I’ve been thinking about whether we should quit creating various forms of corporations–like LLCs–for for the past 15 years or so–ever since Bakunin, more or less. But other than the fraud post a few days ago, I think the only other piece I’ve really written on the subject was a short explanation of my opposition to letting corporations have any kind of political rights (eg, donating to campaigns, freedom of speech,) on the grounds that they are non-human organisms (they are meta-human organisms,) and since I am a human and rather speciesist, I don’t want non-humans getting power.
The problem with discussing whether corporations should exist (or in what form, or if they are good or bad,) is that people are prone to status-quo fallacies where they forget that corporations are just legal fictions and act instead as though they were real, physical objects or forces of nature created by the Will of God, like mountain ranges or entropy.
But a “corporation” is not so much a big building full of people, but a piece of paper in your filing cabinet. Modern corporate structures did not exist throughout most of humanity’s 200,000 year existence, and in fact only came to exist when governments passed laws that created them.
All that takes to change them is a new law. Unlike mountains, they only “exist” because a law (and pieces of paper tucked away in filing cabinets,) says they do. What man has made, man can unmake.
So let’s talk about lawsuits.
America is a litigious society. Extremely litigious. Probably the most litigious in the world. (We also incarcerate a higher % of our people than any other country, though on the bright side, we summarily execute far fewer.)
Sometimes I think Americans are the kinds of people who solve disputes by punching each other, but we’ve gotten it into heads that lawsuits are a kind of punching.
At any rate, fear of litigation and liability are ruining everything. If you don’t believe me, try setting up a roadside stand to sell some extra radishes from your garden or build a bridge over a creek on your own property. You have to pass a background check just to help out on your kid’s school field trip, and children aren’t allowed to ride their bikes in my neighborhood because, “if they got hit by a car, the HOA could get sued.” As farmer Joel Salatin put it, “Everything I Want to do is Illegal.” (All Joel wants to do is grow and sell food, but there are SO MANY REGULATIONS.)
100 years ago, the kind of litigation people are afraid of simply wouldn’t have happened. For example, as Stanford Mag recounts of campus violence around 1910:
Black eyes, bruises, and occasional bouts of unconsciousness didn’t seem to alarm the administration. … Farm life came with a brutish edge. Some freshmen slept in armed groups to ward off hazers, a state of affairs apparently enabled by the administration’s reluctance to meddle. “Persons fit to be in college are fit to look after their own affairs,” Stanford President David Star Jordan said.
Elizabeth Shin (February 16, 1980 – April 14, 2000) was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who died from burns inflicted by a fire in her dormitory room. Her death led to a lawsuit against MIT and controversy as to whether MIT paid adequate attention to its students’ mental and emotional health, and whether MIT’s suicide rate was abnormally high.
… After the incident, MIT announced an upgrade of its student counseling programs, including more staff members and longer hours. However, the Shins claimed these measures were not enough and filed a $27.65 million lawsuit against MIT, administrators, campus police officers, and its mental health employees. …
On April 3, 2006, MIT announced that the case with the family of Elizabeth Shin had been settled before trial for an undisclosed amount.[7]
Universities, of course, do not want to get sued for millions of dollars and deal with the attendant bad publicity, but these days you can’t say “Boo” on campus without someone thinking it’s the administration’s job to protect the students from emotional distress.
All of this litigation has happened (among other reasons) because corporations are seen (by juries) as cash cows.
Let’s pause a moment to discuss exactly what an LLC is (besides a piece of paper.) What’s the difference between selling your extra radishes as yourself and selling your extra radishes as a corporation? If you are selling as yourself, and one of your radishes makes a customer ill and they sue you, then you can be held personally liable for their sickness and be forced to pay their $10 million medical bill yourself, driving you into bankruptcy and ruin. But if you are selling as a corporation, then your ill customer must sue the corporation. The corporation can be found liable and forced to cover the $10 million bill, but you, the owner, are not liable; your money (the income you’ve made over the years by selling radishes) is safe.
(There are some tax-related differences, as well, but we will skip over those for now.)
There are doubtless many other varieties of corporations, most of which I am not familiar because I am not a specialist in corporate law. The general principle of most, if not all corporations is that they exist independent of the people in them.
This is how Donald Trump’s businesses can have gone bankrupt umpteen times and he can still have billions of dollars.
But precisely because corporations are not people, and the people who own them are protected (supposedly) from harm, people are, I suspect more likely to sue them and juries are to award suits against them.
As a lawyer I spoke with put it, he was glad that his job only involved suing corporations, because “corporations aren’t people, so I’m not hurting anyone.”
Suppose MIT were just a guy named Mit who taught math and physics. If one of his students happened to commit suicide, would anyone sue him on the grounds that he didn’t do enough to stop her?
I doubt it. For starters, Mit wouldn’t even have millions of dollars to sue for.
When people get hurt, juries want to do something to help them. Sick people have bills that must get paid one way or another, after all. Corporations have plenty of money (or so people generally think,) but individuals don’t. A jury would hesitate to drive Mit into poverty, as that would harm him severely, but wouldn’t blink an eye at making MIT pay millions, as this hurts “no one” since MIT is not a person.
You might say that it is kind of like a war between human organisms and corporate organisms–humans try to profit off corporations, and corporations try to profit off humans. (Of course, I tend to favor humanity in this grand struggle.)
The big problem with this system is that even though corporations aren’t people, they are still composed of people. A corporation that does well can employ lots of people and make their lives better, but a corporation that gets sued into the gutter won’t be able to employ anyone at all. The more corporations have to fear getting sued, the more careful they have to be–which results in increased paperwork, record keeping, policies-on-everything, lack of individual discretion, etc., which in turn make corporations intolerable both for the people in them and the people in them.
So what can we do?
The obvious solution of letting corporations get away with anything probably isn’t a good idea, because corporations will eat people if eating people leads to higher profits. (And as a person, I am opposed to the eating of people.)
Under our current system, protection from liability lets owners get away with cheating already–take mining corporations, which are known for extracting the resources from an area, paying their owners handsomely, and then conveniently declaring bankruptcy just before costly environmental cleanup begins. Local communities are left to foot the bill (and deal with the health effects like lead poisoning and cancer.)
The solution, IMO, is individual responsibility wherever possible. Mining companies could not fob off their cleanup costs if the owners were held liable for the costs. A few owners losing everything and ending up penniless would quickly prompt the owners of other mining companies to be very careful about how they construct their waste water ponds.
People need to interact with and be responsible to other people.
ETA: This is probably a dumb idea. Let’s consign it to the realm of “thought experiments.”
I admit, it’d be a big change.
So I was reading this sociology article about eviction and the poor, and got to thinking about what a drain rent is. Month by month, renting is cheaper than owning, but in the long term, it’s likely to be more expensive. (The same is likely true for taking out loans vs paying cash.) So the poorest people are hit with extra expenses just because they’re poor.
The article discussed how after the 2008 housing crash, many people lost their jobs or ended up with greatly reduced wages, but rents didn’t go down. (Working class people formerly employed building houses were particularly hard hit, of course.) The article didn’t mention that immigration helps keep housing prices up, of course.
After thirty years of house payments, an “owner” will have generally paid off their loan and own their house outright, owing only property taxes. A renter of thirty years, by contrast, owns nothing and can still get evicted. Moving is expensive, difficult, and takes time. Moving frequently often means losing one’s possessions because they are just to heavy/expensive to transport. (Not to mention the psychological stress.)
But I got to thinking, what if we outlawed renting?
Suppose we passed a law that only the person on the title deed (and their family,) is allowed to live in a house/condo? (With perhaps an exception for people who need temporary housing, like folks who are just going to be in town for a month.)
Yes, obviously the first thing that would happen is that all of the rental properties would go off the market. But second, everyone who owns rental properties would have to sell, because they would no longer be able to make money by renting them out. The sudden influx of properties onto the market would force prices down to a level the poor can afford.
Even if people lost their jobs, say, and then couldn’t make their mortgage payments, (assuming we still have mortgages,) they could sell their homes and get some money back.
Then, even if they ended up in a position where they couldn’t afford their house payments anymore, they could at least sell the house and get some of their money back. Eviction would be less likely, and people would have more long-term interest in maintaining and caring for their property. (In my experience, people care more for things they own than for things they are merely renting.)
Long-term, developers might have to scale back the size of the houses they build in order to sell them to poorer people who want to live in them rather than wealthy people who want to rent them out.
What would happen to the inner cities if there were no money in being a slumlord?
Much of evolutionary literature focuses on the straightforward relationship between predator and prey, or on competition between members of the same species for limited resources, mates, etc.
Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. Red touch black, friend to Jack.
The Coral snake is deadly poisonous. (Or venomous, as they say.) The Milk snake is harmless, but by mimicking the coral’s red, black, and yellow bands, it tricks potential predators into believing that it, too, will kill them.
The milk snake is a fraud, benefiting from the coral’s venom without producing any of its own.
Nature has many frauds, from the famously brood-parasitic Cuckoos to the nightmare-fuel snail eyestalk-infecting flatworms, to the fascinating mimic octopus, who can change the colors and patterns on its skin in the blink of an eye.
But just as predator and prey evolve in tandem, the prey developing new strategies to outwit predators, and predators in turn developing new strategies to defeat the prey’s new strategies. So also with fraud; animals who detect frauds out-compete those who are successfully deceived.
Complex human systems depend enormously on trust–and thus are prime breeding grounds for fraud.
Let’s take the job market. Employers want to hire the best employees possible (at the lowest possible prices, of course.) So employers do their best to (efficiently) screen potential candidates for work-related qualities like diligence, honesty, intelligence, and competency.
Employees want to eat. Diligence, honesty, years spent learning how to do a particular job, etc., are not valued because they help the company, but because they result in eating (and, if you’re lucky, reproduction.)
When there are far more employees competing against each other for jobs than there are openings, not only do employers have a chance to ratchet up the qualifications they demand in applicants, they pretty much have to. No employer trying to fill a single position has time to read 10,000 resumes, nor would it be in their interest to do so. So employers come up with requirements–often totally arbitrary–to automatically cut down the number of applications.
“Must have 3-5 years work experience” = people with 6 years of experience automatically rejected.
“Must be currently employed with no gaps in resume” = no one who took time off to have children. (This is one of the reasons birthrates are so low.)
“Must have X degree” = person with 15 years experience in the field but no degree automatically rejected.
The result, of course, is that prospective employees begin lying, cheating, or finding other deceptive ways to trick employers into reading their resumes. Workers with 6 years of experience put down 5. Workers with 2 record 3. People who can’t get into American medical schools attend Caribbean ones. “Brought donuts to the meeting” is inflated to “facilitated cross-discipline network conversation.” Whites who believe employers are practicing AA tickybox “black” on their applications. And as more and more jobs that formerly required nothing more than graduating college start requiring college degrees, more and more colleges start offering bullshit degrees so that everyone can get one.
The higher the competition and more arbitrary the rules, the higher the incentives for cheating.
It began with a test-fixing scandal so massive that it led to 2,000 arrests, including top politicians, academics and doctors. Then suspects started turning up dead. What is the truth behind the Vyapam scam that has gripped India? …
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and admissions to state-run medical colleges. When the scandal first came to light in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat the exams. …
The list of top state officials placed under arrest reads like the telephone directory of the Madhya Pradesh secretariat. The most senior minister in the state government, Laxmikant Sharma – who had held the health, education and mining portfolios – was jailed, and remains in custody, along with his former aide, Sudhir Sharma, a former schoolteacher who parlayed his political connections into a vast mining fortune.
One of the things I find amusing (and, occasionally, frustrating) about Americans is that many of us are still so trusting. What we call “corruption”–what we imagine as an infection in an otherwise healthy entity–is the completely normal way of doing business throughout most of the world. (I still run into people who are surprised to discover that there are a lot of scams being run out of Nigeria. Nigerian scammers? Really? You don’t say.)
It’s good to get out of your bubble once in a while. Go hang out on international forums with people from the third world, and listen in on some of the conversations between Indians and Pakistanis or Indians and Chinese. Chinese and Indians constantly accuse each other’s countries of engaging in massive educational cheating.
Maybe they know something we don’t.
People want jobs because jobs mean eating; a good job means good eating, ergo every family worth its salt wants their children to get good jobs. But in a nation with 1.2 billion people and only a few good jobs, competition is ferocious:
In 2013, the year the scam was first revealed, two million young people in Madhya Pradesh – a state the size of Poland, with a population greater than the UK – sat for 27 different examinations conducted by Vyapam. Many of these exams are intensely competitive. In 2013, the prestigious Pre-Medical Test (PMT), which determines admission to medical school, had 40,086 applicants competing for just 1,659 seats; the unfortunately named Drug Inspector Recruitment Test (DIRT), had 9,982 candidates striving for 16 vacancies in the state department of public health.
For most applicants, the likelihood of attaining even low-ranking government jobs, with their promise of long-term employment and state pensions, is incredibly remote. In 2013, almost 450,000 young men and women took the exam to become one of the 7,276 police constables recruited that year – a post with a starting salary of 9,300 rupees (£91) per month. Another 270,000 appeared for the recruitment examination to fill slightly more than 2,000 positions at the lowest rank in the state forest service.
Since no one wants to spend their life picking up trash or doing back-breaking manual labor in the hot sun, the obvious solution is to cheat:
The impersonators led the police to Jagdish Sagar, a crooked Indore doctor who had set up a lucrative business that charged up to 200,000 rupees (£2,000) to arrange for intelligent but financially needy medical students to sit examinations on behalf of applicants who could afford to pay.
The families of dumb kids pay for smart kids to take tests for them.
In 2009, police claim, Sagar and Mohindra [Vypam’s systems analyst/data entry guy] had a meeting in Sagar’s car in Bhopal’s New Market bazaar, where the doctor made an unusual proposition: he would give Mohindra the application forms of groups of test-takers, and Mohindra would alter their “roll numbers” to ensure they were seated together so they could cheat from each other. According to Mohindra’s statement to the police, Sagar “offered to pay me 25,000 rupees (£250) for each roll number I changed.”
This came to be known as the “engine-bogie” system. The “engine” would be one of Sagar’s impostors – a bright student from a medical college, taking the exam on behalf of a paying customer – who would also pull along the lower-paying clients sitting next to him by supplying them with answers. … From 2009 to 2013, the police claim, Mohindra tampered with seating assignment for at least 737 of Sagar’s clients taking the state medical exam. …
Mohinda also began just straight-up filling in the bubbles and altering exam scores in the computer for rich kids whose parents had paid him off.
Over the course of only two years, police allege, Mohindra and Trivedi conspired to fix the results of 13 different examinations – for doctors, food inspectors, transport constables, police constables and police sub-inspectors, two different kinds of school teachers, dairy supply officers and forest guards – which had been taken by a total of 3.2 million students.
Remember this if you ever travel to India.
But merely uncovering the scam does not make it go away; witnesses begin dying:
In July 2014, the dean of a medical college in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Dr SK Sakalle – who was not implicated in the scandal, but had reportedly investigated fraudulent medical admissions and expelled students accused of obtaining their seats by cheating – was found burned to death on the front lawn of his own home. …
In an interview with the Hindustan Times earlier this year, a policeman, whose own son was accused in the scam and died in a road accident, advanced an unlikely yet tantalising theory. He argued that the Vyapam taskforce – under pressure to conduct a credible probe that nevertheless absolved top government officials – had falsely named suspects who were already deceased in order to shield the real culprits.
A competing theory, voiced by journalists covering the scandal in Bhopal, proposes that it will be all but impossible to determine whether the deaths are connected to Vyapam, because the families of many of the dead refuse to admit that their children paid money to cheat on their exams – for fear that the police might arrest the bereaved parents as well.
For India’s poor (and middle class,) scamming is a dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t affair:
“My brother was arrested four months ago for paying someone to ensure he cleared the police constable exam in 2012,” the man told me. “Some people in our village said, ‘This is Madhya Pradesh, nothing happens without money.’ My brother sold his land and paid them 600,000 rupees.”
In August that year, he was one of 403,253 people who appeared for the recruitment test to become a police constable. … Four months after his marriage, his name popped up in the scam, he lost his job and he was hauled off to prison.
“So now my brother has a wife and his first child, but no job, no land, no money, no prospects and a court case to fight,” the man said. “You can write your story, but write that this is a state of 75 million corrupt people, where there is nothing in the villages and if a man comes to the city in search of an honest day’s work, the politicians and their touts demand money and then throw him into jail for paying.”
“Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.” — Deuteronomy 24:15
I would like to note that in many of these cases, the little guys in the scam, while arguably acting dishonestly and cheating against their neighbors, are basically well-intentioned people who don’t see any other options besides bribing their way into jobs. In the end, these guys often get screwed (or end up dead.)
It’s the people who are taking the bribes and fixing the tests and creating bullshit degrees and profiting off people’s houses burning down who are getting rich off everyone else and ensuring that cheating is the only way to get ahead.
These people are parasites.
Parasitism increases complexity in the host organism, which increases complexity in the parasite in turn:
With selection, evolution can also produce more complex organisms. Complexity often arises in the co-evolution of hosts and pathogens,[7] with each side developing ever more sophisticated adaptations, such as the immune system and the many techniques pathogens have developed to evade it. For example, the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes sleeping sickness, has evolved so many copies of its major surface antigen that about 10% of its genome is devoted to different versions of this one gene. This tremendous complexity allows the parasite to constantly change its surface and thus evade the immune system through antigenic variation.[8]
Animals detect and expel parasites; parasites adapt to avoid detection.
So, too, with human scams.
We tend to increase complexity by adding paperwork.
A few people cheat on their taxes, so the IRS begins randomly auditing people to make sure everyone is complying. A few people refuse to hire African Americans, so companies must keep records on the ethnic/racial identities of everyone they interview for a job. An apartment complex fears it could get sued if a car hits a bicyclist in the parking lot, so it forbids all of the children there from riding their bikes. A college gets sued after a mentally ill student commits suicide on campus, so the college starts expelling all mentally ill students.
Now, while I appreciate certain kinds of complexity (like the sort that results in me having a computer to write on and an internet to post on,) the variety that arises due to a constant war between parasites and prey doesn’t seem to have much in the way of useful side effects. Perhaps I am missing something, but it does not seems like increasing layers of oversight and bureaucracy in an attempt to cut down cheating makes the world any better–rather the opposite, in fact.
Interestingly, fevers are not diseases nor even directly caused by disease, but by your own immune system responding to disease. By increasing your internal temperature, your body aims to kill off the infection or at least make things too inhospitable for it to breed. Fevers (within a moderate range) are your friends.
They are still unpleasant and have a seriously negative effect on your ability to get anything else done.
An ill patient can do little more than lie in bed and hope for recovery; a sick society does nothing but paperwork.
Certainly the correct response to parasitism is to root it out–paperwork, fever, and all. But the long-term response should focus on restructuring institutions so they don’t become infected in the first place.
In human systems, interdependence in close-knit communities is probably the most reliable guard against fraud. You are unlikely to prosper by cheating your brother (genetically, after all, his success is also half your success,) and people who interact with you often will notice if you do not treat them fairly.
Tribal societies have plenty of problems, but at least you know everyone you’re dealing with.
Modern society, by contrast, forces people to interact with and dependent upon thousands of people they don’t know, many they’ve met only once and far more they’ve never met at all. When I sit down to dinner, I must simply trust that the food I bought at the grocery store is clean, healthy, and unadultarated; that no one has contaminated the milk, shoved downer cows into the chute, or failed to properly wash the tomatoes. When I drive I depend on other drivers to not be drunk or impaired, and upon the city to properly maintain the roads and direct traffic. When I apply for jobs I hope employers will actually read my resume and not just hire the boss’s nephew; when I go for a walk in the park, I hope that no one will mug me.
With so many anonymous or near-anonymous interactions, it is very easy for people to defraud others and then slip away, never to be seen again. A mugger melts into a crowd; the neighbor whose dog shat all over your yard moves and disappears. Twitter mobs strike out of the blue and then disperse.
So how do we get, successfully, from tight-knit tribes to million+ people societies with open markets?
How do modern countries exist at all?
I suspect that religion–Christianity in the West, probably others elsewhere–has played a major role in encouraging everyone to cooperate with their neighbors by threatening them with eternal damnation if they don’t.
6 Do not take a pair of millstones—not even the upper one—as security for a debt, because that would be taking a person’s livelihood as security.
7 If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you. …
10 When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge.11 Stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you.12 If the neighbor is poor, do not go to sleep with their pledge in your possession.13 Return their cloak by sunset so that your neighbor may sleep in it. Then they will thank you, and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God.
14 Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns.15 Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. …
17 Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.18 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.
To be fair, we have to credit Judaism for Deuteronomy.
Here we have organized religion attempting to bridge the gap between tribalism and universal morality. Enslaving one of your own is an offense punishable by death, but there is no command to rescue the enslaved of other nations. You must treat your own employees well, whether they come from your own tribe or other tribes.
In tribal societies, justice is run through the tribe. People with no families or clans–like orphans and foreigners–therefore cannot access the normal routes to justice.
The new barbarian rulers also disliked the death penalty, but for different reasons. There was a strong feeling that every adult male had a right to use violence and to kill, if need be. This right was of course reciprocal. If you killed a man, his death could be avenged by his brothers and other male kinsmen. The prospect of a vendetta thus created a ‘balance of terror’ that kept violence within limits. So, initially, the barbarians allowed capital punishment only for treason, desertion, and cowardice in combat (Carbasse, 2011, p. 35). [bold mine]
Frost quotes:
[The Salic Law] is a pact (pactus) “concluded between the Franks and their chiefs,” for the specific purpose of ensuring peace among the people by “cutting short the development of brawls.” This term evidently means private acts of vengeance, the traditional vendettas that went on from generation to generation. In place of the vengeance henceforth forbidden, the law obliged the guilty party to pay the victim (or, in the case of murder, his family) compensation. This was an indemnity whose amount was very precisely set by the law, which described with much detail all of the possible damages, this being to avoid any discussion between the parties and make [murder] settlements as rapid, easy, and peaceful as possible. […] This amount was called the wergild, the “price of a man.” The victim’s family could not refuse the wergild, and once it was paid, the family had to be satisfied. They no longer had the right to avenge themselves (Carbasse, 2011, pp. 33-34).
This situation began to change in the 12th century. One reason was that the State had become stronger. But there also had been an ideological change. The State no longer saw itself as an honest broker for violent disputes that did not challenge its existence. Jurists were now arguing that the king must punish the wicked to ensure that the good may live in peace.
In a tribal system, a victim with no family has no one to bring a suit on their behalf, if they are murdered, there is no one to pay weregild to. This leaves orphans and “foreigners” without any access to justice.
Thus Deuteronomy’s command not to mistreat them (or widows.) They aren’t protected under tribal law, but they are under Yahweh’s.
The threat of divine punishment (and promise of rewards for good behavior,) may have encouraged early Christians to cooperate with strangers. People who would cheat others now have both their own consciences and the moral standards of their Christian neighbors to answer to. The ability to do business with people outside of one’s own family or clan without constant fear of getting ripped off is a necessary prerequisite for the development of free markets, modern economies, and million+ nations. (In short, universalism.)
In the absence of universalist societies that effectively discourage cheating, groups that protect their own will out-compete groups that do not. The Amish, for example, have grown from 5,000 to 300,000 people over the past century (despite significant numbers of Amish children choosing to leave the society every generation.)
(By contrast, my own family has largely failed to reproduce itself–my cousins are all childless, and I have no second cousins.)
The Amish avoid outsiders, keeping their wealth within their own communities. This probably also allows them to steer clear of cheaters and scammers (unlike everyone who lost money in the 2008 housing crash or the 2001 stock market crash.) As insular groups go, the Amish don’t seem too bad–I haven’t heard any reports of them stealing people’s chickens or scamming elderly widows out of their life’s savings.
A great deal of fiction–possibly the majority–is dedicated to the fantasy of having some control over your life. Superman and Batman are strong enough that they can beat up (or otherwise stop) the bad guys, and don’t get sued or put in prison for their vigilante activities. Luke Skywalker gets in a little plane and shoots a laser beam into a hole and thereby brings down an entire Death Star. Voldemort gets pissed off at everyone for treating him shittily and so becomes the world’s most powerful wizard and sets out to make the world burn; Harry Potter uses his own magic power to defeat evil.
One of the most horrible villains in the Harry Potter series isn’t over-the top, sad-backstory Voldemort, but Dolores Umbridge–a plump Hogwartz teacher who dresses in pink, decorates with fluffy pink curtains and china plates with pictures of kittens on them, and makes Harry Potter write apologies in his own blood for, IIRC, having honestly states that Voldemort was back. She is the image of sweetness and propriety while torturing students and helping Voldemort, and there’s nothing Harry and his friends can do to stop her from using the official wizarding world bureaucracy to take over his school, at least until they lure her into the forest and trick her into getting abducted by centaurs.
In real life there are many Doloreses, but no centaurs.
In real life, it is quite illegal to get in a fight (of any kind) with anyone. Even cursing at someone can be “verbal assault.” The desire for revenge against those who’ve wronged you may be a basic human instinct (I am quite certain it is,) but revenge is illegal. Oh, yes, the state can take revenge–the state can lock people up or even put them to death–but ordinary citizens are not allowed to track down miscreants and beat the shit out of them. It is very, very illegal.
What do you do when someone wrongs you?
Here, fill out this form; talk to these people. If your case matches our criteria, something may be done–in months, or years. Here’s some more paperwork.
Nope, sorry, you don’t meet the criteria. There is nothing you can do.
The sheer amount of paperwork to keep track of in American society is overwhelming. I have friends who’ve lived in both America and China; the Chinese do not suffer under half the paperwork burden we do.
“Reducing overhead” remains one of my #1 political agenda items.
Paperwork, bureaucracy, and red tape are crushing our economy. They are probably worse than military spending, welfare, and everything else people hate that the government does combined. And they destroy people’s lives by forcing them to spend their time doing fucking paperwork instead of living.
And we do paperwork because we aren’t allowed to punch each other anymore.
If a mining company destroys a community by dumping poison waste into the local drinking water, the natural consequence is that the affected locals find the CEO, tie him to a chair, and drop him in the river. Today you file a class-action lawsuit and petition the local city officials to switch drinking water sources and groan in frustration as nothing happens for three decades straight.
Living in cities (as most of us do) means coming into constant contact with other people. Some of those people are nice, some are mean, and most are just irrelevant. You pass them on your way to work (or they pass you), ignore them at lunch and try not to make eye contact with them on the street.
Don’t make too much noise; the neighbors might hear you.
I was just talking to someone who was vociferously complaining that their neighbors “slam their car doors” at 2 am. And what will they do? Ask their neighbors to close their doors more softly? Or call the police to report a noise complaint? Probably the latter.
Everyone has to dial down their personalities, close up, avoid the people around themselves to avoid conflicts with the hundreds (or thousands) of people they pass by every day, otherwise lawsuits or police officers get involved.
Cities are intolerable.
There is no power in real life; no one (except maybe lawyers, police officers, and some politicians,) has any power.
For all my disagreement with them, I understand where the BLM crowd and their ilk are coming from: they feel powerless. The system is against them (it’s against everyone.)
Pretty much the only easy way to get power in modern society is to assemble a Twitter mob and attack someone. Maybe you can get them uninvited to a con, or kicked out of a university. Maybe you can just make them cry: power.
It’s the closest we come to bloodying a bully’s nose.
You might say the Twitter mob is the bully.
Yes, that’s the entire point. The bully is the one with the power.
A friend of mine was abused as a child. It’s powerless enough just being a child; everyone else is bigger than you. You must constantly obey others–teachers, parents, even older siblings and bigger kids on the playground. But to be beaten by your parents is another level entirely. And no one saved my friend. They grew up, broken, and devoted their life to becoming the biggest, baddest, meanest person around so they wouldn’t be hurt again.
Of course, then the police got them.
Even when something doesn’t involve conflict–just a simple change that would benefit everyone involved–it’s virtually impossible to get anything done. Take milk. Pediatricians overwhelmingly agree that children should drink regular–4%, full-fat, whole–milk, not low-fat or fat-free milk. The low fat milks are specialty diet products for people who are on a diet, and pediatricians don’t advise putting your kid on a diet unless they truly need to be on one, because calorie restriction can be really unhealthy when your body is supposed to be growing. Despite this, my kids’ school only serves low-fat and fat free milk, and since no one who has the actual power to make purchasing decisions gives a shit that this is actually unhealthy for kids, only an insane amount of protesting on my part (say, convincing a few hundred parents to sign a petition to change the milk) could get them to change the milk to the variety it is supposed to be.
And this is accompanied by the infuriating feeling that people are only pretending to listen, because they never actually change anything.
So the best we can do is put on a movie or pic up a book and read about someone else–the girl who wins the super handsome hunk, the hero who defeats the evil bad guy–who gets to be powerful and control their life.
Ruined church at Freneystown (credit Kevin Higgins)
I noticed something funny while attempting to weed the garden this morning: the most difficult part to weed is right next to (or inside!) the walls. The middle of the garden I can just mow. Two swipes with a fancy cutting machine and the grass and weeds are all under control. In between the carrots and tomatoes I can easily trim, hoe, stomp down the weeds, or just spread ground-cover cloth and top it with mulch.
But getting right up to the wall is tricky. Often the weeds are growing flush against it, if not into it. The mower can’t get in there. You have to pull each weed away from the wall–sometimes through the wall–before you can cut it. Vines love the wall and slowly beak down the physical structure of its surface.
Like the Irish, I have piled up my plowed up rocks into a wall; grass grows between the stones and by the end of the season, the wall has half-disappeared. At that point, just pulling up the weeds disturbs the wall, because their roots are growing under the wall. It’s often faster to just move the wall and then put it back, crushing the weeds. (Or, of course, not letting them grow there to start with.
Without maintenance, the rocks would shelter the very plants that split them apart and pull them down.
So I was reading about the building of the trans-continental railroad (and Napoleon) and wondering to myself why so many of our politicians seem utterly lacking in leadership skills like actual competence or ability to get things done.
Napoleon rose to the top of the French Military (as far as I know,) by winning battles. Railroad tycoons got to be railroad tycoons by building railroads. Steve Jobs got to be famous by … innovating in product design? Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and understood the necessity of building a universal power grid so he could sell them to everyone.
George Washington was a leader, not a politician. He got into office because everyone involved decided, based on the job he’d done leading the army during the Revolutionary War, that he’d be a good national leader in peacetime.
But systems have unexpected consequences–you get what you select for, not what you intend to select for. The founders wanted voters to simply come to a rational agreement about who would be the country’s best leader. Since then, we have accrued dozens of layers of complications–political parties and primary votes; super pacs and campaign ads. I have no doubt the founders would have despised it all.
In our case, the electoral system now selects for people who are good at winning elections.
I was originally going to use La Griffe du Lion’s Smart Fraction Theory to calculate this, but then I discovered that it doesn’t make any practical difference, so went with the simpler metric of IQ.
We have a correlation, but it’s not huge. There are a few states that seem like obvious outliers–the two states with the highest GDP per cap were Alaska (oil) and Delaware (tax haven of some sort.) Among under-performers, I speculate that Maine is being held back by geography (it’s really cold.) California has a low average IQ, but an abnormally wide IQ range, due to the presence of Stanford and Silicon Valley and the like, while West Virginia may have the opposite problem of an unusually narrow IQ range (it also has the problem of being in the mountains.) In these two cases, if I could actually calculate the smart fraction instead of using Griffe’s assumption of Gaussian distribution around the average, I’d probably get a more accurate result.
I decided to try running the regression again without the states with obvious external factors–California, Hawaii, Nevada, Alaska, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, and Vermont–like tourism, climate, gambling, or oil. I did not eliminate outliers that did not have (potentially) clear reasons for their under- or over- performance (for example, I have no idea why Idaho should do worse than Wyoming. I also left in Louisiana, whose over-performance may be due to having a significant port and/or tourism.)
Potential conclusions:
Random chance matters. An oil boom in your area, nice beaches, or a long, harsh winter can push a state (or country) into wealth or poverty.
I suspect that redistribution strategies (ie, welfare) prevent states from dropping below a certain level, hence the near-flat line around $32,000. (Outliers at Mississippi and W. Virginia.)
Number two ought to be obvious, but for some reason people fail miserably at it. If the supply of something is infinite–or you operate as though it were–then you have no incentive to preserve it. You may simply keep using and using it. Obviously sunlight is “valuable” in the sense that you cannot live without it, but how much would you pay for it? Nothing, for it is infinitely available. Would you conserve sunlight? Of course not. But a scuba diver pays for air and conserves it carefully, for air beneath the waves is dear indeed.
That which people own, they care for. That which they do not own, they frequently destroy. Compare the state of an owned house to a rental to a squat. These are different kinds of ownership–a renter owns a right to live in a house for a while, though not forever; a squatter may be evicted at any time. A patent lets you develop an idea by guaranteeing you the profits from its sales; an employment contract entitle you to another person’s labor or the products of it.
Without ownership, people cannot invest resources. Would you plant crops on a piece of land that might get bulldozed tomorrow to put up an office building? Would you put up an office building if squatters might be allowed to turn it into apartments tomorrow?
I started thinking about all of this in the context of the Taino, Caribbean Indians who were wiped out by the Spaniards about 500 years ago.
(Hey, did you know that we are temporally closer to the American Revolution than the American Revolution was to Columbus?)
The Spaniards basically treated the Indians like an infinite resource: they’d send them into the fields without food or water and beat them if they stopped working until they dropped dead about 36 hours later. Then they’d send out the next batch of Indians, to work until they fell dead.
When they ran out of Indians, they started importing Africans.
The treatment of slaves in Africa look a lot like the treatment of the Taino, except that no one ran out of Africans. At the funeral of King Gezo, King of Dahomey, Africa, “his loving subjects manifested their sorrow by sacrificing eight hundred negroes to his memory.” Efunsetan Aniwura, a Nigerian chieftess, was praised in song:
“The woman, who instils fear in others,
the fearsome one, who slaughters slaves to celebrate Id-el-Kabir.
Efunsetan is one force, Ibadan is another.
The valiant that challenges the Almighty God,
if the most high does not answer her on time,
Efunsetan leaves the earth to go and meet him in Heaven…”
It cost money to bring African slaves to the Caribbean, so they were slightly scarcer than in Africa and treated, correspondingly, slightly better. Not a lot better, but better than the Taino.
Getting worked to death in the fields (or, if you got captured by the Aztecs, getting butchered for dinner), is obviously labor’s worst-case-scenario. This happens when you have:
No state to protect you, and
Skills that are in near infinite supply.
(Thus also the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.)
There is an extremely large supply of humans, whose lives are of infinitely greater value to themselves than to anyone else.
A functional state protects its people from harm; in return, the people owe the state their allegiance. A state that is not owned is worthless–the German people do not “own” their state any more, because they do not have the right to bar others from it–a people that is not protected by their state will soon be dead. (edited) Skilled workers demand better wages than unskilled ones, because fewer people can do their job. Work a skilled employee to death and you might not find a replacement.
Perhaps labor’s best-case-scenario is to have one’s educational expenses covered by a corporation (or society itself) in exchange for a number of years of service to that corporation (or society), in order to produce a small number of highly-skilled people who will be able to command high salaries and good living conditions. An exam or other qualification standards to ensure that inferior workers don’t dilute the profession also helps.
A company cannot afford to invest in training employees if it cannot guarantee a return on its investment–that is, some right of ownership on the employees future labor. Unskilled laborers have little of value to offer on their own in return for education, except the promise of their future labor.
Once the debt is paid, the laborer owns his labor, though he may continue his contract with his company if he so desires.
In the US, doctors and lawyers have it pretty good–well paid and hardly ever worked to death. Entrance to these professions is tightly restricted–only people who have received legal or medical degrees from accredited colleges and passed an exam on the subject are legally allowed to practice. Individuals bear the cost of their initial educations (usually funded based on the promise of future wages paid back to the banks,) but lawyers and doctors then endure many years of on-the-job training–fellowships and residency for doctors, “associate” status for lawyers. At the end of this apprenticeship, lawyers hope to become owners of the company–partners–and doctors, attending physicians.
Wages have stagnated in America since the 60s while owners’ share of profits has increased, most likely because the labor market itself has massively increased due to mass immigration and the entry of women into the workforce. One of the great ironies of our modern age is unions advocating for increased immigration.
So I was thinking yesterday about the idea of a country as a thing that people own.
Suppose we decide to run the US like a corporation. We issue about 320 million shares of stock; each share entitles you to vote for the CEO and entitles you to 1/320th of the government’s profits. (Why shouldn’t the government have profits? If Harvard can run a profit off its investments, why not the gov’t?)
Can people sell their shares?
Why not? It’s certainly more entertaining if they can. We could see the emergence of a market where shares of the government are bought and sold–initially very cheaply, as about 40% of people realize they don’t vote, anyway, and try to sell off their stock for quick cash. It could take quite a while for the initial glut to clear, with some people (millionaires, stock investors,) buying up large numbers of votes.
There’d be a lot of angsty hand-wringing during the process about the inevitable result that a lot of white rich dudes would be buying up the votes from poor blacks and Hispanics. But eventually the market would clear, and life would go on.
Eventually we’d get mutual funds where people could invest in part of a vote (or multiple votes.) I’d expect the prices on these to go up shortly before an election, leading to some interesting activity in stock futures (and now you could short the election, hahah.)
2. Who is allowed to buy a vote? Can anyone do it, or do you have to be a citizen?
Maybe “citizenship” simply means you own a vote. I guess everyone could vote on it.
3. Stock shares can be inherited, but new stock is not issued.
Issuing new stock dilutes the value of the old stock. This is supply and demand. Suppose there are ten votes for sale, at $10 million dollars each. You buy one. Then the government issues new stock, and 30 more votes go on the market. Assuming our market works linearly, your vote is now worth $2.5 million dollars.
Inspired by Infowarrior1’s comments on Theory: the inverse relationship between warfare and homicide, I got to thinking about “What is a state?” (Please note that I am sort of thinking out loud, so I can’t promise that I’ve got every detail worked out. Feedback is welcome and useful.)
I tend to take a pretty expansive definition of “government,” including not just the formally recognized thing people mean when they say government, but also the entire power structure of the entire society, including your boss, newspaper publishers, popular people, religious leaders, and even parents. (Note: most of the time when I use the word “government,” I mean it in the normal way that people would understand it.) Under the normal definition, the gang violence is just homicide, but under the expensive, gangs are a form of small-scale government (they exert power over others, after all,) and violence between them is warfare.
Gangs do many things that formal governments do: they engage in trade, regulate contracts, tax people, punish people who break their laws, control territory, and engage in warfare. The Mafia clearly has its origins in the family-based governing structure of Sicily/southern Italy, and creates a structure within which its family members benefit from government contracts and the like. The Japanese Yakuza “began as a temporary staffing agency on the docks of Kobe” and host “an annual rice cake-making event at the start of the year in which the gang distributes food and booze to the locals. … And after the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the great disaster of March 2011, the earthquake and tsunami and Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, the Yamaguchi-gumi was quick to provide aid in the form of blankets, food, water, and shelter.” (source)
(It has long been somewhat of a mystery to me why the formal gov’t doesn’t just treat gangs like invading armies, and simply shoot everyone involved until they stop trying to occupy American cities.)
So what is the difference between such groups and formal governments? If we call a formal government a “state” and these other organizations “non-state governments”, then what is a state? Is ISIS a state? Yes, it seems to have enough of the normal characteristics of a state to call it a state. Is a gang a state? No, clearly a gang is not a state. What about Somalia? No, not a state so much as a state-shaped hole in the map where other states don’t want to go. The Somali government simply does not exert an organizing influence over its own territory.
Which got me thinking about the state as an institution that increases organizational complexity of a society/aids in its homeostatic maintenance within a specific territory.
By contrast, bandits, while they exert power over others, decrease a system’s organizational complexity by interfering with normal function in order to shunt other people’s wealth to themselves.
I’m sure you’ve heard the claim that “taxation is theft.” This has always seemed like a fallacious argument, especially since most things that taxes get spent on are actually programs that people want and support, and so such conversations generally lead to painstakingly laying out the fact that libertarianism doesn’t deal very well with multipolar trapsyet again, which, sorry, starts quickly feeling like explaining to my kids again that, yes, things really do cost money and no, people aren’t going to just give you what you want in life because you want them to. (Not that libertarianism is all bad–just the vacuous repetition of certain catchphrases.)
At any rate, a legitimate government uses its taxes to increase the overall order of the system, while an illegitimate one uses its power to decrease order. The Somali government does not increase (or maintain) the overall order of Somalia, so it is not a state.
Let’s switch for a moment from Somalia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ne Zaire, ne the Belgian Congo.
I have mentioned before Josephine and Frederick’s account of their attempt to drive from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa–a distance of about a thousand miles, or 1,500 km–in the DRC. It’s a great story, so I recommend you read it yourself, but I’m going to highlight a few relevant bits:
When the Belgians ruled the area, they built a lot of roads. Today, if you are brave enough to go there, you can see the condition the roads are in:
There are a few good roads in the country–built by Belgian-run NGOs, mining companies (I believe these are generally run by the Chinese), and Catholic missionaries, eg:
“That night we talked for hours with Frère Louis. Our little adventures here dissapear in the nothing compared to everything he went trough. He had been in DRC for over 40 years, he stayed during all the wars. He had to abandon everything and run for his live three times as teams were sent out to kill him. But he always returned. Many books could be filled with his adventures.
He is also responsible for most of the bridges Katanga. He build hundreds of bridges himself. He has a small working budget from Franciscans, but he funds most of it all by himself. He has put every last penny in the Congolese people. That is why his house in Luena was so rundown.
He also told us about the Mayi-Mayi rebels that still roam the jungle. We were not prepared for the horror stories we would hear. I still have problems giving these stories a place. They are not just stories though, he gave us a 100 page document with his interviews of victims. If you thought, like us, that cannibalism was something that belonged in comic books and dusty museums about Africa. You are wrong. :cry:” [source]
Not only do the Congolese themselves not maintain their own roads, they contribute to their destruction by digging holes in them to trap passing vehicles so they can demand money in exchange for helping them out. Likewise, many of the “tolls” charged of passing vehicles go not to road maintenance (a legit reason to charge people for using a road,) but to line the pockets of the people charging the tolls.
In other words, while many Congolese are trying to use the roads to conduct trade and transport goods, others are actively destroying the roads and sabotaging that trade in order to benefit off other people’s hard work. A man who charges tolls in order to pay for improvements to the road is contributing to the structural complexity of society; a man who charges tolls to line his own pockets is a bandit.
In response to a comment in the thread–“Absolutely great to read you ! Belgians in the Congo ! You must be nuts ! “–Frederik responds:
I presume you are referring to the “not so nice” role Belgium has had in the history of Congo. For a while I thought that would be a problem as well, but it isn’t. Just about anything that still exists in Congo is made by the Belgians. The older generation who had their education from the Belgians really have fond memories of that era. And at the moment Belgium is still one of the main funders of the country (via aid). The dark pages of history during the Leopold 2 era is not what the Congolese people think about. All in all I think being Belgian was actually a plus. As a matter of fact, a lot of people asked how things were going with the “war” in Belgium :-o” [source]
Also on the subject:
“Occasionally (and I must admit, it was a rare event) we meet nice people. Like this guy on his bike. [picture] He stopped to say hello. He was a well educated person who previsouly worked as an accountant for a big company. The company is no longer there so now he survives like everybody else by trading a few things. [picture] He was a good example of the older generation. They grew up in a prosperous (relative) Congo and have seen it go downhill. They still have the pride every person should have. The younger generation grew up in disastrously f*cked up country and lack the pride. Why should they, they know they do not get any chances?
It is that old generation that longs back to the colonial time. They acknowledge there were a lot of problems in that period and that they were discriminated by the white colonisator. But at least they had a functional country. They had roads and schools. They had jobs and could buy supplies. And above all, there was stability. Now there is nothing but uncertainty.. waiting for the next war to start.” [source]
And on a related note:
If there is any thing you can find anywhere in the world it is Coca-Cola. They should know how to get their goods in the country. We had no response on mails, so we called them up. Their answer was pretty short: They do not have a distribution network outside the major cities in Congo😯 And it proved to be true, Congo is the first country we have visited were Coca-cola is hard to get once you leave the major cities.” [source]
Someone else–Christian P.–comments on his own experiences,
Before entering the country, we did not really know what to expect and we had the same exact nervosity as you were reffering. And it never went away.
The place is hard to imagine and describe. I have travelled a lot in Africa but the DRC is like nothing else. And I have only spend a few days there….
The look on people’s face is different. The vibe on the street is intense. It seems like everything is on the verge of exploding. I had never seen that many guns in one place. There is no bank, no guidebooks, no backpackers, no tour bus, no hotels, nothing. It truly still is the dark side. [source]
And I haven’t even mentioned all of the times random villagers tried to hack Frederik and Josephine to pieces with machetes, which is a definite deterrent to trade!
Like Somalia, the DRC isn’t a country so much as a country-shaped hole in the map. What government there is tends to be local, tribal, or run by folks like the mining companies or Catholic missions, and much of the time, what authority exists is actively undermining any larger systems of social/economic complexity for their own short term gain.
But what about states that are clearly “states”, but are clearly bad for the people under their rule? Soviet land collectivization in Ukraine, for example, killed 2.5–7.5 million people. Collectivization caused mass famines throughout the USSR; the exact number of lives lost is unknown, but estimated between 5.5 and 8 million deaths. The previous Soviet famine of 1921 had killed another 6 million people. Depending on whose definitions we use, communist regimes are generally blamed for somewhere between 20 and 100 million civilian deaths during the 20th century.
(How is it, then, that some of the nicest people I know are communists? Are they just idiots?)
Communist governments, I think it is safe to say, are state-level bandits.
“–Frederik responds: