Happy New Year, and Starting Over

[From Mike Acree (990105.0904 PST)]

Bruce Gregory (981230.1245 EST)--

That leaves only the anomaly of my
being, so far as I can tell, the only person on the Net, with one
exception, who believes that a society based on negotiation, such as

is

suggested there, isn't impossible, or even undesirable, in principle.

Societies based on negotiation require individuals willing to

negotiate. If

you listen to the news you will find that such individuals are not in
abundant supply. If you listen to Rick, you will find that according

to PCT

there is no reason to expect them to be.

Q.E.D.

Your position appears to be that if we can't get people to do what we
want by peaceful means--negotiation--then we'll just have to force them.

I don't see anything in Bill's theory which presupposes a change in
human nature.

On the contrary: that has always been the problem with _socialism_, as
proponents as diverse as Owen and Lenin have grudgingly admitted.
Lenin, and to lesser extent U.S. Presidents and Congresses in the last
65 years, were willing to try to impose by force their view of what
human nature should be like. It's the forcible-redistributionist pot
rather than the negotiationist kettle that looks black to me.

Mike

[From Rick Marken (990105.1030)]

Mike Acree (990105.0904 PST)--

that has always been the problem with _socialism_ ...

Lenin, and to lesser extent U.S. Presidents and Congresses in the
last 65 years, were willing to try to impose by force their view
of what human nature should be like.

I think you could say the same thing about capitalism, though
the force is far more subtle than it is in socialism. Capitalism
imposes on us a view of human nature that says people work only for
financial reward (incentives) so if there were not the possibility of
the "pot of gold" then people would just sit on their duffs and do
nothing. Laissez faire capitalism is based on a Skinnerian view of
human nature, where money is the only reinforcer and productivity
is the only behavior. Most people seem to find this view of human
nature completly compatable with their intuitions; so the only time
force is needed in Capitalist societies it is when it is used to
keep non-Skinnerian points of view down; points of view that
suggest that sharing (welfare) and redistribution (progressive
taxation) for example, will not stop productivity.

Actually, I think the force used in socialism is not used to
impose a view of human nature; it's used because the socialist
view of human nature is basically the same as the capitalist
view; the view is that people are basically greedy and will do
whatever they can to get and maintain tons of money. So socialist
force is used to "fight" the greed of the capitalist oppressors
and turn the people who had been the losers in this fight (the
proletariate) into the oppressors themselves (though, of course,
it usually turns out to be a small "politburo" that ends up
doing all the oppressing).

So I think both capitalism and socialism are based on essentially
the same mistaken notion of human behavior -- the behaviorist or
Skinnerian notion that people are just a bunch of greedy bastards.
Capitalists think that goodness emerges out of this greed (social
Darwinism; survival of the fittest greedy people); socialists
think it should be surpressed (using force so that socialist
greed will overwhelm the greed of the fittest capitalists).

A negotiated society (like the one you propose -- and the kind I
would like to see) is based on a view of human nature that is
quite different from the Skinnerean view used by capitalists
and socialists. It's based on a model of people as hierarchical
control systems; systems that have many goals besides money;
systems that can see the value of cooperating with each other
for their mutual and individual benefit rather than acting only
in their own self interest (like capitalists) or only in the
interest of the group (like socialists).

Best

Rick

···

---
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken

[From (990105.1320 EST)]

Mike Acree (990105.0904 PST)

Your position appears to be that if we can't get people to do what we
want by peaceful means--negotiation--then we'll just have to
force them.

Only if we are committed to getting them to do what we want.

I don't see anything in Bill's theory which presupposes a change in
human nature.

On the contrary: that has always been the problem with
_socialism_, as
proponents as diverse as Owen and Lenin have grudgingly admitted.
Lenin, and to lesser extent U.S. Presidents and Congresses in the last
65 years, were willing to try to impose by force their view of what
human nature should be like. It's the forcible-redistributionist pot
rather than the negotiationist kettle that looks black to me.

I have nothing against negotiating. I am just pointing out that it takes
two to negotiate. If the other person believes that he or she can
prevail without giving up anything, then negotiation is not an option.
This is the situation the U.S. faces in Iraq. The U.S. needs to
recognize that it really has only two options: (1) send in ground forces
and remove Sadham from power by force; or (2) let Sadham have his way.
The search for a third option has gotten nowhere.

Bruce Gregory

[From Bill Powers (990105.1455 MST)

Mike Acree (990105.0904 PST)
writing to Bruce Gregory (981230.1245 EST)--

That leaves only the anomaly of my
being, so far as I can tell, the only person on the Net, with one
exception, who believes that a society based on negotiation, such as
is suggested there, isn't impossible, or even undesirable, in principle.

One can surely prefer a society based on negotiation without having to
assert that all people would be willing to negotiate in such a society.
Utopias all work just fine as long as you claim that ALL the individuals in
it will behave according to its tenets. But they all fail when they fail to
figure out what to do about the mavericks, the people who (a) don't buy
into the system, (b) refuse to go away or die, and indeed (c) come to
dominate the society becaus of not submitting to self-limiting constraints
(like, I have the gun, so why shouldn't I just take what I want?).

Best,

Bill P.

[From Mike Acree (990111.1446 PST)]

I had thought of changing the subject line to "Negotiation," but I find
with pleasure that the original subject still feels apt. The 1999
exchanges have thus far been marked by civility and respect, and, for
me, unusual interest. (I'll try not break the trend.) I have
appreciated among others Fred Nickols' sharing his answers to the
leading questions of B:CP, and Bill's candid responses. Nice to know I
wasn't the only one stymied by the famous egg-production question!

Rick (990105.1030) makes first of all a worthwhile point in his
observation that both capitalism and socialism have traditionally been
defended--or attacked--on the basis of concepts of reward and incentive.
That's actually not surprising, since those are the terms in which
behavior in general has predominantly been understood. I'm not sure,
though, that one need endorse Skinner's behaviorism to use these
concepts. The objection to them from PCT, as I understand it, lies in
an interpretation of them as locating causality, as Skinner would, in
the environment; but that doesn't seem to me a necessary part of the
concept. I would think the terms still meaningful so long as it is
understood that what makes something an incentive is that people have
high reference levels for it, but that incentives by themselves don't
make people do anything.

In any event, I think PCT provides unequal support for capitalism and
socialism, if by capitalism is meant absence of third-party intervention
in negotiation of contracts, as opposed to a more typically Republican
conception of policies favoring business over other groups. That PCT
entails capitalism in this sense almost follows from definitions, given
the closeness of meaning between laissez-faire and the autonomy PCT
would have us respect. Socialism is also compatible with PCT, of
course, so long as it is voluntary, but such communities depend on
extraordinary interpersonal bonds and thus have been both small and very
short-lived. I assume PCT would interpret these failures in terms of
the disconnect between actions and resulting perceptions: whatever work
you do, going into the common pot, makes a negligible difference in what
you get to eat. The Puritans, like the Jamestown colonists before them,
were starving under the socialist charter imposed by their backers (who
feared that private ownership would threaten the return on their
investment), until Bradford allowed them to claim their own plots of
land; once they had some control over perceived return, they got off the
boat and went to work.

Bill Powers (990105.1455 MST)--

One can surely prefer a society based on negotiation without having to
assert that all people would be willing to negotiate in such a

society.

Utopias all work just fine as long as you claim that ALL the

individuals in

it will behave according to its tenets. But they all fail when they

fail to

figure out what to do about the mavericks, the people who (a) don't

buy

into the system, (b) refuse to go away or die, and indeed (c) come to
dominate the society becaus of not submitting to self-limiting

constraints

(like, I have the gun, so why shouldn't I just take what I want?).

In some way I'm still struggling to understand, it looks to me as though
we keep talking past each other on this point. When I read Chapter 17
of B:CP or the chapter on interpersonal conflict in MSB, I don't get any
indication that the author is describing a utopian vision which could
never work in practice, so long as there were a single jerk (maverick)
on earth. But when I register my agreement with those chapters, you
regularly protest that they are utopian. So let me make clear my
agreement with the assumption that there will always be those who, if
they have the power to coerce others--thus to be able to avoid
negotiation--will do so. That will be true under any social
organization whatever (or lack thereof). (That is not to deny that some
systems will do better than others at producing mavericks, but that's a
separate, if still important, question.) The question is only what, if
anything, to do about it.

It would seem obvious that the way to minimize such breakdowns of
negotiation would be an even distribution of power. (I take this point,
applied to governments themselves, to be the fundamental insight of
Leopold Kohr's _The Breakdown of Nations_, which inspired E. F.
Schumacher's _Small Is Beautiful_.) For some reason almost everybody
believes, on the contrary, that the best strategy is to concentrate
enough power in a single group that that group can beat up anybody
else--and then hope to hell they stay on our side. That is essentially
the concept of government, an organization that is powerful enough to
bully everybody else. That's not to say government is intrinsically
totalitarian; it is possible to implement a minimal state of the sort
envisioned by Humboldt and Locke, as was nearly done after the American
Revolution. The key question is whether any institution powerful enough
to constitute a government will remain constrained: if it is powerful
enough to function as a government, it is powerful enough to disregard
or repeal constitutional restraints. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments,
for example, surely looked to their authors like a strong check, but
historically they've been almost totally ignored. One can be impressed,
with Bill (some post around June 1997, I think), at how long the system
lasted--until the Civil War, or 1913, or the New Deal, depending on
which expansion of government power/restriction of individual liberty
you regard as crucial. On the other hand, even two centuries is a
rather pathetically short span on the scale of human history (the
anarchic society of medieval Iceland lasted about 400 years), and the
starting conditions were as near perfect as could realistically be
imagined.

It is obviously not necessary to construe any of this development
moralistically, or to blame any particular individuals. Power (meaning
the power to coerce--I completely support, incidentally, Bill's
discussion of that term), like money, tends to flow to those who already
have it, since either one constitutes a means of acquiring more, and
since either commodity gives us the ability to control more of our
perceptions at desired levels. (The difference is that money alone
can't prevent others from acquiring it. Microsoft can't prevent anyone
else from developing a superior product that costs less, and thus taking
over their market, but the government prevents by law (by force) anyone
else from delivering first-class mail. (So it's natural that the
government should be charging Microsoft with restraint of trade.))
Hence the slide toward totalitarianism seems to me quite inevitable, and
hence I think there is reason to say that in setting up a government we
abandon at the outset the possibility of a society based on negotiation.
There is no guarantee that over time a single private protection agency
wouldn't achieve enough market dominance to function as a de facto
government; but it could achieve that position, like Microsoft, only by
extraordinary performance in the provision of contracted services. (The
current bureaucratic system of justice, in contrast, suffers from the
same disconnect as socialism: the jobs and salaries of police do not
depend on whether any crimes are ever prevented or solved.) And, since
such an agency would be unable to institute anything like gun control,
it is hard to see how it would ever be in a position to perpetrate the
sort of atrocities possible to governments. (The Holocaust would have
been impossible had the Nazis not instituted strict gun control in
1935.)

What is remarkable is the popular support enjoyed by the trend toward
bigger government and constriction of liberty--no doubt in part due to
the fact that the government has run the schools for the past century.
Conservatives happily embrace expanded government power to impose their
values on others, especially with regard to sex and drugs. But more
remarkable is liberal support for gun control. If I were going to
select a group to whom to give all the guns, I might think first of
single mothers. But gun control, to the extent that it is successful,
has the effect of concentrating power still further in the hands
of--darlings of the left--the police and the military.

Hence the prognosis for freedom appears to be the same as for
mathematics education. I'm thinking of the 1985 NSF study which
compared 30 U.S. classrooms with 30 Japanese classrooms. In first grade
there was no difference in math achievement, but by fifth grade the two
distributions were nonoverlapping. Much more alarmingly, whereas
Japanese parents and teachers expressed some concerns with the quality
of math instruction, not a single parent or teacher in the U.S. sample
expressed any dissatisfaction whatever. Hence continued deterioration
in both cases is pretty well assured.

Mike

[From Rick Marken (990112.0800)]

Mike Acree (990111.1446 PST) --

In any event, I think PCT provides unequal support for capitalism
and socialism...That PCT entails capitalism in this sense almost
follows from definitions

I don't see that PCT "entails" any particular economic arrangement.
PCT shows how people might control for living according to _any_
system concept by varying the principles, programs, events, etc
they control for. PCT entails everything from feudalism to
socialism to capitalism to fascism to christianity.

money alone can't prevent others from acquiring it.

It looks like it can. I highly recomend that you read "Leakage"
by T. C Powers; it's really quite an exquisite piece of work, not
least because it's applies systems analysis to real data. Ordering
information is at News, Politics, Sports, Mail & Latest Headlines - AOL.com

Also, I highly recommend William T. Powers essay "Degrees of
freedom in social interaction" in LCS, p. 221-236. This might
help you understand the relationship between HPCT and folk
concepts like "liberty" and "freedom".

What is remarkable is the popular support enjoyed by the trend
toward bigger government and constriction of liberty

It looks to me like the popular support in the US is for getting
the fruits of government (highways, sewers, flood drains,
communications infrastructure, retirement insurance, medical
insurance, etc) with none of the responsibilities ("freedom" from
taxes, regulations, etc).

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken

[From Rick Marken (990113.1030)]

Mike Acree (990113.1006 PST)--

We had an extended discussion of _Leakage_ from February through
June 1997. My principal criticisms had to do with various ways
in which it failed specifically as systems analysis. I argued
that TCP's fundamental premise, for example, didn't hold except
when applied to the global economy, rather than to arbitrary
components of it in isolation.

I guess I forgot the details. I'd be very interested in hearing
why you think TCP's fundamental premise doesn't hold, except
when applied to the global economy. I'd also like to know what
you think TCP's fundamental premise is.

Me:

It looks to me like the popular support in the US is for getting
the fruits of government (highways, sewers, flood drains,
communications infrastructure, retirement insurance, medical
insurance, etc) with none of the responsibilities ("freedom" from
taxes, regulations, etc).

Mike:

No argument there!

Then you agree that there are "fruits of government"? But I
thought you were opposed to government. Or are you just opposed
to government that uses coercion to do things like collect taxes?

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken

[From Mike Acree (990113.1006 PST)]

Rick Marken (990112.0800)--

I highly recomend that you read "Leakage"
by T. C Powers; it's really quite an exquisite piece of work, not
least because it's applies systems analysis to real data.

We had an extended discussion of _Leakage_ from February through June
1997. My principal criticisms had to do with various ways in which it
failed specifically as systems analysis. I argued that TCP's
fundamental premise, for example, didn't hold except when applied to the
global economy, rather than to arbitrary components of it in isolation.
Also that his proposed interventions failed to take into account the
predictable resistance from those on whom they were imposed.

Also, I highly recommend William T. Powers essay "Degrees of
freedom in social interaction" in LCS, p. 221-236. This might
help you understand the relationship between HPCT and folk
concepts like "liberty" and "freedom".

I, too, highly recommend it, like practically everything else Bill has
written.

It looks to me like the popular support in the US is for getting
the fruits of government (highways, sewers, flood drains,
communications infrastructure, retirement insurance, medical
insurance, etc) with none of the responsibilities ("freedom" from
taxes, regulations, etc).

No argument there!

Best,
Mike

[From Mike Acree (990115.0554 PST)]

Rick Marken (990113.1030)--

We had an extended discussion of _Leakage_ from February through
June 1997. My principal criticisms had to do with various ways
in which it failed specifically as systems analysis. I argued
that TCP's fundamental premise, for example, didn't hold except
when applied to the global economy, rather than to arbitrary
components of it in isolation.

I guess I forgot the details. I'd be very interested in hearing
why you think TCP's fundamental premise doesn't hold, except
when applied to the global economy. I'd also like to know what
you think TCP's fundamental premise is.

His fundamental premise I took to be the assertion that, for the nation
as a whole, aggregate spending equals (except for "leakage") aggregate
income. It is true, of course, that what anybody spends is income for
somebody else; and this may be the idea that TCP started from. But it
is not true that income necessarily equals spending for any particular
individual (or corporation, etc.), either in any given time slice or
across a lifetime. Some people save all their lives; others, with a
different sort of effort, are perpetually expanding their credit. Any
arbitrary aggregate of people we happen to enclose with a geographical
boundary may all be savers. The principle that aggregate income will
equal aggregate spending will hold only for communities that trade
exclusively among themselves--or for the global economy. TCP evidently
appeals here to a law of large numbers, in assuming that all the
variations wash out in the aggregate. When I made this point 2 years
ago, with reference to the economies of Durango or Arkansas, Bill
allowed that these economies (especially Durango) might be too small for
TCP's analysis to apply. But some nations are small; most rank below
some of our states. TCP does not claim to deal with any economy except
the U.S.; but neither does he give any indication why his theory should
apply only to this country. So far as I can see, the principle
determining whether aggregate income equals aggregate spending is not
the size of the group, but whether its trading is wholly self-contained.
It might have applied, for instance, to isolated medieval villages off
the routes of itinerant merchants and traveling fairs.

I think TCP would agree that the equation of spending with income for
aggregates less than the global economy was an approximation. He seems
to think the errors of approximation are negligible because such large
numbers are involved. But that averaging principle applies only to
self-contained economies. In other aggregates, no matter what the size,
there is nothing I can see to constrain these aggregates to be equal.
Nations as a whole can be savers or debtors. It certainly seems
possible to me that the error induced by considering arbitrary subunits
of the global economy (i.e. nations) would be of the same order as what
TCP calls leakage. Furthermore, even for those who sooner or later
spend exactly what they make, shopping takes time, even for men. Hence,
even without "leakage," and even in the aggregate, we should expect a
chronic lag, which would show up in positive bank balances. That is
what led to my suggestion 2 years ago of comparing income with spending
a year later. You ran the data, and, as I recall, found a reasonable
fit for at least certain periods. For both of these reasons it wasn't
clear to me that any special concept of "leakage" was necessary to
account for TCP's data.

It looks to me like the popular support in the US is for getting
the fruits of government (highways, sewers, flood drains,
communications infrastructure, retirement insurance, medical
insurance, etc) with none of the responsibilities ("freedom" from
taxes, regulations, etc).

Mike:

No argument there!

Then you agree that there are "fruits of government"? But I
thought you were opposed to government. Or are you just opposed
to government that uses coercion to do things like collect taxes?

I don't think I understand your point here. You seem to be suggesting
that not believing in government is like not believing in fairies, so
that an anarchist would be obligated to perceive all the existing
highways, etc., as being privately owned. If that was your intention,
as a joke, then I'm willing to smile. What I thought I was agreeing
with was your apparent claim that if people could get something for
nothing, they would. Creating that illusion, in fact, is just what
makes possible the Jurassic Pork that Congress is famous for. The money
that goes to build a dam or museum in one particular district makes a
negligible difference in taxes on all the others. This is the flip
side, incidentally, of the disconnect beetween actions and resulting
perceptions that I mentioned in connection with socialism. If the taxes
levied in each district were proportional, on the other hand, to the
spending bills its representative voted for, you can guess what would
happen to all the pork.

PCT, as I read it, gives us reason to expect government, operating as it
does on the basis of punishment or the threat thereof, not to work very
well. More importantly, governments are dangerous. The scale of
private violence, even between the Hatfields and the McCoys, does not
compare to the estimated 170,000,000 people killed by governments in the
past century. Hence it should take a compelling argument to persuade us
of the necessity of government. I have yet to see such an argument,
despite having looked. Certainly the functions you name are not
intrinsically governmental. In the first half of the 19th century, for
example, this country had over 10,000 miles of private toll roads,
before they were put out of business by the railroads. As a proportion
of the national economy at the time, that was larger than the present
interstate highway system. Nowadays, of course, there are major legal
obstacles to private roads. Permission to build the Dulles Greenway
required a special act of the Virginia legislature. But in the 1970s
St. Louis privatized a number of streets in an older, modest
neighborhood and saw crime fall and real estate values double.
Government involvement in medical insurance goes back only a few
decades, and I don't have the sense that people are happier with it now
than they were before.

Actually, the issue is deeper and more interesting than my remarks here
would indicate. The fact that one is much more likely to be met with
ridicule than argument--even, for instance, just in pointing out that
fire departments could be and have been private--suggests that there is
something profoundly threatening about the idea of
self-responsibility--perhaps in much the same way that atheism still is
for many people: the idea of there not being somebody up there--in the
sky, or in Washington--who is running things and taking care of
everything for us.

Mike

[From Rick Marken (990115.1230)]

Mike Acree (990115.0554 PST) --

His fundamental premise I took to be the assertion that, for
the nation as a whole, aggregate spending equals (except for
"leakage") aggregate income.

Not quite. I think the fundamental premise is that the aggregate
producer and the aggregate consumer are the same entity; the
aggregate producer pays itself (aggregate income) to buy the
good and services it has produced. There is no requirement that
aggregate consumption (spending) equal aggregate income. TCP's
model (and data) shows that if consumption and spending _are_
equal (there is no leakage) then growth in production will be
at the maximum possible level.

So far as I can see, the principle determining whether aggregate
income equals aggregate spending is not the size of the group

There is no "principle" determining whether aggregate income
equals aggregate spending. Either all the aggregate consumer's
income is spent on what it (as aggregate producer) produces, or
it's not. Growth in GNP varies depending on the degree of
deviation (leakage) between aggregate income and aggregate spending.

I think TCP would agree that the equation of spending with
income for aggregates less than the global economy was an
approximation.

The data suggest that it is a nearly _exact_ approximation for
an economy as large as that of the US.

It certainly seems possible to me that the error induced by
considering arbitrary subunits of the global economy (i.e. nations)
would be of the same order as what TCP calls leakage.

I think not. Leakage is on the order of 8%. The variance in
leakage over the last 50 years has been on the order of 1%.
I think we're looking at a real phenomenon.

Furthermore, even for those who sooner or later spend exactly
what they make, shopping takes time, even for men. Hence, even
without "leakage," and even in the aggregate, we should expect a
chronic lag, which would show up in positive bank balances. That is
what led to my suggestion 2 years ago of comparing income with
spending a year later. You ran the data, and, as I recall, found
a reasonable fit for at least certain periods.

No fit at all. Time lag did not account for leakage.

The very first graph in TCP's book presents data that should
give any fan of lassaiz faire capitalism a big surprise. It
shows that the proportion of GNP that goes to capital investment
has always been _exactly_ 20%. This means that capital investment
does not "drive" the economy. No theory is needed to interpret
this result; the data is clear. The rate of growth in GNP has
varied all over the place, from -5% during the depression to
nearly 12% at the start of WWII but capital investment has always
been _exactly_ 20% of GNP. So capital investment is clearly _not_
what drives the US economy. I think this has to be TCP's most
extraordinary finding.

What I thought I was agreeing with was your apparent claim
that if people could get something for nothing, they would.
Creating that illusion, in fact, is just what makes possible
the Jurassic Pork that Congress is famous for.

What's wrong with pork? It gives purchasing power to the
aggregate consumer. That's why Reagonomics worked so well;
government spending. The problem with the something (gov't
spending) for nothing (lower taxes) philosophy that is pushed
mainly by Republicans is that you have to borrow (as Reagan did)
to pay for the governement spending. Borrowing is a boon to people
with surplus income (rich people) who can afford to loan it to
the government. So Reagan managed to make the economy look good
via gov't spending while increasing the maldistribution of wealth
by putting the US trillions of dollars in debt to the richest
segment of the population. Clinton has been easing us out of
this morass, and doing an amazingly good job, given not only
the size of the problem but the staggaring degree of hostility
from the usual protectors of the wealthy -- the religious
hypocrites.

More importantly, governments are dangerous.

Really? Are you sure it's not the people who happen to
implement the particular government? Hitler's government
looked a lot more dangerous than Kohl's though both were
governments.

Certainly the functions you name [like building roads and
schools] are not intrinsically governmental.

What makes an organization like Microsoft or IBM less "dangerous"
than the US government? Who's going to hire these company's
to build the infrastructure? Who's going to resolve disputes
about whether the freeway should be built near my property rather
than yours? Or do we just shoot it out at the OK corral, now that
those pesky gun control laws are gone;-)

The fact that one is much more likely to be met with ridicule
than argument--even, for instance, just in pointing out that
fire departments could be and have been private--suggests that
there is something profoundly threatening about the idea of
self-responsibility

Let me be the first to ridicule that idea;-) I'm in favor of
organizational systems (like government) and I am not at all
threatened by the notion of self-responsibility; indeed, I
_assume_ that people are responsible for themselves (for controlling
their own perceptions). Responsibility is a natural law not a moral
decision. I'm also impressed by the power of cooperation, which
requires coordination, admistration and management of self-responsible
control systems. You seem to understand this; you seem to think
that such organization is OK as long as it's prtivate. But even
a private fire department will have a chief, managers, rules,
punishments for violations, etc. Governments are just organizations
at a higher level than fire departments, schools, Mircosofts and
Suns. You seem to have identified a particular level of organization
of independent (self-responsible) control systems ("government") as
the cause of all our problems. You think that if goverment went away
everything would be fine. Maybe you're right. But I don't think
we're ever going to find out. At least, I hope not;-)

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken

[From Mike Acree (990122.1239 PST)]

Rick Marken (990115.1230)--

This was an illuminating post, at least with respect to clarifying how
far apart our frames of reference evidently are, and how little dialogue
is taking place. I'm still not quite sure what to make of the
divergence.

Me (990115.0554):

His [TCP's] fundamental premise I took to be the assertion that, for
the nation as a whole, aggregate spending equals (except for
"leakage") aggregate income.

You:

Not quite. I think the fundamental premise is that the aggregate
producer and the aggregate consumer are the same entity; the
aggregate producer pays itself (aggregate income) to buy the
good and services it has produced. There is no requirement that
aggregate consumption (spending) equal aggregate income. TCP's
model (and data) shows that if consumption and spending _are_
equal (there is no leakage) then growth in production will be
at the maximum possible level.

I'm not sure there's any real difference in our understanding here. My
phrasing seemed to be generally understood in the original exchange:

Me (970221.1608):

If the national economy is
essentially a legally defined entity, it is not clear to me why for

that

particular aggregate spending and income should add up to 0 at any
particular moment, any more than they should for any other arbitrary
aggregate.

Bill Powers (970221.1840):

The summation to zero wasn't clear to me, either, until I began to

learn how

to think in terms of composite entities.

Back to your last post (990115.1230):

Me:

Furthermore, even for those who sooner or later spend exactly
what they make, shopping takes time, even for men. Hence, even
without "leakage," and even in the aggregate, we should expect a
chronic lag, which would show up in positive bank balances. That is
what led to my suggestion 2 years ago of comparing income with
spending a year later. You ran the data, and, as I recall, found
a reasonable fit for at least certain periods.

You:

No fit at all. Time lag did not account for leakage.

I was speaking from (a rather vague) memory. Here is what you said when
you ran the analysis at my suggestion:

You (970324.1000):

Mike Acree has suggested that the leakage seen by TCP is an artifact;
consumer income (GNP + U + S) cannot be spent right away so it is no
surprise that GNP + U + S at time t doesn't [should be "does"] equal

GNP at time t + some time

later. Mike suggested that consumer income at time t should actually
match consumer spending (measured as GNP) at time t + 1 year or so.

I computed the relationship between consumer income and spending this
way and found that, indeed, GNP + U + S at time t is almost always

VERY

close to GNP at time t + 1 year. If this little lagged analysis holds

up

then the whole idea of "leakage" goes right out the window; it would
suggest that all consumer income is spent within one year after it is
recieved. This would require a MAJOR change in TCPs data analysis.

Others can perhaps guess at what you're controlling for here, but,
obviously, where there is "no fit at all" is between your own two
descriptions of your results. (If you respond here as you did the other
two times when I pointed out that you had directly contradicted
yourself, you will call this "an extremely poor choice of words," making
it clear that your thinking was correct and consistent all along.) You
go on, here and in a later post (970326.1430), to suggest an alternative
interpretation of your results. My explanation was a prediction from (a
very simple) theory, whereas yours was ad hoc and contrived, but that
doesn't prove mine is right.

We've come full circle: you asked what my criticisms of _Leakage_ had
been, and I reminded you. Economic data, as Bruce Gregory (970326.1740)
observed (he said "government data gathering"), are often too equivocal
and uncertain to decide definitively between rival interpretations. To
pursue the matter much further would require more expertise in economics
than I intend to acquire, which is why I dropped the discussion before.

Me:

More importantly, governments are dangerous.

You:

Really? Are you sure it's not the people who happen to
implement the particular government? Hitler's government
looked a lot more dangerous than Kohl's though both were
governments.

Yes, I meant specifically the institution of government--which is not to
deny that governments can't exist without the people who implement them.
Nor, of course, does the claim that governments are intrinsically
dangerous imply that they have all realized that potential in equal
destructiveness. But government does give people powers they otherwise
wouldn't have--for instance, to jail people for the medical use of
marijuana, as the North Tahoe Narcotics Task Force just did with Steve
Kubby and his wife. (Kubby, the Libertarian candidate for governor of
California last year, was a leader in the successful campaign for
Proposition 215 in 1996, which allowed medical use of marijuana. He
attributes having survived adrenal cancer to marijuana.)

Me:

The fact that one is much more likely to be met with ridicule
than argument--even, for instance, just in pointing out that
fire departments could be and have been private--suggests that
there is something profoundly threatening about the idea of
self-responsibility

You:

Let me be the first to ridicule that idea;-) I'm in favor of
organizational systems (like government) and I am not at all
threatened by the notion of self-responsibility; indeed, I
_assume_ that people are responsible for themselves (for controlling
their own perceptions). Responsibility is a natural law not a moral
decision.

I may be off-target in my generic psychological speculation; but,
nevertheless, if your intention was to show that you're not threatened
by the idea of self-responsibility, trivializing the concept is not an
effective way to do it. There is of course a sense in which
self-responsibility is unavoidable--no one else can do our perceiving or
acting for us--but there is also a serious sense in which it is not
involuntary (though attaching a moral evaluation may be optional).
Indeed, if living responsibly were automatic, we wouldn't have the
problem of mavericks. I was referring here more to existential
self-responsibility, but the concept can also be illustrated with
respect to cognitive self-responsibility. Years ago, when I began
arguing that significance testing could not logically be doing for us
what we thought it was doing--namely, providing us with an objective
criterion of whether our results were meaningful or important (Jacob
Cohen and others have made some of the same arguments more recently)--I
found that my audiences would invariably ask: "If we can't use
significance tests, then how are we supposed to interpret our data?" My
answer was not very satisfying to them: "Why do you insist that I--or
anyone else--tell you how to interpret your data?" These were
grown-ups--Ph.D.s, in fact, talking about their own research--but they
were obviously uncomfortable with the idea that the judgment was
ultimately their responsibility (or of anyone else who wanted to
undertake it). You and I agree that these psychologists _were_ in fact
responsible, but they preferred to act as if they weren't. Hope that
clarifies what I meant.

You:

Governments are just organizations
at a higher level than fire departments, schools, Mircosofts and
Suns.

Governments themselves can be construed hierarchically in terms of their
scope--local, state, federal--though even there the relationships aren't
always clear, as witness jurisdictional disputes between local police
and the FBI. But to speak of a whole society as hierarchically
organized, with government merely another layer at the top, might apply
in some sense to totalitarian societies, but is hard to get the sense of
when applied to our own. A hierarchical organization implies that each
level is subordinated to the one above, in the service of an overall
goal, such as the life of an organism. It is odd enough, for me, just
to think of Life Learning Associates subserving the goals of the LAPD,
or of the government of Los Angeles more broadly.

We might notice, incidentally, that the top of the "hierarchy" has
always been vacant, unless we count the UN in the last 50 years as a
world government. The fact that the UN is as weak as it is may reflect
the ambivalence that most members feel toward it: just as with
Congress, we all want our guys to be in charge. I see little reason to
expect the world to be a better place if there were a strong world
government: the bloodiest wars have tended to be civil wars. Consider
that ultimate liberal ideal, a world government with gun control, so
that the U.S. has no weapons. If you have doubts about the desirability
of that arrangement, that's another reason to think governments may not
be necessary (or desirable) at lower levels, either.

The far more important problem with thinking of government as "just
another level in the hierarchy," however, is that it obliterates the
distinguishing characteristic of governments (of any type), which is
their legal monopoly on the use of physical force (violence within
families has usually been excepted, along with the circumscribed use of
force in self-defense).

You:

What makes an organization like Microsoft or IBM less "dangerous"
than the US government?

Microsoft can (unless forcibly prevented by government) decide whether
to sell its computers with or without its web browser, but it can't jail
people for posting material on the Internet that it doesn't approve of.

Bill says that Hugh Gibbon persuaded him that anarchy wouldn't work
because of mavericks. That still surprises me, given how disappointing
I found Hugh's analysis. I think Bill got it right the first time. It
is precisely because of mavericks that we ought to avoid setting up
power structures that they can all too easily get hold of. Hitler,
after all, was elected, and by a notably educated populace. (And one of
his first acts, again, was to collect all the guns. We know where the
800-pound gorilla got to sleep after that.)

You:

Who's going to resolve disputes
about whether the freeway should be built near my property rather
than yours? Or do we just shoot it out at the OK corral, now that
those pesky gun control laws are gone;-)

It's interesting, and puzzling, to me that your challenges have tended
to be the easy ones. The question you raise about freeways, for
example, is _easily_ solved by negotiation (i.e., by the market)--just
as it was with the Dulles Greenway, which involved no use of eminent
domain. Some landowners sold their land; others donated it; one can
imagine still others so eager to have the road near their property that
they would have paid the road builder. But one could imagine your
posing stiffer challenges: If highways were private, greedy capitalists
would build double-decker freeways on soil known to be unstable, and
they would collapse in the next big quake, with major loss of life. If
the schools were private, then only the children of the rich would be
educated, and most of the rest would graduate from high school being
unable to add fractions or locate Brazil on a map, and with a reading
level that used to be considered 6th-grade. If police were private,
they would be free to pursue their own personal agendas, like arresting
people for the medical use of marijuana. If the justice system were
private, rich celebrities could get away with murder, and Presidents
could get away with perjury, while the rest of us had to pay. And so
on.

To say more of substance at this point, however, would be tediously
repetitious. I want to focus instead on the form of our discussion,
which has been so--I can't say "singularly" unproductive, but
unproductive nevertheless. (I have observed that I have much lower
threshold for frustration with such exchanges than other participants on
the Net--or maybe, of those who share my frustration threshold, I'm the
only one who speaks up.) We have been around the same loop three or
four times now. I start off with the observation (as in 990115.0554):

PCT, as I read it, gives us reason to expect government, operating as

it

does on the basis of punishment or the threat thereof, not to work

very

well. More importantly, governments are dangerous. . . .
Hence it should take a compelling argument to persuade us
of the necessity of government.

You (or someone else) makes one of two responses. (a) Government is
obviously necessary because we can't do without schools, medical care,
highways, fire departments, etc. Trying to keep the discussion as much
as possible factual rather than hypothetical, I point out historical and
current instances where these functions have been successfully
privatized. (b) You set up a disjunction between government and chaos,
arguing or implying that if we don't have government there won't be any
social organization at all, and we'll be back to the days of the Wild
West. (Since you and Bill have brought up the Wild West so often--as
though that were the worst imaginable scenario--it may be worth
mentioning incidentally here that historical scholarship of the last
decade or so has suggested that the lawlessness of the Old West is
something of a romantic myth. There appear to have been two principal
sources of violence. One was cattle rustling, which was largely taken
care of by the technology of barbed wire. The other, if a recent _New
Yorker_ article is to be believed, was the same goddamned religious wars
(in this case between Protestants and Catholics) that go on around the
world (much bloodier when governments are involved, which is usually the
case). It is not clear, in short, that Tombstone in the 1890s was any
more unsafe than Detroit in the 1990s.) This rhetorical question was
also Ayn Rand's supposedly knock-down argument against anarchy: on
being robbed, you call police from your security agency, and the robber
does the same. She left it there, as though your Wild West shoot-out
were the only conceivable outcome. But I've argued before that this is
the least likely scenario. First, because violence is very expensive
for those who engage in it (medical costs, staff replacement, property
damage). Such trigger-happy agencies would certainly have a hell of a
time getting insurance. Second, it's extremely bad for business. Given
their own economic self-interest, it's all but inconceivable that
security companies wouldn't have arbitration agreements worked out in
advance.

You then say, ignoring my historical examples and arguments,

Who's going to resolve disputes
about whether the freeway should be built near my property rather
than yours? Or do we just shoot it out at the OK corral, now that
those pesky gun control laws are gone;-)

After awhile I lose the sense of interacting with a sentient being, and
feel as though I'm dealing with a robot with no memory and a limited
repertoire of programmed responses. Probably your experience is the
same, except that you are dealing with a very _slow_ robot, given that
my latencies are orders of magnitude larger than yours. Certainly I've
been dismayed, in reviewing our earlier exchanges, by how repetitious my
own messages have been. A good time to stop.

You:

You think that if goverment went away
everything would be fine.

"Fine," not in the sense that violence would be eliminated, but that it
would be minimized.

Maybe you're right. But I don't think
we're ever going to find out. At least, I hope not;-)

Spoken like a true scientist. You attach a smiley, but indications
elsewhere make me think you may really mean it. Just in case I'm wrong,
I resort to a device of which you make frequent use, which is to refer
you to another source. We don't have to do the scary experiments
ourselves, after all, if other people have done them for us. There are
lots of books about privatizing, or reprivatizing, roads, schools,
medical care, Social Security, and so on. But let's jump straight to
the hardest issues. Even most libertarians still think government is
necessary for police and the courts. Read Bruce Benson's _To Serve and
Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice_ (New York
University Press, 1998) to see how these functions could be--and have
been--privatized. I had been aware, for example, that in England around
1200 actions, like murder, which had been treated as torts came to be
regarded as crimes against the state. The reason for the shift was not
any dissatisfaction of the people with the older system, but the fact
that the new, public system of justice gave more money and power to the
king (through collecting fines, etc.). What I had not realized, until
reading Benson, was that this shift was also the origin of the switch in
the focus of the justice system from restitution to punishment. That
alone ought to recommend the private system to PCTers.

Mike ("8086") Acree

[From Rick Marken (990123.0950)]

Mike Acree to me:

You ran the data, and, as I recall, found a reasonable fit for
at least certain periods.

Me:

No fit at all. Time lag did not account for leakage.

Mike Acree (990122.1239 PST)--

I was speaking from (a rather vague) memory. Here is what you
said when you ran the analysis at my suggestion:

You (970324.1000):

> ...
> I computed the relationship between consumer income and
> spending this way and found that, indeed, GNP + U + S at
> time t is almost always VERY close to GNP at time t + 1 year.
> If this little lagged analysis holds up then the whole idea
> of "leakage" goes right out the window

Others can perhaps guess at what you're controlling for here, but,
obviously, where there is "no fit at all" is between your own two
descriptions of your results.

Yes. My comments from March 1997 are quite embarassing since they
reflect a complete misunderstanding on my part of what the data
represent. U + S is the unspent part of GNP. So the variable
GNP + U + S is a nonsense variable. Any relationship between
GNP + U + S at time t and GNP at time t + 1 is completely spurious.
So my comment "No fit at all. Time lag did not account for leakage"
is only partially correct; there was a fit between GNP + U + S (t)
and GNP (t+1) but this time lagged fit certainly doesn't "account"
for leakage; indeed, it's completely irrelevant (though, apparently,
I didn't know why 2 years ago; live and learn;-))

(If you respond here as you did the other two times when I pointed
out that you had directly contradicted yourself, you will call this
"an extremely poor choice of words," making it clear that your
thinking was correct and consistent all along.)

My choice of words was fine; it was my thinking that was incorrect.
I'm _much_ better now;-)

Economic data, as Bruce Gregory (970326.1740) observed (he said
"government data gathering"), are often too equivocal and
uncertain to decide definitively between rival interpretations.

That's what modeling is for; you try to find a model that best
accounts for the data. But one piece of data in "Leakage" seems
rather unequivocal; the fact that exactly 20% (+-1%) of GNP has
gone to capital investment over the last 100 years. This seems
to rule any econimic model that views capital investment as an
economic "stimulus" variable. Doesn't this fact create some
problems for your view of the benefits of laissez faire capitalism?

As far as our discussion about the relative merits of government
goes, I'm happy to kiss government goodby and privatize everything,
if you like. My problem with your point of view (besides the
evidence that without government redistribution the US would
quickly turn into Mexico instead of Canada) is understanding
what we do when the now government-free private companies start
doing what the government used to do: making and enforcing rules.

As we speak, for example, the company I work for has a bunch
of pesky rules about carrying firearms on campus. If there
were no government they might even make rules about buying
guns on campus. They might even make rules about using drugs
on campus (they already force smokers to smoke outside). My
company is a private company yet it has all kinds of rules
that curb my god given right to take drugs on the job, carry
a .45 magnum under my coat and print pornography on the color
printer in my secretary's office. This is a private company
doing this! And my operatives in other company's tell me that
the same kind of affronts to liberty are found where they
work -- private companies all. And these companies enforce
their rules, too. You can be fired (and lose your livelihood)
if you break the rules. These private companies seem as anti-
liberty as any liberal democrat;-). Is this an indication of
the libertarian paradise we can expect once we have eliminated
the scourge of government?

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken/

[From Mike Acree (990125.0938 PST)]

Rick Marken (990123.0950)--

Thanks for a nice post.

one piece of data in "Leakage" seems
rather unequivocal; the fact that exactly 20% (+-1%) of GNP has
gone to capital investment over the last 100 years. This seems
to rule any econimic model that views capital investment as an
economic "stimulus" variable. Doesn't this fact create some
problems for your view of the benefits of laissez faire capitalism?

You've pointed this out several times, and I wasn't controlling for
frustrating you by ignoring it. Fact is, my understanding of economics
is fuzzy enough that I had no preconceptions or thoughts at all about
whether this percentage should be constant. I certainly agree that that
constancy is intriguing, and I have no idea what to make of it, but it
hadn't set up any particular conflict in my beliefs just because my
beliefs about that were never that well defined. If it did, then my
next move would probably be to scrutinize TCP's data more carefully.
But for now, I leave it as a puzzle worth bearing in mind, in case I
ever learn anything more about economics.

As far as our discussion about the relative merits of government
goes, I'm happy to kiss government goodby and privatize everything,
if you like. My problem with your point of view (besides the
evidence that without government redistribution the US would
quickly turn into Mexico instead of Canada) is understanding
what we do when the now government-free private companies start
doing what the government used to do: making and enforcing rules.

As we speak, for example, the company I work for has a bunch
of pesky rules about carrying firearms on campus. If there
were no government they might even make rules about buying
guns on campus. They might even make rules about using drugs
on campus (they already force smokers to smoke outside). My
company is a private company yet it has all kinds of rules
that curb my god given right to take drugs on the job, carry
a .45 magnum under my coat and print pornography on the color
printer in my secretary's office. This is a private company
doing this! And my operatives in other company's tell me that
the same kind of affronts to liberty are found where they
work -- private companies all. And these companies enforce
their rules, too. You can be fired (and lose your livelihood)
if you break the rules. These private companies seem as anti-
liberty as any liberal democrat;-). Is this an indication of
the libertarian paradise we can expect once we have eliminated
the scourge of government?

Not that Mexico and Canada lack strong governments. Or that these
private companies aren't operating in a country with a strong
government. But more to the point:

I assume you have some (implicit) rules about the way people must behave
in your house, or in the offices of Life Learning Associates. The need
for rules, and for making them explicit, would increase as your business
grew, and you knew fewer of your employees personally. I don't have
trouble with the idea that you should be able to throw out people who
misbehave (persist in tearing up your furniture, or whatever), or in
refusing them admission--whether we are talking about your home, office,
or company. I don't see their liberty extending to behaving as they
please _on your property_ (just as their freedom of speech doesn't
include the right to publish what they please _in your newspaper_). In
principle, we all tend to sort ourselves out according to the rules we
like--some are comfortable in the white shirts and ties that IBM used to
require, others want a casual atmosphere; some want a noisy, smoky bar,
and others want a quiet place to talk; etc. That doesn't mean there
aren't still some serious problems with rules in some companies. I know
of some companies that seem to me extremely short-sighted in the
strictness of their rules, so that they create chronic conditions of
heavy stress. For the long run, one can expect such practices to be
self-correcting, as other companies show that less stressed employees
are more productive, and capture the business of their short-sighted
competitors. Reputations like that will over time also make it more
difficult for the company to recruit replacements for those who leave.
All that's mild consolation, of course, for those who may have no choice
but to continue putting up with it or look for another job. Still, it's
not clear to me that there's any call for forcible intervention from any
outside agency (government)--particularly when there isn't any guarantee
that government rules won't also have their shortcomings.

The crucial point, however, is that jobs are contractual relationships.
Once we've met any conditions we may have agreed to on hiring, we're
free to leave and look for something better. A virtue of competition
and freedom of movement is that it serves as a check on abuse and
stupidity (a check that, as acknowledged, isn't perfect and may take
time). If the police are abusive, on the other hand (as they have
occasionally been known to be), there isn't any competing protective
agency to take your business to. The self-correcting mechanism, however
slow, is now gone. Our only recourse is to political process, which is
much more sluggish and less responsive than the market. (Compare trying
to persuade the school board to change its policy on sex education with
simply taking your kid to a different school.) Freedom of movement is
also a very limited option between nations: many countries sharply
restrict emigration, and all restrict immigration. One of the virtues
of our federal system was supposed to be in allowing diversity;
individual states would be free to experiment with different rules, and
could learn from each other; people could also vote with their feet if
they felt strongly enough about some rules. To some extent we still
benefit from that diversity--businesses have been fleeing California for
the less restrictive rules of Idaho or Utah, gays move from Idaho and
Utah to California, Tiger Woods moves to Florida to avoid the income
tax, and so on--although increasing power in the federal government has
curtailed that benefit in many cases through enforced homogenization
(e.g., highway speed limits). If freedom of movement were as easy
between nations as between our states, some problems of governments
would be reduced.

Mike

[Martin Taylor 990126 22:11]

[From Mike Acree (990122.1239 PST)]

In your long diatribe against governments and in favour of a system of
multiple feudal dictatorships (read privately owned public necessities),
I see little signs of your comparing the degree of control people have
under the dictators (read private owners of public businesses) as
compared to the control they have in a system of hierarchic elected
governments that have the power to regulate and oppose the business
owners.

It seems odd that you suggest that governments are inherently dangerous,
when to be under a powerful baron accountable to nobody except the more
powerful neighbour baron is not dangerous.

And I find it also odd that although you make a point of saying that fire
departments were once private, you do not follow that point by noting
why that system was found to be inadequate--and very dangerous.

Very odd indeed.

Martin

[From Mike Acree (990128.1422 PST)]

Martin Taylor 990126 22:11--

In your long diatribe against governments and in favour of a system of
multiple feudal dictatorships (read privately owned public

necessities),

I see little signs of your comparing the degree of control people have
under the dictators (read private owners of public businesses) as
compared to the control they have in a system of hierarchic elected
governments that have the power to regulate and oppose the business
owners.

It seems odd that you suggest that governments are inherently

dangerous,

when to be under a powerful baron accountable to nobody except the

more

powerful neighbour baron is not dangerous.

And I find it also odd that although you make a point of saying that

fire

departments were once private, you do not follow that point by noting
why that system was found to be inadequate--and very dangerous.

Very odd indeed.

I would have said that your post was the odd one, but perhaps two odds
makes us even.

I don't know in the first place what you mean by "public" businesses or
"public" necessities. Is FedEx or Pinkerton's a public business? A
public necessity? I would say that the private protection services I
was talking about were public in the same sense that these businesses
are (whatever you meant by that), and also private in the same sense
that they are. If FedEx and Pinkerton's are not feudal dictatorships, I
don't know why private security agencies are.

I, too, "see little signs" of my having compared the degree of control
people have under private businesses and under governments, but I also
see some big signs: That was very much the point of my whole argument.
If it was implicit at times, I also sometimes made it explicit. E.g.:

Mike Acree (990125.0938):

Compare trying
to persuade the school board to change its policy on sex education

with

simply taking your kid to a different school.

I wouldn't have supposed we would have barons without governments.
Powerful barons accountable to nobody is just what I have been saying
was dangerous. Accountability is very much the issue. Now and then
somebody, like Nixon, gets caught and steps down, but that is the
exception. A facade of accountability is still important to us,
however. Janet Reno made a show of "accepting full responsibility" for
what happened at Waco, but then she should have been tried for mass
murder. Instead Congress, after viewing infrared footage showing more
or less continuous machine-gun fire covering the rear exit of the
building, accepted the testimony of the FBI representative that not a
single shot was ever fired by government personnel and that all 27
bodies found with bullet holes were shot by fellow Davidians or
themselves. Bill has already suggested that that example doesn't count,
just because it was so bad; but you can consider instead the daily diet
of scandals about campaign funding from Buddhist nuns, undeclared war on
Iraq, perjury--or the IRS. Reno has said she won't pursue the issue of
Gore's campaign funding because she found no "proof of criminal intent."
The rest of us don't get to escape charges so easily. Where's the
accountability?

For private businesses, on the other hand, accountability is inescapable
(unless, like Sun or Netscape, you appeal to the government to forcibly
suppress the competition).

The flip side of the contention that anarchy doesn't work is the
implicit claim that government does--which entails shrugging off
government atrocities from Waco to the Vietnam war or the Holocaust as
flukes or as regrettable necessities or in any case as a lot better than
what would have happened without government.

And I find it also odd that although you make a point of saying that

fire

departments were once private, you do not follow that point by noting
why that system was found to be inadequate--and very dangerous.

Very odd indeed.

Or not so odd, if you consider that, if private fire companies were
inadequate and very dangerous, I didn't know about it. I would be
interested in seeing your sources. The only private fire company in
this country that I know about in recent years is the Rural/Metro in
Scottsdale, which, so far as I know, still contracts for fire protection
for about 20% of Arizona's population. I never heard anyone suggest
that its service was either inadequate or very dangerous. What's more
interesting is that for 2 years during the '70s Rural/Metro also
contracted to provide police services in Oro County. During those 2
years burglaries dropped from an average of 14 per month to 0.7 per
month. Rural/Metro's contract was for $35,000 a year; the government
police department budget was $241,000. The opposition came, as you
would expect, not from their customers, but from the competition. The
Arizona association of law enforcement officials filed suit, and
Rural/Metro didn't have the resources to fight it. Accountability for
Rural/Metro was/is omnipresent with the possibility of nonrenewal of
contract. Where's the accountability for the government police
department--to citizens who were now stuck paying 7 times as much for
1/20 of the protection?

This is very much the pattern, in fact. The current clamor for
government regulation of nutritional supplements isn't coming from
worried consumers, but from the drug companies, who contribute heavily
to legislators. The private justice system, I said earlier, wasn't
unsatisfactory to the people, but to the king--though no doubt plenty of
rumors about the dangers of the private system were spread by the
royalists. (So I trust that your sources on the dangers of private fire
departments are not _government_ reports--i.e., the reports of a real or
potential competitor.)

"Diatribe" is a dismaying label. I never had any interest in writing a
diatribe. What I was looking for from the beginning, however foolish it
may seem, was dialogue. Although my thinking has moved in the direction
of anarchy in the last decade or so, it is far from a closed position.
There are some difficult issues I've hardly begun to think about, and I
don't know that anyone is in a position to say for sure that it would
work. But I see good reasons to think that it might, and that
possibility seems very much worth considering. The CSGNet looked like a
natural place to seek dialogue on the question, given my naive
assumption that its members agreed with Chapter 17 of B:CP. The passing
comment that started this thread was just my remarking on the anomaly
that I was the only one, including the author, who found that chapter
convincing.

The exchanges over the past 2 years have been instructive, but primarily
in revealing how much resistance and even hostility the concept of
anarchy arouses. I'm thankful for having followed some other exchanges
enough to know that this characteristic doesn't necessarily have
anything to do with the topic or with me. It has been disappointing to
encounter so few new ideas, but also possibly telling. It may still be
true that the reason why I'm the only anarchist is that everyone else is
so much more thoughtful and informed about the issues; but, if so, I
can't yet tell.

Meanwhile, intriguing evidence still comes in from unexpected sources.
The Washington Post recently published a couple of articles reporting
record harvests and a booming economy in Somalia, which has officially
been declared anarchic by the UN. The UN made its own attempt to impose
a government several years ago, but withdrew after a resounding military
defeat. The anarchy doesn't necessarily reflect any lack of ambition on
the part of the various warlords of the country; but evidently none of
them was powerful enough to prevail over the others; and if they
couldn't be dictator, they didn't want anybody else to be,
either--precisely the even distribution of power that seemed to me a
priori optimal. The return, after 30 years of a corrupt dictatorship
and a civil war, to the peaceful, traditional, clan-based anarchic
system of the precolonial era isn't perfectly smooth--thanks to the
generosity of the American and Soviet governments, practically every
13-year-old has a machine gun--but it still seems to be working rather
well.

Mike

[from Tracy Harms (990129.0800)]

Mike Acree (990128.1422 PST)

The CSGNet looked like a
natural place to seek dialogue on the question, given my naive
assumption that its members agreed with Chapter 17 of B:CP. The passing
comment that started this thread was just my remarking on the anomaly
that I was the only one, including the author, who found that chapter
convincing.

I, for one, found the chapter and its implications quite impressive.

The Washington Post recently published a couple of articles reporting
record harvests and a booming economy in Somalia, which has officially
been declared anarchic by the UN. The UN made its own attempt to impose
a government several years ago, but withdrew after a resounding military
defeat. The anarchy doesn't necessarily reflect any lack of ambition on
the part of the various warlords of the country; but evidently none of
them was powerful enough to prevail over the others; and if they
couldn't be dictator, they didn't want anybody else to be,
either--precisely the even distribution of power that seemed to me a
priori optimal. The return, after 30 years of a corrupt dictatorship
and a civil war, to the peaceful, traditional, clan-based anarchic
system of the precolonial era isn't perfectly smooth--thanks to the
generosity of the American and Soviet governments, practically every
13-year-old has a machine gun--but it still seems to be working rather
well.

Mike

This is good news, and it runs counter to the presumptions which
precipitated the disasterous military intervention of the US. But Somalia
counts as anarchic only from the standpoint of nationalism. Nationalism
has a narrow recognition as to what counts as legitimate political players.
Somalia does not lack rulership, it only lacks *consolidated* leadership
at the level of international diplomacy. That, or some facade with that
appearance, is demanded by the reigning ideology of this century. But
failure to fit the expectations of national identity is not, to my mind,
identical with anarchy--in any sense of that word.

I'm a bit miffed that the American government has provided such generous
aid to poor kids in Africa while our children at home go deprived. I don't
greatly begrudge this aid, but I do have a son of my own who will be
thirteen before long. The complications in getting him a full-auto battle
rifle of his own are quite annoying. I am not happy about the fact that
the same organization which so liberally provided those gadgets to
Somalians (out of the pocket of the American public) puts up such obstacles
against the American public holding similar gear.

Tracy Harms
Bend, Oregon

[From Kenny Kitzke (990129.1900 EST)]

<Tracy Harms (990129.0800)>

<I don't greatly begrudge this aid, but I do have a son of my own who will
be
thirteen before long. The complications in getting him a full-auto battle
rifle of his own are quite annoying.>

I hope not annoying enough for his father to coerce anyone with a
semi-auto? :sunglasses: By the way, is your son's name Rambo H. Arms?

Government stinks. Especially, the liberal socialistic Democrats. If they
get their way, you or you son will not be able to own a BB-Gun. Better for
society and for them, ya know.

We Americans need to forget all that Constitution stuff and the Bill of
Rights for which our brave men gave their final measure. We need to
revisit what these silly old words really mean. According to several
experts called by the President's Managers, the Bill of Rights simply means
that Our President, Mr. Bill, is Always Right. He is sooooo Right, he is
Right even when he is Wrong.

Oh noooo, Mr. Bill! Look out for Vernon Jordan. He is going to open a
hole in the dike that even Slick Willie will not be able to plug.

Tracy, this is mostly to rile up Rick. I am in a cantankerous mood.

Hope all else is well with you.

Best wishes,

kenny

[From Mike Acree (981230.0923 PST)]

Last year Bruce Abbott marked the passing of 1997 with a public
expression of appreciation to various contributors to the Net, and I was
sufficiently flattered at finding my name on the list to want to offer
something similar (a day early--I'm offline till Monday). I have
remained on the Net, in a read-only mode, primarily for the marvelous
pearls that Bill produces from time to time. The one other person whose
contributions I have substantively appreciated, on a comparably broad
range of topics, is Bruce Nevin. The often-remarked ugliness of much
that falls in between would otherwise have led me, as it evidently has
others, to withdraw entirely. But there are several contributors whose
consistently respectful tone I have very much appreciated and admired,
without having followed the technical details of the arguments very
closely. Aside from Bill and Bruce, these notably include Bruce Abbott
and Fred Nickols. I never understood how Abbott kept it up as long as
he did. (Viagra for flagging respect and civility. Now there's
something that could change the world--except that I somehow doubt it
would sell.)

I will take this occasion also to record belatedly two responses to
_Making Sense of Behavior_, which I ordered and read as soon as its
availability was announced on the Net. The reactions were relief and
sadness. I had been a little apprehensive about what might be said on
interpersonal conflict, given Bill's notice last year that he had moved
away from the anarchy espoused (though not by name) in Chapter 17 of
B:CP. But I was relieved to find nothing inconsistent with my
understanding of that chapter. That leaves only the anomaly of my
being, so far as I can tell, the only person on the Net, with one
exception, who believes that a society based on negotiation, such as is
suggested there, isn't impossible, or even undesirable, in principle.

The other reaction was more personal. I had been curious why the
original title _Starting Over_ had been abandoned at the last minute.
Once I saw what kind of book the new one was, however, it became clear
that the title applied not just to the field of psychology starting over
to understand human behavior. It also seemed to apply, a little too
poignantly, to the fact that the _author_ was starting over, after 25
years of disappointment with psychologists, to try to reach a new
audience. I wish I felt more sanguine about the prospects for a Happy
New Year for PCT.

Mike

[From Bruce Gregory (981230.1245 EST)]

Mike Acree (981230.0923 PST)

That leaves only the anomaly of my
being, so far as I can tell, the only person on the Net, with one
exception, who believes that a society based on negotiation, such as is
suggested there, isn't impossible, or even undesirable, in principle.

Societies based on negotiation require individuals willing to negotiate. If
you listen to the news you will find that such individuals are not in
abundant supply. If you listen to Rick, you will find that according to PCT
there is no reason to expect them to be.

Bruce Gregory

[From Kenny Kitzke (981230.1640 EST)]

<Mike Acree (981230.0923 PST)>

You post is fair and most appreciated. I too felt that both Bruce Nevin
and Tim Carey remained scientific and principled under a barrage of
"coercive" fire from the biggest guns in PCT.

Some people who have taught me much who were always scientific and
professional could not take the accusatory style and left. I personally
miss the participation of Ed Ford and Tom Bourbon who wanted to advance
knowledge of behavior not advance their own perceptions of their personal
world view.

I just plowed my driveway of an inch of snow. That may seem stupid. But,
I perceive my drivway is 300 feet long and myself as not having the energy
I once did. So, it worked for me.

Happy New Year to all!