[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