Thinking About Alliances

In my dissertation work, I'm attempting to develop ethical guidelines for when non-state groups have the right to go to war (that is, when they have Right Authority). My claim is that non-state groups can often represent their communities as well or better than state governments can, and the current argument that only states are allowed to go to war is absurd.

At the moment, my current obstacle has to do with one of the traditional requirements for Right Authority: the Authority's ability to control and discipline its subordinates. Basically, if fighters on your side are running rampant, attacking civilians, disregarding your orders, and ignoring attempts to broker ceasefires with the other side, then there is a serious problem with your claim of being a Right Authority. That's the way that the issue is presented, anyway. Underlying this treatment is the assumption that armed groups are part of a hierarchical chain of command.

The problem is that when you look at conflicts like the Mindanao struggle in the Philippines, many armed men are part of mostly-autonomous bands that might affiliate with MILF one day, with Abu Sayyaf the next, and pop off for a spot of independent banditry on Sundays. While they are certainly influenced by the demands of the organized group leaders, to call them part of a stable chain of command is ludicrous. Yet, given that, should the existence of such groups harm the standing of the organized units like MILF? That is, should you view such groups as examples of a failure of MILF discipline? Or should they be viewed in another way altogether, one that better fits the facts of the case?

Right now, I'm leaning toward the latter view. I think the best way to look at such groups is as members of an alliance with the major armed organizations. And that brings us to a key point: while political theorists have wrangled back and forth over the ethics of warfare, there has been practically zero discussion that I can find of the ethics of wartime alliances. Can you ally with bad actors? What obligations to control them might you have? If you do ally with bad actors and then fail to control them from committing atrocities or the like, does that ethical breach stand on its own or does it harm your own standing as a Right Authority?

I don't know the answer yet (though I suspect I'll be doing a lot more reading about civil wars, such as this book that comes highly recommended by some big names in the field). But I find it encouraging as a budding young scholar to discover such a rich vein of apparently untapped questions—especially since the topic of ethical alliances could have applications ranging from international relations, to civil wars, to even the institutional workings of democracy itself.

When Hubris and Poverty Mix

I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger "secular" cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin's previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin's theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin's work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges "an oversupply of elites." This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue's muscle.

In Turchin's research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

Yet a disparity in wealth is not the only way to create an oversupply of elites. Joseph Schumpeter, in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, proposed that the growth of an intellectual class was profoundly dangerous to society. Intellectuals, he argued, are alienated from the society around them and believe themselves to be the natural leaders of a new, better, society that they will create. Philosopher Robert Nozick expands on this theme, arguing that intellectuals are those who are most successful in the artificial environment of the classroom; when (after two decades of endless success in school) they are exposed to the unforgiving "real world," many of them cannot handle no longer being the top dog. Seething with resentment and humiliation, they turn to radical ideologies and reject the society around them. After all, they should be the leaders! Aren't they brilliant, aren't they better than those who got C's on their tests?

It seems to me that many more people today aspire to being an "elite" than ever before. And the expansion of university education is to blame. For people in the "softer" side of the academic world, college does a poor job of preparing one for success in the real economy. At the same time, college students are constantly being told that they are America's elite—never mind that nowadays, around 68% of high school students go on to college! Combine that with the prevalence of revolutionary ideologies on campus, and we have a dangerous brew. (No coincidence that the Peruvian Maoist group Shining Path was begun by a university professor, and its initial members were hundreds of his students.)

Not to say that economic factors aren't at work either. American politics is becoming a contest of billionaire against billionaire, quite tedious to watch, quite alarming to live through. It remains to be seen whether the growth of mass connectivity will break this dynamic, or feed into it.

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It's called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

And Now, For Some Shameless Self-Promotion

There's been a slight change to the layout of this blog. As you look on the right sidebar, you can now see a new section titled "My Books," with a pretty picture just underneath.

As one might surmise, this is because I have published a book—The Best Congress Money Can Buy, a collection of short stories about political possibility. It is presently available on Amazon Kindle and will be available in hardcopy as well within a week or two. The first story is available for free on the Amazon page (which you can access by clicking on the image in the sidebar) using the "Look Inside" feature. Check it out!

If you ever wanted to read about replacing taxation with crowdfunded governments, congressmen who sell their votes to the highest bidder, or what happens when prisons are replaced with workhouses, give my new book a try. Plus, if you are a member of Amazon Prime, you can borrow the book for free on Kindle, and I get paid anyway—which is a pretty sweet deal.

God-willing, this will be the first of many publications. If you like it, please let people know by leaving a reader review on Amazon. Thank you all! Without my readers, I'm just another political nut talking to himself...

Investing in True Value

(I should preface this post by saying that nothing in here constitutes a recommendation to buy or sell securities, etc.)

Working in finance as I have for years now, I am growing more and more convinced that our societal attitudes toward saving and investing have gone haywire. We now assume automatically that when one saves, one is chiefly saving for retirement or for your children's college; that such saving is primarily done through the financial markets; that there is nothing strange about (for example) keeping part of your portfolio in bonds that pay 2% while at the same time carrying a home mortgage charging 4% or more.

Our assumptions about saving are driven by a combination of government policy, such as the creation of tax-advantaged retirement savings vehicles like the 401k, and a financial industry that is eager to market itself as the midwife of your future prosperity. Yet it seems odd indeed to save for a time that might be thirty or forty years off, when nowadays people can be laid off from their job at short notice—and if you want access to your 401k money earlier than the government prefers, you must go through lots of red tape to "prove" that you are in hardship. Otherwise, you are penalized.

It also seems odd that our first reflex is to use savings to buy securities. The long-term return for investing in the stock market is on the order of 7% or 8%, depending on your time period, and that assumes that you can phlegmatically wait out the bad periods without panicking and taking excessive losses. During the bad years, the destruction of your savings also causes immeasurable psychic harm to yourself and those around you. Stocks are still a decent vehicle for those with the discipline to invest over a 40-year window and then forget about it; their whole appeal is that your money can work for you without your personal involvement, freeing up your attention for other things.

Admittedly, some can make a study of market trading and, if they are of the proper cast of mind, secure annual returns that are much higher than the average—assuming that you are not one of the many who jump into such trading with dollar signs in their eyes, who then lose everything in a blaze of misplaced optimism. But here is another odd thing. To achieve above-average success, you must essentially turn stock market trading into a second job, or even a first job. Yet the whole attraction of stocks was that they shouldn't take up more of your time, no? And if you want another job that can turn your savings into profits, there are many industries with much higher rates of return on capital than stock market trading. Moreover, trading profits must necessarily come from someone else's losses; while in other industries, or other uses of capital, there is a net creation of wealth.

I've been thinking about this more because in the last six months or so, I tried my hand at options trading with disastrous results. At about the same time, I commissioned a pair of artists to illustrate a children's story I have written, which is nearly complete. The process of overseeing the book's creation has taken some work, but not much; it is also extremely fulfilling to see a work of art being created that will have my name on it. It was cheaper to commission the art than to trade options; and once the book is published, it would need only 20 books sold per year to achieve a higher annual rate of return than the stock market average. (It's a fun story, too, and should provide joy to many readers. To me, that's a definite plus.)

(Oh, and if you want to hear when the book is published, feel free to subscribe either here or on my other blog. The title is The Princess, the Dragon, and the Baker: A Hanukka Fairy Tale.)

There are many talented artists out there desperate for commissions, and lots of people with frustrated visions for artistic projects that they lack the skill to realize. Yet how many of these people are maxing out their retirement savings and handing their money over to Wall Street, instead of taking a fraction of that money and trying to bring something new into the world? Admittedly, many such projects wouldn't return a profit; but it would be a lot more fun than investing in WorldCom or Enron.

Other opportunities exist. Want a quick way to make 50% on your money? Buy in bulk at the grocery store. What about residential solar panels? Do you think you could beat a 2% return per year on them? What about investing in your own professional skills? For some people, improving their skills at working with others, or selling to customers, or marketing, or project management could easily increase their income far more than the same amount of money would earn in the stock market.

What about maintaining your health with a gym membership? Health care costs are a huge fraction of costs in retirement, and anything that can improve your health will pay off big. Plus, you'll enjoy your life more now, and you might even be more effective in your job.

I know people who are channeling excess savings into upkeep on their houses, rather than investing in the stock market. Stock market returns are unpredictable, they reason, and inflation is surely coming given our present central banking policies. But people will always need housing.

But for some reason, speculation is the order of the day for most people. Even those skeptical of the stock or bond markets often turn to some other form of sterile speculation, such as buying gold, a metal which is allowed to languish in inert bars rather than being turned into jewelry or circuit boards or something else of added value. In part, this is because we have been trained as a society to avoid the hard work of overseeing other people and creating new things. Far easier to speculate; you might lose your money but at least you don't have to talk to anyone in the process.

Take stock of your own opportunities. Is there any way that you can use your capital to add wealth or beauty or skill to the world, instead of merely chasing speculative profits? And would such uses actually be more lucrative than the Wall Street slot machine?

Concerning Cooperatives

Thinking about how to make an economic system that is more humane, and less riven by class struggles, many thinkers have advocated for workers' cooperatives (the Distributists being one example). Cooperatives differ from the traditional capitalist firm in that workers share ownership and management of the company, as opposed to being salaried employees with no participation in the profits besides what management feels like giving them. They differ from a socialist commune in that there is still private property, and individuals can benefit directly from the success of the firm, which tends to mitigate the typical Socialist tendency of "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" and lead to more creativity and enterprise.

With these advantages, why hasn't the cooperative become more popular in the United States? In part, because cooperatives come with some drawbacks. First, if workers share ownership in the company, what happens when you hire new people? Does that mean that you've just diluted the ownership of the existing employees? If so, then there will be a tendency of the owner-employees to delay hiring more people, even if it means sacrificing business opportunities. Or do different classes of employees have different shares of ownership? If so, then the cooperative differs from a typical capitalist firm only by degrees.

How much of the ownership of the firm accrues to the investors, as opposed to the employees? After all, without the initial investment, there would likely be no business in the first place. And asking employees themselves to buy in, as some cooperatives do, places a high bar in front of poor job-seekers.

Additionally, there will always be a place in a large-sized firm for experts of some kind, who will be paid more for their expertise. Should such experts, be they management or whoever, also get a disproportionate share of the company?

All of these questions have answers, and the answers will vary depending on the particular needs of each cooperative. But even if you could come up with an ideal structure for your own situation, it is far from clear that existing law could support the ownership structure you want. To my knowledge, in the United States the most common means for employee ownership of their company is the ESOP, or Employer Stock Option Plan, and these are typically structured so that employees have partial ownership without true control. While American law has well-understood prototypes for traditional capitalist firms, like the C-Corporation or the S-Corp, there are few prototypes for worker-owned cooperatives.

If such prototypes existed, then new insights could be gained as people experimented with them and figured out what works and what does not in different contexts. And cooperatives could become more accepted in modern industrial economies—which is not to say that they would displace the typical capitalist firm entirely, or even mostly. Each firm structure solves different problems. The best structure depends on your own situation, and the imperatives of your industry. Still, more options are good.

One handicap of your typical utopian social reformers is that they tend to focus on parapolitics, action outside the system, rather than trying to work within the system. True, such parapolitics often has an effect, but you only get mass adoption of your ideas in the face of total collapse of the system you are opposing. In this case, those who seek to have the cooperative form catch on in society ought to be lobbying for its inclusion in the tax code, the same way that a C-Corp or S-Corp is. With an off-the-shelf model to work with, with well-understood procedures for sharing ownership and profits, more entrepreneurs may elect the cooperative model without any political or social goal at all—which is how you win.

Those who have read my previous pieces, advocating for a populist politics based on left-anarchism (to which I am presently giving the working title of "Arcadianism"), will not be surprised to read that such reforms of the tax code ought to be a major part of such a movement's platform. Cooperatives match very well with the social mindset of the Left, and they also cut directly against the Progressive agenda of corporate titans serving as intermediaries of the state, dictating terms to their subservient workers on behalf of grand social policies. Aside from which, cooperatives or other forms of alternative organization such as sociocracy address the problem where capitalist firms become "indigestible lumps of socialism" (a quote variously attributed to David Friedman or Kevin Carson), because of internal power hierarchies that mitigate the advantages of free trade.

Those on the libertarian right ought to be pushing for such reforms as well—but I doubt they will, which is why we need Arcadianism or something like it to play the same role in the Democratic Party that the Tea Party groups have done in the Republican Party.

The Politics of Crowds

If the characteristic method of collective action for Libertarians is the free market, then I submit that the characteristic method of collective action for left-anarchists is the crowd.

By "crowd," I do not mean "mob"; I mean more in the sense of "crowdfunding," "crowdsourcing," and the like. In a mob, individuals lose their individuality, submerging themselves in an unstoppable group tidal wave that breaks the bounds of civilized behavior without any sense of responsibility. In a crowd, on the other hand—at least in the sense that I mean—actors retain their individuality, and indeed can act to further it in ways that otherwise they could not have. The crowd allows you to participate in collective endeavors that would be beyond individuals. (Burning Man, for example, is not known for its oppressive uniformity!)

Let me explain. In a free market, the actions of individuals are coordinated with each other through the pricing mechanism, so that as each individual seeks his own interest, a larger social balance is achieved in an undirected, emergent process. (For details, read practically anything by Hayek.) In the pure form, free markets do not have collective action per se, in the sense of groups of people united around a particular goal—unless you consider "making money" to be that goal, and even then individuals compete with each other to achieve that goal. While there is some cooperation in the free market, usually around shared resources and institutions, the primary focus is on the individual's interests, which "automatically" generates social optima in a meta-interaction with the surrounding economy.

In a crowd, on the other hand, people do engage in united behavior around a shared goal—but of a special kind. Take crowdfunding, where someone publicizes a project that he wants to carry out, and others choose to contribute or not to contribute, as their own desires and identities impel. The point is not to submerge your own identity in a collective, as the Progressive corporatists tend to do. Rather, by contributing to a project you like, you are expressing your own individuality by what you choose to affiliate with. Importantly, you can choose to contribute to any number of projects if you like them, even if they might seem to be expressing different values, reflecting the multifarious nature of our identities.

The crowd is not coerced. It is free behavior, but it is also group behavior—where free individuals come together to do something as a community. And it is that aspect of community that distinguishes crowd behavior from markets.

Now, to say that crowd behavior is characteristic of the anarchist left is not to say that Libertarians, or anyone else for that matter, do not use crowdfunding from time to time. And likewise, left-anarchists do not eschew the market entirely. But they are skeptical of it at best, and it seems that they take to crowd activity much more readily than do anarcho-libertarians or the Right in general. Take Open Source Software development, an example of crowd activity in that people can contribute code to projects they like in an uncompelled manner. (Indeed, most successful crowds are structured like the "Bazaar" model  of famed OSSer Eric S. Raymond.) Engineers in general tend to lean to the Right, but it appears from casual observation that the OSS subculture has a stronger left-anarchist contingent than its anarcho-libertarian one.

Or, consider that in the last week, TechCrunch went live with its new crowdsourced sight for citizen involvement in legislation, Project Madison. Despite Madison's origins in the office of the impressive Republican congressman Darrell Issa, of the websites linked in my sidebar only the relatively left-anarchist sites BoingBoing and Slashdot reported on Project Madison going live. The conservative blogs I read did not cover the story, that I noticed. (This seems to be a strategic mistake, as the tool seems a fantastic way for small-government conservatives to get more input into active lawmaking.)

I last wrote on this blog of the need to develop a left-anarchist analogue to the Tea Party, which would contest the Democratic Party and challenge the Progressive corporatists for control, much as the Tea Party is wresting control of the Republican Party from the big-government faction. Such a left-anarchist movement (and what would it be called?) needs a platform for how it would govern differently from the Progressives. I believe that the concept of crowd action is a fruitful place to start.

Suppose, for example, that a portion of tax revenues (say 10%) were allocated not by Congress, but by the choices of individuals. Suppose that Amy Taxpayer can allocate $2000 in tax revenue between any government projects she feels like. In such a system, government departments that don't get their desired funding from Congress would be compelled to appeal directly to the people, and justify their value. If they are convincing, they may get fully funded or even overfunded, for example if Amy and her friends all decide to allocate their taxes to the Department of Education. At the same time, this would be a great way for disconnected citizens to become more engaged and knowledgable in the business of government, as they can feel more control over their own political efficacy.

The funding choices that people might make could be a useful corrective to the dysfunctions of Congress, as well as being a valuable source of information on voter preferences. In short, it would appeal to the left-anarchist values of involvement, freedom of choice, and community action in a way that might actually make government run better.

Nothing stops libertarians from seizing on this idea themselves, of course, and I wish they would. I don't think they will, however, and that is why we need a left-anarchist voter bloc to correspond to them.

Critiquing Progressivism from the Left?

It will be no secret to the readers of this blog that I have strong sympathies for libertarianism and other positions usually called "small-government conservative." At the same time, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the libertarian Right is running up against serious limits to its ability to reach out to new voters. These limits are why the Progressive Left has has such electoral success, managing to build a durable coalition of 45%+ of voters even while people are becoming more and more angry with the corporatist big-business/government nexus. (Indeed, the progressives have gotten away with making populist calls against Wall Street, even while pursuing policies meant to favor Wall Street as the handmaiden of government!)

Let me explain. Modern libertarianism came of age during the struggle against Communism and socialism. As such, it took on certain characteristic attitudes in opposition to those of Communism. The Reds preached the virtues of sacrificing for the collective; therefore, libertarianism developed a focus on "rugged individualism" and the virtues of greed. (This partly reflects the influence of Ayn Rand, who was hostile to all forms of collectivism.)

The problem here is that credos such as "greed is good" run counter to the experience and beliefs of a lot of people. Furthermore, most religious or philosophical traditions explicitly attack greed as a corrosive vice, and selfishness as the expression of hatred toward your fellow. Followers of these traditions believe that altruism and charity is the truly good life, and the libertarian program is harmful to the human spirit. Libertarians will argue that greed and selfishness can actually embody a second-order altruism, but many people are congenitally predisposed to doubt them.

Yet opposing tyrannical government need not require embracing greed, or rejecting all collectives. Some followers of the Catholic Church, for example, advocate a political economy called distributism, which focuses on the role of worker collectives as opposed to the domination of rich capitalists and governments both. More to the point, there are some political traditions on the Left that are hostile to the grand corporatist project of the state that has become the conventional wisdom among the Progressive Left. The tradition of Left-anarchism has many followers today; Jane Jacobs remains hugely influential, and you can find anti-statist attitudes among such movements as the Maker Movement and the like. The important thing is that you needn't be an individualist to be anti-Progressive.

But it is hard to perceive this, when the Progressives have so thoroughly dominated the Left that "progressive" is now used as a synonym for "all that is right and good." In part because of the wholesale libertarian rejection of collectives and embrace of entrepreneurialism as the highest expression of human creativity, the Progressive movement has managed to portray itself as the defender of communities, charity, solidarity, workers' rights, art, and lots of other things that people find appealing and meaningful. This is a tragedy; the good news is, it is also a sham and a deceit.

Progressive government—that is, corporatist government—inexorably destroys communities and families. It attenuates the bonds between people, replacing them with bonds between a single person and the all-powerful State. To truly defend the human spirit, in accordance with the highest ideals of the Left, must mean to crush Progressive/corporatist power structures and replace them with human bonds between people.

The libertarian movement sometimes makes references in this direction, noting Tocqueville's admiration for the (now-attenuated) American impulse toward private, local associations instead of relying on government. But because of the libertarian embrace of individualism, they lack some of the vocabulary necessary to truly build alternatives to government that require organizing people in society, to take on some of the functions that governments claim to provide. At best, libertarians hope that private industry will step in. But that does not work in all cases, and besides, many voters find such visions unacceptable.

It is for these voters that a new approach must be developed. The next stage of the campaign against Progressive Corporatism must come from within the Left: a populist blend of Left-Anarchism and "doing what works" (as the grand Progressive projects have consistently failed, over and over again, and only persist because the Left has been colonized by Progressivism).

To give a simple example: Our present educational system is an industrial process, stamping out compliant factory drones well-suited for a 19th-century economy, or a 20th-century totalitarian society. (See here for details, among other places.) The anarchist Left despises modern schooling, as they and all good people should. A political platform based on Left-Anarchism could attack modern Progressive education in terms that would nevertheless resonate with the half of the voting public whose sympathies lean Left. In this way, a coalition of interest can perhaps form between the small-government Right and the anarchist Left to reform our education, to the benefit of everyone.

To advance the cause of freedom from Progressive Corporatism, we must reach beyond the Right. If we do not rebuild the tradition of Anarchism, and reclaim the Left from the colonization of the Progressives, we will never be able to reach out to half of the country. I think the next great battlefield of this conflict is for the soul of the Left.