This is often trotted out by many Republicans, or Joe the Plumber, that we should live in terror of the rich going on strike, and it assumes that only a few people have what it takes to create businesses to enslave, excuse me, employ the rest of us. But the fact is more likely that without Joe the Plumber creating a vast plumbing monopoly that out-advertises everyone else, chances are the regular plumbers will still have work and may even get to keep more of the money paid for their services. See also:
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16 """ When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" - intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell - which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position - "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labor" angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor. """
Very insightful: "government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities". In a way, the USA had its greatest general prosperity when marginal tax rates were 91% and the government was interfering heavily in the economy right after WWII, which lead to the Golden Era of the 1950s with many one-income blue collar families, the sort of "family values" many Republicans talk about. What does that tell us? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
This is really insightful. As California goes, into a depression and insolvency from an ideological inability to tax and regulate and invest in the public good, so goes the nation? Some alternative ideas:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)" http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
A "basic income" or making work fun are other alternatives. http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html Bob Black talks about "the abolition of work" here: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:
temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
improved local subsistence like with 3Dprinting and organic gardening;
a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
a shorter work week (like tried in France);
rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).
Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our besteducators say compulsoryschool as we know it shoulddisappearentirely.
The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds " http://sunysb.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/evolution.htm "We extend previous work on cooperation to some related questions regarding the evolution of simple forms of communication. The evolution of cooperation within the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been shown to follow different patterns, with significantly different outcomes, depending on whether the features of the model are classically perfect or stochastically imperfect (Axelrod 1980a, 1980b, 1984, 1985; Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Nowak and Sigmund, 1990, 1992; Sigmund 1993). Our results here show that the same holds for communication. Within a simple model, the evolution of communication seems to require a stochastically imperfect world. "
My take on economics, inspired by cybernetics: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html """ In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spo
Clojure is a lisp on the JVM designed for multi-threading. From: http://clojure.org/ """ Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR ). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs. """
This three to eight year lag is the spread of cyberweapons is supposed to reassure us?:-( What other weapons have three to eight year lags in being available to everyone?
We need to move beyond current defense ideology in the USA based on competitive profit-maximizing centralized brittle infrastructure that we try to defend by unilateral dominance (at a cost of about a trillion dollars a year in the USA).
Hiram makes some good points. Still, is not regulation of monopolies something you need a government for? Also, much drug research is fundamentally based on publicly funded (NIH) studies. Also, broadcast media was in general much better for families when there was an equal time law and restrictions against advertising to children. So, some of the problems he points to are the result of deregulation as well as shifting government resources away from "butter" and into "guns". I agree public schooling is a big problem (see John Taylor Gatto and my other post).
We need to separate out various functions of government like regulation and oversight or taxing and redistributing wealth for legitimate public purposes (including avoiding a concentration of wealth that is bad for democracy, like with a progressive tax up to 91% under Roosevelt after WWII) from the issue of who actually provides the services.
Or even this: From: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2159038/postshttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202191.html "Armed robotic aircraft soar in the skies above Pakistan, hurling death down on America's enemies in the war on terrorism. Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle. Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace.
The detachment with which the United States can inflict death upon our enemies is surely one reason why U.S. military involvement around the world has expanded over the past two decades. The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return.... The rapid emergence of the armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) that roam over Pakistan is a sequel to Moore's Law. Onboard computers became far more powerful, so automatic pilots became far more competent. Signal processors became more sophisticated, facilitating collection and processing of more interesting intelligence. Global Positioning System receivers shrank and could be economically employed on small robotic aircraft. Precision-guided munitions could deliver lethal firepower. And so forth....
The U.S. Navy has arguably moved farthest toward substituting treasure for blood. A generation ago the Reagan administration brought World War II-era battleships out of mothballs to provide gunfire support to onshore operations. With a crew of more than 1,500, these ships were designed to be manned by the low-paid draftees of the 1940s, not the more amply rewarded volunteers of the 1980s. The Navy couldn't afford them, and the ships were soon returned to mothballs. In their place, the Navy came up with the new DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, an automated warship with a crew of only 150."
"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."
I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:
"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will."
And if one of those people on their one acre of land makes a bioengineered plague, then everyone dies? Or, when the nuclear power plant next door melts down, we permanently evacuate Manhattan?
Here is something to consider, by Manuel de Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Manuel de Landa suggests we need a healthy balance between meshworks and hierarchies.
Also, on "socialism": http://digg.com/political_opinion/Socialist_Agencies_Destroying_America_Graphic """ This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in me
"I'll post a computer simulation about the tragedy of the commons that really makes it stand out why this is so."
I'd encourage you to do that. I hope your simulation includes the fact that it usually takes money to make money, and then one can see the consequences of an accumulation of wealth in a few actors in the system then gaining a lot of decision making power. For many people, the golden years of the USA were when the marginal tax rate on top income was above 90% to counter that trend.:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
From The American Conservative: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ """ This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. """
There are other aspects of a good life beyond those, like community.
Markets have all sorts of problems: * systemic risks of collapse, especially from pyramid schemes involving debt * negative externalities like pollution are paid by society * positive externalities like global health are ignored in product design * money tends to get centralized, as it takes money to make money * those with a lot of money set standards to benefit themselves * competition can be very wasteful if people otherwise agree on goals * preparing and fighting war is profitable * as above, human labor is needed less and less for production * money tends to corrupt the political process * the market doesn't hear the needs of people with money, so people can starve or sicken amidst physical plenty * extrinsic security and planned obsolescence may be more profitable than intrinsic security and durable goods * money distorts information flows about news * money corrupts the medical decision making process (conflict of interest) * money corrupts academia (Kept University)
There are probably others.:-)
Sometimes, market processes are the best we can use. But we need to be aware of where they go wrong. The USA has been greatly damaged over the last few decades by "market fundamentalism". Markets may be a great way to ration scarce goods if everyone has some ration units to pay with, giving everyone a right to some share of the industrial commons. But, as we have already seen globally, when the market does not need people's labor like in Africa, or the market is run by organizations so powerful they don't have to pay much for labor, then things can go badly.
Markets and the fear of starvation or the fear of looking bad socially or the desire to get ahead of everyone else materially may motivate some people to do some disagreeable jobs. But we now have the technology to rethink most jobs to make them more agreeable, or to eliminate them entirely if they are unpleasant to everyone (like by using robotics or better design). Ultimately, the income-through-jobs link is breaking as predicted here:
Except you completely ignore externalities, systemic risks, and equity, which is what got us in various messes already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Consider the "True cost" of oil from various perspectives: http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461 """ Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel. That would make the "real" cost of filling up a family sedan about $220, and filling up a large SUV about $325 (when oil was $10 a barrel cheaper than it is now!). """
By the way, I've read it takes as much *electricity* to produce a gallon of gas as it would take an electric car to go about the same distance. So, all the external costs of gasoline are totally for nothing energywise. http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
Depending on other regions for energy creates a systemic risk. Pipelines are inherently indefensible and so require a police state to protect because one small group could do vast damage to the society by damaging just one oil pipeline. Solar panels on your roof do not require a police state to protect, just regular police; if someone vandalizes them, the entire economy does not collapse.
Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few who control oil companies also creates a wealth dispartity that damages democracy as well as the economy (because few can start small businesses without loans or investments from big organizations). One reason we have oil pipelines instead of solar panels everywhere is that it has been more profitable to a few people to do that, while the rest of us pay huge taxes for a military to defend those pipelines at home and abroad.
I could go on, but basically, you need to look at issues like externalities, systemic risks, and concentration of wealth to see the various ways that markets can and do fail regularly in practice unless they are taxed and regulated. Taxes and regulation have their problems too, of course: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Ideally, we need to move beyond markets and rationing for most things. So, your enthusiasm is great. You're right that cheap energy would help with a lot of things (as long as it was also relatively clean, inherently safe, and long lasting -- like wind and solar and many other renewables). Ideally, we want an energy infrastructure that is inherently secure, not brittle and requiring now about a trillion dollars a year to secure extrinsically with soldiers and bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Still, if all the benefits of cheap energy or any other major innovation go to a few people, then we just have another problem. See Marshall Brain's short story on this: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
You're right that a left that focuses on rationing and scarcity is dysfunctional; that has historically b
Yet, even as the White House becomes more efficient and the website costs less to build and operate, this is one more step towards a post-scarcity future that the White House is not otherwise directly engaging, like by promoting a "basic income" for all regardless of whether someone "works": "Why limited demand means joblessness" http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/ "Summary: Mainstream economics assumes demand for almost anything is infinite. Thus, the theory goes, when human workers get replaced by robots, or better design means less human labor is needed, then there will soon be new jobs making new things; the only issue might be retraining. But, if demand is limited (because the best things in life are free or cheap, and everything you own also owns you), then when people get laid off, the jobs are gone for good, because there is nothing more that anybody wants then is already produced. And people having more time outside of compulsory work would be a good thing, if we more evenly shared the wealth from automation and better design, but we don't -- yet." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
On having a healthy weight, see "Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!" http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm "The modern American diet contains concentrations of chemicals that we were never meant to consume. As food manufacturers have sought to compete with each other, foods have become increasingly artificial--loaded with ever-higher concentrations of pleasure-inducing chemicals, such as sugar, salt, and fat. But curiously, though the concentrations of these chemicals have escalated, the actual pleasure from eating has always stayed about the same. We now understand why. As our modern foods have become increasingly stimulating, our taste nerves are becoming desensitized--neuro-adapting to the modern diet's excessive stimulation. This sets the stage for a devastating trap, wherein a health-promoting diet is relatively unappealing. Fortunately, you now understand what it takes to escape this deceptive dietary trap. With consistent discipline, or perhaps an occasional period of supervised, water-only fasting, you can always get yourself back on track. In doing so, you will discover--or perhaps re-discover--that the diet of our natural design can be very enjoyable."
Why is it OK to force people to get vaccinations (which are not 100% effective, and which can have side effects) but asking medical staff to get enough sleep, eat right, avoid bad stress, exercise, and either get sunlight or take vitamin D3 supplements seems like it can't be enforced? Why is it OK and moral to insist on vaccinations for medical staff but not diet and lifestyle issues? Forcing medical interns to work overtime so they lose sleep is obviously putting everyone at risk, too, if the interns' immune systems are weaker from lack of sleep or sunlight. Why don't hospitals change their policies more on that?
Slashdot Mirror
This is often trotted out by many Republicans, or Joe the Plumber, that we should live in terror of the rich going on strike, and it assumes that only a few people have what it takes to create businesses to enslave, excuse me, employ the rest of us. But the fact is more likely that without Joe the Plumber creating a vast plumbing monopoly that out-advertises everyone else, chances are the regular plumbers will still have work and may even get to keep more of the money paid for their services. See also:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
On regulators being captured by special interests, see: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/ or this related presentation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7382297202053077236
For other ideas, see:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"""
When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" - intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell - which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position - "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labor" angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor.
"""
Some ideas on what to do about it, because automation only makes this worse:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
Very insightful: "government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities". In a way, the USA had its greatest general prosperity when marginal tax rates were 91% and the government was interfering heavily in the economy right after WWII, which lead to the Golden Era of the 1950s with many one-income blue collar families, the sort of "family values" many Republicans talk about. What does that tell us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
Also related:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
Ideally, we need to tax and redistribute as a basic income, given the income-through-jobs link is breaking down through out our society from automation and better design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
This is really insightful. As California goes, into a depression and insolvency from an ideological inability to tax and regulate and invest in the public good, so goes the nation? Some alternative ideas:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
On Education vs. Schooling:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
A "basic income" or making work fun are other alternatives.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Bob Black talks about "the abolition of work" here:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
See also: "The psychopath as peer?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005499.html
But also a reply:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005502.html
+1 Insightful
+1 Funny/Ironic
"""
These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:
Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.
The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds "
http://sunysb.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/evolution.htm
"We extend previous work on cooperation to some related questions regarding the evolution of simple forms of communication. The evolution of cooperation within the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been shown to follow different patterns, with significantly different outcomes, depending on whether the features of the model are classically perfect or stochastically imperfect (Axelrod 1980a, 1980b, 1984, 1985; Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Nowak and Sigmund, 1990, 1992; Sigmund 1993). Our results here show that the same holds for communication. Within a simple model, the evolution of communication seems to require a stochastically imperfect world. "
Wow, thanks for the fascinating and informative reply.
Related links:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
On Marxism, Joan Roelofs
http://mysite.verizon.net/joan.roelofs/index.htm
has suggested that Charles Fourier said anything good that Marx said decades before him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
Bob Black wrote this essay inspired in part by Charles Fourier's ideas:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
My take on economics, inspired by cybernetics:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spo
Clojure is a lisp on the JVM designed for multi-threading. From:
http://clojure.org/
"""
Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR ). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.
"""
This three to eight year lag is the spread of cyberweapons is supposed to reassure us? :-( What other weapons have three to eight year lags in being available to everyone?
We need to move beyond war, in part because it is too terrible to contemplate at this point:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
We need to transition to "intrinsically secure" infrastructure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
that we protect by means of "mutual security":
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
We need to move beyond current defense ideology in the USA based on competitive profit-maximizing centralized brittle infrastructure that we try to defend by unilateral dominance (at a cost of about a trillion dollars a year in the USA).
A rebuttal to the "socialist agencies" comment I quoted is here by "hiram":
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/08/a_savage_mob.html
Hiram makes some good points. Still, is not regulation of monopolies something you need a government for? Also, much drug research is fundamentally based on publicly funded (NIH) studies. Also, broadcast media was in general much better for families when there was an equal time law and restrictions against advertising to children. So, some of the problems he points to are the result of deregulation as well as shifting government resources away from "butter" and into "guns". I agree public schooling is a big problem (see John Taylor Gatto and my other post).
We need to separate out various functions of government like regulation and oversight or taxing and redistributing wealth for legitimate public purposes (including avoiding a concentration of wealth that is bad for democracy, like with a progressive tax up to 91% under Roosevelt after WWII) from the issue of who actually provides the services.
But, as I said earlier, take a look at this video of a high speed robot hand from Japan and tell me *anything* about our economy will make sense as-is in ten or twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Or even this: ... ...
From:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2159038/posts http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202191.html
"Armed robotic aircraft soar in the skies above Pakistan, hurling death down on America's enemies in the war on terrorism. Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle. Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace.
The detachment with which the United States can inflict death upon our enemies is surely one reason why U.S. military involvement around the world has expanded over the past two decades. The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return.
The rapid emergence of the armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) that roam over Pakistan is a sequel to Moore's Law. Onboard computers became far more powerful, so automatic pilots became far more competent. Signal processors became more sophisticated, facilitating collection and processing of more interesting intelligence. Global Positioning System receivers shrank and could be economically employed on small robotic aircraft. Precision-guided munitions could deliver lethal firepower. And so forth.
The U.S. Navy has arguably moved farthest toward substituting treasure for blood. A generation ago the Reagan administration brought World War II-era battleships out of mothballs to provide gunfire support to onshore operations. With a crew of more than 1,500, these ships were designed to be manned by the low-paid draftees of the 1940s, not the more amply rewarded volunteers of the 1980s. The Navy couldn't afford them, and the ships were soon returned to mothballs. In their place, the Navy came up with the new DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, an automated warship with a crew of only 150."
I came across that while looking what the freepers say about robots:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/robot/index?tab=articles
Anyway, many conservatives don't get it about technology invalidating muc
"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."
I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:
"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education
"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/
"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html
"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583
General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me
"If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will."
And if one of those people on their one acre of land makes a bioengineered plague, then everyone dies? Or, when the nuclear power plant next door melts down, we permanently evacuate Manhattan?
Here is something to consider, by Manuel de Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Manuel de Landa suggests we need a healthy balance between meshworks and hierarchies.
By the way, make sure you get enough Vitamin D while working inside on simulations, as I agree the public health agencies have dropped the ball on a lot of things:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
Also, on "socialism":
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Socialist_Agencies_Destroying_America_Graphic
"""
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level
determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in me
"I'll post a computer simulation about the tragedy of the commons that really makes it stand out why this is so."
I'd encourage you to do that. I hope your simulation includes the fact that it usually takes money to make money, and then one can see the consequences of an accumulation of wealth in a few actors in the system then gaining a lot of decision making power. For many people, the golden years of the USA were when the marginal tax rate on top income was above 90% to counter that trend. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
And then you can also model the effects of a "basic income" within your assumptions. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
A basic income almost passed under Nixon.
The great thing about a simulation is it forces people to make their assumptions explicit and look at the consequences of playing with them.
From The American Conservative:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
"""
There are other aspects of a good life beyond those, like community.
Markets have all sorts of problems:
* systemic risks of collapse, especially from pyramid schemes involving debt
* negative externalities like pollution are paid by society
* positive externalities like global health are ignored in product design
* money tends to get centralized, as it takes money to make money
* those with a lot of money set standards to benefit themselves
* competition can be very wasteful if people otherwise agree on goals
* preparing and fighting war is profitable
* as above, human labor is needed less and less for production
* money tends to corrupt the political process
* the market doesn't hear the needs of people with money, so people can starve or sicken amidst physical plenty
* extrinsic security and planned obsolescence may be more profitable than intrinsic security and durable goods
* money distorts information flows about news
* money corrupts the medical decision making process (conflict of interest)
* money corrupts academia (Kept University)
There are probably others. :-)
Sometimes, market processes are the best we can use. But we need to be aware of where they go wrong. The USA has been greatly damaged over the last few decades by "market fundamentalism". Markets may be a great way to ration scarce goods if everyone has some ration units to pay with, giving everyone a right to some share of the industrial commons. But, as we have already seen globally, when the market does not need people's labor like in Africa, or the market is run by organizations so powerful they don't have to pay much for labor, then things can go badly.
Markets and the fear of starvation or the fear of looking bad socially or the desire to get ahead of everyone else materially may motivate some people to do some disagreeable jobs. But we now have the technology to rethink most jobs to make them more agreeable, or to eliminate them entirely if they are unpleasant to everyone (like by using robotics or better design). Ultimately, the income-through-jobs link is breaking as predicted here:
Except you completely ignore externalities, systemic risks, and equity, which is what got us in various messes already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Consider the "True cost" of oil from various perspectives:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"""
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel. That would make the "real" cost of filling up a family sedan about $220, and filling up a large SUV about $325 (when oil was $10 a barrel cheaper than it is now!).
"""
By the way, I've read it takes as much *electricity* to produce a gallon of gas as it would take an electric car to go about the same distance. So, all the external costs of gasoline are totally for nothing energywise.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
Depending on other regions for energy creates a systemic risk. Pipelines are inherently indefensible and so require a police state to protect because one small group could do vast damage to the society by damaging just one oil pipeline. Solar panels on your roof do not require a police state to protect, just regular police; if someone vandalizes them, the entire economy does not collapse.
Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few who control oil companies also creates a wealth dispartity that damages democracy as well as the economy (because few can start small businesses without loans or investments from big organizations). One reason we have oil pipelines instead of solar panels everywhere is that it has been more profitable to a few people to do that, while the rest of us pay huge taxes for a military to defend those pipelines at home and abroad.
I could go on, but basically, you need to look at issues like externalities, systemic risks, and concentration of wealth to see the various ways that markets can and do fail regularly in practice unless they are taxed and regulated. Taxes and regulation have their problems too, of course:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Ideally, we need to move beyond markets and rationing for most things. So, your enthusiasm is great. You're right that cheap energy would help with a lot of things (as long as it was also relatively clean, inherently safe, and long lasting -- like wind and solar and many other renewables). Ideally, we want an energy infrastructure that is inherently secure, not brittle and requiring now about a trillion dollars a year to secure extrinsically with soldiers and bombs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Still, if all the benefits of cheap energy or any other major innovation go to a few people, then we just have another problem. See Marshall Brain's short story on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
You're right that a left that focuses on rationing and scarcity is dysfunctional; that has historically b
Yet, even as the White House becomes more efficient and the website costs less to build and operate, this is one more step towards a post-scarcity future that the White House is not otherwise directly engaging, like by promoting a "basic income" for all regardless of whether someone "works":
"Why limited demand means joblessness"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
"Summary: Mainstream economics assumes demand for almost anything is infinite. Thus, the theory goes, when human workers get replaced by robots, or better design means less human labor is needed, then there will soon be new jobs making new things; the only issue might be retraining. But, if demand is limited (because the best things in life are free or cheap, and everything you own also owns you), then when people get laid off, the jobs are gone for good, because there is nothing more that anybody wants then is already produced. And people having more time outside of compulsory work would be a good thing, if we more evenly shared the wealth from automation and better design, but we don't -- yet."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
On having a healthy weight, see "Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!"
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
"The modern American diet contains concentrations of chemicals that we were never meant to consume. As food manufacturers have sought to compete with each other, foods have become increasingly artificial--loaded with ever-higher concentrations of pleasure-inducing chemicals, such as sugar, salt, and fat. But curiously, though the concentrations of these chemicals have escalated, the actual pleasure from eating has always stayed about the same. We now understand why. As our modern foods have become increasingly stimulating, our taste nerves are becoming desensitized--neuro-adapting to the modern diet's excessive stimulation. This sets the stage for a devastating trap, wherein a health-promoting diet is relatively unappealing. Fortunately, you now understand what it takes to escape this deceptive dietary trap. With consistent discipline, or perhaps an occasional period of supervised, water-only fasting, you can always get yourself back on track. In doing so, you will discover--or perhaps re-discover--that the diet of our natural design can be very enjoyable."
Maybe it is more important to ask everyone to get their Vitamin D levels checked?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Why is it OK to force people to get vaccinations (which are not 100% effective, and which can have side effects) but asking medical staff to get enough sleep, eat right, avoid bad stress, exercise, and either get sunlight or take vitamin D3 supplements seems like it can't be enforced? Why is it OK and moral to insist on vaccinations for medical staff but not diet and lifestyle issues? Forcing medical interns to work overtime so they lose sleep is obviously putting everyone at risk, too, if the interns' immune systems are weaker from lack of sleep or sunlight. Why don't hospitals change their policies more on that?
Most US people are Vitamin D deficient. See the Vitamin D Council web site for how to test and supplement:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml