The "MBA-in-a-box" scenario presupposes that the corporate form will continue to be viable. Considering that we're beginning to see the breakdown of state subsidies to centralization (intellectual property is one that comes up a lot here on Slashdot), I don't have faith.
Methods of social organization are technologies too, and I'm willing to bet we'll see rapid evolution in that sector over the next few decades. Who knows what sort of other changes that will enable? I'm not willing to get completely on board with Kurzweil, since he makes numerous faulty assumptions of his own, but change can still come from unexpected directions.
Perhaps it's time to abandon a broken system. The nation-state is merely a technology for maintaining order, just like the computer in front of you is a technology for manipulating information. (Hell, it was never even intended to dominate scientific research like it does now. That only really came about after the destruction of an entire generation's productive capacity through an economic collapse and a world war.) Trying to force the legislature to somehow be more representative is like trying to wedge DDR RAM into a 486.
The only way to ensure that the prevailing social order is truly representative of the people who make it up is to decentralize and devolve authority to those who are most directly affected by it. Let them make their own decisions about whom to delegate power to and when, rather than offering them a limited number of artificially restricted choices every time the state's election happens to roll around. Sure, there's a lot of intellectually and socially degenerate people throughout the country who you probably don't trust to control themselves, but the government's past attempts at social engineering haven't been able to pick them up out of the dirt, and arguably put a lot of them there in the first place. Time to upgrade.
It seems appropriate to chime in here with a recommendation for the writings of Kevin Carson. His in-progress work on organization theory discusses a lot of what you lay out here.
I should've been more precise. Suprnova was never directly re-instantiated, it basically became a brand because people were already familiar with the name.
Microsoft is operating in a market distorted by intellectual property laws, where they can capitalize on what would otherwise be freely copied and modified. Free-market logic does not apply.
A recurring fee just turns the whole arrangement into an explicit protection racket. "So, youse gots dis here idea youse don't want nothin' to happen to..."
Your stance against property ensures that your philosophy will have limited applicability towards meaningful change. Even after the US is humbled by the developing financial crisis, the vast majority of people will still want to be sure that they can call their junk theirs. That is why capitalism endures: even though it visibly sucks, the common man believes it to be the only system under which there are guaranteed provisions for individual rights and private property. If you want true social change in America, you cannot put collectivism forward as the only, or even the best, alternative to capitalism. That is why I embrace the Ron Paul campaign, warts and all. Most of his supporter base will probably never progress beyond Objectivist bullcrap or the Mises Institute's party line, but there will be people left over with a genuine interest in developing individualism as a rigorous social theory. In fact, there are already people out there thinking along these lines, but they don't get much exposure because they're diametrically opposed to capitalists and state-socialists both. For instance, I recommend this book by an ex-World Bank speechwriter named David Ellerman: http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/p&c.htm
Along the same lines, the "social contract" is not a very good metaphor. Could you show me this contract? What are the terms? Who drafted it? Who signed it? Why doesn't everybody carry around a wallet-sized copy for reference purposes? Of course, the standard Ron Paul supporter answer would be that the Constitution is the only social contract we have, and in terms of legal documents, they'd be right. Social contract ideology muddles the definition of the word "contract" in an attempt to counter capitalist rhetoric, but it falls flat with the people it's trying to convert. If you wish to present poverty and inequality as inevitable consequences of capitalism, you're far better off doing so in a deliberative, logical fashion; even if the average American does have the attention span of a newt. The "social contract" is a woeful attempt to package all that logic into a sound bite, and just like sound bites in popular politics, it lowers the overall level of debate.
Inflation does not tax the poor: They have no cash savings. Inflation does not tax the middle class: They keep their assets in real-estate and mutual funds.
Inflation gives the poor no incentive to save, as their cash savings will decrease in real value over time, and they are unlikely to be able to accumulate enough cash to invest in more risky instruments that are more likely to hold value. Furthermore, the prevalence of cheap credit fosters predatory lenders such as payday-loan and rent-to-own establishments, and the availability of such instant gratification enforces a high time preference among the poor. You can cling to Keynesianism and try to regulate the predatory lenders out of existence, but that doesn't solve the root problem.
As for inflation not harming the middle class, tell that to all the members of the middle class who are staring down foreclosure, or whose mutual funds took a gigantic dump because they were holding now-worthless mortgage-backed CDOs. Once again, the mainstream argument will be that more regulation must be placed on the mortgage industry. But if those lenders didn't have the Fed telling them they won't be allowed to go broke in a bank run, they never would've been able to make those bad loans in the first place.
I don't completely agree with those preaching the "gold standard," as they merely believe that gold would become predominant if there was a free market in media of exchange. But it's complete BS to claim that inflation is harmless. The deleterious effects are there if you look for them.
Money, if treated as the most readily exchangeable good in an economy rather than some mystic avatar of wealth that should be held separate from all other goods, is not necessarily a scam. But fractional-reserve banking is, and the Federal Reserve is the means by which that scam is stabilized and perpetuated.
Bank runs occur due to the practice of fractional-reserve banking, which was considered a type of fraud in many historical legal systems. The Federal Reserve acts to stabilize and regulate these practices, but if such a system is unstable in the absence of regulation, why should it continue to exist at all? Keynes' "General Theory" is the cornerstone of the mainstream answer to that question, but it serves only as an ex post justification of a system that was, by then, already prevalent; not as a description of human trade practices in the absence of state and banking cartel intervention.
For some people, independence is a good in and of itself. The market as a whole is biased to consider goods in light of their dollar return, mostly through hidden subsidies that other posters have already detailed.
Or perhaps it is evolution in action? Just how adaptable are those societies that value the strength of the collective over the freedom of the individual? Considering the number of dead empires littering the historical record, I'd have to say that when push comes to shove, they're not very adaptable at all. Your bias towards collectivism leads you to make a number of unreasonable assumptions about the nature of the state and its effectiveness in problem-solving which you do not bother to justify. Politicians are not philosopher-kings. They gain power by promising the people whatever they want most, whether it be empire and national glory or a forcibly-imposed social safety net (or sometimes both, which is the fastest road to collapse). Their solutions are, by necessity, biased towards a high time preference, since they need to either produce some kind of results or else lose power. Very few, if any, of the problems we face can be solved within the term of a president or prime minister, but that doesn't stop them from trying, and the populace at large must bear the costs of their failures. The basic laws of economics cannot be ignored, whether the good in question is as tangible as food or as abstract as political power.
Another question for you: how is it that collectives like the Cybermen from Dr. Who, the Borg from Star Trek, or the Zerg from StarCraft keep recurring in popular culture as negative archetypes? Perhaps it's because involuntary collectivism runs against the grain of human nature? Or is that, too, a consequence of the evil and diseased US hegemony?
(Hell, shit like "The fact the the U.S. is currently aberrant is a symptom of disease, not strength" makes you sound a little like ol' Locutus yourself.)
Here's an idea: the United States, a territory far removed from the rest of the "first world," underwent a revolution based on individualist principles. Trade and intellectual exchange took place at a distance, so that the US was less likely to be strongly influenced by European ideas about government. Most of western Europe, by contrast, transitioned to liberal democracy from some form of monarchism (in many cases, with destruction, poverty, and totalitarianism in between). Hell, in the UK, you people still have a reigning monarch, even if she doesn't do much besides provide fodder for gossip papers and society newsletters.
Monarchism fosters respect for government and authority, and socialism arises because people want a guaranteed standard of living. In the ashes of postwar Europe, the last stable, non-murderous government many people lived under was monarchical, but they had the examples of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin to warn them against vesting so much power in a single individual. Considering the conditions they lived in then, it's no surprise that they also wanted a guaranteed standard of living, so that they'd never have to experience such poverty again. Combine the post-monarchist understanding of government (central to society, but destructive in the hands of a single individual) with the socialist impulse, and you have today's European governments, for good or ill. Considering what the UK has become and what the central government of the European Union is becoming, I'd say it's ultimately for ill; but if nothing else, you're free to form your own opinion.
One reason we discount the future so highly is because central banks, operating as quasi-governmental institutions, create capital out of thin air. Those closest to this new capital benefit disproportionately from it, and use their first-mover advantage to pass as many of their costs as possible onto the rest of us poor suckers. Part of this is using the political influence of accumulated capital to buy protection against those who are affected by their externalized costs, and to skew scientific research (most of which is state-funded and controlled) so that everybody else doesn't realize just how they're being harmed.
This might seem a tangential response to your post, but there's a greater socio-political factor to your concerns than you seem to understand. You blame individual power for the rise of the negative externalities we face, but you should instead be asking how the current system allows the individuals who generate those externalities to get away with it. Just because most mainstream libertarians don't think through all the consequences of state capitalism doesn't mean that nobody's thinking about it from an individualist point of view.
This assertion is not an effective response to the grandparent poster, although I think that's because the GP wasn't worded clearly enough. Punishment, such as imprisonment, is only effected after an individual has already offended against others. The GP was discussing the hypothetical loss of rights (for optimum philosophical consistency, negative rights) on the part of all individuals, which is detrimental to society, as society is made up entirely of individuals.
As a side note, I think the consideration of institutions unto themselves is a critical flaw of many political philosophies. Often, statists will push benefits to "society" and libertarians will push benefits from the "free market" while seldom stopping to consider those abstract institutions in the light of the many and diverse individuals that compose them.
The idea that Straczynski's pitch goes off of, searching for the "progenitor race" or what have you, is ripped straight from the TNG episode "The Chase" anyway. I think that idea has a lot of potential, but there'd be no reason to shoehorn it into a TOS reboot other than the writers having an irrational hard-on for the TOS characters or being too lazy to come up with new characters.
Slashdot Mirror
And maybe ignore the discounting of money to net present value at the same time.
Fascinating... you are the first to resist the almighty genjutsu Tsukuyomi. I should not have underestimated the power of your pedantry jutsus...
For the next seventy-two hours... you will be subjected to even more worthless Slashdot stories than usual.
The "MBA-in-a-box" scenario presupposes that the corporate form will continue to be viable. Considering that we're beginning to see the breakdown of state subsidies to centralization (intellectual property is one that comes up a lot here on Slashdot), I don't have faith.
Methods of social organization are technologies too, and I'm willing to bet we'll see rapid evolution in that sector over the next few decades. Who knows what sort of other changes that will enable? I'm not willing to get completely on board with Kurzweil, since he makes numerous faulty assumptions of his own, but change can still come from unexpected directions.
And also granted by the government. Capitalism is just as much of an engineered society as Soviet communism was, it's just somewhat less monolithic.
It doesn't work when it's attached to a centralized state. Which is more valuable to you?
The writings of Kevin Carson may appeal to you, if you haven't discovered them already.
Perhaps it's time to abandon a broken system. The nation-state is merely a technology for maintaining order, just like the computer in front of you is a technology for manipulating information. (Hell, it was never even intended to dominate scientific research like it does now. That only really came about after the destruction of an entire generation's productive capacity through an economic collapse and a world war.) Trying to force the legislature to somehow be more representative is like trying to wedge DDR RAM into a 486.
The only way to ensure that the prevailing social order is truly representative of the people who make it up is to decentralize and devolve authority to those who are most directly affected by it. Let them make their own decisions about whom to delegate power to and when, rather than offering them a limited number of artificially restricted choices every time the state's election happens to roll around. Sure, there's a lot of intellectually and socially degenerate people throughout the country who you probably don't trust to control themselves, but the government's past attempts at social engineering haven't been able to pick them up out of the dirt, and arguably put a lot of them there in the first place. Time to upgrade.
What advantage does proprietary software have in a market where it is not protected by IP law?
It seems appropriate to chime in here with a recommendation for the writings of Kevin Carson. His in-progress work on organization theory discusses a lot of what you lay out here.
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/04/organization-theory-outline-expanded.html
I should've been more precise. Suprnova was never directly re-instantiated, it basically became a brand because people were already familiar with the name.
...but Demonoid did. I think this indicates a subtle but meaningful change.
No, that is not what society is. That is what the current form of government is. Please do not confuse the two.
Microsoft is operating in a market distorted by intellectual property laws, where they can capitalize on what would otherwise be freely copied and modified. Free-market logic does not apply.
A recurring fee just turns the whole arrangement into an explicit protection racket. "So, youse gots dis here idea youse don't want nothin' to happen to..."
Your stance against property ensures that your philosophy will have limited applicability towards meaningful change. Even after the US is humbled by the developing financial crisis, the vast majority of people will still want to be sure that they can call their junk theirs. That is why capitalism endures: even though it visibly sucks, the common man believes it to be the only system under which there are guaranteed provisions for individual rights and private property. If you want true social change in America, you cannot put collectivism forward as the only, or even the best, alternative to capitalism. That is why I embrace the Ron Paul campaign, warts and all. Most of his supporter base will probably never progress beyond Objectivist bullcrap or the Mises Institute's party line, but there will be people left over with a genuine interest in developing individualism as a rigorous social theory. In fact, there are already people out there thinking along these lines, but they don't get much exposure because they're diametrically opposed to capitalists and state-socialists both. For instance, I recommend this book by an ex-World Bank speechwriter named David Ellerman: http://ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/p&c.htm
Along the same lines, the "social contract" is not a very good metaphor. Could you show me this contract? What are the terms? Who drafted it? Who signed it? Why doesn't everybody carry around a wallet-sized copy for reference purposes? Of course, the standard Ron Paul supporter answer would be that the Constitution is the only social contract we have, and in terms of legal documents, they'd be right. Social contract ideology muddles the definition of the word "contract" in an attempt to counter capitalist rhetoric, but it falls flat with the people it's trying to convert. If you wish to present poverty and inequality as inevitable consequences of capitalism, you're far better off doing so in a deliberative, logical fashion; even if the average American does have the attention span of a newt. The "social contract" is a woeful attempt to package all that logic into a sound bite, and just like sound bites in popular politics, it lowers the overall level of debate.
Inflation gives the poor no incentive to save, as their cash savings will decrease in real value over time, and they are unlikely to be able to accumulate enough cash to invest in more risky instruments that are more likely to hold value. Furthermore, the prevalence of cheap credit fosters predatory lenders such as payday-loan and rent-to-own establishments, and the availability of such instant gratification enforces a high time preference among the poor. You can cling to Keynesianism and try to regulate the predatory lenders out of existence, but that doesn't solve the root problem.
As for inflation not harming the middle class, tell that to all the members of the middle class who are staring down foreclosure, or whose mutual funds took a gigantic dump because they were holding now-worthless mortgage-backed CDOs. Once again, the mainstream argument will be that more regulation must be placed on the mortgage industry. But if those lenders didn't have the Fed telling them they won't be allowed to go broke in a bank run, they never would've been able to make those bad loans in the first place.
I don't completely agree with those preaching the "gold standard," as they merely believe that gold would become predominant if there was a free market in media of exchange. But it's complete BS to claim that inflation is harmless. The deleterious effects are there if you look for them.
Money, if treated as the most readily exchangeable good in an economy rather than some mystic avatar of wealth that should be held separate from all other goods, is not necessarily a scam. But fractional-reserve banking is, and the Federal Reserve is the means by which that scam is stabilized and perpetuated.
Bank runs occur due to the practice of fractional-reserve banking, which was considered a type of fraud in many historical legal systems. The Federal Reserve acts to stabilize and regulate these practices, but if such a system is unstable in the absence of regulation, why should it continue to exist at all? Keynes' "General Theory" is the cornerstone of the mainstream answer to that question, but it serves only as an ex post justification of a system that was, by then, already prevalent; not as a description of human trade practices in the absence of state and banking cartel intervention.
For some people, independence is a good in and of itself. The market as a whole is biased to consider goods in light of their dollar return, mostly through hidden subsidies that other posters have already detailed.
Or perhaps it is evolution in action? Just how adaptable are those societies that value the strength of the collective over the freedom of the individual? Considering the number of dead empires littering the historical record, I'd have to say that when push comes to shove, they're not very adaptable at all. Your bias towards collectivism leads you to make a number of unreasonable assumptions about the nature of the state and its effectiveness in problem-solving which you do not bother to justify. Politicians are not philosopher-kings. They gain power by promising the people whatever they want most, whether it be empire and national glory or a forcibly-imposed social safety net (or sometimes both, which is the fastest road to collapse). Their solutions are, by necessity, biased towards a high time preference, since they need to either produce some kind of results or else lose power. Very few, if any, of the problems we face can be solved within the term of a president or prime minister, but that doesn't stop them from trying, and the populace at large must bear the costs of their failures. The basic laws of economics cannot be ignored, whether the good in question is as tangible as food or as abstract as political power.
Another question for you: how is it that collectives like the Cybermen from Dr. Who, the Borg from Star Trek, or the Zerg from StarCraft keep recurring in popular culture as negative archetypes? Perhaps it's because involuntary collectivism runs against the grain of human nature? Or is that, too, a consequence of the evil and diseased US hegemony?
(Hell, shit like "The fact the the U.S. is currently aberrant is a symptom of disease, not strength" makes you sound a little like ol' Locutus yourself.)
Here's an idea: the United States, a territory far removed from the rest of the "first world," underwent a revolution based on individualist principles. Trade and intellectual exchange took place at a distance, so that the US was less likely to be strongly influenced by European ideas about government. Most of western Europe, by contrast, transitioned to liberal democracy from some form of monarchism (in many cases, with destruction, poverty, and totalitarianism in between). Hell, in the UK, you people still have a reigning monarch, even if she doesn't do much besides provide fodder for gossip papers and society newsletters.
Monarchism fosters respect for government and authority, and socialism arises because people want a guaranteed standard of living. In the ashes of postwar Europe, the last stable, non-murderous government many people lived under was monarchical, but they had the examples of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin to warn them against vesting so much power in a single individual. Considering the conditions they lived in then, it's no surprise that they also wanted a guaranteed standard of living, so that they'd never have to experience such poverty again. Combine the post-monarchist understanding of government (central to society, but destructive in the hands of a single individual) with the socialist impulse, and you have today's European governments, for good or ill. Considering what the UK has become and what the central government of the European Union is becoming, I'd say it's ultimately for ill; but if nothing else, you're free to form your own opinion.
One reason we discount the future so highly is because central banks, operating as quasi-governmental institutions, create capital out of thin air. Those closest to this new capital benefit disproportionately from it, and use their first-mover advantage to pass as many of their costs as possible onto the rest of us poor suckers. Part of this is using the political influence of accumulated capital to buy protection against those who are affected by their externalized costs, and to skew scientific research (most of which is state-funded and controlled) so that everybody else doesn't realize just how they're being harmed.
This might seem a tangential response to your post, but there's a greater socio-political factor to your concerns than you seem to understand. You blame individual power for the rise of the negative externalities we face, but you should instead be asking how the current system allows the individuals who generate those externalities to get away with it. Just because most mainstream libertarians don't think through all the consequences of state capitalism doesn't mean that nobody's thinking about it from an individualist point of view.
This assertion is not an effective response to the grandparent poster, although I think that's because the GP wasn't worded clearly enough. Punishment, such as imprisonment, is only effected after an individual has already offended against others. The GP was discussing the hypothetical loss of rights (for optimum philosophical consistency, negative rights) on the part of all individuals, which is detrimental to society, as society is made up entirely of individuals.
As a side note, I think the consideration of institutions unto themselves is a critical flaw of many political philosophies. Often, statists will push benefits to "society" and libertarians will push benefits from the "free market" while seldom stopping to consider those abstract institutions in the light of the many and diverse individuals that compose them.
"Spock, what do the sensors say about the Klingon ship's power level?!"
The idea that Straczynski's pitch goes off of, searching for the "progenitor race" or what have you, is ripped straight from the TNG episode "The Chase" anyway. I think that idea has a lot of potential, but there'd be no reason to shoehorn it into a TOS reboot other than the writers having an irrational hard-on for the TOS characters or being too lazy to come up with new characters.