---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Mar 20:
Armstrong (& most humans)
is a Marxist! (
even he doesn't realize it)
From: iamback
Date: Fri, March 20, 2015 8:30 am
To: "Armstrong Economics" <
armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheesh CoinCube, your Marxist tilt makes you so gullible. I expect greater rationality from you with your math background! Where did you attain the Maxist indoctrination? How can you rid yourself of that mental disease?
All reputation systems scale to "winner take all". Humans can manage this in small tribes within their Dunbar limit where they can see all the shit that everyone does to minute detail so the tribal leader is held accountable. But we don't live in isolated tribes any more. Thermodynamics applies in spades (c.f. Coasian barriers, closed vs. open systems, etc).
The Dunbar number (the hypothesized maximum number of people man can maintain stable social relationships with) is thought to be anywhere between 150-250. It seems reasonable that with the aid of modern technology and only for trade this could be extended by a factor of at least 2-5 before you start to hit serious issues with reputation and scaling.
Absolutely false!
The actual number (when applied to this context) is well below a 100, because people simply don't have enough time to both work, raise a family, and be on top of the myriad of ways that those with reputation secretly (i.e. opaquely through a side channel outside the transparent paradigm) aggregate power.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/17/the-majority-are-just-fools/In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, theyve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.
I was asked to review the documents when Hillary amazingly made hundreds of thousands of dollars trading futures at the same precise time she was in meetings. Her lawyer had an account at the same firm and a trade would be put on but left open until the end of the day. It would be a spread long and short the same commodity. At the end of the day, the losing trade went to her lawyer and the win into her account. Today, that is called money laundering.
This is why society must crash and burn. It is just too damn corrupt and the majority are simply sheep who believe whatever they say.
To Armstrong, that is the reason that even direct democracy will never solve the dilemma of politics being a power vacuum where the winner takes all, e.g. the DEEP STATE which is now in control.
Proxies for investigation and reporting such as the media can be controlled with power, thus they are not a fulcrum which can be used to raise the Dunbar limit. Politics only works in small isolated groups. We humans are still trying to do what we did to organize ourselves as hunter-gatherers, but this evolutionary ingrained paradigm causes us to be Marxist and enslave ourselves. We wonder why we are enslaved when we trust politics above our Dunbar limit and then blame what is natural for the cause, e.g. blaming greed, filling of power vacuums (thermodynamics & entropy), and our ability to exist (i.e. non-uniform distributions of skills, talents, interest, wealth, personality, etc[1]).
I have risen above my hunter-gatherer brain, but it seems most people can't evolve! Including both CoinCube and Armstrong! They just don't get it!
Again for the 100th time (
fuck I am tired of writing the damn same thing over and over and the gullible Marxists just can't get it and that is why we must crash and burn), I will quote about the
Logic of Collective Action about how power MUST aggregate to those who are the most corrupt:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984Some Iron Laws of Political Economics
Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population.
The result is a scramble in which individual interest groups perpetually seek to corner more and more rent from the system, while the incremental costs of this behavior rise slowly enough that it is difficult to sustain broad political opposition to the overall system of political privilege and rent-seeking.
When you add to Olsons model the fact that the professional political class is itself a special interest group which collects concentrated benefits from encouraging rent-seeking behavior in others, it becomes clear why, as Olson pointed out, good government is a public good subject to exactly the same underproduction problems as other public goods. Furthermore, as democracies evolve, government activity that might produce good government tends to be crowded out by coalitions of rent-seekers and their tribunes.
This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:
There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.
Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.
Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class.
The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.
The probability that the actual effects of a political agency or program will bear any relationship to the intentions under which it was designed falls exponentially with the amount of time since it was founded.
The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.
Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.
Changing the leaders of central planning to engineers or traders won't change the fact that the power vacuum will force the most corrupt to rise to the top and "winner take all". Armstrong is wasting his fucking time. The only possible solution is as it has always been since 6000 B.C., which is private money for the Private waves in Armstrong's cyclical model of oscillation between resets of the political MORASS. Armstrong believes private money is impossible in the digital age. If he is correct, then the human race will go extinct. I know the technology of cryptography and anonymity. I know Armstrong is incorrect. We will have private money in the digital age. The collective morass will eventually have to put a chip inside our body in order to attempt to stop private money (but that is for a future time, not this cycle).
[1] I am not going to explain all over again why we can't exist without diversity and how for us to all be the same and omniscient would require the speed-of-light to be infinite which would collapse the present and past into an infinitesimal point in time, c.f. my blog posts which eludicated this is great detail:
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.htmlhttp://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html So an enhanced barter system with the aid of technology could probably function reasonably well as long as the group size was limited to somewhere between 300-1000 people. Small trading groups could potentially exist within a larger community. Barter transactions would be incentivized by tax avoidance and the need to not compromize government benefits and inhibited by the natural inefficiencies that are unavoidable with barter.
Would it work? I have no idea. The poor are typically poor for reasons that go far beyond bad luck. However, their economic incentives going forward will increasingly favor barter transactions so it seems at least plausible that something like this would help them at least to some degree.
I am of the opinion that any system that encourages and allows trade to occur without debt and without fiat is a step in the right direction. Some attempted solutions may be more useful than others and some will fail outright but I believe it is a mistake to summarily dismiss and discourage those with interesting ideas.
Nobody wants a money that has a limited scope. Precisely what makes money useful is it raises the efficiency of trade. The poor don't want some unit which they can only get one or two things in exchange for. They want fungible money just like the rest of us do!
And non-anonymous ledger isn't going to help anyone escape taxation. The government will threaten to cut off their welfare benefits.
The idea is the insanely stupid idea, I can't even believe you fell for it! Cripes, I am very disappointed in you. You have absolutely no talent whatsoever as an entrepreneur. You are too far removed from reality.
That you can fall into this shit which has been tried over and over in history just goes to show how hopeless it is to reform a MOR-ASS. Humans are really blinded to their fate in the Petri dish. They will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
I find myself in the odd position of quoting Martin Armstrong back at you.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/10/13/solution/The system can be reformed. We must eliminate the old guard who refuse to see the light because they are the very problem. This is part of the political reform process that will begin after 2016.
On this issue as on many others my friend we agree on the overall picture but not the details. Like Armstrong I also believe government can eventually be reformed. It will not come easy and it will not come soon (definitly not before a major collapse and probably not this generation) but I believe it can eventually be done.
You can join Armstrong and both of you can be good Marxists who believe you can top-down manage the universe.
Sorry I am smarter than you guys.
P.S. I suspect Armstrong is starting to realize I am correct. I think he is too smart not to get this. I hope I am not disappointed by him.