The reason the Constitution does not require a balanced budget is because the founders did not intend for the Federal Government to finance like households.
The Federal Government, unlike households, is too big to fail, and if it does, the security, the domestic tranquility, of all households suffers.
While default of one household among a plurality does not threaten the entire system, default of the national debt affects everyone equally (like a flat tax) as long as household incomes do not accumulate unequally. As long as a plurality is maintained, one household cannot threaten other households with the risk of detriment and extort value unless enough value is accumulated to be a threat.
That the Federal Government is too big and powerful to fail is exactly what anti-federalists did not like about it, but the Federalist party contended that the Constitution provides for adequate checks and balances (pluralism).
Among our nation's most famous, founding Federalists was our first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton who argued it was impractical for the Federal Government to have a balanced budget. Not only did the government assume the debts of the states when they ratified the Constitution, but having an ongoing debt, Hamilton argued, with the full faith and credit of the Federal Government to pay it without fail scores a AAA credit rating to build the wealth of the nation.
The result is the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, assured by means of public finance that did not require a balanced budget but a continuous debt proportion that always demonstrates the full faith and credit of "We the People" of the United States.
Showing posts with label pluralism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pluralism. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2011
Saturday, April 4, 2009
April Fools
The huge federal tax increase on tobacco that takes effect April 1st is our first indication that toggling between Democrats and Republicans is a false pluralism. The first act of a so-called "new" congress and administration--a huge regressive tax increase triumphantly passing congress and signed by the president--appropriately takes effect on April Fool's Day.
The best way to ensure children get the healthcare they need is to control the cost and increase the income to pay for it. SCHIP does neither!
When the government tries to control rising prices the new pool of money the new tax provides, the medical profession will simply reluct the service to be rendered in a free market fashion. Without meeting the price, and increasing the need to tax, the newly insured will be faced with a shortage. Everybody loses to the non-market, cost-push distortion of the regressive, tax-funded insurance program. The free market mechanism, instead of an equitable efficiency, is then rendered to increase the income of the healthcare sector and reduce the income of the consumer--a deflationary whipsaw effect (a continued consolidation of wealth), just exactly what we do not need!
A progressive tax will be required to correct for the distorted distribution of income, rendering the distribution more equitable so that the free market mechanism will work to everyone's benefit and not just a few market tyrants armed with an elitist, self-satisfied sense of superiority, the will to power, and a tax authority.
Instead of controlling the cost and increasing the ability to pay for it, all healthcare consumers will be whipsawed; and the race is on to see how quick an economic sector can get rich at the public trough...not exactly the legitimate model of a free-market mechanics.
Rather than freedom, the entire scheme, from the regressive, inferior-lifestyle-targeted tax burden to the distribution of the economic benefit, induces the model of tyranny being the preferred model of a two-party, duopolistic system, and a false pluralism. It is a tyranny of false choices that raises its ugly head to gain a legitimacy of power characterized by a superiority of lifestyle that especially opportunes in a time of crisis, like The Great Depression. It is a tyranny that we have learned at great cost burgeons a philosophy of intolerance that will destroy freedom in order to save it only for a few that have the will to claim righteousness and the virtue of choice for themselves.
State capitalism is not socialism. Nor is it a free-market economy.
The hope of ensuring a more free-market mechanism to control costs and increase incomes--the sure cure for deflation--by toggle-switching to the Democratic Party...April Fool!
The best way to ensure children get the healthcare they need is to control the cost and increase the income to pay for it. SCHIP does neither!
When the government tries to control rising prices the new pool of money the new tax provides, the medical profession will simply reluct the service to be rendered in a free market fashion. Without meeting the price, and increasing the need to tax, the newly insured will be faced with a shortage. Everybody loses to the non-market, cost-push distortion of the regressive, tax-funded insurance program. The free market mechanism, instead of an equitable efficiency, is then rendered to increase the income of the healthcare sector and reduce the income of the consumer--a deflationary whipsaw effect (a continued consolidation of wealth), just exactly what we do not need!
A progressive tax will be required to correct for the distorted distribution of income, rendering the distribution more equitable so that the free market mechanism will work to everyone's benefit and not just a few market tyrants armed with an elitist, self-satisfied sense of superiority, the will to power, and a tax authority.
Instead of controlling the cost and increasing the ability to pay for it, all healthcare consumers will be whipsawed; and the race is on to see how quick an economic sector can get rich at the public trough...not exactly the legitimate model of a free-market mechanics.
Rather than freedom, the entire scheme, from the regressive, inferior-lifestyle-targeted tax burden to the distribution of the economic benefit, induces the model of tyranny being the preferred model of a two-party, duopolistic system, and a false pluralism. It is a tyranny of false choices that raises its ugly head to gain a legitimacy of power characterized by a superiority of lifestyle that especially opportunes in a time of crisis, like The Great Depression. It is a tyranny that we have learned at great cost burgeons a philosophy of intolerance that will destroy freedom in order to save it only for a few that have the will to claim righteousness and the virtue of choice for themselves.
State capitalism is not socialism. Nor is it a free-market economy.
The hope of ensuring a more free-market mechanism to control costs and increase incomes--the sure cure for deflation--by toggle-switching to the Democratic Party...April Fool!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Gaming With Too Big to Fail
We will see the oversized financial firms being compensated by the public sector for wrecking the economy bargain to have it all their way with the threat of not participating in the government programs, or threatening to wreck it even more. That is what organizing to be too big to fail is for--to have it all your way. To be a tyrant.
Considering that "too big to fail" means they are indispensable, it is nothing but extortion. The fraud and abuse we have come to expect from these unexpendable economic entities is apparently not enough to demonstrate the extent of corporate hegemony.
Fascism is not the acceptable alternative to the threat of socialism.
What is too big to fail is easily cured with the public sector operating to ensure a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority, the antithesis of "too big to fail." Fascism or socialism (another false binomial choice in which to toggle) is not the only alternative. The government action will not be ex-post-facto, it will not be a bill of attainder to punish corporates that have organized to get away with fraud, abuse and extortion. The progressive tax code needed to finance the third alternative will be to pluralize and destroy the tyranny that plagues The People.
The lack of action to progress the tax code renders the Obama administration's Keynesian stimulus plan equally unstimulating because it depreciates the value of the dollar. Energy and food prices will rise with a depreciating dollar, deflating the economy, what the stimulus spending is supposed to cure.
Understand that being able to dictate the cause-effect relationship of the dollar's value coupled with consumer prices is accomplished by organizing to be too big to fail, mainly by being able to restrict supply and thereby determine demand (deflation).
Being too big to fail does not suffer from deflation. It is a winner on the up cycle and the down cycle. It is being too small to survive that incurs all the detriment, and that detriment is consolidated into the benefit of being able to dictate the relationship, the ability to assess the value, control the bid, of commodities and currencies.
Ensuring the competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, financed with a progressive tax code across all jurisdictions, in priority cures this organizational problem of being too big to fail. The economy is then dominated by small firms with highly adaptable and innovative efficiencies that are as much concerned with low prices, full employment and adding supply (a strong dollar) by default of the system than just making a profit and deflating the economy by default.
Large, too-big-to-fail corporates benefit from deflation. It is profitable. It strengthens the ability to tyrannize the marketplace. The favorable terms for the corporate to be offered by treasury secretary, Geitner to recapitalize the financial market is a demonstration of "success" of the business model that Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke describes as inimical but inevitable. Tyranny is the efficiency that a consolidated and collusive corporate achieves (and that can be a socialist legitimacy as well) at the expense of all other efficiencies.
Arguing that the large size, and big profits, of the large corporate allows for risk taking that would not otherwise occur, providing productive and innovative efficiency that only organizing to be too big to fail can provide, is an empirically nulled hypothesis. Maintaining the argument at this point is just a lie intended to conserve the means of tyranny (the elitist model of power and political economy).
The treasury secretary's plan to recapitalize "too big to fail" (remember, huge profits were made and converted into private equity before big financial firms "failed" with the probability of global economic collapse, which means that they--what is inimical--really should be allowed to fail) will be a demonstration of the power of the corporate that will confirm by false induction the Hamiltonian model as the only possible alternative: the private sector's too-big-to-fail corporate structure trumps the value of government (the sovereignty of The People). The empirical measure of superior value will be the assessed value of return on investment for one private enterprise dollar over a government (The People's) dollar. According to Geitner's plan, "The Public-Private Investment Program," The People's dollar only has a fraction of the value a hedge-fund, private-equity dollar of the private sector. The value of the private sector's dollar is considered, and validated, as supra-sovereign, and in the same way, as Nietzsche describes it, the inexorable "will to power" that is "beyond good and evil."
The difference between the public and private sector's return on the investment is the reward, the vigorish, of the will to power (to organize to be too big to fail). The struggle for political-economic dominance, hegemony of power, is the reason for being and existence again being played out and verified by the gaming we see now in progress. If we want to be verified existential moral deficients, we buy into this philosophical construct and practical modeling of power.
If we want to ensure the good life (a moral existence), we should try the third alternative: ensuring the competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, financed with a progressive tax code across all jurisdictions, in priority to cure the organizational problem of being too big to fail.
Considering that "too big to fail" means they are indispensable, it is nothing but extortion. The fraud and abuse we have come to expect from these unexpendable economic entities is apparently not enough to demonstrate the extent of corporate hegemony.
Fascism is not the acceptable alternative to the threat of socialism.
What is too big to fail is easily cured with the public sector operating to ensure a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority, the antithesis of "too big to fail." Fascism or socialism (another false binomial choice in which to toggle) is not the only alternative. The government action will not be ex-post-facto, it will not be a bill of attainder to punish corporates that have organized to get away with fraud, abuse and extortion. The progressive tax code needed to finance the third alternative will be to pluralize and destroy the tyranny that plagues The People.
The lack of action to progress the tax code renders the Obama administration's Keynesian stimulus plan equally unstimulating because it depreciates the value of the dollar. Energy and food prices will rise with a depreciating dollar, deflating the economy, what the stimulus spending is supposed to cure.
Understand that being able to dictate the cause-effect relationship of the dollar's value coupled with consumer prices is accomplished by organizing to be too big to fail, mainly by being able to restrict supply and thereby determine demand (deflation).
Being too big to fail does not suffer from deflation. It is a winner on the up cycle and the down cycle. It is being too small to survive that incurs all the detriment, and that detriment is consolidated into the benefit of being able to dictate the relationship, the ability to assess the value, control the bid, of commodities and currencies.
Ensuring the competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, financed with a progressive tax code across all jurisdictions, in priority cures this organizational problem of being too big to fail. The economy is then dominated by small firms with highly adaptable and innovative efficiencies that are as much concerned with low prices, full employment and adding supply (a strong dollar) by default of the system than just making a profit and deflating the economy by default.
Large, too-big-to-fail corporates benefit from deflation. It is profitable. It strengthens the ability to tyrannize the marketplace. The favorable terms for the corporate to be offered by treasury secretary, Geitner to recapitalize the financial market is a demonstration of "success" of the business model that Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke describes as inimical but inevitable. Tyranny is the efficiency that a consolidated and collusive corporate achieves (and that can be a socialist legitimacy as well) at the expense of all other efficiencies.
Arguing that the large size, and big profits, of the large corporate allows for risk taking that would not otherwise occur, providing productive and innovative efficiency that only organizing to be too big to fail can provide, is an empirically nulled hypothesis. Maintaining the argument at this point is just a lie intended to conserve the means of tyranny (the elitist model of power and political economy).
The treasury secretary's plan to recapitalize "too big to fail" (remember, huge profits were made and converted into private equity before big financial firms "failed" with the probability of global economic collapse, which means that they--what is inimical--really should be allowed to fail) will be a demonstration of the power of the corporate that will confirm by false induction the Hamiltonian model as the only possible alternative: the private sector's too-big-to-fail corporate structure trumps the value of government (the sovereignty of The People). The empirical measure of superior value will be the assessed value of return on investment for one private enterprise dollar over a government (The People's) dollar. According to Geitner's plan, "The Public-Private Investment Program," The People's dollar only has a fraction of the value a hedge-fund, private-equity dollar of the private sector. The value of the private sector's dollar is considered, and validated, as supra-sovereign, and in the same way, as Nietzsche describes it, the inexorable "will to power" that is "beyond good and evil."
The difference between the public and private sector's return on the investment is the reward, the vigorish, of the will to power (to organize to be too big to fail). The struggle for political-economic dominance, hegemony of power, is the reason for being and existence again being played out and verified by the gaming we see now in progress. If we want to be verified existential moral deficients, we buy into this philosophical construct and practical modeling of power.
If we want to ensure the good life (a moral existence), we should try the third alternative: ensuring the competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, financed with a progressive tax code across all jurisdictions, in priority to cure the organizational problem of being too big to fail.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Fear or Loathing: Do Economists and Business Leaders Lack Expertise to Manage the Economy?
There has been criticism that our technocratic elite have shown considerable incompetence to predict, prevent, and now control and abate the economic crisis.
The criticism, getting a loud voice from a wealthy class of new rich who are now being branded in the media as "less rich," is incorrect. The economy has and continues to be managed with competence to define class distinction, or the measure of "success" that occurs with the deflationary phase of the macro-economic business cycle.
The "class" dimension is absolutely critical to understanding the measure of success or failure. What appears as a political failure--a maldistribution of wealth to the upper class--is an economic success. That is what the Hamiltonian (elitist) model of power and political economy is supposed to do: operate to clearly confirm class distinction, defining just exactly who the elite are. At this point within this elitist model, there is, of course, the impetus for a political solution to catalyze a recovery phase of the cycle that is the antithesis of deflation, or inflation (an economic metric).
As long as the recovery phase is managed within the Hamiltonian model, the political measures taken will be inflationary: monetizing the debt with a regressive tax code that produces a budget deficit. The alternative to the budget deficit (inflation) is an equally massive economic detriment, like people starving in the streets, that no one can tolerate, not even the elite because it accumulates too much retributive value to be managed at one time.
At this phase of the political-economic cycle we can choose to finance the recovery with a regressive tax burden that confirms operation of the practical elitist model, or we can choose to progress the tax code and modify the working model to a more pluralistic effect.
Progressing the tax code will not destroy our nation or the free market as all the conservative rhetoricians, that have all the access to media form the margin because the elite can afford to own it, say it will. The fearmongering is an expression of this marginal disproportion of power that the elitist model produces and is designed to maintain with a level of competence that is the best money can buy.
The experts are busy telling us that the prospect of progressing the tax code is keeping the economy in a deflationary trend. We should be afraid of that prospect. It will spoil recovery by discouraging the reinvestment needed to trickle down to the masses and overcome their fear of having no income to spend. Nevermind, of course, that expert implementation of this theory led to their having less income to spend, record depreciation of household net worth, and the fear (the prospect) that it will get worse. What is bad about the economy, what is to be loathed, is being expertly attributed to the fear the elite have of probable change that occurs with the depth and breadth of the cyclical trend and the unequal distribution of wealth and power it is intended to conserve. What the elite fear is, by the absurd reduction of the 18th Century collective utilitarian argument, what we all really fear in our collective self-interest.
What is the elite's fear is the non-elite's triumph of a constitutionally endowed pluralism. The fear that our technocrats are telling us is driving our economy into the ground is a misattribution. The fear factor is the political will to switch to a more pluralistic model that threatens the status quo of power a la Thomas Jefferson.
Our economy is not continuing to trend deflationary out of fear of the largely non-elite consumer who is not spending. The spending is inadequate because the income is not there to support it. It has been consolidated as per the elitist model in operation, and being very competently applied. The trick is now to fool us into believing that choosing the means for a more pluralistic model of power--a more progressive tax burden that will enhance non-elite spending--is antithetical to the basis of our constitutional form of government that protects our freedom. The argument is, of course, absurd.
Operating with the elitist, Hamiltonian model causes the lack of income because it has been accumulated in the upper class to now be consolidated through political process of a regressive tax burden so that the recovery will be financed by borrowing from the consolidated wealth with interest (a budget deficit) instead of taxing it.
The elite of power are afraid, they fear The People will realize that the practical model can be easily changed so that instead of financing the means of consolidating power, We finance the means of real freedom we are all endowed.
Instead of financing the means to defeat free-market economics, We finance the means to allow for it in the fullest measure. We may then confirm what it is we have to fear: a free market or the lack of it?
The expertise being used is being mistaken for the lack of it because the complexity of the problem is being used to convince us all that the cure for our loathing is to be feared: that the problem is the solution; to identify the fear of the elite--the solution--as the object of the loathing, or a fundamental error of attribution. It is a deliberate error, a fallacy, being detected but erroneously interpreted as, attributed to, incompetence of the technocrats instead of the successful operation of the organizational technology--the elitist model of power and political economy.
The bad economics we all loathe is not the result of free-market economics, merely the lack of it. Realizing that is what the elite fear and will do whatever it takes to turn what We loathe into what they fear with the highest level of expertise.
The criticism, getting a loud voice from a wealthy class of new rich who are now being branded in the media as "less rich," is incorrect. The economy has and continues to be managed with competence to define class distinction, or the measure of "success" that occurs with the deflationary phase of the macro-economic business cycle.
The "class" dimension is absolutely critical to understanding the measure of success or failure. What appears as a political failure--a maldistribution of wealth to the upper class--is an economic success. That is what the Hamiltonian (elitist) model of power and political economy is supposed to do: operate to clearly confirm class distinction, defining just exactly who the elite are. At this point within this elitist model, there is, of course, the impetus for a political solution to catalyze a recovery phase of the cycle that is the antithesis of deflation, or inflation (an economic metric).
As long as the recovery phase is managed within the Hamiltonian model, the political measures taken will be inflationary: monetizing the debt with a regressive tax code that produces a budget deficit. The alternative to the budget deficit (inflation) is an equally massive economic detriment, like people starving in the streets, that no one can tolerate, not even the elite because it accumulates too much retributive value to be managed at one time.
At this phase of the political-economic cycle we can choose to finance the recovery with a regressive tax burden that confirms operation of the practical elitist model, or we can choose to progress the tax code and modify the working model to a more pluralistic effect.
Progressing the tax code will not destroy our nation or the free market as all the conservative rhetoricians, that have all the access to media form the margin because the elite can afford to own it, say it will. The fearmongering is an expression of this marginal disproportion of power that the elitist model produces and is designed to maintain with a level of competence that is the best money can buy.
The experts are busy telling us that the prospect of progressing the tax code is keeping the economy in a deflationary trend. We should be afraid of that prospect. It will spoil recovery by discouraging the reinvestment needed to trickle down to the masses and overcome their fear of having no income to spend. Nevermind, of course, that expert implementation of this theory led to their having less income to spend, record depreciation of household net worth, and the fear (the prospect) that it will get worse. What is bad about the economy, what is to be loathed, is being expertly attributed to the fear the elite have of probable change that occurs with the depth and breadth of the cyclical trend and the unequal distribution of wealth and power it is intended to conserve. What the elite fear is, by the absurd reduction of the 18th Century collective utilitarian argument, what we all really fear in our collective self-interest.
What is the elite's fear is the non-elite's triumph of a constitutionally endowed pluralism. The fear that our technocrats are telling us is driving our economy into the ground is a misattribution. The fear factor is the political will to switch to a more pluralistic model that threatens the status quo of power a la Thomas Jefferson.
Our economy is not continuing to trend deflationary out of fear of the largely non-elite consumer who is not spending. The spending is inadequate because the income is not there to support it. It has been consolidated as per the elitist model in operation, and being very competently applied. The trick is now to fool us into believing that choosing the means for a more pluralistic model of power--a more progressive tax burden that will enhance non-elite spending--is antithetical to the basis of our constitutional form of government that protects our freedom. The argument is, of course, absurd.
Operating with the elitist, Hamiltonian model causes the lack of income because it has been accumulated in the upper class to now be consolidated through political process of a regressive tax burden so that the recovery will be financed by borrowing from the consolidated wealth with interest (a budget deficit) instead of taxing it.
The elite of power are afraid, they fear The People will realize that the practical model can be easily changed so that instead of financing the means of consolidating power, We finance the means of real freedom we are all endowed.
Instead of financing the means to defeat free-market economics, We finance the means to allow for it in the fullest measure. We may then confirm what it is we have to fear: a free market or the lack of it?
The expertise being used is being mistaken for the lack of it because the complexity of the problem is being used to convince us all that the cure for our loathing is to be feared: that the problem is the solution; to identify the fear of the elite--the solution--as the object of the loathing, or a fundamental error of attribution. It is a deliberate error, a fallacy, being detected but erroneously interpreted as, attributed to, incompetence of the technocrats instead of the successful operation of the organizational technology--the elitist model of power and political economy.
The bad economics we all loathe is not the result of free-market economics, merely the lack of it. Realizing that is what the elite fear and will do whatever it takes to turn what We loathe into what they fear with the highest level of expertise.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Healthcare and Public Policy
Providing healthcare, along with many other sectors of our economy, is increasingly being considered a public good, like a public utility. If, for example, the financial system is so critical to the public welfare, why should it be subjected to a cycle of boom and bust that is inimical to that welfare generally as long as it remains in the private domain of the power structure where it has demonstrated the model of inefficiency and corruption, providing the lowest quality at the highest possible cost.
Bifurcation of the power strucutre into the domains of public and private is supposed to allow for a pluralistic efficacy. In some cases, goods and services are to be determined best provided in the private sector, some in the public. Failure in the private sector tends to force an enterprise into the public domain, if not in whole, in part by regulation of public enterprise--government. So we see that the conservative argument that "government does not produce anything...it is the model of inefficiency" is merely a "belief" proffered as an absolute truth (a guiding principle) that is nothing but sophistry that identifies their self-interest with the general welfare. It is the rhetorical stock-in-trade of the conservative element and is completely, empirically, disconfirmed by the evidence.
So it is with the healthcare system residing in the private sector. It is a model of inefficiency, and where it intersects with the public sector, it is a model of racketeering, fraud and corruption, just like the financial system. While medical doctors, for example, gain the public's confidence as the keepers of the public health, they at the same time bilk the public coffers (the tax base) with fraudulent and abusive pricing practices that only Enron could rival. This, of course, explains the byzantine regulatory scheme of Tom Daschle, for example. Complex schemes provide the opportunity for the abuse it is supposed to prevent, like the tax code, and that would explain how Daschle, and many others like him, can be both industry-friendly and keeper of the public trust (see the article, "Restructuring the Elements of Power" at griffithlighton.blogspot.com).
The remedy for the tendency to engineer complex schemes and organizational public/private technologies is a free market system, falsely discredited by the partisan, duopolistic, politics of the power structure that allows industries and markets to consolidate, defeating its operational utility.
A doctor should become wealthy because the public prefers that doctor over others, not because there are not enough doctors as per the entrance requirements of the AMA, its medical procedures, or its billing practices. The AMA is operating with the classic model of early 20th Century capitalism in which unscrupulous businessmen monopolized industries and markets in the name of free enterprise and free-market economics only to render its operation null and void. Only the most unscrupulous were the fittest to survive, or rewarded with a profitable measure of success.
The Standard Oil Trust Corporation became the model of uncivil behavior and economic inefficiency because it defeated the utility of free-market economics. Practitioners of organizing economic trusts became the criminal element of a civil society, and medical doctors should be no exception because they swear a hippocratic oath of doing no harm.
Anti-trust laws were enacted to control the tendency of organizing capital so that producers could tyrannize consumers by dictating the marketplace, consolidate the capital, and power. A significant part of that legal remedy was allowed to be dismissed by the Clinton Administration with the result of letting the financial sector both horizontally and vertically integrate. The result of this false two-party system of practical governance was catastrophic! Liberals and conservatives, by the evidence to date, work against each other in a bivariate--binary--system of false opposition and cooperation to produce the status quo of power. Allowing this realpolitique to continue--allowing bipartisanship to masquerade as nonpartisanship--should be at the very top of our list of things NOT to do!
The advocates of organizing to consolidate power either public or private should exist at the fringe of the power structure. Consolidation of power will be abusive! A government that acts to ensure a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority is a government that governs least because the free market takes care of keeping everybody accountable by direct participation (Democracy with a BIG "D") and controls prices with a plurality of easily accessible capital and markets.
Doctors claim their incomes are high because they have the special knowlege to keep the public health. The free market dictates that a high income will draw enough practitioners into the profession to equilibriate the cost of healthcare so that everyone can afford it--so that it is in adequate supply. The only reason it will not be in adequate supply would be a barrier-to-entry into the profession and, consequently, a cost-barrier to "acquiring" healthcare (what is reasonably to be considered a "requirement"). The final result of "rigging the market" (defeating the economics of a free market) is the lowest quality at the highest possible cost. It is the model of inefficiency, and organizing it into the public sector, so-called "socializing" it, without trust-busting the AMA just jumps it from the frying pan to the fire. The organized utility of bifurcating the power structure to preserve the status quo, the class distinction of have and have not (Hamiltonianism), will be very elegantly applied and accomplished.
The formula for providing healthcare is the formula for economic health: adequate income and controlling costs. It is what a free-market economy provides through pluralistic means.
The way the healthcare sector is organized now, we have the high cost rendering incomes inadequate--it is deflationary. The SCHIP legislation is just a reinvention of the status quo, financing extension of coverage through a regressive tax burden, a deflationary tax policy. It does not fit the formula for economic health: it despoils income and, rather than controlling costs, it provides public funding for price increases. The public/private mix is a false pluralism of power. It provides less an efficiency for public welfare than for a consolidation of power for private profit (a consolidation of private property--Hamiltonianism).
Pluralism provides. Consolidation deprives. Despite all the rhetoric and promise, consolidation of power always proves corrupt and inefficient. Pluralism always proves an efficiency of costs and effectiveness with the highest degree of accountability, which is why the most unscrupulous among us will always try to organize to defeat it without prohibition. The healthcare sector is no exception.
In terms of economic health, the medical profession is overfed and its patients are undernourished.
Bifurcation of the power strucutre into the domains of public and private is supposed to allow for a pluralistic efficacy. In some cases, goods and services are to be determined best provided in the private sector, some in the public. Failure in the private sector tends to force an enterprise into the public domain, if not in whole, in part by regulation of public enterprise--government. So we see that the conservative argument that "government does not produce anything...it is the model of inefficiency" is merely a "belief" proffered as an absolute truth (a guiding principle) that is nothing but sophistry that identifies their self-interest with the general welfare. It is the rhetorical stock-in-trade of the conservative element and is completely, empirically, disconfirmed by the evidence.
So it is with the healthcare system residing in the private sector. It is a model of inefficiency, and where it intersects with the public sector, it is a model of racketeering, fraud and corruption, just like the financial system. While medical doctors, for example, gain the public's confidence as the keepers of the public health, they at the same time bilk the public coffers (the tax base) with fraudulent and abusive pricing practices that only Enron could rival. This, of course, explains the byzantine regulatory scheme of Tom Daschle, for example. Complex schemes provide the opportunity for the abuse it is supposed to prevent, like the tax code, and that would explain how Daschle, and many others like him, can be both industry-friendly and keeper of the public trust (see the article, "Restructuring the Elements of Power" at griffithlighton.blogspot.com).
The remedy for the tendency to engineer complex schemes and organizational public/private technologies is a free market system, falsely discredited by the partisan, duopolistic, politics of the power structure that allows industries and markets to consolidate, defeating its operational utility.
A doctor should become wealthy because the public prefers that doctor over others, not because there are not enough doctors as per the entrance requirements of the AMA, its medical procedures, or its billing practices. The AMA is operating with the classic model of early 20th Century capitalism in which unscrupulous businessmen monopolized industries and markets in the name of free enterprise and free-market economics only to render its operation null and void. Only the most unscrupulous were the fittest to survive, or rewarded with a profitable measure of success.
The Standard Oil Trust Corporation became the model of uncivil behavior and economic inefficiency because it defeated the utility of free-market economics. Practitioners of organizing economic trusts became the criminal element of a civil society, and medical doctors should be no exception because they swear a hippocratic oath of doing no harm.
Anti-trust laws were enacted to control the tendency of organizing capital so that producers could tyrannize consumers by dictating the marketplace, consolidate the capital, and power. A significant part of that legal remedy was allowed to be dismissed by the Clinton Administration with the result of letting the financial sector both horizontally and vertically integrate. The result of this false two-party system of practical governance was catastrophic! Liberals and conservatives, by the evidence to date, work against each other in a bivariate--binary--system of false opposition and cooperation to produce the status quo of power. Allowing this realpolitique to continue--allowing bipartisanship to masquerade as nonpartisanship--should be at the very top of our list of things NOT to do!
The advocates of organizing to consolidate power either public or private should exist at the fringe of the power structure. Consolidation of power will be abusive! A government that acts to ensure a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority is a government that governs least because the free market takes care of keeping everybody accountable by direct participation (Democracy with a BIG "D") and controls prices with a plurality of easily accessible capital and markets.
Doctors claim their incomes are high because they have the special knowlege to keep the public health. The free market dictates that a high income will draw enough practitioners into the profession to equilibriate the cost of healthcare so that everyone can afford it--so that it is in adequate supply. The only reason it will not be in adequate supply would be a barrier-to-entry into the profession and, consequently, a cost-barrier to "acquiring" healthcare (what is reasonably to be considered a "requirement"). The final result of "rigging the market" (defeating the economics of a free market) is the lowest quality at the highest possible cost. It is the model of inefficiency, and organizing it into the public sector, so-called "socializing" it, without trust-busting the AMA just jumps it from the frying pan to the fire. The organized utility of bifurcating the power structure to preserve the status quo, the class distinction of have and have not (Hamiltonianism), will be very elegantly applied and accomplished.
The formula for providing healthcare is the formula for economic health: adequate income and controlling costs. It is what a free-market economy provides through pluralistic means.
The way the healthcare sector is organized now, we have the high cost rendering incomes inadequate--it is deflationary. The SCHIP legislation is just a reinvention of the status quo, financing extension of coverage through a regressive tax burden, a deflationary tax policy. It does not fit the formula for economic health: it despoils income and, rather than controlling costs, it provides public funding for price increases. The public/private mix is a false pluralism of power. It provides less an efficiency for public welfare than for a consolidation of power for private profit (a consolidation of private property--Hamiltonianism).
Pluralism provides. Consolidation deprives. Despite all the rhetoric and promise, consolidation of power always proves corrupt and inefficient. Pluralism always proves an efficiency of costs and effectiveness with the highest degree of accountability, which is why the most unscrupulous among us will always try to organize to defeat it without prohibition. The healthcare sector is no exception.
In terms of economic health, the medical profession is overfed and its patients are undernourished.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Organizing for Needed Change
If We The People want to effectively reverse and eliminate the cyclical crisis we are now experiencing, not only is trickle-down economics an empirically disconfirmed hypothesis that demands much-needed change, but the organized consolidation of the economy that it operates to produce and maintain demands change as well.
We see the congressional delegaton attempting to apply solutions to our economic woes that are the problem. It can hardly be characterized as "change we need."
From the price of commodities to the way public and private entities plan what we produce, the problem is organizational.
Bailing out what is "too big to fail" just perpetuates the problem--too big to fail--and effectively validates the "belief" that it is the model of efficiency when it is a hypothesis clearly disconfirmed by the evidence (massive unemployment and massive monetary support).
The massive monetary support will not reorganize the problem. It will provide a short term monetary stimulus that will forget the cause of the problem--the acquired belief that bigger is better, or most efficient.
The evidence that it is not is overwhelming!
Organizing for the consolidation of the political economy, for the consolidation of power, is the status quo ante, not change we need.
Instead of a point at which change is to naturally occur for a continuous, empirical improvement, our current crisis is being used to reinvent the problem into a confirmed consolidation of practical power that allows for elitist command and control of our political economy and for a continued false self-determination of The People.
If we do not reinvest, reorganize, consolidation of economic factors into small factors of manageable efficiencies that are quickly responsive to supply and demand costs and benefits and the tastes and preferences of the consumer (the public) with an equally quick accountability, the public is condemned to elite management of the political economy that in no way ensures a rational, objective, pragmatic decisional process that the collective will of The People is most apt to provide with a clearly verifiable legitimacy.
It is not impossible, and surely more possible and less complex than what we are doing now, to invest a small entrepreneurial economic system in which the stabilty of the system is not dependant, and therefore less apt to be corrupt, abusive and inefficient, if the failure of one industry or market entity does not condemn the entire system to short or long-term cyclical crisis.
Instead of how big you are being the measure of success, surviving the pluralism of the free marketplace is the measure of success.
Allowing for organized consolidation renders as the measure of success how corrupt and abusive a business can be and still stay in business (like securitizing--consolidating--debt obligations too big to let fail and impossible to renegotiate so that the debtor must fail and the lender must be bailed out). The abuse includes the margin of profit (inflation and unemployment to be managed politically) and a decisional process that leads to clearly verfied inefficiencies of current form that are shown to be difficult at best to reverse even with the force of public funding and authority. Reversing this measure of success is the change we need, and is entirely possible.
More than $2 trillion of monetary and fiscal stimulus (investment) is best spent to pluralize (deconsolidate) the economy, and power. The reason this alternative is ignored if not discouraged is because it will effectively cure what ails us. It will minimize the probability of crisis by not maintaining a consolidated model of power in which its huge costs are rendered a predictable, recurrent benefit of a power elite and a means to apply power rather than properly deny it.
Instead of denying access to power the inefficiencies of aspiring to be big enough to be corrupt and abusive, what access to financing provides and largely determines, the rigors of pluralism are discouraged for a systematic structure of power in which the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is largely the discretion of a ruling class, enforced by the self-determination of the masses to be in service to it. It is antithetical to a structural model for freedom, morality, and efficiency.
Maintaining the model we have now is to commit to a proven model for encouraging inefficiency, immorality and a lack of freedom that interact to be a cause for crisis and, historically, acquiesence to an elitist model that cyclically reinforces and reinvents itself. An elitist model always deliberately discourages the natural tendency for a peaceful and prosperous pluralism. It cultivates and ensures its succession with the promise of a short-term comfort and security that assures the probability of an insecure future.
Invest pluralism of the marketplace in priority, not its continued consolidation as we are determined to do now despite the domonstrable political will for "change we need."
We see the congressional delegaton attempting to apply solutions to our economic woes that are the problem. It can hardly be characterized as "change we need."
From the price of commodities to the way public and private entities plan what we produce, the problem is organizational.
Bailing out what is "too big to fail" just perpetuates the problem--too big to fail--and effectively validates the "belief" that it is the model of efficiency when it is a hypothesis clearly disconfirmed by the evidence (massive unemployment and massive monetary support).
The massive monetary support will not reorganize the problem. It will provide a short term monetary stimulus that will forget the cause of the problem--the acquired belief that bigger is better, or most efficient.
The evidence that it is not is overwhelming!
Organizing for the consolidation of the political economy, for the consolidation of power, is the status quo ante, not change we need.
Instead of a point at which change is to naturally occur for a continuous, empirical improvement, our current crisis is being used to reinvent the problem into a confirmed consolidation of practical power that allows for elitist command and control of our political economy and for a continued false self-determination of The People.
If we do not reinvest, reorganize, consolidation of economic factors into small factors of manageable efficiencies that are quickly responsive to supply and demand costs and benefits and the tastes and preferences of the consumer (the public) with an equally quick accountability, the public is condemned to elite management of the political economy that in no way ensures a rational, objective, pragmatic decisional process that the collective will of The People is most apt to provide with a clearly verifiable legitimacy.
It is not impossible, and surely more possible and less complex than what we are doing now, to invest a small entrepreneurial economic system in which the stabilty of the system is not dependant, and therefore less apt to be corrupt, abusive and inefficient, if the failure of one industry or market entity does not condemn the entire system to short or long-term cyclical crisis.
Instead of how big you are being the measure of success, surviving the pluralism of the free marketplace is the measure of success.
Allowing for organized consolidation renders as the measure of success how corrupt and abusive a business can be and still stay in business (like securitizing--consolidating--debt obligations too big to let fail and impossible to renegotiate so that the debtor must fail and the lender must be bailed out). The abuse includes the margin of profit (inflation and unemployment to be managed politically) and a decisional process that leads to clearly verfied inefficiencies of current form that are shown to be difficult at best to reverse even with the force of public funding and authority. Reversing this measure of success is the change we need, and is entirely possible.
More than $2 trillion of monetary and fiscal stimulus (investment) is best spent to pluralize (deconsolidate) the economy, and power. The reason this alternative is ignored if not discouraged is because it will effectively cure what ails us. It will minimize the probability of crisis by not maintaining a consolidated model of power in which its huge costs are rendered a predictable, recurrent benefit of a power elite and a means to apply power rather than properly deny it.
Instead of denying access to power the inefficiencies of aspiring to be big enough to be corrupt and abusive, what access to financing provides and largely determines, the rigors of pluralism are discouraged for a systematic structure of power in which the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is largely the discretion of a ruling class, enforced by the self-determination of the masses to be in service to it. It is antithetical to a structural model for freedom, morality, and efficiency.
Maintaining the model we have now is to commit to a proven model for encouraging inefficiency, immorality and a lack of freedom that interact to be a cause for crisis and, historically, acquiesence to an elitist model that cyclically reinforces and reinvents itself. An elitist model always deliberately discourages the natural tendency for a peaceful and prosperous pluralism. It cultivates and ensures its succession with the promise of a short-term comfort and security that assures the probability of an insecure future.
Invest pluralism of the marketplace in priority, not its continued consolidation as we are determined to do now despite the domonstrable political will for "change we need."
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Recovery Phase Indicator
Oil prices near $50 per barrel signals a stop and reversal of the deflationary phase and the beginning of the recovery phase of the business cycle.
Commanding the price of energy and food (core CPI) commands the depth and breadth of the cycle. Command has been accomplished with deregulation of a consolidated capital and the use of futures and options contracts. All that is required to reverse the deflationary trend is to stop buying futures contracts and allow prices to return to a "fundamental" bid rather than the speculative bubble bid of a consolidated capital.
It does not indicate the deconsolidation of the capital, but the active management of it by not inequitably bidding up the price of commodities and taking the value of your income, the value of your home and your savings. That value is now consolidated to the point of diminishing return. Specifically, at the most fundamental level of finance, it is the point at which the only people left capable of paying taxes--paying the debt and financing real estate dvelopment--is the upper class of incomes.
The value consolidated is now considered, by the principles of conservatism, to be the rightful ownership of those who own the consolidated capital--the people Obama is going to raise taxes to fianance our economic recovery. Opposition to it is solely a function of class distinction, of what defines the ruling class: you do not pay taxes, you collect them.
If the money needed to bail out the financial system you wrecked with leverage finanace must be borrowed from you through Treasury and the Federal Reserve system, you cannot be assigned the creditor status if you are the only party, class, that can pay it. Thus, economic growth, or the recovery phase of the cycle, marked by the reversal of core CPI indicators like fuel and food.
We now have a chief executive not incumbent to the creditors of our debtor-subject society. This is not a realignment from conservative to liberal identity that perpetuates the cycle of preserving conservative values and principles that verifiably result in overaccumulated wealth that causes cyclical crisis.
The larger cycle of a diffusion of power is in operation. As the retributive value is paid, rather than borrowed, through a peaceful pluralistic process that comes with a deconsolidation of wealth and power, the human condition is that much closer to actualizing an identity of self that was once the utopian fantasy of the dystopic critique.
Try as we may, there is no stopping the ideal whose time has come.
The ambition to power and dominion has been hoisted on its own petard. Where aspiring to a social position that by definition we cannot all have produced great wealth and power, the utility has diminished into large-scale economic inefficiencies and an absurd quality of existence in a a kind of existential Skinner Box where the self is condemned to the reward of the promise of freedom on command.
The contradiction is so profound to be irreversable. Our lives are no longer to be defined by the absurdity of being the slave aspiring to be the master. Our moral intelligence has matured to the empirical, practical realization, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "As I would not want to be a slave, I do not want to be a master."
Commanding the price of energy and food (core CPI) commands the depth and breadth of the cycle. Command has been accomplished with deregulation of a consolidated capital and the use of futures and options contracts. All that is required to reverse the deflationary trend is to stop buying futures contracts and allow prices to return to a "fundamental" bid rather than the speculative bubble bid of a consolidated capital.
It does not indicate the deconsolidation of the capital, but the active management of it by not inequitably bidding up the price of commodities and taking the value of your income, the value of your home and your savings. That value is now consolidated to the point of diminishing return. Specifically, at the most fundamental level of finance, it is the point at which the only people left capable of paying taxes--paying the debt and financing real estate dvelopment--is the upper class of incomes.
The value consolidated is now considered, by the principles of conservatism, to be the rightful ownership of those who own the consolidated capital--the people Obama is going to raise taxes to fianance our economic recovery. Opposition to it is solely a function of class distinction, of what defines the ruling class: you do not pay taxes, you collect them.
If the money needed to bail out the financial system you wrecked with leverage finanace must be borrowed from you through Treasury and the Federal Reserve system, you cannot be assigned the creditor status if you are the only party, class, that can pay it. Thus, economic growth, or the recovery phase of the cycle, marked by the reversal of core CPI indicators like fuel and food.
We now have a chief executive not incumbent to the creditors of our debtor-subject society. This is not a realignment from conservative to liberal identity that perpetuates the cycle of preserving conservative values and principles that verifiably result in overaccumulated wealth that causes cyclical crisis.
The larger cycle of a diffusion of power is in operation. As the retributive value is paid, rather than borrowed, through a peaceful pluralistic process that comes with a deconsolidation of wealth and power, the human condition is that much closer to actualizing an identity of self that was once the utopian fantasy of the dystopic critique.
Try as we may, there is no stopping the ideal whose time has come.
The ambition to power and dominion has been hoisted on its own petard. Where aspiring to a social position that by definition we cannot all have produced great wealth and power, the utility has diminished into large-scale economic inefficiencies and an absurd quality of existence in a a kind of existential Skinner Box where the self is condemned to the reward of the promise of freedom on command.
The contradiction is so profound to be irreversable. Our lives are no longer to be defined by the absurdity of being the slave aspiring to be the master. Our moral intelligence has matured to the empirical, practical realization, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "As I would not want to be a slave, I do not want to be a master."
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Your Self-Interest and the General Welfare
Pluralistic processes produce a social interaction of legitimate outcomes that is the application of an individual's choice, preference, that is the General Welfare.
If power is allowed to consolidate, to become non-pluralistic, but the legitimacy of the outcome is maintained to be pluralistic, there must be a mechanism in place to achieve this fraud.
The latest application is the current economic rescue plan being deliberated and soon to be legislated as the General Welfare.
Remember that the regressive tax policy of the Bush administration--the tax cuts for the wealthy that McCain says we NEED to make permanent--was argued to be everyone's self-interest, or the General Welfare.
The policy was decidedly not the self-interest of the vast majority of Americans, and management of this inequitable outcome--the rescue plan--is being sold as the General Welfare. Bush has, again with very certain terms, stated that not passing the rescue plan will mean a fate even worse than rewarding the corrupt and incompetent for an inequitable outcome that his administration argued with absolute confidence would not occur.
Yes, a crisis worse than we have now, that we were told would not occur to begin with, is definitely not in the self-interest of the vast majority of Americans. Notice how the self-interest of the vast majority has been sacrificed to preserve the self-interest of the rich all the way and is being called your self-interest.
This is how the Hamiltonian model of political-economy operates: exploitation of your self-interest is in your best interest. Slick, huh?
You should be ever-lov'n, hopp'n mad!
Let's try pluralism for a change!
If power is allowed to consolidate, to become non-pluralistic, but the legitimacy of the outcome is maintained to be pluralistic, there must be a mechanism in place to achieve this fraud.
The latest application is the current economic rescue plan being deliberated and soon to be legislated as the General Welfare.
Remember that the regressive tax policy of the Bush administration--the tax cuts for the wealthy that McCain says we NEED to make permanent--was argued to be everyone's self-interest, or the General Welfare.
The policy was decidedly not the self-interest of the vast majority of Americans, and management of this inequitable outcome--the rescue plan--is being sold as the General Welfare. Bush has, again with very certain terms, stated that not passing the rescue plan will mean a fate even worse than rewarding the corrupt and incompetent for an inequitable outcome that his administration argued with absolute confidence would not occur.
Yes, a crisis worse than we have now, that we were told would not occur to begin with, is definitely not in the self-interest of the vast majority of Americans. Notice how the self-interest of the vast majority has been sacrificed to preserve the self-interest of the rich all the way and is being called your self-interest.
This is how the Hamiltonian model of political-economy operates: exploitation of your self-interest is in your best interest. Slick, huh?
You should be ever-lov'n, hopp'n mad!
Let's try pluralism for a change!
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Confirming Command Economy
The price compression on a barrel of oil due to overproduction with the artificially high, non-fundamental, fraudulent price not only adds value to the substitute, alternative supplies of energy, but serves as a clearly confirmed demonstration of the command mode of the global economy.
OPECs decision to cut production to support the price per barrel above $100 is a confirmation of power. It is not to get rich. The supra-sovereigns are plenty rich. No. It is a demonstration of power over what is natural; the law of supply and demand and the natural justice, the righteousness, that comes with the confirmation of pluralistic processes like a free market economics.
However, freedom cannot be expropriated or disallowed. It can only be artificially accumulated with a natural, unavoidable, retribution. The more retributive value accumulated, the worse off the elite really are. This is what Obama, a highly intelligent man, means when he says the elite seem to take pride in their own stupidity. The first thing a political scientist learns is that people do not necessarily know what their self-interest is.
Ultimately, Nature, God, dictates a free market. The supra-sovereign, super-natural, status of the elite is but a foolish conceit. Nature commands the reconciliation of truth to power. The people are sovereign by Natural Right--it is not an abstraction of human imagination, it is an observation, a realization. The retributive value will be paid one way or another. God gives us the freedom to choose the form of payment. It is a soft determinism.
The retributive value is a variable unnecessarily suffered.
Let's choose freedom in priority.
Obama/Biden 2008!
Very best wishes.
OPECs decision to cut production to support the price per barrel above $100 is a confirmation of power. It is not to get rich. The supra-sovereigns are plenty rich. No. It is a demonstration of power over what is natural; the law of supply and demand and the natural justice, the righteousness, that comes with the confirmation of pluralistic processes like a free market economics.
However, freedom cannot be expropriated or disallowed. It can only be artificially accumulated with a natural, unavoidable, retribution. The more retributive value accumulated, the worse off the elite really are. This is what Obama, a highly intelligent man, means when he says the elite seem to take pride in their own stupidity. The first thing a political scientist learns is that people do not necessarily know what their self-interest is.
Ultimately, Nature, God, dictates a free market. The supra-sovereign, super-natural, status of the elite is but a foolish conceit. Nature commands the reconciliation of truth to power. The people are sovereign by Natural Right--it is not an abstraction of human imagination, it is an observation, a realization. The retributive value will be paid one way or another. God gives us the freedom to choose the form of payment. It is a soft determinism.
The retributive value is a variable unnecessarily suffered.
Let's choose freedom in priority.
Obama/Biden 2008!
Very best wishes.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Government Supported Enterprise
GSE's as they are known, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are quasi-private enterprise. The reason it is not appropriate to refer to them as quasi-public enterprise is because the underlying legitimacy that is fundamental to the power structure of enterprise is the ownership of private property.
The question posed is fundamental: should the legitimacy of enterprise be fundamentally "switched" from state capitalism to state socialism?
Operationally there would be little difference, and both claim the legal, constitutional, legitimacy of the popular consent of the governed.
Nationalizing Fannie and Freddie would be a switch to state socialism. The institutions would be funded by means of public finance, directly by the government through the treasury and not through the Federal Reserve which is financed through private banks (private ownership of capital, or property). The public debt, for example, is held publicly but paid privately through the Federal Reserve system. The interest on the debt is paid publicly through taxation (consent of the governed) and the treasury.
A person that owns enough capital (savings) to privately own (buy) the public debt and collect interest and is taxed to pay it is essentially sending themselves a check in the mail. In order to avoid this contradiction, this financial dissonance, we have the Federal Reserve "system" and all manner of regressing the tax code into a complexity that is always demanding simplicity like a flat tax, which will be a regressive burden by popular consent.
It is not difficult to see that "the system" is organized to be overly complex and requires central management of a controlling bureaucratic authority that is not necessarily elected and accountable to the consent of the governed, but operates in a supra-sovereign fashion that demands "the switch" to achieve the legal public legitimacy of authority.
Nationalization is not in this way the deliberate folly of the masses to secure a free lunch, but the natural process of satisfying a constitutional legitimacy. It does not mean "the switch" from private to a purely public legitimacy will not be corrupted, but that it will naturally occur despite the deliberate systematic organization to prevent it, which entrenches its inevitability by its own organizational devices.
Being assured direct accountability of any organized means of power by the consent of the governed requires deconsolidation of power (deliberately organized pluralism), not just a change of its legitimacy which is easily manipulated and the civility of its liberty easily denied by a centralized power of authority be it public or private.
Very best wishes.
The question posed is fundamental: should the legitimacy of enterprise be fundamentally "switched" from state capitalism to state socialism?
Operationally there would be little difference, and both claim the legal, constitutional, legitimacy of the popular consent of the governed.
Nationalizing Fannie and Freddie would be a switch to state socialism. The institutions would be funded by means of public finance, directly by the government through the treasury and not through the Federal Reserve which is financed through private banks (private ownership of capital, or property). The public debt, for example, is held publicly but paid privately through the Federal Reserve system. The interest on the debt is paid publicly through taxation (consent of the governed) and the treasury.
A person that owns enough capital (savings) to privately own (buy) the public debt and collect interest and is taxed to pay it is essentially sending themselves a check in the mail. In order to avoid this contradiction, this financial dissonance, we have the Federal Reserve "system" and all manner of regressing the tax code into a complexity that is always demanding simplicity like a flat tax, which will be a regressive burden by popular consent.
It is not difficult to see that "the system" is organized to be overly complex and requires central management of a controlling bureaucratic authority that is not necessarily elected and accountable to the consent of the governed, but operates in a supra-sovereign fashion that demands "the switch" to achieve the legal public legitimacy of authority.
Nationalization is not in this way the deliberate folly of the masses to secure a free lunch, but the natural process of satisfying a constitutional legitimacy. It does not mean "the switch" from private to a purely public legitimacy will not be corrupted, but that it will naturally occur despite the deliberate systematic organization to prevent it, which entrenches its inevitability by its own organizational devices.
Being assured direct accountability of any organized means of power by the consent of the governed requires deconsolidation of power (deliberately organized pluralism), not just a change of its legitimacy which is easily manipulated and the civility of its liberty easily denied by a centralized power of authority be it public or private.
Very best wishes.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Pragmatic Alternative
The alternative to all the complexity we experience with political-economic issues can be obviated with a very simple political measure: ensuring a free and unconsolidated economic model in priority.
Ensuring a competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, Adam Smith said, is the first and foremost job of government.
Why is it we don't hear big business mention that part of Adam Smith's prescription for free market economics? How come we don't hear Bernanke or Paulson say anything about ensuring a practical pluralism instead of ensuring that what is big cannot be allowed to fail? How pragmatic is it to not put all the eggs in one basket? I do believe an MBA can figure that out as being of a very high practical utility, yet it is suffering a complete technocratic deficiency.
Why is because it does not have priority. In fact, it has no priority for the administration of power. The alternative we need to achieve an efficienct accountability of power is being denied access to its constitutional apparatus. It is barred from entry, and those barriers must be removed to achieve a genuine constitutional legitimacy of power. The antithesis of the true legitimacy is not just a bad approximation of the perfect model, it is the lack of it. It is wholly illegitimate.
Notice that the inflation has been increasing most in sectors that have been allowed to consolidate the most. That clearly identifies a direct causal relationship that can be effectively treated with ensuring a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority instead of trying, or not trying, to regulate it with an easily cooptable authority.
Pluralism is poison to a consolidated model of power. It ensures accountability, low prices, full employment and adequate compensation for sustainable growth through innovation in priority. It is a deconsolidation of power that centralized power authorities consider inimical to its interests and must falsely sell to The People as the general welfare.
We need to stop buying it and strive for the perfect market model. Practice makes perfect, and if we try, we can get close enough for all practical purposes. What do we have to lose but the chains that bind us with what we have now.
The antithesis of what we have now is ensuring a free market model, not ensuring a consolidation of power.
Obama is the consumate pragmatist. He is most suited to allow for the pragmatic processes of a legitimately free market mechanism that allows for the innovative empirics of a continuous improvement and a quality of life we all deserve, that we all KNOW we can have, if we try!
Very best wishes.
Ensuring a competitive multiplicity of the marketplace, Adam Smith said, is the first and foremost job of government.
Why is it we don't hear big business mention that part of Adam Smith's prescription for free market economics? How come we don't hear Bernanke or Paulson say anything about ensuring a practical pluralism instead of ensuring that what is big cannot be allowed to fail? How pragmatic is it to not put all the eggs in one basket? I do believe an MBA can figure that out as being of a very high practical utility, yet it is suffering a complete technocratic deficiency.
Why is because it does not have priority. In fact, it has no priority for the administration of power. The alternative we need to achieve an efficienct accountability of power is being denied access to its constitutional apparatus. It is barred from entry, and those barriers must be removed to achieve a genuine constitutional legitimacy of power. The antithesis of the true legitimacy is not just a bad approximation of the perfect model, it is the lack of it. It is wholly illegitimate.
Notice that the inflation has been increasing most in sectors that have been allowed to consolidate the most. That clearly identifies a direct causal relationship that can be effectively treated with ensuring a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority instead of trying, or not trying, to regulate it with an easily cooptable authority.
Pluralism is poison to a consolidated model of power. It ensures accountability, low prices, full employment and adequate compensation for sustainable growth through innovation in priority. It is a deconsolidation of power that centralized power authorities consider inimical to its interests and must falsely sell to The People as the general welfare.
We need to stop buying it and strive for the perfect market model. Practice makes perfect, and if we try, we can get close enough for all practical purposes. What do we have to lose but the chains that bind us with what we have now.
The antithesis of what we have now is ensuring a free market model, not ensuring a consolidation of power.
Obama is the consumate pragmatist. He is most suited to allow for the pragmatic processes of a legitimately free market mechanism that allows for the innovative empirics of a continuous improvement and a quality of life we all deserve, that we all KNOW we can have, if we try!
Very best wishes.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Health Care is Not a Demand-Side Problem
Health Care is Not a Demand-Side Problem
The cost of healthcare is a supply-side problem.
Considerable time is being spent arguing costs are entirely demand driven. It is not! This argument is nothing but part of a scheme to rig the market to limit supply to support the costs (the profit margin). It is a pro-profit argument, like Reaganomocs, not pro-growth.
Yes, demand is strong and relatively inelastic. In other words, one unit increase in price does not result in a decrease in demand. Everybody needs health care. This is the perfect condition for abusive pricing and fraudulent practices that comes with minimizing market forces and maximizing public finance. It is also a strategic market for taxing the value added and reinvesment by means of public finance to increase the supply to meet the demand, thereby controlling the costs.
The sector charges largely whatever it wants and the government pays it. There is currently some control, but it is very weak because of the revolving door and requires a huge government bureaucracy, adding to the cost. They know that if the government does not pay it, the cost will be dramatically reduced because if no one can afford you, and you do not lower your prices, you do less business, and your income is dramatically reduced.
More focus needs to be placed on supply-side measures--all the things health care professionals and entrepreneurs do not want to talk about or dismiss as either unprofessional or detrimental to quality, like market forces--a competitive multiplicity in the marketplace. The arguments against market forces here are the same used during the robber-barron era of economic trusts: market competition is wasteful, crude, unsophisticated and diminishes quality and innovation--all of which is just a lot of self-interested nonsense being sold as the general welfare.
Economic pluralism is what the health care industry does not want and has the money (the value added) to prevent. The focus is on demand, and if your lifestyle does not meet the prescribed measure of health, you are not being sufficiently taxed to cover the cost. This could not be more tyrannical!
The jig is up!
If you want to control health care costs, here is how you do it.
The first step is to tax the value-added for reinvestment in growth (supply) rather than consolidation. The value added (the profit margin) is a market solution that a consolidation of capital tends to not allow. Investment in the added value as a measure of what we want and need, like healthcare and energy, is what gives free markets the force of cost-effectivness, efficiency, and legitimacy. It is the role of government to be sure it is fully operational.
The Treasury has a leading role for strategic, supply-side reinvestments. The legislature identifies the value-added markets and enables it through the Treasury. The Federal Reserve, our nation's prime lender, reacts to the disinflationary effects of added supply, rather than the deflationary effects of consolidating the added value. The result is a pro-growth, downward pressure on rates. Instead of encouraging inflation, like we have now, the Fed is encouraging growth, adding to the supply side.
Government is just as easily opeationalized to ensure affordable market solutions as it is to limit it.
The general-case solution statement of maximizing market mechanics will result in higher incomes and lower costs. This is the formula for making health care more affordable. It has nothing to do with diminished professional standards, quality, or any particular lifestyle. If that bag of potato chips does not kill you, something else will.
It is not because you are too fat, or because you smoke too much, or you drive an air polluting car.... Health care costs are so high because the market is rigged to maximize demand and the taxes to support it, and minimize supply so that costs are projected to be a $5 trillion expense by 2011.
Controlling the costs of health care is entirely possible, and instead of being an economic detriment, it is the demand for growth that drives a healthy economy.
Copyright 2008 by Griffith Lighton
The cost of healthcare is a supply-side problem.
Considerable time is being spent arguing costs are entirely demand driven. It is not! This argument is nothing but part of a scheme to rig the market to limit supply to support the costs (the profit margin). It is a pro-profit argument, like Reaganomocs, not pro-growth.
Yes, demand is strong and relatively inelastic. In other words, one unit increase in price does not result in a decrease in demand. Everybody needs health care. This is the perfect condition for abusive pricing and fraudulent practices that comes with minimizing market forces and maximizing public finance. It is also a strategic market for taxing the value added and reinvesment by means of public finance to increase the supply to meet the demand, thereby controlling the costs.
The sector charges largely whatever it wants and the government pays it. There is currently some control, but it is very weak because of the revolving door and requires a huge government bureaucracy, adding to the cost. They know that if the government does not pay it, the cost will be dramatically reduced because if no one can afford you, and you do not lower your prices, you do less business, and your income is dramatically reduced.
More focus needs to be placed on supply-side measures--all the things health care professionals and entrepreneurs do not want to talk about or dismiss as either unprofessional or detrimental to quality, like market forces--a competitive multiplicity in the marketplace. The arguments against market forces here are the same used during the robber-barron era of economic trusts: market competition is wasteful, crude, unsophisticated and diminishes quality and innovation--all of which is just a lot of self-interested nonsense being sold as the general welfare.
Economic pluralism is what the health care industry does not want and has the money (the value added) to prevent. The focus is on demand, and if your lifestyle does not meet the prescribed measure of health, you are not being sufficiently taxed to cover the cost. This could not be more tyrannical!
The jig is up!
If you want to control health care costs, here is how you do it.
The first step is to tax the value-added for reinvestment in growth (supply) rather than consolidation. The value added (the profit margin) is a market solution that a consolidation of capital tends to not allow. Investment in the added value as a measure of what we want and need, like healthcare and energy, is what gives free markets the force of cost-effectivness, efficiency, and legitimacy. It is the role of government to be sure it is fully operational.
The Treasury has a leading role for strategic, supply-side reinvestments. The legislature identifies the value-added markets and enables it through the Treasury. The Federal Reserve, our nation's prime lender, reacts to the disinflationary effects of added supply, rather than the deflationary effects of consolidating the added value. The result is a pro-growth, downward pressure on rates. Instead of encouraging inflation, like we have now, the Fed is encouraging growth, adding to the supply side.
Government is just as easily opeationalized to ensure affordable market solutions as it is to limit it.
The general-case solution statement of maximizing market mechanics will result in higher incomes and lower costs. This is the formula for making health care more affordable. It has nothing to do with diminished professional standards, quality, or any particular lifestyle. If that bag of potato chips does not kill you, something else will.
It is not because you are too fat, or because you smoke too much, or you drive an air polluting car.... Health care costs are so high because the market is rigged to maximize demand and the taxes to support it, and minimize supply so that costs are projected to be a $5 trillion expense by 2011.
Controlling the costs of health care is entirely possible, and instead of being an economic detriment, it is the demand for growth that drives a healthy economy.
Copyright 2008 by Griffith Lighton
Monday, February 25, 2008
Independents Called to Action
Restructuring the Elements of Power
Big business, bypassing the element of bureacratic power, has stagflated the economy in spite of the Federal Reserve. Prices and profits are supported while labor costs and competitive market forces get resistance. It is a needless restructuring of power that is not even in the best interest of a power elite.
Correcting for this consolidation of power will at first protect a power elite from itself, as a bureaucratized pluralism of power tends to do, and will at least help avoid a prolonged deflationary period.
Whatever independent bureaucratic diffusion of power the Federal Reserve had is now secondary to the Exxon-Mobils of the world. It has been co-opted. The price of oil has been used to consolidate the wealth of our nation and leads the direction of our economy. The Federal Reserve is a reactive, rather than a proactive, element of the power structure.
Independent voters can provide a needed check by demanding government operate to primarily ensure a more free and unconsolidated marketplace, a progressive individual and corporate income tax, and strategic reinvestment of revenue into consolidated markets like energy and healthcare.
Market forces--a competitive multiplicity in the marketplace--is the solution to much of what government agency labors to prevent or eliminate. Reinvestment of value-added revenues that comes from a progressive tax structure would operationalize the efficiency of markets to control costs, and externalities, both public and private in a way that a regulatory bureaucracy can only approximate.
For private capital, value-added reinvestment, the reinvestment of profits, is a function of consolidation: buying the competition. This is referred to as growth. However, the effect is to limit supply and discourage economic growth, supporting prices, profits, and the ability to engage in abusive practices without fear of losing market share and being forced out of business. The result is a proliferated demand for government and all the costs associated with it. Profits, the value added, is continuously reinvested in consolidating markets, and while economic growth will occur by creating an incentive for new markets, growth will not occur in strategic markets, like energy and healthcare, to control costs, quality and abusive practices.
The argument that consolidation promotes the proliferation of new markets is false. Investment in new markets is just as likely to occur without a consolidated marketplace.
Value-added reinvestment through means of progressive taxation is a function of optimizing investment in strategic markets and economic growth, controlling costs and abusive practices with less need for government.
Private capital discourages progressive taxation because it can be used to finance the competition (the value-added market solution), which is economic growth and optimally full employment which, again, reduces the need for government, producing growth with low inflation without the need for reactive bureaucratic interventions.
Private capital much prefers to have a proliferation of bureaucratic power than progressive taxation. It creates a revolving door, barriers to market entry, and can be co-opted, all with the force and legitimacy of public authority while, at the same time, consolidation of the marketplace can be blamed on government interventions.
While proliferation of the bureaucracy is a pluralistic diffusion of power, and can be added to the analytical models of power, it operates at first, as it did for 18th Century despots, to protect a power elite from itself. The EPA operates as much to keep the self-interest of a power elte from polluting itself to death as it does to protect and serve in the public interest. The same is true economically. The Federal Reserve operates more to protect private capital from itself, which in turn is called the general welfare.
The bureaucracy is just as easily operationalized for the general welfare as it is for the administration of a power elite.
Independents will function to ensure freedom.
The two parties are but a playground for its wealthiest contributors. The results tend to verify. The stakes are not very high with a binary system and provides the perfect playground for cultivating party loyalty and the utility of organized hierarchy and membership, win or lose. The result is a party system that functions to reward party satraps of the status-quo and a nepotism of power both public and private.
The party system is not operationalized for any kind of improvement. It is operationalized to give the false potential for change. That is why democratic party rhetoric tends to be full of "hope."
The time is right to act. Independents are called to action!
Copyright 2008 by Griffith Lighton.
Big business, bypassing the element of bureacratic power, has stagflated the economy in spite of the Federal Reserve. Prices and profits are supported while labor costs and competitive market forces get resistance. It is a needless restructuring of power that is not even in the best interest of a power elite.
Correcting for this consolidation of power will at first protect a power elite from itself, as a bureaucratized pluralism of power tends to do, and will at least help avoid a prolonged deflationary period.
Whatever independent bureaucratic diffusion of power the Federal Reserve had is now secondary to the Exxon-Mobils of the world. It has been co-opted. The price of oil has been used to consolidate the wealth of our nation and leads the direction of our economy. The Federal Reserve is a reactive, rather than a proactive, element of the power structure.
Independent voters can provide a needed check by demanding government operate to primarily ensure a more free and unconsolidated marketplace, a progressive individual and corporate income tax, and strategic reinvestment of revenue into consolidated markets like energy and healthcare.
Market forces--a competitive multiplicity in the marketplace--is the solution to much of what government agency labors to prevent or eliminate. Reinvestment of value-added revenues that comes from a progressive tax structure would operationalize the efficiency of markets to control costs, and externalities, both public and private in a way that a regulatory bureaucracy can only approximate.
For private capital, value-added reinvestment, the reinvestment of profits, is a function of consolidation: buying the competition. This is referred to as growth. However, the effect is to limit supply and discourage economic growth, supporting prices, profits, and the ability to engage in abusive practices without fear of losing market share and being forced out of business. The result is a proliferated demand for government and all the costs associated with it. Profits, the value added, is continuously reinvested in consolidating markets, and while economic growth will occur by creating an incentive for new markets, growth will not occur in strategic markets, like energy and healthcare, to control costs, quality and abusive practices.
The argument that consolidation promotes the proliferation of new markets is false. Investment in new markets is just as likely to occur without a consolidated marketplace.
Value-added reinvestment through means of progressive taxation is a function of optimizing investment in strategic markets and economic growth, controlling costs and abusive practices with less need for government.
Private capital discourages progressive taxation because it can be used to finance the competition (the value-added market solution), which is economic growth and optimally full employment which, again, reduces the need for government, producing growth with low inflation without the need for reactive bureaucratic interventions.
Private capital much prefers to have a proliferation of bureaucratic power than progressive taxation. It creates a revolving door, barriers to market entry, and can be co-opted, all with the force and legitimacy of public authority while, at the same time, consolidation of the marketplace can be blamed on government interventions.
While proliferation of the bureaucracy is a pluralistic diffusion of power, and can be added to the analytical models of power, it operates at first, as it did for 18th Century despots, to protect a power elite from itself. The EPA operates as much to keep the self-interest of a power elte from polluting itself to death as it does to protect and serve in the public interest. The same is true economically. The Federal Reserve operates more to protect private capital from itself, which in turn is called the general welfare.
The bureaucracy is just as easily operationalized for the general welfare as it is for the administration of a power elite.
Independents will function to ensure freedom.
The two parties are but a playground for its wealthiest contributors. The results tend to verify. The stakes are not very high with a binary system and provides the perfect playground for cultivating party loyalty and the utility of organized hierarchy and membership, win or lose. The result is a party system that functions to reward party satraps of the status-quo and a nepotism of power both public and private.
The party system is not operationalized for any kind of improvement. It is operationalized to give the false potential for change. That is why democratic party rhetoric tends to be full of "hope."
The time is right to act. Independents are called to action!
Copyright 2008 by Griffith Lighton.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)