Government as a simulation of Free Market

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Ironic, I know.
In your modern democratic voting system, there is (at least allegedly) no coercion, nor fraud. You are free to start a new party and there are no barriers to conducting your party as you please.

The outcome? A duogamous tennis match in single-party countries, and the same very few parties in multi-party coalition countries.

Of course the same is true for the business world in any Capitalist nation, with all kinds of limited State involvement. Proponents of Anarchism, Minarchism, Libertarianism, and all those pro-Capitalist ideologies are kidding themselves that the business world would turn out any different to the current business world - Democracy shows us so. There are no laws to moderate voting, yet people still gravitate toward the same morally reprehensible “best of a bad bunch” of whatever is on offer from the top down.

Parties are brand names.
The main parties carry the same kind of weight as any popular product/service provider. The little guys still sort of figure, mostly obscure to the vast majority, not really doing much but satisfying some level of demand for the extremely few. There’s just no significant faith in them as being any better than the familiar “corporations”, and they remain the little guys. The big guys have no trouble staying on top with all the benefits of having been the first to win the hearts of the crowd (whether they still deserve this victory or not). People just don’t think the little guys are up to the realities of the big guys’ positions. They cling to security when they vouch for the current “free” system, whether or not this is actually what they really want. And all the while, the big guys seemingly homogenise into the same oppressive force as a dictatorial monopoly.

This is “freedom” in practice - it is only free as a means, but by no means is it freedom as an end.
Only intervention from the bottom up can cure the malaise that emerges from initial freedom.

It served its purpose as a temporary reshuffle of things back when there was a more level or distorted playing field - toward a more representative hierarchy of what people actually wanted. Beyond that point it only serves as Conservativism. To keep voting for freedom is to vote Conservative, even if you’re voting for the more liberal of the main parties on offer.

Another reshuffle is needed, yet it can only come in the form of bottom-up intervention. Lack of intervention is what now serves to preserve things - it is not ideal in eternal principle, it is only circumstantially appropriate. If it was ever intervention that created a static, unrepresentative and oppressive playing field - from where “freedom” started, then only at that point was it freedom’s turn to reshuffle things.

Right now, we are stuck in a boring routine and we need to take some relationship advice, with regard to both economics and politics - mix things up with change and fresh air at a more fundamental level, step outside of the familiar box and do something new.

2

A further irony is that the governments of nations with the freest markets actively oppose perfect competition in government.

The most Capitalist nations stick to a single-party democratic system - i.e. a government monopoly. Somehow their ideology doesn’t extend to their own government.

So whilst the voting process simulates free market competition, free market governments monopolise the State power once in power. You only find multi-party systems in less Capitalist nations, such as a few countries in Europe. In practice, this is more of an oligarchical State power, but the principles are much more close to free market perfect competition.
In the UK, there is currently a rare coalition between two parties - they are not a country that enjoys a multi-party system by default. The right wing party received the most votes (only 36%, mind!) so they formed a coalition with a centre-left party(!) to gain the majority vote. In reality, the right wing party consistently gets its way with the majority of seats, and blames the centre-left party for all the backlash received through the unpopularity of right wing government policies. There certainly is no perfect competition going on here - it’s all such a mess of hypocrisy. Such is the state of the limited top-down options that have emerged from principles of “freedom”. Such principles now only serve to allow the most powerful to maintain their power.

The only way to counter this from further perpetuating itself is through bottom-up planning.

3

Alot of so called modern democracies whether they are republican, socialist, or otherwise have become dominated by oligarchical technocrats where the private corporations that have come to monopolize government are practically indistinguishable from it along with the major politicians that also comprise it’s halls who work for them buried within their pocket books.

The citizens toil away for the ceos of governments often enough called presidents, prime ministers, and head chairmen because anymore the distinguishment of government or corporation means little anymore.

The ceos of corporate government even have their own military when it concerns global conflict in the acquisition of natural resources or enforcing financial banking cartels.

In the global casino of economy those that own the biggest percentage of the global economy in material resources, financial banking, and technology wins. And who can forget military power?

Government anymore is runned like a national corporation through the national economy within the international market arena. The nation as a corporation and the government as the ceo inner circle of management. National economies or even nations themselves reduced to individual corporate firms. Let’s call it national corporatism.

Government privatizes the profits and socializes the losses. Independent citizens? What’s that? More like non-unionized taxable employees.

Citizen you better know your place at the lower end of society toiling away in sweat for we are here to look out for your best interests, don’t you know?

Society mirrors this power struggle by being reduced to services and commodifications when it concerns subservience to the higher functions of government to which the great antagonism between wealthy and poor working individuals constantly plays out on a variety of fronts. Welcome to the new world order.

4

Fix it.

5

Sorry if i skipped too much of your op. I have something very simple to say:

When the recipient of money is the government in a democracy, they are supposed to give to society at the lowest cost possible. We then elect these dudes based on how good a job they do.

When the recipient of money is a pile of stockholders, they are supposed to demonstrate their increased ability to provide dividend payments.

On paper, a government is held to the standard of voters who might disagree with them and then vote them out of power.

On paper, chairmen of boards are supposed to find the best way to increase the payments that they can make to stockholders. There is no other standard to which they are held.

Who should we trust? Republicans? So obvious.

6

Talking is the first step to fixing. Spreading the idea helps…

7

What we need is a modern Joseph Stalin. That ought to fix things atleast to my liking anyways. Off to the gulags with you capitalist scum. The dictatorship of the proletariat will prevail. I got my KBG bitches. We will find you…

8

One extreme for another?

9

Well, you can’t really escape one extreme or the other in my book.

What you will notice in history is that upon any revolution there is a trade up of one extreme for another.

Each extreme serves the needs of one generation to the other. When one extreme no longer fits the need of one generation they will abandon it for another. This is what history is made of. The process is very repetitive.

The extremities of the city state historically replaced tribal villages. Rome’s extreme of a republican consul uniting all city states under one imperial authority of head Caesar replaced the extreme of the acropolis.

No matter how you look at civilization or history there always seems to be the competition of various extremes.

10

Go back and read the OP, Future Man.
Your “something very simple to say” has nothing to do with it.

Stalin? Seriously? The dude was never a commie, just a paranoid psychopath who basically just reinstated the Tsar under a different name.

Stalin may have been the next extreme to the Tsar, but what is the next extreme to Corporatocratic Capitalism?

Assuming that’s true, this only shows that revolutions only happen under extreme circumstances. People need to be losing property and jobs on a sufficiently mass scale before our current predicament qualifies as extreme.

Even once that happens, it won’t be another Stalin who holds the reigns. Technology can now be used to make such planning positions much more transparent, and improved scientific knowledge can ensure that planning isn’t catastrophically stupid, such the Chinese killing all the birds to protect the harvest, leaving bugs free to take over and destroy it. The people are going to have to vouch for bottom-up planning rather than just another oppressive top-down dictatorship because we’ve exhausted top-down possibilities.

I offer the above bottom-up planning solution. This thread shows how anything free is not appropriate right now - it only acts as a conservative measure in the current state of things. At another time it might be appropriate, but for now we need planning. Top-down planning has too recently been shown up, and bottom-up planning has not yet been put through its paces. It’s the only viable option left and it just so happens to be extremely appropriate to current conditions.

All it needs is more widespread recognition such that it moves naturally out of popularity. So spread, spread and spread.

11

Well for all his character and political faults he turn agricultural Russia into a military technological industrial country.

I used to think the same as you in describing him but now I’m starting to think that is just a unfair accessment of the man.

What you have to understand is that communism obviously had and still to this day has alot of enemies where there will be those who will dissent against or disrupt the process of it.

What are you going to do with rebels, dissenters, and disrupters that challenge your state of existence? Joseph Stalin had it figured out. It was called Siberia.

I don’t think this made him any less of a communist. Mao wasn’t any less of a communist for his purgings either.

Both were men forced to carry out specific actions in the name of communism because necessity and history forced them to do so.

Technocratic and oligarchical fascism in the creation of a type of totalitarianism that the world has never seen before.

A future of inserted chips into the human body to track people’s whereabouts and occasionally give a electric jolt of pain in order to get them to submit.

We have already found ways to control human bodies in population. The body is already conquered. The next state of evolution for totalitarianism is the conquest of mind.

The future will be one where the totalitarian regime will find ways to conquer the human mind in general. It will be one where all of thought is controlled where if it can’t be controlled they will settle for the manipulation of it instead.

That is the coming future of extremes given the current spiraling trend of things. That is the inevitable evolutional future of capitalist societies. It is it’s final destination course.

Of course from here on out way into the future you can count on there being more wars especially the global world war kind. The theater of maintaining global hegemony and control will keep being played out.

Agreed.

Were on the road to it certainly. Haven’t you noticed that it takes people to lose everything before they are willing to revolt or rebel on any mass scale?

Human beings are lazy and complacent in their routines typically. Revolutions don’t happen over night. Revolution takes years of building up to until finally the bubble collapses forcing everybody to revolt.

Yes it will. The old order won’t sit idly by watching the peasant masses burn cities and rioting. They will do everything they can to keep the reigns of power.

It is never pacifist Ghandi figures that initiate change in the world but instead it is a whole line of Caesars,Kahns, Alexanders, Napoloeons, and Stalins.

The only revolutions that are successful are the violent kind. Revolutions based upon kind word exchanges never amount to anything.

Once you understand that the violent ruling class will do everything to stay in power you then come to know that only a Stalin like figure can emerge to come out and challenge them.

12

Then there is no point in change?

Slavery was once a typicality…that changed…even such things as this can be changed…it requires alteration in the belief system of those who would otherwise participate in said actions, not by force but by logic.
in interpolating for the root of an equation by using the bisection method, you start with a guess on either side of where the root should be, you half that and try for the center f those two don’t work,then you can tell which the root is between and half that…you don’t just keep swinging between the first two guesses…

13

Sending off to Siberia, in other words banishment, only works so long as you have a place unpopulated enough to banish to… and leads to growth in population of those against you…for example if we entered the space-colonization age that would be insane as it could lead to growing populations that would latter be warred with. In fact yo might say banishment is probably the reason there is such thing as different countries to begin with…It is better i would think to find a means to correct as can be correct those that can be…and then deal with those that can’t be as humanely as possible, though such as to prevent further crime.
Part of the problem with the communism enacted in Russia was that it placed to much emphasis on laws without an underlying belief system that was logical to the people, as a result the laws didn’t work so well. And plus when you build up to many laws it is like building a wall that eventually gets too high and comes crumbling down. it is better to have freedoms and a belief system that just lends to those within it not doing certain things…I.E. illegalized marijuana does not work, and ends up costing to much money to jail people, and without correctionalism in place the crime only escalates anyways… and simple blind propaganda wouldn’t work because a person has to believe to be manipulated…I.E. you can’t hypnotize a person unless they let you.

That might work for a period of time, but the body would evolve such as to get used to the pain. And if you escalated it continually the body would eventually get used to escalation…
And if it was continued over time it would reduce the tendency of people to rely on there own minds to take action and would result in extreme costs of controlling a population that could lend to toppling of the system as it grew to big to power.

In order to maintain such a system there would have to be Energy, electricity…but inorder to continue powering things at the level we have been we would have to begin to mine resources from other planets. Solar power won’t work because there is not possible to transmit the power gained from solar power of significant magnitudes to the earth. I.E. if we had space solar panels and transmitted by microwaves there would be a limit to the strength/intensity of the microwave transmitions, and how many could be had, less we altered our atmosphere or even set in on fire if the waves were intense enough…but then there isn’t much guarantee that mining from other planets would be effective because it would require energy to power the tools and space ships to do it, and it would take time to transmit the resources itself…
it may actually be impossible to continue a system that pulls as much on electricity as we currently do…
Even if we were to find a way to mine resources off planet there would still be a limit to how fast we could bring those resources in, how many ships could be landing at once, and what not…
The only solution to continued resource consumption at the current level may be colonization such as to allow for spreading out the population and thus allowing for less energy needed to be transmitted to a planet…
but we probably won’t figure out how to, or have had enough time to, colonize by the time we begin to have to face reduction in capacity of energy production, which may then limit our ability to colonize and slow the process even more if it would then be possible…And the we would begin to run into the problem of insuring our population didn’t get to spread out such as to lead to warring differences, and to big such as to prevent efficient spread of ideas…
Ultimately it seems to me most likely that we are going to have to face a reduction in energy consumption…possibly to the extent of reversion to a less technocratic/“luxurious”/consuming-beyond-needs society.

Conditions perceived as extreme.
I.E. If everybody wants their video games and then nobody can produce them any more…

And what if loss of the consumptious-lifestyle had, is due to incapacity to continue producing at that level, such that no alteration in government can repair it to that previous state…

The only revolutions that are remembered are the violent kind…because they were violent…sometimes the more important ones go unnoticed…

14

This is an important, the role of violence in creating social change. There are different definitions of violence, just like there are different definitions of terrorist. In a way Ghandi did do some actual violence to the status quo because he interrupted business as usual. This necessitated some concessions.

I think the question is whether there was actually any redistribution of power or just some palliative measures to reduce civil unrest. What’s tended to happen in 20th century US is you get a bunch of unemployed people, then they start to organize into militant groups. At this point the middle class realizes a need to protect itself from unrest, so the government is induced to regulate robber barons to assuage the concerns of militant unionists (1920s) or we get some New social programs to prevent communists from rallying unemployed people (1930s) or we get medicare and medicaid so the Black Panthers stop taking Grandma’s medicine from the pharmacy by force (1960s). But every time there’s some amelioration it’s accompanied by some kind of control. People get some resources that they didn’t have before, but often they do not get any additional power over their lives. Just adequate resources to survive the current power structure.

In the New Deal we got some great stuff: minimum wage, 40-hour week, child labor laws, social security, further regulations on banks and utilities. But it’s worth noting that this was all in the “2nd” New Deal. It wasn’t enough that people were poor. People were poor at the beginning of the Great Depression. At that point you get the 1st New Deal, but things continue to tank. People start to organize out of necessity to keep from being evicted, to keep from starving. As a result of organization you get unrest and the middle class, landlords and retailers, starts to feel threated. Then we get the 2nd New Deal.

But often the services and functions of the organized people are replaced by municipal/federal agencies or otherwise bureaucratized. This replaces organization with administration.

The only threat of violence comes from organization. And the only meaningful redistributions of power have always come out of militant organization, a threat of violence. The most important thing you need for organization is a bunch of unemployed people. There are lots of ways you keep people from actually being unemployed, without them being employed either. If there aren’t jobs for everyone, then you’ve got to take unemployed people out of the running altogether by:

Making sure young people spend longer and longer in school, then college, then graduate school.
Throwing as many perpetrators of non-violent crime in prison as possible.
Getting lots of people into expensive centralized hospitals by marginalizing possibilities for preventative care.
Making sure women feel as uncomfortable as possible outside their kitchens and feel guilty when they aren’t child-rearing.
Making sure older people are not looking for work by having disproportionately more social programs targeting seniors.

EDIT:
Having the CIA send crack into the projects.
Sending young people god knows where to fight some war (so they’ll be able to afford to spend some time in college after that)

15

This is indeed the crux of it.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with unequal power distribution, wherever the power accumulates. The point is that “where should the power be distributed?” is no longer the question.

The importance is in the rate of power redistribution.

Problems arise when power stagnates in particular areas. Things eventually shuffles around in showdowns of all scales, as history testifies, though this involves all levels of inhumanity when we are just left to it, “free”.

This is why I propose power to be distributed toward bottom-up planning, a point of view that has been thoroughly neglected for too long. Though bear in mind this is not a permenant solution just as any other power distribution there has been, it is just currently appropriate.

16

What’s the difference between bottom-up and top-down planning? I’m assuming top-down is having a strong central government (but i’m not very confident about that).

17

except that doesn’t really work in the long run due to costs.

"Making sure young people spend longer and longer in school, then college, then graduate school. " Payed for by taxes from a reducing taxable-population-base
“Throwing as many perpetrators of non-violent crime in prison as possible.” Ridiculously expensive: court costs, incarceration costs…again Payed for by taxes from a reducing taxable-population-base
"Getting lots of people into expensive centralized hospitals by marginalizing possibilities for preventative care. " in an attempt to accrue more money that doesn’t work due to reduction in ability to pay by those that would succumb to such…
Pretty much it all costs money and at the same time reduces the further capacity to result in the production of more money…

18

So they were pragmatic. Doesn’t mean they didn’t resort to mass genocide.

This strikes me as particularly behaviourist - an outdated branch of psychology. Even current neuroscience knows itself to be woefully lacking in knowledge of the brain. Direct control of the mind is aeons away, if possible at all.

But control of the mind and body already extends particularly far anyway, and tests continue to even shed light on how to tell who people are going to vote for - simply from their enviro-genetic constitution. Marketing is continually refined like there’s no tomorrow. However the onus isn’t on obedience as an end in itself. What is desired from the oppressed is use. If they are made to feel like free agents they are more useful etc. - it’s all about having the right touch. Heavy handed techonological oppression is not the optimal resort.

Your technocratic fascism is inappropriate nonsense I’m afraid.

Absolutely. They have their weaknesses though, and physical violence may be at the base of everything but it is not their weakest point.

If a kingdom knows itself to be particularly weak in one area, it will bolster its defenses there. The ideal is to be invulnerable from all sides, if not equally then appropriately. Where attacks can come from, obstructive measures can be taken.
However, a functioning kingdom cannot only come from maximum defense in all areas, there must be some functional flow where defensive obstruction must be at a minimum. This is where weakness lies.

Corporatocratic Capitalism relies on free trade between corporations. It leaves itself vulnerable by relying on trade being as unobstructed as possible. You mess this up and you mess up the entire functional flow and then not even defenses can be maintained. Workers are the core of such functional flow - if you can get to them, then you can get to the powerful who rely on the workers. The only problem is that the workers believe themselves to be reliant on the powerful.

If workers become self-reliant, the kingdom crumbles. Even scares and increases in relative restrictions in spending can disrupt the functional flow. There is probably no limit to the ways in which Corporatocratic Capitalism can be immobilised from the inside.

Good question. I’m assuming a pyramid where the top are the few and the bottom are the many. Top-down is more efficient in speed but much less appropriate and nuanced to cater to the many. Bottom-up is cumbersome in speed but who knows what the many want better than the many?

We need both speed and appropriation, but as the moment we only have the former. The latter is needed, and is achieved through bottom-up planning.

19

The idea of the rate of power re-distribution is very good. Similar to the idea of the need for circulation of money rather than stagnation of it in large bank accounts and what not…

but What do you mean by “Bottom-Up” planning, I am getting an idea from what you have said but i am uncertain?

The later thought makes me think that the idea of having parties that represent the distinct “classes” if such exist would allow a continually distribution especially if maybe what happened was say each year a president of each party had to be elected: I.e year 1 Middle-class-party, year 2 lower class, year 3 upper class, but election based on that party that year…I.E. year 1 the middle class would present all its candidates, and all the people would vote on who they wanted, from any class…Some issues might arise…what issues might this have what problems?

20

i think one thing we need to get rid of is the electoral college. With the tech and ability to transmit info that we have now, it would be easy to just have everyone vote directly for the president they wanted. IDK though, perhaps representation by state is best…