare according to Hamilton and the Federalists. The limit of government is where that capacity (that power) is diminished by government action, and according to Jeffersonians where the power of government begins to keep the pluralistic coefficiency of markets fully operational in priority.

Both camps fully recognized the power of pluralism. Hamiltonians knew it is an effective means of diffusing risk and limiting liability to the actuators rather than distributing it as an indivisible public good with exclusively divisible benefits to be trickled down.

Hamiltonians knew a government that ensures pluralism in priority would prevent the emergence of a power elite, what they then, and now, consider to be a moral hazard.

America's founders recognized the pluralistic coefficiency of markets. Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians alike recognized the reliability of free markets to deliver a legitimate liability of risk.

The founders recognized, as King George found out, that it is a free market afterall. It is a truth "self evident" in complement with enumeration of our natural rights--coefficient constants with a re-liable measure of risk and liability.

For Hamiltonians, the risk of liability is to be a reliably limited coefficient with a strong force (the more wealth accumulated, the stronger the force). For Jeffersonians, the risk of liability is reliably unlimited (continuously retested) with an inherently weak-force distribution.

The pluralistic model of power keeps the risk in constant application so that it cannot accumulate into a crisis proportion.

The elitist model of power constantly surpluses risk so that it can be applied in what appears to be an ontological proportion of crises that effectively limits the liability.

Constantly avoiding the liability accumulates risk. It is then surplused and managed into cyclical crises with an exculpatory ontology described as legitimately undirected (self-determined) market mechanics--a fraud that Jeffersonians knew would perpetrate if consolidation, rather than pluralism, was allowed to become the coefficiency of markets and, consequently, the structure of power.

The re-liable coefficient constant of pluralism is considered by Jeffersonians to be the primary function of a representative form of government. Legitimacy of power is constantly re-tested so that the liability of the elite is not limited to a set of philosophical principles with the absolute power (the legitimacy) of moral obligation like avoiding the moral hazards (the hierarchy of incentives that makes it right to bail out what is too big to fail in zero sum).

For Hamiltonians, surplusing the value of the risk (consolidation of value that allows for taking "big" risks) is the moral obligation of the power elite. Consolidation of power is the test, and the re-test in the public domain of representative government is coronation of that power.

Validation of power is exactly what Jeffersonians expect to prevent by ensuring the empirical power of pluralistic processes both economic and political with an easily verifiable coefficiency.

Reorganizing the Risk

The first measure to be achieved is to disabuse the efficiency of avoiding the alpha risk and consolidating it, reorganizing it, into a gamma risk to be re-authored, reallocated, by elite, government authority.

Consolidation occurs to achieve an economy-of-scale efficiency to "minimize risk" and maximize capital for investment, but the real risk being avoided is the free market. The marketplace is then organized to support a bad intent, all manner of vice, that a free-market system would not otherwise tolerate.

At this point of the business cycle, for example, as the accumulation of wealth presents as a recessionary trend, the accumulated risk on that value (the gamma risk) also presents a retributive value.

Managing the retributive value is taking the form of limiting liability. The incentive to, for example, overleverage capital for a capital gain that receives favorable tax reduction while shorting economic growth at the same time fully indicates the deliberate, knowing intent to gain capital at the expense of growth. While the beneficiaries argue the gain is legitimately ontological (without mal-intent, but the product of systemic opportunity--incentives--and the legal right to pursue self-interest), the people whose debt now exceeds their assets (negative equity) and a depreciating prospect of adequate income (a lack of economic growth), the system is ostensibly organized to support a mal-intent.

Without a free-market mechanism ensured in priority, instead of minimizing it (minimizing the inherent, systemic risk to capital--the declining rate of profit), we spend a lot of time arguing about how to systematically re-organize for virtue instead of vice (minimizing the risk of moral hazards or perverse incentives). We spend most our time determining whether there is a criminal intent so that "doing the wrong thing" is a function of avoiding prosecution (whether you can get away with it or not)...something that a real free-market system prosecutes in priority by allowing for maximum exercise of taste and preferences (democracy).

Ponzi schemes, like the Madoff scandal, for example. The "good faith of a reasonable person" is not a persuasive defense of Madoff victims to the alpha risk. Returns were clearly "too good to be true." Investors, however, considered the return to be a function of wealth and privilege, not a moral hazard. The incentive to perpetrate the crime and participate in the return was not considered a moral hazard until Madoff was prosecuted; and instead of fully, and simply, considering the source of the incentive to engage in this "unreasonable" behavior, we are fully engaged in discovering the extent of the liability and the validity of the losses. The result will be legislative measures to strengthen regulatory authority that is limited to prosecuting the effect rather than minimizing the probability (the sanctity) of its occurrence (the perverse incentive). If it is not practically immoral until the perpetrator is caught and prosecuted, then getting caught and prosecuted is what is effectively immoral. A criminal intent (making a profit without producing real wealth...what we are experiencing on a macro scale) is encouraged in priority if we do not ensure a free-market mechanics before anything else.

A criminal intent is not likely to survive a free-market system in priority. What we have now, however, with right-wing support, are firms too big to fail operating to get away with all manner of fraud and abuse with the burden of proof, and the right thing to do, being on the consumer in posteriori.

Reorganizing the risk requires a transposition of philosophical priorities.

Political and economic discussion is always dominated with ethical measurements that are translated into public policy programs. These form a structured environment that provides incentives. The structure (a corporate body for example) becomes the culpable component with the measure of liability--who makes and takes the risk--being reduced to a discussion of practical philosophical values that describes and explains the cost and benefit of organizing risk in any particular way.

Technically, what is at the very fundament of reorganizing the risk is a practical philosophy that determines the way incentives are structured and the legitimate distribution of rewards and deprivations.

The question, of course, is how to measure the success of a practical philosophy imbued with normative values.

The solution posited is to ensure a pluralistic ontology that provides the highest probability for economic growth and the least possible need for teleological processes to determine the legitimacy of distributive value verified with empirically evaluative measures.

Ensuring a free-market transforms a large, complex organizational structure, like our economy, and a problem like providing health care, from being too big and complex to be solved to everyone's legitimate satisfaction into an easily verifiable hypothesis.

The market tests and retests hypotheses, micro and macro. The result is an empirical process of continuous improvement with a distributive verification of legitimate, non-retributive value that minimizes the need for government authority; compared to what we have now with an ostensibly strong demand for an authoritarian regime to manage the organization of risk.

The free market tests and retests valuations until it gets it right--until the retributive value is reduced to a level of risk tolerance that defines the peaceful and prosperous, legitimate limitations of power, which forms the substance at the philosophical fundament.

Foundation for Authenticating and Reorganizing the Risk

It is possible to re-author the risk into an organized ontology that authenticates the power of a constitutional self-determination.

Attention to a right to self-determination is not to be dismissed as a flimsy, idealistic sentiment of the Enlightenment that does not reflect the real world. It is a practical efficiency that tends to be supplanted by argued efficiencies of scale that consolidate wealth and power.

Seeing to a strong, constitutional self-determination allows markets to operate toward an effective equilibrium, not the disequilibrium we have now of a crisis proportion. The disequilibrium is not limited to an economic affect. It is also political.

Economic disequilibrium affects the political fabric in our social time and space. It creates a force that holds us where we are. It conserves the progress and fulfillment of the Enlightenment's vision of a peaceful and prosperous self-determination, pluralistically endowed with an authentic ontological means-to-ends legitimacy that is easily confirmed right down to the individual.

Conservation of a cyclically algorythmic disequilibrium (recurrent crises) is holding us back.

Organizing for Crisis

The previous discussion explored the President's proposal to "organize for America." So, then, what exactly has America been organized for?

America is organized for crisis. Specifically, liquidity crisis.

Managing crises is our working, practical, existential model. It is the means by which the elite gain the legitimacy of power. In the case of America, it is a legitimacy of power beyond the concept of who is legally sovereign. It is, however, inferred from the "natural law" argument that some are more fit to rule than others, and they will "naturally" take power and rule, especially as a result of crises. Thus, we have the ruling class operating with an organized ascendancy and conservation of the means of power--cyclical crises.

Without liquidity crises, the system fails the elitist model. In the current case, we see our administrative elite, both public and private, acting in concert to provide the liquidity (the trickle-down legitimacy) missing from the system. The result is a budget deficit that can only be described as "gymongous!"

Where did all that liquidity go? Was it ever there to begin with or is it just a phantom phenomenology of our minds, a Jungian apparition of existential gestalt, or a real angst of materialistic expression?

Why do we organize for liquidity crisis? If we did not want it, we would not be organized for it, right?

Liquidity crisis is a technical tool of an organizational technology...it is the hammer that hits the nail that builds the house, and so on.... It is what builds the systemic risk and the elusive liability of who "takes" the risk. Legitimately, it should be whoever "makes" it, but the corporate is organized, consolidated, to make, but not take, the risk.

The "reason" for liquidity crisis is purely technical. It is a technique for politically and economically managing risk-to-reward.

Liquidity is the tool that authors, or builds, the risk into the rewards of wealth and power.

In order to "organize for America" it is necessary to authenticate the risk.

Free Markets, Diffusion of Power, and Dissipation of Risk

What defines the limits of power? It is not just a matter of saying yes OR no, but having the power to say yes AND no. Does, for example, the proposed health care reform empower consumers with the discretion of both yes and no to deter abuse of power?

If, for example, consumers find the cost of health care to be too high, paying the insurance premium, directly or indirectly, always says yes to the cost. If insurance is mandatory, not only is saying no not an option by organized default, it is illegal.

Without being able to say yes and no (to bid the price up or down), consumers are not empowered to control the cost. Prices inflate because there is no resistance. There is no deterence value--a reciprocal value of self-determination--in determining prices. Consumers have to pay the cost that providers can claim is set by a demand ontology. The accumulation of wealth, and the concommittant power to self-determine (deter and terminate, or define the limit of power), is claimed to be ontologically determined by a free-market process (supply and demand) and, thus, exculpatory (not retributively valued and subject to gamma risk).

Regulating markets (gamma risk) is all about deterence value--providing incentives or disincentives (creating a predictable, manageable, ontology of purpose).

The best deterence is, of course, to prevent the accumulation of power. Within that structure of power is the discretion to control (deter) costs and "determine" income.

For example, the short selling of our economy through credit default swaps expanded (leveraged) the limit of power. The gamma risk that accumulates results in a well-defined, "prudential" regulatory authority. The swappers were self-determining; they knew that if the capital was not being leveraged to cause economic growth, the mortgages were bad (toxic) debt.

Self-determination is not by definition exculpatory. The determinants that shorted our economy and caused the Great Recession knew investing in CDS and CDO's would result in a recessionary trend, causing a loss for everyone else's wealth and income for their own self-determined capital gain. It is completely the opposite of a free-market ontology and the gain can not in any way be considered exculpatory, beyond a punitive tax authority to retribute the value and reverse the deflationary trend.

We see then that the limit of power is to determine income. If the ability to self-determine is limited either by the public or private sector, the power to determine, and responsibility, is alienated from the self. The process of determination is then in a constant state of regulatory reform, aimlessly searching for prudence and responsibility that has been alienated into an authoritarian regime with an affirmative power that is too big to fail.

Health care reform legislation, for example, is for consumers an alienation of power. The ability to "deter" or "terminate" the extent of power is limited to government authority based on the distribution of the risk-to-reward.

The dispropotion of low risk to high reward of a collusive consolidation makes the credible case for a public utility, like a national health insurance program.

Big profits, if not checked by price controls appropriate for something the consumer is commanded to have, can be reinvested to expand the supply and control the costs of the entire sector. With the immense consolidation of wealth and power, however, the probability it will not be corrupted is very low, something that a free-market economics prevents if ensured in priority.

Given the need to spread the risk, health insurance presents a good case for government providing what people cannot provide for themselves, (something free-market economics does very well, by the way, if income is adequately distributed to allow for it). However, solving the problem with organized consolidation (with the problem) is as irrational as consolidated organizations are likely to be, always acting with an affirmative too-big-to-fail economy of scale.

Whether the public or private sector, or in combination, the evaluation of a too-big-to-fail economy of scale is always affirmatively "yes" since its "subjects" do not, by design of the leviathan, have the power to deter, or limit, with the right to self-determination. That Constitutional right, rather than being empowered by government authority, is deterred.

A government healthcare program, for example, is by definition too big to fail. What defines its success or failure? Are the processes of power close enough to readily access the incentive to change its delivery for a facile fit to the wants and needs of individual consumers like a free-market system? The probability favors a power elite embellishing its progressively oversized sense of self, dictating consumer preferences right down to the fingernail.

Rather than encouraging the growth of consolidation, which maximizes the negative, non-productive effect of the zero-sum and the need for government, America can be credibly organized for economic growth without massive government spending and the massive tax liability to fund it. The liability, rather than accumulated and shifted to the public by large corporates into a crisis dimension, can be organized, and spread out, into a manageable ontology with a very close and easily verifiable accountability.

Without expansion of the pie, and a "disinflationary" tendency, the capital gained is not "verifiably" legitimate and needs "validation" of government authority. Using this illegitimate gain (gaining the profit without assuming the alpha risk, which is the product of the consolidated brand of growth), the investors, (by claiming an inherent, constitutional right to their property) induce a "deflationary" cyclical trend like we have now instead of economic growth with low inflation.

It should be clear, by even the most casual observation, the organizational legitimacy (the prescribed benefit) of allowing for an unobstructed "organic growth" of an ever-bigger corporate is critically flawed. The cost (massive unemployment and transfer of wealth to the investors) to benefit (big profits and salaries to the corporate) is overwhelmingly obvious but is being afforded constitutional protection. How, pray tell, can this possibly be regarded as the utilitarian ethic of promoting "the general welfare?"

This "general welfare" is supposed to "trickle down." The evidence, however, shows the welfare generally trickling up. The deficit between theory and practice literally, empirically, results in deficit spending which is explained as being the result of, as Ronald Reagan described it, government spending without the need.

If we are to rely on this kind of logic, it is not difficult to see why we face such a political-economic maelstrom. Stopping and reversing an extreme lack of good reason starts with properly identifying the problem, and the new admistration has, at this point, done that.

According to the president, it is time to "organize for America." So, then, what exactly has America been organized for?

It is no coincidence middle-class families face rebuilding their savings while too-big-to-fail corporates reap record profits. If your wealth was not plundered by this recession, it will the next one, or the next. Your wealth was not lost, it was consolidated. The value still exists, just not in your bank account. There is, however, considerable risk to this conversion and consolidation of value that is being busily managed by our two parties and our public/private corporate bureaucracy.

Where there is reward there is risk and the assigment of that risk/reward, its distribution, legitimately won or lost. We are politically organized to manage, and conserve, the risk our economy has organizationally evolved to accomplish--liquidity crisis.

Crises result from the accumulation of risk. It is, then, necessary to dissipate that risk.

Determining Who Is In Command and Control

A recent forty-percent rate increase for health insurance due to lower demand of the recessionary trend, for example, technically indicates that the market is too consolidated. Is there not anyone else in the world wanting to share in the multi-billion dollar profits at a competitive price?

The incentive to compete for Anthem's huge margin is not likely in a recessionary trend. Financing is not likely available and, even without the recessionary environment, there is enough collusion in the sector to prevent either a competitive intravention or intervention in a geographic market.

Collusion rigs the market, and banks prefer to finance the low-risk/high-reward ratio of consolidated market share, magnifying the risk into a systemic, crisis proportion. Financial support for consolidation supports the problem--the deflationary trend that reduces demand and raises prices to maintain the profit margin.

Both liberals and conservatives agree that consolidation solves the problem because it controls (commands) the risk. Instead of being an ontology beyond our control, it is rendered a manageable, cyclical algorythm which, of course, plausibly defines the problem as the solution. The problem is, then, continuously innovated to replicate the distribution of costs and benefits that cause the problem; and as the economy becomes more consolidated, effects emerge that seem to defy the "natural laws" (the ontologies) that give legitimacy to outcomes.

While raising prices in the face of falling demand seems to defy gravity, a long-term slow-to-no growth supply relative to demand reduction, along with transfer payments, in a cyclical, deflationary trend supports prices and profit margins. This stagflationary tendency of a consolidating economy, instead of the disinflationary tendency of a free-market economy, prevents a "deflationary" declining rate of profit. The "law" of supply and demand is not being defied.

Consolidation purposefully reduces supply to support prices and profits while the corporate reduces demand by creating unemployment. Stagflation indicates an economy that is too consolidated and easily predicts a deflationary trend followed by an inflationary, government infusion of capital invested to support the weak demand which, in turn, supports the profit margin. As the infused capital consolidates, the economy stagflates because the capital infused does not increase supply, but increases demand.

Just as stagflation indicates an economy that is too consolidated, and the problems that are sure to accumulate, it also indicates the solution--deconsolidate!
We should wonder why the countless hours of discussion and analyses rarely, if ever, mention deconsolidation. The discussion on "too big to fail," for example, is always about not being allowed to fail, not being too big. Is it not obvious that being "too big" is for the purpose of not failing--of avoiding the deflationary declining rate of profit in which the oversized corporate body collapses in cardiac arrest without a cyclical government infusion of new, life-giving capital by Dr. Keynes' prescription?

The oversized corporate body, instead of reducing size, is encouraged to get bigger, gormandizing on the technical largesse of preventing systemic crisis in the interest of the general welfare.

Gorging itself on the general welfare into a morbidly obese body of bureaucratic blob, the body corporate has stroked out and been recussitated so many times it presents with severe dimentia.

An oversized corporate is irrational and delusional. The People paying the captains of finance massive bonuses for massive unemployment, record foreclosures, budget deficits and, sooner than later, tax increases, is completely absurd.

The corporate expects the body of The People to be grateful for all the misery and mayhem. What appears to be irrational and delusional, according to the corporate, is the secert, elite knowlege in the "black box" that produces the inscrutible benefit of the "invisible hand."

Experiencing the price of goods and services increasing as demand declines, for example, among a host of other irrational technical inversions and unreasonable if not delusional expectations, organizing an oversized corporate renders a body politic in the throws of full-blown psychosis.

Our schizophrenic liberal vs. conservative approach to defining the problem just results in more bemusement with technical characteristics that, rather then being illogical, are upon closer inspection symptomatic verification of what exactly the problem is.

The purposeful (organized) manipulation of supply and demand essentially defines "the problem" we now face. It is offered as the solution with the concept of "organic growth" meaning: continued consolidation of the risk to be easily managed in an aggregated (crisis) proportion. The result is "organized crisis." It has a purpose (telos) with the ontological legitimacy of natural law (supply and demand, and the rights of humanity which includes the corporate "body").

A spiraling, deflationary, declining rate of profit is a classical, cyclical ontology of capitalism our executive, legislative, judicial, and administrative processes are entrusted to resist in priority, not support.

While government does operate to resist the declining rate of profit,
government, however, acting in posteriority (because, supposedly, no"body" really wants a crisis, it just naturally happens)--acting to palliate rather than prevent--tends to support a spiraling, deflationary trend that resists demand (unemployment) and supports the formation of capital (the profit margin).

Despite the populist rhetoric to resist the current trend, for example, policy has largely supported the deflationary trend, prices, and profits. Stimulus measures have overwhelmingly supported deflation of middle and lower-class assets and incomes while resisting a deflationary, declining rate of profit. It is not difficult to see how the one finances the other. The partisan wrangle over health care reform, for example, will produce the same neo-classical effect in the ostensible theatre of legitimate public process.

Anthem's insurance rates increased because it was less able to spread the risk to support the margin, what a free market essentially prevents by spreading the risk in "disinflationary" priority.

The free market avoids the declining rate of profit being a failed expectation. The impetus to rig the market to support the profit margin is supplanted with support of a robust demand structure and the impetus for economic growth, not stagflation. Anthem would be expected to reduce rates to retain or win marketshare and maintain or increase margin in an expanding marketplace, not a consolidating one.

Collusion to rig markets is illegal. Where is the prosecution in defense of free markets (to increase the supply so that the consumer has a choice to demand--bid for--equitable behavior rather than government being trusted to command it)? Instead, as in the case of health insurance, what is being offered is a big government alternative that will do little-to-nothing to control costs in the entire health care sector.

It is no secret that buying insurance will not ensure health care, but it will support the profit margin; and when care is delivered, the cost gets support.

Collusion of the public and private sectors is not illegal, and the distribution of costs and benefits cannot be considered illegitimate. Although the distributive result may be considered undesireable, the organized means is too big to fail.

The financial reform legislation in progress is vowed to eliminate the too-big-to-fail doctrine and the organized incentive (the exculpatory ontology of purpose) to use its accumulative power to a detriment.

The best way to redirect the risk of an organized consolidation of power to detrimentally decide the fate of others in zero sum is to deconsolidate--what health care and finance reform is not likely to do. The diffusion of power and risk will not be easily relinquished into a genuine model of self-determination.

The word "determination" includes the word "deter." Self-determination is where the ability to command and control has reached its allowable limit. It is possible to deter the pursuit of power beyond the allowable limit.

The False Efficiency-of-Scale Argument: The General Case

Being too big to fail provides optimal efficiencies of scale. It also provides accumulation of errors and distortions, costs and abuses, on a massive scale, that cannot fail.

It is critical to understand that an organizational model that is scaled too big for failure creates risk of equally large size. Since it cannot fail, it is immune to the risk. If you are not the beneficiary of that risk, then you are "at risk" to the reward. Your savings, your home, your income is at risk of being consolidated into capital that is supposed to finance your savings, your house, and your income. It is intended to sacrifice the benefit to you for "the general welfare" which is seeing to the welfare of the rich in priority. It is a zero sum.

Being organized "too big to fail" causes risk, it does not take the risk. No. The risk is caused to consolidate assets in the form of legitimate market risk that is not at all legitimately ontological. The risk, rather, is created by an organized teleology just for the purpose of failure. It is intended to effect a reward by causing a detriment through organized means.

Being "too big to fail" effectively creates a "detrimental reliance" which is considered by law to be an abusive relationship typically associated with theft by scheme and the product of a criminal intent. The organization is the cause, the failure is the effect. The result is a profit without risk, or an illegitimate zero-sum game.

On a macro-economic scale, instead of forming the capital necessary to create jobs, being too big to fail has formed massive systemic risk and created massive unemployment.

Massive capital has been formed. So, where are the jobs?

Unfortunately, if you need a job, unemployment is the capital amassed. It has been converted and consolidated into private property. The property will not again be capital until it is used to expand the pie (what currency derivatives and credit default swaps will not do). It is a massive failure of the system, managed to a consolidated, too-big-to-fail level of incompetence (to the gamma-risk limit of power).

While the system has failed, the parts that comprise the system failure are too big to fail, and the system stubbornly persists in error.

Organizing firms so big that they cannot fail is to organize for failure, not success. It allows for the system to persist in error by managing, rather than preventing, the systemic risk. The system is then driven to a level of managerial incompetence. It is dysfuntionally organized with the "peter principle."

A free-market pluralism technically avoids the organizational problem of the "peter principle." Instead of allowing the pursuit of power to support an accumulation of errors, pluralistic organizational technologies provide a self-corrective, empirical ontology that awards power based on the merits and not an accumulation and consolidation of power itself based solely on the ability to game the system. It will resist the pursuit of power without the qualification--the merits--for having it, like a practical moral intelligence.

A free-market pluralism ensures the means of gaining power is not an end in itself, so it must be ensured in priority. Managing markets after the dirty deeds have been done ensures markets fail and produce the success of consolidating power by defeating the meritorious mechanism of free-markets.

Regulated markets with firms too big to fail do not produce a free-market effect. They do, however, give dirty deeds the legitimacy of public process and the force of public authority.

Today's organizational techniques and financial instruments become the clever innovations of tomorrow that evades the letter of the law, or deliberately encounters the ignorance of a like-minded regulatory authority.

Rather than resisting the incentive for dirty deeds, a regulatory regime that does not ensure operation of a free-market mechanism in priority supports the incentive to produce outcomes that elicit a populist sentiment. The trick then, of course, is to give the outcome legitimacy despite the negative sentiment.

Allowing firms to "grow" too big to fail because it is economically efficient supports the probability the negative effects will occur. What is to be prevented by popular demand (like having to sell your assets at a loss because you lost your job while big bankers reap record profits and salaries by investing in derivatives rather than economic growth--i.e., consolidation of industry, markets, and the wealth) will innovatively occur as unintended, ontological crises.

The argument for needed change then takes this form: it does not matter what we do, the crises that continuously consolidates wealth and power will (ontologically) occur. It is a law of nature. It is the result of natural processes that cannot be avoided; and since crises cyclically occurs no matter what, the argument that it is futile to try (a la Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche) is empirical truth.

The ontological argument for the consolidation of wealth and power is a conservative argument that is generally accepted across the ideological spectrum. It is an argument of the general case: organized consolidation (an economy of scale) is a gamma risk that can only be managed, not ontologically avoided, or prevented.

We should be quick to test this hypothesis by ensuring a free-market pluralism in priority. It will be interesting to see who objects and why.

A pluralistic ontology prevents the accumulation of power into the pursuit of a criminal intent. It is a pursuit that has been described as "crony capitalism" or "robber-barronism" in which power is accumulated from the privation, rather than the provision, of others. (The current health care debate, for example, includes insurers admitting they are so non-free-market organized that they can deny access and raise prices all they want without, by definition, market sanction. The power to sanction is the exclusive domain of the firm too big to fail the marketplace.)

Capitalism is organized to prevent economic growth in the name of expanding it.

Through an efficiency of scale, the ever-larger "growth" of a consolidating corporate body intends to defeat free-market economics (the incentive for growth) for a tyrannical effect that commands the free-market measure of success--the profit margin (but without growth). The lack of economic growth is expressed as an efficiency of scale that prevents failure and ensures success by empirical proof of the profit margin.

The corporate body must include government, and its regulatory authority, so that it does not act to produce a free-market effect by popular demand. The tyrannical, non-free-market effect (the false free-market measure of success by being too big to fail) then has the force and legitimacy of democratic, government authority (state capitalism).

It is time to reject the organized model of a too-big-to-fail efficiency. It is time to reject the false ontology that legitimizes the consolidation of wealth and power and accept a true economic, ontological scale of efficiency.

We should reject the traditional, conceptual ontology that forms the elitist model of economic efficiency in which economies of scale are the statement of the general case.

"Organizing for America"

"It is time we start organizing for America," the President recently declared. It is a practical expression that affords more than hopeful inspiration. It recognizes the political-economic maelstrom we face reduces to dependance on a singularly independant variable: organization.

The Supreme Court's decision to extend the corporate's virtual freedom of speech into the realm of inalienable right pushed all sensible "hope" for an equitable co-existence with the most alienating organized force on the planet over the virtual edge.

It is naive to think the corporate is organized for inclusive, participatory ontology of purpose like democracy. It is organized to isolate, alienate, from the ontological legitimacy of democratic process. It is organized for, and empowered with, a specific purpose: to limit liability, if not a direct accountability, which has always been pushed to the very limit, and now beyond.

What the lack of accountability does not provide, the limited liability of the corporate will. Its legal status of limited liability is empowered with an organizational technique that reduces the risk of a verifiable accountability to the semantics of legal argumentation. Rather than being decided in the marketplace, accountability becomes more a function of a co-optable legislative and judicial procedure than the probability of firm and market risk.

For the analyst, the corporate creates a black box that prompts all manner of technical tools to divine market trends. Analyses often resemble a divination because of the elitist, command quality built into the corporate structure. While equity price data, for example, does not lie, and should accurately reflect the alpha-risk, regression of price and volume patterns harbor hidden variables, like direct manipulations, that suggest future trends and predictable patterns of risk. The regressions are statistically significant but inferentially flawed.

Whether alpha or beta price data, regression on upper and lower indicators includes any manipulation and may, in fact, over time, technically indicate manipulation of prices. If the objective is to falsely indicate a trend over time by manipulating the technicals, however, the risk pattern becomes an infathomable fractile reduction with an ultimate probability only known to the manipulator at any particular time, dependant only on the gamma risk.

Trends, most importantly the macro trend, can be largely determined by a systematic organizational typology. Systematic trends emerge and apply with spurious and confounding, independant variables by elite directive that phenomenologizes the level of risk.

Despite the arbitrary and capricious variations by elite directive, the hierarchical regime of corporate bureaucracy renders the pattern, direction and level of risk a relatively easy, teleological inference.

Organized consolidation into large corporates to avoid the alpha risk gains capital without actually winning what the value is supposed to represent--gaining market share by expansion of the pie, not consolidation of it. The legitimacy of the capital gained and accumulated as the private property of the investors, despite having avoided the risk rather than having gained it, is nevertheless maintained along with the naturally endowed right to use it as they see fit.

The right to use property (capital) as one sees fit being evermore extended to the corporate as a "body" with inalienable rights provides a scapegoat to which the liability is attached. The system is what is blameworthy. The system motivates action and consequence, not the people in it.

By incorporating, then, more power can be gained than a person can be held liable for. Exponentially more power can be applied than one-man-one-vote can account for by organizing into a corporate "body."

Deliberate organization of the capital into an oversized corporate bureaucracy, which includes being operationalized with government enterprise (the recent bailout, for example), maximizes effective power while minimizing accountability and potential liability.

The motive to maximize profit no matter the cost, like pollution, for example, is the result of the system...we are organized to do it. In the same way, massive unemployment, forcing mass foreclosures and negative net worth to support maximum profit margin (resisting the declining rate of profit) is a systematic, organizational problem. It is beyond the culpability of individual corporate "bodies," each with an individual natural right to property and the pursuit of happiness. (Notice how pluralism of the corporate body into "individual" legal entities with discrete articles of incorporation lends the value of legitimacy. If all the corporates consolidate into one body through mergers and acquisitions, the concept of "the body" loses pluralistic legitimacy and is considered to be an illegal trust with more power than "individuals" can possibly have. It does not, however, in the name of achieving free-market "synergies" or "networked externalities," prevent corporates from being organized to sytematically operate, including the function of government, as one body referred to as "the corporate.")

Yes, the political-economic maelstrom we face is an organizational problem. We need to organize for an easy and direct accountability that the current organization does not provide.

Easy alienation of the liability cultivates an untrustworthy environment that is likely to result in a perennial "crisis of confidence" technically indicated as "too good to be true."

Bush's tax-cut policy, for example, resurrecting the so-called supply-side economics of the Reagan administration to provide both robust economic growth with low inflation (low deficits) was too good to be true. The result, The Great Recession, was easily predictable and fully indicated well in advance.

In addition to a technically inverted yield curve, general short-term reward patterns emerged with Bush's tax cuts that did not fit an empirical regression on the long-term risk factors (high deficits with low interest rates, for example), indicating risk was being avoided, accumulated, and shifted to the system. The risk was organized into what is known as the systemic risk.

Bush's tax cuts shifted the liability from the private, corporate sector to the public sector where the legally sovereign, "We the People" reside (privatizing the reward and socializing the risk). While the benefits (assets) accrue privately, the costs (liabilities) accumulate publicly, and because it results from public policy, due process infers the distribution of costs and benefits is by the legitimate consent of the governed (the sovereign power).

While we can pin our problems on Bush's tax-cut policy, the corporate claims, at the same time, the recession will not reverse without it. What is the truth? Where is the liability?

With the liability being largely scapegoated, all that is left is the accumualted gamma risk to be managed by the Fed and Treasury with a huge budget deficit (the bureaucratic model of power and political economy).

What remains after the limited liability is a corporate waste product, an accumulated risk, to be dumped into the sovereign environment of "The People."

Like pollution, the corporate "body" is immune to the detrimental status of being a sovereign body because it is not actually a real, "organic" person. Nor can its growth--its consolidaton of power--be considered "organic." It is artificial, an "artifice" of power masquerading a massive organizational detriment (the liability) as a public good administered for the general welfare.

How can the legitimacy of the capital gained be maintained if the risk is avoided and not taken? The risk avoided then becomes the gamma risk--a systemic, organized risk that causes the need for government management and authority. Without intervention of government authority (mostly by regulatory and judicial command and control), the legitimacy fails.

In the absence of a legislative regulatory authority, the executive serves to manage the systemic risk, like President Clinton's "working group" managing the risk posed by Long Term Capital Management. While this group may have thought they had avoided the regulatory gamma risk, the risk was accumulated and organized to present as systemic risk in the future with the benefical "growth" properties of being "too big to fail." The free market failed in this case because it was allowed to consolidate (grow) into "dark markets" that are inimical to a free market system.

While the result of a deregulated and highly consolidated marketplace, replete with "synergistic" efficiencies and "networked externalities" (complex interdependencies), is the antithesis of a free market, it is still argued as the successful model of free-market capitalism. The model must be conserved lest we flirt with socialism, defeating the productive incentive of class society and expansion of the pie that allows us the freedom to choose in the marketplace. In other words, it is necessary to defeat the free market in order to preserve it? Is it paradox or a contradiction that indicates a consolidation of power into the realm of full-blown irrationality?

As long as the problem is not identified as organizational size, the solution reduces to the easy control of bivariation: choosing between either a public or private brand of authoritarianism or, more immediately, choosing between liberal or conservative, partisan ideology. The choice voters now face, for example, is being reduced to a false positive: resistance to the failure of the Democratic party is positive support for a Republican agendae by default. Rejection of one automatically realigns the electorate behind the other. In the same way, toggling between a public or private authoritarian regime conserves the macro model of consolidated power by default. The determining variable is organizational size, not partisan program variations, ideological principles, the persuasions of ponderous platitudes, or the influence of corporate money in the election process....

Organizational size determines the ability to command and control the system into a predictable and stable level of managed risk we call "the systemic risk." That risk, and the distribution of rewards, is determined by regulation of economic growth. The legitimate ontology of a free-market process is substituted with the command and control of large, bureaucratic entities organized to default into a system of rewards and deprivations. Since the distribution of risk/reward is a stable, routine task, economic expansion can be considered optimal by default of the system, or by a legitimate ontology of process like a free-market system, but without actually having it. Artfully painted red or blue, the model is effectively maintained authoritarian.

Just because an authoritarian regime effectively operates primarily from the private sector with "properly limited government" does not make it any less authoritarian or any more legitimate. The determining variable is whether the regime is authoritarian, not whether it is public or private, or both.

Since conservatives argue that business is not in business to employ people, and it is not the government's job to employ people, it certainly cannot be argued that a private sector regime is more effectively productive and economically expansive. Hard to be productive if you are unemployed.

Capitalism requires an accumulation of capital. The effect of "capital formation" is employment.

Since capital is formed (acquired) by the profit margin, employment is dependant on the margin of profit. If the profit margin is impeded, taxation for example, the supply of labor (unemployment) increases. As the profit margin increases, then, employment increases. Why is it, then, that exactly the opposite happens, resulting in crises?

Essentially, capitalism effects crises, and authoritarianism, because it does not rely on free markets to manage capital, but to acquire it.
Capitalism must cause unemployment in order to acquire (accumulate) capital. Businesses are then not investing (distributing) to employ people, but to unemploy them to "acquire" capital.
The free market must be avoided in order to accumulate capital because if markets are freely open and transparent there is a declining rate of profit that minimizes inflation and maximizes employment.

Free-market economics is the opposite of capitalism. Instead of an accumulation of value that maximizes inflation and minimizes employment, free-market economics functions with a distribution of value (pluralism) that minimizes inflation and maximies employment. Instead of the profit margin effecting employment (the lowest possible to maximize the profit), in a free-market economy, employment causes the profit margin.

Instead of a direct relationship, if the correlation between the accumulation of capital and employment is inverse, unemployment and deflationary crisis has a 100 percent probability. The probable outcome is the opposite of capitalism's purported benefit to maximize employment and economic growth. Reagan's cure for unemployment, for example, was to cause unemployment. The effect, then, was capital accumulation which is supposed to cause employment. The effect, however, was crisis. Accumulation occured on the "supply side" because there was insufficient demand--because his policies caused a deep recession. It is not the model of high productivity.

It does not do much good to produce a lot of things we cannot afford to buy. It is the productive incentive of capitalism for labor to then work harder and longer for less in order to afford the product. The higher productivity at lower cost does not, however, result in a disinflationary tendency. It is deflationary because the productivity is gained as capital in the form of an accumulated oversupply (including the labor that produced the value).

According to the capitalist theory of finance, unemployment (capital formation) causes employment. Despite being supremely illogical and a thoroughly disconfirmed hypothesis the argument is nevertheless maintained as good and verifiable reasoning. It requires the secret knowlege of the power elite to make any sense (it might make sense after being pinged on the forehead with a hammer during a secret ritual, damaging the moral capacity of the prefrontal cortex) and its currency serves to indicate the power it has accumulated at the expense of "the masses."

The knowlege we need has been empiricaly tested over time. It is encoded in our organizational memory and manifested in our current crisis. Creating wealth is not dependant on mass deprivation of The People. Continuing to maintain that it does is not the product of a secret code embedded in elite knowlege where the natural world intersects with the geometric abstraction of the mind, but the perpetration of a verifiable fraud that lacks the virtue of a moral intelligence.

Organizational size is the secret code of accumulated wealth and power. Alexander Hamilton strongly opposed Jefferson's decentralized pluralism of the nation's banking system because it would not take the "big risk" to build great things. He also knew that a central bank would provide the organizational size necessary to command and control the economy, and our nation, into a plutocracy (a power elite) with a constitutionally democratic legitimacy.

Taking the "big risk" evolved into a $500 trillion overleverage by the year 2000.

The sacrifice necessary to build great things was organized to be the burden of the masses and not the privileged elite.

Maintaining a free-market system in priority instead of building capitalism would have spread the risk (prevented the accumulation of sacrifice into social class) so that everyone benefited instead of just a privileged few.

What Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed at the inception of our nation is essentially what we have now: a strong, centrally planned governance to manage, rather than to prevent, the accumulation of risk that goes with the accumulation of reward (the gamma risk that cannot be avoided). So here we are, now looking to invest small, regional banks to manage the risk and cause employment.

The result of capital formation is not employment, but unemployment. Instead of capital financing employment, unemployment is financing capital. Instead of economic growth, the result of capitalism is the classic, cyclical crisis of overproduction: economic contraction and the consolidation of wealth and power.

Instead of economic growth, the reduction of labor costs with rising productivity gains creates an economic maelstrom. The public is left with nowhere to turn but the public sector (an organized entity that is too big to fail) to reverse the spiraling trend.

As we again struggle with low-to-no-growth despite record profits, capitalism, despite the claim, tends not to be optimally productive considering it is organized to minimize employment to form "The Capital."

If business and government do not operate to cause employment, where does productivity come from?

According to conservative theory, The Capital, not labor, causes productivity. This alienation of The Capital from labor, according to Marxist theory, is artificial; labor and capital are actually the same thing.

Capitalism organizes to accumulate The Capital to be distributed by command and control authority. Deprivation of The Capital (the theory of surplus value) has an optimal productive effect and is what makes capitalism great. It encourgages expansion of the pie by depriving it, so we always have a "deflationary" surplus of goods and services labor cannot afford to buy. It is government's job to then re-inflate the economy or, in the case of the Fed (Hamilton's central bank), to balance the amount of labor-to-capital to smooth the stochastic oscillation (the boom-and-bust accumulation and distribution) of the business cycle.

The Fed, of course, is neither a public or private enterprise, but is supposed to be an independent technical authority organized with business and government to effect optimal productive capacity through the "controlled" distribution of an accumulated capital, just as Marx predicted. Marx referred to this political-economic phase of historical ontology as "anti-socialist socialism."

By design, the alternatives, whether from the left or the right, only appear to be bivariate. It appears to reduce to a hard ontological determinism, but only if we regard ourselves as mere economic animals (homom habilis) devoid of a moral intelligence (homo sapien).

Nature does not dictate we must ontologize with an authoritarian effect.

It is entirely possible to build great things without causing the pain and suffering supposedly necessary to be productive. People are just as likely to be productive, if not more, without being deprived the full value of their production. Strikes are the result of deprivation and abuse, for example. The lack of productivity is the result of the employer looking for a free lunch that, as the capitalist comes to know very well, is not free.

Productivity, if deprived of (or alienated from) its full measure of profit, which is likely to happen in the absence of free-market mechanics (including socialism), is retributively valued.

Just as it was at the time of the American Revolution when the bourgeoise demanded they be allowed the full value of their labor and risk being converted into the king's divine right to property, the capital that has formed (the wealth accumulated, just as it was with the king) is more likely to prevent productivity than cause it.

Why be productive if the value is converted and consolidated into The Capital to be distributed by the property right of would-be kings? If the answer is, to keep from starving, then The People are being treated as mere animals to be abusively exploited by the power elite. It is not because it makes people more productive, but because it demonstrates power. It defines who is powerful (truly independent and sovereign) and who is not.

Usurpation of value and abuse of the middle class was not the right thing to do at the time of The Revolution, as the king found out when the middle class redeemed the accumulated value (the unavoidable gamma-risk ontology), and it is not the right thing to do now. The calculus is a moral intelligence that does not often obtain with the ambitions, and arrogance, of power.

Pursuit of power is an ambition that a free-market mechanism reliably organizes into the public good with minimal deprivation.

Pluralistic pursuit of power renders an ignorance of moral value the enlightened self-interest of staying in business (or staying empowered), not just making a profit that will be otherwise retributively valued. It turns the irrational fanaticism of the ambition to consolidate power, and its dystopic tendencies, into the rational pragmatism of predictive utility and renders a law of intended, rather than unintended, consequences. Power, and its pursuit, is then rendered with a genuine, built-in facility for an empirically legitimate ontology.

Last, and most important, ensuring a pluralistic pursuit of power, by providing an an easily verifiable legitimacy of the outcome with a collective ontology of process rather than a top-down teleology, prevents an accumulation of irrational arrogance.

Since being powerful means being better than everybody else, the powerful are not likely to admit being wrong. Along with being piqued, there is a benefit to be protected, like a profit margin. It is mutually reinforcing--being piqued with the skill to both gain power and keep it. Nevertheless, a stubborn, irrational accumulation of error that is likely to accumulate with power leads to a fanatical pursuit of tyranny often expressed, especially in the American experience, as the liberty to pursue happiness, or the pursuit of one's goals (teleology) to a level of incompetence (to the empirical limit of power, or failure). It is not difficult to see, then, why it is so necessary to organize into a corporate body that is too big to fail--to protect the power elite from itself. The corporate body is engineered so that it will fail safe.

Instead of allowing power, economic or political, to consolidate and be happily exercised to a massive level of incompetence, like the Great Recession, it would be of immense practical moral intelligence to organize for preventing consolidation without destroying the pursuit of anyone's happiness.

Instead of allowing the incompetence of an ever-aspiring elite to always accumulate into a zero-sum benefit--cyclically buying and selling distressed assets at a profit--that achieves an ever-higher level of incompetence (remembering that staying empowered despite being incompetent is to achieve the pinnacle of power), it is possible to organize this cycle of tragedy-to-farce into an efficient means of operationalizing ambition with the general welfare.

Ambition is an empty vessel filled with the values contained within the object of that ambition.

It is possible to turn the ambition to accumulate power into an empowered measure of competence that is not too big to fail.

If the problem as described by small businesses is access to cash, it is being deprived. Deprivation does not build wealth, it deprives it. If we are organized for deprivation, then that is the change we need.

Consolidation of industry and markets does not build wealth. It consolidates it.

If health care is to be the model of reorganization, then the Obama administration is validating a thoroughly disconfirmed hypothesis: the bigger the better. Both parties are busily in competition validating the false efficiencies of an organized economy of scale.

Whether public or private (whether the Democratic or the Republican option), organized consolidation is the problem, not the solution.

Organizing to Control Costs: Healthcare and Energy Markets

The tendency to organize into horizontally and vertically integrated, monopolistic entities to distort valuations into the realm of the irrational was strongly argued against and identified as inimical to free markets by Adam Smith, founder of classical economic theory.

Smith argues that organizing into ever larger entities consolidates power in the marketplace and creates false indicators (the irrationality). Smith's solution is to be sure capital, industry and markets are deconsolidated. The profit margin is then a more accurate measure of future expectation (the trend) that is less likely to become a failed expectation and a sudden shock (the crisis) that further consolidates the wealth and power (systemic risk management).

According to Adam Smith, it is the job of government in priority to ensure the marketplace is free and unconsolidated. That, according to his theory, will effectively manage the systemic risk we are now grappling with. The government, then, according to classical theory, is in the business of creating jobs and wealth by ensuring it in priority despite the rhetoric of neo-conservative propagandists.

Notice that there is little to no evidence of government operating to apply Smith's prescription of deconsolidation.

Healthcare relies on the "public option." Energy relies on the regulation of derivative markets, like futures, which will innovate to avoid the gamma risk. Both elicit the need for progressive taxation to keep capital from the overaccumaltion that causes a deflationary trend with inflationary, monetarist counter-measures (stagflation).

The "need" for the progressive tax is obviated by organizing for a free-market system in priority. The need for a more progressive tax code is an accurate measure of extant free-market (democratic-economic) modality: the more the economy is organized for free-market mechanics, the less need for progressive taxation to technically correct for over-accumulation (liquidity crisis, or the systemic risk).

Government has operated largely to encourage and protect the organization of consolidated entities to the point of absurdity, irrationality, we have now: economic entities that are too big to fail and paying outrageous bonuses to business elits that have clearly managed the system into what is considered an illegitimate failure by the vast majority of Americans.

(The ultimate ignominy is to pay the devil a bonus for making you miserable! Is that the ultimate con game or what? The con is systematically organized to convert and consolidate value without legal liability. The liability is purely political. It is the gamma risk with a retributive, economic value.)

Current econmic policy clearly indicates a strong tendency to support state capitalism--a command economy with private consolidation of the wealth bureaucratically managed to protect the interests of the wealthy elite in "the public interest." Just enough pluralism is allowed, like a "public option," to give the consolidation of power a popular legitimacy.

The pluralistic legitimacy is really false. It is a Hamiltonian trick that keeps being reapplied in the name of democracy and self-determination.

Despite the freedom to pursue success and fully enjoy its reward without taxation, according to the conservative argument, the accumulation of wealth and power is nevertheless endowed. It is a legitimately necessary condition endowed by the god in which We all trust. The outcome is ontological--it just "naturally" happens. Thus we have the conservative concept of the Rights of Man: the utilitarian free pursuit of happiness with a naturally endowed outcome that if technically corrected for is contrary to the natural order of things.

Any attempt to correct for the accumulation of power and wealth that causes crises is considered to be an unnatural tyranny imposed on the natural order of things. That, according to the conservative argument, is the cause of perennial, systemic crises, like the deflationary trend we are experiencing now.

Not allowing for the naturally endowed tyranny of those with the secret, elite knowledge (the noble character to rule which, as far as I can tell, is merely the capacity to be corrupt and self-seeking in the name of the public interest) is an unnatural tyranny that causes crises. It is a self-fulfilled, teleological argument masqueraded as an ontology. It is a lie, a polemic, a lawyers trick, a sanctimonious, self-serving profanity that keeps the wealth, and power, legally consolidated as an act of God. Deconsolidation, then, is considered not only illegal, but a constitutional deprivation of the Rights of Man that is fundamentally evil.

Yes, deprivation of the Rights of Man is fundamentally bad. It results in crises and all manner of humanity's inhumanity to itself. It is an illogical, irrational, condition. It is an irrationality that mirrors the Hamiltonian ontological argument.

The Hamiltonian ontology is nothing but sophistry, later in history embraced as a moral ontology (an objective, untranscendable truth to be scientifically acknowledged) "beyond good and evil," as Nietzche described it.

The power elite is fallaciuosly argued to be a breed beyond the masses with a secret knowledge that is the public good...the general welfare. Why does Goldman Sachs give exclusive information, "tips," to its most privileged clients? (Recognize that the word "privilege" is a combination of the words private and legal).

The masses can never know, then, what the public good is because...it's a secret! It is entirely antithetical to a popular (pluralistic) legitimacy. The contradiction is not reconcilable, but historically it is ontologically played out in the natural order of things in which the truth naturally prevails over the lies.

The need for a progressive tax code to correct for an over-accumulation is considered by conservatives to be inimical to the public's best interest. It is therefore necessary to hide the wealth with innovative investment vehicles that are only accessible by the wealthiest clients (the consolidated capital).

The consolidated capital cannot be progressively taxed to correct for the over-accumulation if it is hidden. It's a secret. Can't tax what you can't see. All in the public interest.

It is then up to the Ben Bernankes of the world to save us all from the ontology of ourselves; from the mindless consolidation of power beyond good and evil, armed with the philosophy that conserving, rather than preventing, what is too big to fail will "reliably" effect the crises. If the effect is predictable, the risk can be "effectively" managed and predictably trended, which is what Keynesian economics does.

If the element of uncertainty is eliminated, the systemic risk can be effectively managed to keep the patient alive while we ontologically play out the proper diagnoses.

Rather than deconsolidation, government operates to regulate and technically correct for the lack of free-market mechanics (collective, direct democratic legitimacy).

The technical corrections (the gamma risk) plagues small investor analysts with a complexity that suckers them into following trends rather than predicting them. It is a furtive, systemic racketeering (yielding a privileged--a legally secret or private--benefit) that, as small investors found out, will result in reduction (consolidation) of net worth that supports a long deflationary trend, like we have now.

Until the means of deconsolidation is applied--a progressive tax code and reinvestment to pluralize consolidated markets and entities--small investors must always be on the defensive. They must protect themselves from trends commanded and controlled by entities too large to fail by applying an effective counter-tyranny in the marketplace.

Always being opposite the big money momentum (predicting the trend) is essential for capital preservation (to keep assets from being consolidated). It is a lesson to well be learned by the Obama administration and the current congressional delegation as we watch the stimulus money being consolidated into paying state debt and overpriced medicare bills, but that its leadership is unwilling to learn, much less apply. Changing that would be change we really need.

It is important to understand that, for example, what the Obama administration is recognizing as a necessary command and control of the futures markets by regulating the purpose of its participation is to control the ability to command the deflationary trend. Understand that both the problem and the solution are the same thing--command and control, not free-market economics.

At the same time, understand that the objection to the proposed action by the CFTC to remove the buyers (the speculators) dark marketeers say is needed to make futures markets operate with optimal efficiency to hedge the risk is not in any way supported by the evidence.

Physical users of the futures markets are penalized by the mass movement of private equity and hedge funds into futures contracts, driving up their costs and deflating the economy--the consequence (the trend) in command, and "the risk" to be controlled in "the public interest" (We, the ignorant mass of The People, can't be sure what that is, of course, because it's secret, privileged, knowledge).

We cannot legitimately measure the success of managing the risk by the depreciation or appreciation of income because it all happens by the secret knowledge of elite authority. All we supposedly know is challenging that elite authority, like allegorically realizing what causes the shadows on the cave wall, is inimical to our self, the public, interest.

Medical professionals, for example, have the esoteric knowledge of what drives the unlimited cost of healthcare. Talking about what a particular medical procedure costs is an uncivil questioning of authority (questioning the legitimacy of commanding the price).

Demanding the price is considered by the elite to be an ignorant act of defying civil authority. The equilibriating effect of a democratic, free-market economics on income will destroy the natural ability of the best and the brightest to protect the public's interest. Of course, it will not. The protection will be best afforded by not impoverishing the protected.

Controlling costs will be a function of ensuring economic democracy--free-market economics--in priority. As long as the price is commanded, either by public or private means, fair value is not empirically, legitimately, verifiable for either producers or consumers.
Incomes as well are not measurably fair and equitable without ensuring a free-market economics in priority.

We often hear conservatives say it is no one's business what their income is, and conspicuous consumption distributes the wealth fairly and equitably. The crisis that ensues from overaccumulation is falsely attributed to government intervention (the gamma risk) that distorts the free market. The cure, according to conservatives, is laissez-faire.

The reason income is a desireable "secret" is because it is an empirical measure of inequity. That inequity is retributive in value that must be protected. It is a risk that must be managed to be conserved (...sshhh... that's supposed to be an analytical secret well hidden within the dirty bowels of academe where obsequious conformists fear to tread). If the value was not retributive, no one would care what your income is, and you wouldn't care if it was a secret.

Empiricism is by definition to know, not to not know. It is antithetical to the privilege of the elite and why they resist free-market, demand economics for command economy. It is why income should be secretive and should not be considered the object of public policy to distribute it by free market means or any other means, but to conserve it.

Focusing on controlling costs is to focus on incomes and the legitimacy of those incomes. Costs have less to do with the esoteric knowledge of doctors, lawyers, business professionals... than with having the organized, systematic ability to command prices, and economic trends.

Controlling costs is a function of controlling the ability to command the price (ensuring a free-market mechanism in priority).

Controlling the ability to command the price is not accomplished with the ability to command the cost, like the public option does, or like the big box-store model does in which the provider commands the price and the consumer picks the quantity, but by The People having the power, the income, to democratically demand the price and thereby legitimately control the cost unless, of course, there is some secret knowledge I am unaware of.

Ensuring in priority a free and unconsolidated marketplace is to organize to control costs, and policy focused on income, rather than reorganizing the effects like a public option, is essential to ensuring it.

Organizational Modalities Indicates Probable Trends

When investment banks reorganized into commercial bank holding companies to take the TARP funds, they traded the alpha and beta risks for the gamma risk.

Being too big to fail and the highly leveraged, unregulated organizational type indicated the probability of the Great Recession (and the gamma risk) we are now experiencing long before it presented.

At the outset of the organizational changes made to bank regulation that allowed for horizontal and vertical integration of the industry and markets (networking the externalities), political economists who raised red flags were villified by both Democrats and Republicans as anti-free-market doommongers.

These political economists were merely identifying a technical indicator, an organizational typology: consolidation of industry and markets that, by recognition of the empirical evidence, always causes (indicates) the recessionary trend (and the necessary management of the systemic risk) we are in now.

There is a very clear cause-effect relationship. Getting to the Great Recession was no random walk.

The alpha and beta risk is so well commanded and controlled in the short and intermediate term by being too big to fail that the only probable risk is gamma. Managing the gamma predicts a merger (consolidation) of public and private function into an organizational typology with predictable trend indicators.

Macro sector consolidation to manage the sytemic risk immediately indicates that too big to fail is a confirmed efficiency to be conserved. This is the leading, trend indicator suggested by organizational type.

Intervention of the gamma risk will be managed co-operatively, indicating the recessionary trend will be long and slow with public authority now in a position to take the blame for the negative effects of the trickle-down economics of a consolidated capital.

The organized modality indicates a money flow. The flow is the relative trend, the probable path, of the economy. Since the organizational type necessitates a trickle down flow, the strength or weakness of the recovery will be determined by "control" of that flow. That is what this modality is intended to do--control the gamma risk intervention and the distributional value of the accumulation.

How the accumulated value is distributed determines what balance sheets and income statements look like and when. So the organized modality not only indicates the probable strength of the macro economic trend, but the valuations of sectors and markets over time. It has a market timing determinant.

Whether from the public or private sector, or both, command of the economy from the top down will have a mean frequency of both time and money. The small investor needs to keep in mind, however, the ability to be unpredictably arbitrary and capricious is not only an emblem of power but a means of technical manipulation.

Being able to dictate what the technicals look like tends to position investors to fall for false indicators.

In the short term epspecially, small investors looking for that technical hedge on the risk are easy victims to the law of large numbers. Flash trades and large volumes at the last minute of trading can present false indications. The frequency distributions can be arbitrarily distorted till the favorable condition for the consolidation presents for execution. While the short term indicators look noisy in retrospect, the long term may present as a normal distribution.

Organized consolidation of the capital allows for this trending by directive. Goldman Sachs predicting that energy prices will retrace record levels, for example, sets up a trage. It positions investors for surprising reversals all dependant on their position at any particular time.

While the aggregate position, the threshold, that triggers an execution to consolidate the accumulated value has the appearance of being a legitimately organized process of self-determination (a pluralistic, free-market mechanics), the director is always the probable winner with the risk almost entirely eliminated. Being "free" of risk is the stock in trade of hedge funding with a large volume of capital (the law of large numbers).

The law of large numbers can also act positively from the bottom up. It is a trend the current organizational mode does not indicate occurring anytime soon but would do much to facilitate the time of recovery. The money used to drive futures contracts at the top would drive the recovery from the fundament if it were used as liquidity at the root instead of waiting for it to inadequately trickle down, with or without a gamma risk intervention. The price of energy would then be fundamentally driven, but not at a rate that delivers that magnified, exponential hedge-fund return that entails high gamma risk and indicates support of the deflationary trend. Rather, the profit on the demand pressure very simply indicates recovery.

Goldman Sachs' prediction for energy prices indicates support of the recessionary trend, largely determined by the organizational modality.

The small investor will be sure to hear big financial analysts, and pop media analysts generally, touting indications of recovery, but it is a way to position the retail investor for a trage consolidation.

Given the indicated organizational modality, the recovery will not be indicated till the retail volume has been consolidated. At that threshold, the capital has no where to go to make a profit but to finance the fundament and economic recovery. It is the classical model of capitalism in which markets are allowed to consolidate and the long wave shows a normal distribution. While the process looks "largely" normal, unfortunately this modality operates at the very highest cost to the vast majority to provide, to finance, the benefit.

Energy prices will not, then, retrace peak levels at the time of recovery as Goldman Sachs suggests. Prices will be generally deflated. The peak price of energy indicates deflation given the organizational model in operation, and will consolidate the value positioned for recovery.

Weak energy prices, and a gamma risk that controls the speculative demand--a public-private organizational modality, will signal a near-term recovery.

Peak energy prices will not be an indicator of recovery.

Surprise!

It is absolutely critical the small investor understand that market sentiment (the irratonal exuberance) is driven to absurdity by non-free-market forces.

The historical tendency to attract investment and overvalue assets to an absurdity is an organizational problem.

For example, grappling with healthcare reform, providers want to talk about everything but price. If controlling the cost is the goal, it is necessary to talk about the price, not just lifestyle choices and the accumulation of capital needed to drive technological innovation.

Talking about everything but the price rigs (organizes) the market to command it.

If, for example, consumers talk about "organizing" a healthcare co-operative, the consumer empowers a democratic organizational typology in which to demand the price in a disinflationary, free-market fashion instead of the inflationary command-model fashion that accumulates value and deflates the economy.

The determining variable is the organizational modality.

Case Study in the Efficiency of Not Being Too Big to Fail

Ford Motor Corporation, having divested itself of acquisitions has had the cash to avoid needing a government bail out.

The success is dubious considering that GMC, a company that was designed to be an automobile trust (the business model of "too big to fail"), will benefit from both the government funds (a huge line of credit no one else is likely to get) and the prospect of a structured bankruptcy settlement.

Nevertheless, becoming smaller has prevented Ford from needing government assistance, and as a general statement, a government that ensures firms do not become too big to fail first and foremost, rather than bailing them out with what the macro business model "too big to fail" refers to as the "infusion phase," is a partnership of efficiency that accrues both public and private.

Automobile manufacturers are victim of the financial sector. The leveraging that went on instead of investment in economic growth deflated our economy. Combine that with an outrageous inflation of the healthcare sector driven by gigantic pools of cash generated by a tobacco tax scheme, and we have one colossal recession with a strong deflationary trend.

Do not discount the deflationary value of rising healthcare costs by means of public finance for the economy generally, and the automobile sector in particular.

Despite the reduced number of smokers over many years, the cost of healthcare did not go down, but up. Way up! It was not the smokers that caused the high inflation, it was the tax. All the tax means to the healthcare sector is more money available for price increases (derived from a cohort that are addicted to a product with a tax hypocritically argued to be by volition on the one hand, and to be controlled as a highly addictive substance on the other). The result is an extreme accumulation of wealth that is a major cause of the depth and breadth of the current deflationary trend (and the highest level of cynicism that only the most self-satisfied and illiberal deserve).

It needs to be made perfectly clear that much of what ails us is the economics built into the healthcare sector operating with an inelastic demand curve and a huge pool of tax money to drive (push) the cost up.

The inelastic demand curve gives healthcare that too-big-to-fail quality of being indispensable, and the public financing will always push the cost up as long as it is made available without limitation. Again, that limitation should be by ensuring it is a free and unconsolidated marketplace first, then adjust for the externalities. Adjusting for the externality of having no income as the result of deflationary pressure (because of its accumulation into the hands of a few people) just increases the cost (an accumulation of income) and the deflationary pressure, like we are doing now despite controlling healthcare costs being a pillar of our plan for economic recovery and reinvestment.

With the accumulation of wealth, verifiably, comes the accumulation of power and the need, therefore, to deconsolidate it.

The divestiture that needs to occur with the healthcare sector is the tax subsidy.

Public and Private

The model of a bifurcated power structure allows for a comparable pluralism that has evolved into managing both the positive and negative externalities of capitalism with a combined, practical organization of the two elements.

The convergence of public and private into a bureaucratic model of power evolves the power structure to produce results with a mixed legitimacy that is not clearly public or private. It allows for an analytical complexity, a plurality of opinions, that cultivates a technocratic power elite to "resolve" the complexity into the practical administration of power.

Bernanke refers to an improved "resolution process" as we look for the systematic means to ensure equitably legitimate measures to stabilize the financial market and organize to predict and avoid systemic risk originating from the private sector with what he calls the "resolution authority." He is a technician engaged in engineering and executing an organizational technology that renders, resolves, all the ideas for what is the greatest good into the fundament of monetary policy, merging the elements of the power structure into a manageable, predictable operational model that distributes value into what is considered to be the primacy of the private sector with the force and legitimacy of public authority (Hamiltonianism).

The means tends to innovate and evolve, the ends of power does not. The means has evolved with the changing perception of equitable distribution of power and wealth in post-industrial society. The conservative element of power must maintain its legitimacy with a practical administrative model that is no longer the sole command of the private sector and the captains of industry.

Where accumulated wealth in the private sector continues to largely determine the results of market mechanics by sheer size and momentum, and financial means innovate to circumvent each regulatory reform in response to accumulations allowed into a crisis proportion, we progressively defer the privacy of power to the technocrats who "resolve" in the public forum of legitimate, constitutional power.

The quest for what is manageable and predictable organized from the top down is a command economy that requires a critical measure of accountability that is best accomplished from the bottom up by ensuring a free-market mechanics, the evaluative wisdom of a collective legitimacy, in priority. Without the means to evaluate with the legitimacy of ensuring the priority, bureaucratic power becomes a tyranny of technocrats--a technocracy.

Political-economic technocrats claim the legitimacy of acting with the "public" trust. The implication is that the results of public-private organizational technique are public and the distribution of rewards and deprivations (the measure of exercised power) is the legitimate public good. Democratic (pluralistic) results are thereby ensured through autocratic (elitist) means. The means, despite being undemocratic, is argued to justify the ends in an organizational tautology that validates the elitist model as the best practice of the republic.

As we hear a lot of acrimonious rhetoric from the right wing that we are engaged in the move to socialism, analytically, they do not understand the political-economic dynamic in operation or are so blinded by ideological socialization they cannot accept divergence from the passe' pre-industrial model of bifurcated power that has built great wealth, but with an increasingly conflicted public-or-private legitimacy over the distribution of costs and benefits that has come to a point of reconciliation, or "resolution."

The right wing is losing, clinging to an absolute and obsolete theoretical legitimacy that does not square with the need for technocracy, leaving them with a diminishing credibility that is evermore reduced to the lunatic fringe of conservative talk show hosts and clownish intellectualism.

If treasury (a public bank) and the federal reserve (a private bank) do not separately or together act to produce the general welfare, then what does? The complex debate is not about a welfare--a distribution of costs and benefits--that is general, or fair and equitable, it is about producing an inequity with the legitimacy of the general welfare.

A legitimacy based on inequity requires the force of a public authority, and this is where the conservative argument resorts to all manner of fallacy and intellectual feats of funambulism because what is public authority (government, the sovereign) is historically corrupt if not incompetent, and according to The Constitution, The People are sovereign. Hence, the Hamiltonian argument that power must be exercised from the private sector by a power elite that have the ambition, the will, to power.

The ambition to power can only be by the accumulation of wealth. It is the real measure of power and is produced by the private sector with a legitimate self-determination to acquire it. Sharing the wealth is to share power. If a person wants to share in the power, a person must produce wealth, and that share is equivalent to the share produced determined by the market price in the marketplace (a private enterprise performed in public).

Since accumulating wealth can control the price, a person can accumulate shares disproportionate to the wealth produced by that person. The shares are attributed to the powerful (the elite) who must then engage a political process of preventing the value being retributed, or shared. If the value is not shared, a crisis ensues and forces political distribution of the value. It is the plight of the conservative element to minimize, or conserve, the retributive value as private property protected by constitutional right, or public authority.

We see, then, the contradiction of the conservative argument that must be "resolved." There is the accumulation of private power with the supremacy of public authority.

Co-opting the legitimacy of public power is absolutely essential for maintaining the primacy of the private sector. Hence, we have the conservative argument that if government is not limited to enforcing the right to private property and self-determination in priority, it is otherwise corrupt and incompetent. The problem here, again, is to prevent this legitimacy of public authority from becoming "public" beyond the mere force of the argument when the inequity becomes so disproportionate that retribution of the value is the only possible resolution. It then becomes the function of government to resolve BOTH public and private.

The arguments for the inefficiencies of government are nevertheless vestigial and iterates the ambition to power.

Even with a public-private resolve it is still possible to maintain, in true Hamiltonian fashion, the function of constitutional government is to provide The People with the illusion of a self-determination (sovereignty) that is self-enforced by operation of public authority--the sovereign. The elite do not claim to be the sovereign, like the technocrat, only the representative of the sovereign (the republican form of government), providing the competence and moral strength the sovereign lacks to rule in the interest of the general welfare.

Despite an ambitious technocracy programed for elitist ends, it is clear to the conservative element that the mission of a bureaucracy can be changed without an act of congress or amending a constitution. The actual administration of power, and the actual outcome, is essentially the practical discretion of the bureaucratic elite in any case. It is a sharing of power, an evolution, the ruling class of consolidated capitalism has absolutely no intention of occurring.

If technocrats take on the vestigial mantle of the ruling class, the current power elite are supplanted by means of their own device, and nothing is more humiliating for a power elite than being victim of one's own stupidity (which was what the philosophes were for--to enlighten the despots). In this case, it is nothing but the stupidity of greed and avarice to be tempered with the practical, pragmatic wisdom of a technocratic elite to resolve the nagging contradictions of legitimate power either public or private.

Evolution does not appear to be linear in any respect. Nature cycles up and down, back and forth. As elements merge, and ideas converge, change emerges indifferent to the determination of our self always decided by choices we make now with virtue (the strength of what is righteous) being the vision of destiny.