Is the State Moral?
The state enforces order (cooperation) sufficient to deny competitors access to the territory, resources, people, their production, and networks of productivity and trade. And to deny internal inhibitors to the income necessary to pay for it. It does this by suppressing local rent-seeking, corruption, and transaction costs, and centralizing these returns as ‘taxation’, where the concentration of that income can be devoted to the production of commons and the multipliers produced by such commons. this creates opportunity for centralized corruption and alliance with the state against the people, but without exception, the returns on state vs non-state are obvious: non-state’s cannot and do not exist. Even those claimed by ‘libertarians’ are just borderlands defended by states or empires, investing in settlement by permissiveness we translate as liberty. Since settlers provide claims to a territory which can be defended by arms, because in fact, they are investing in that territory, and reciprocity is the only international natural law that we can observe. We defend what we invest in.
The only means of policing the state that we know of is rule-of-law through the courts of universal standing in matters both private and common.We have had this revoked by the state during the modern period, and we’ve been disintermediated from the courts as our means of defense.
Democracy can never control anything other than voting an oligarchy into or out of office. Its insufficient for policy or defense because representatives are not required to state terms of contract before they enter office. So with democracy, disintermediation from the courts the only remaining method of insurance of sovereignty, liberty, freedom, and reciprocity is the militia and revolt.
So the state must and can collect fees for defense, and the courts. It cannot compete unless it can collect fees for investment in the commons. Paying such people richly if small in number reduces their chances of corruption. But allowing them to buy votes through redistribution; and provides finance and internationals (large scale) with access to rents, rather than locals whose rents were suppressed (small scale), merely shifting the problem from many distributed rent-seekers to fewer larger centralized rent-seekers.
This would appear to be a null trade, but it’s not, since the suppression of local corruption and rent-seeking provides the economic velocity that makes finance and internationals possible. So we must simply repeat the process of using the courts and the law to suppress new, larger organizations of rent-seekers and corruption. And this process never ends. Man invents. So men will invent new means of rents and corruption, and other men will use the market for the suppression of parasitism that we call the courts and the law to stop them.
In this sense, the (positive ) market for goods, services, and information is the one we are most aware of. We are somewhat aware of the government (not state) as a market for commons. But of equal import is the (negative) market for the suppression of ir-reciprocity whether in the market for consumption (goods services information) or the market for multipliers (commons) we call government. Technically speaking the ‘state’ consists of the assets of the polity and the law its regulator, and the government a means of producing commons.
Where commons include the state and its holdings and the means of defense whether military, judicial or sheriff.
Collectively the government and the state also provide the services of an insurer of last resort. The problem is maintaining its role as the insurer, investor, and resolver of disputes, while not allowing the public to demand redistributions that limit their responsibility rather than insurance that retains it.
WHAT PEOPLE MEAN BY TRUST IN THEIR GOVERNMENT
In the political context, when people are expressing in their government, it only refers to three factors: (a) the framing of the debate by the media, academy, state complex, (b) the orderliness or at least comprehensibility of the patterns of speech and (c) the current levels of anxiety over the future.
In other words, the academy, state, media, create demand by generation of conflict, just as diversity of race, ethnicity, and class generates conflict, just as ideological competition creates conflict. The state generates conflcit for ATTENTION which gets them POWER.
Trust is a synonym for predictability over time.
Monarchy
Monarchy (which is a purely Christian european order, in which kings are crowned by the church, as an insurer of their fitness), has been limited by traditional (indo european then germanic law) of individual sovereignty, interpersonal reciprocity, truthful testimony, promise, and contract.
Russian Tzars had dictatorial power,
European monarchs did not.
Roman and Greek did not.
The rest of the world has some version of chieftain, headman, ruler, but they do not have traditional european law of tort, trespass, property, or what we call natural law.
As far as I know we had the optimum form of government evolve in England, with a strong monarchy, a strong parliament as a jury negotiating the monarchy’s requests for money and policy, a house of industry (lords) as a supreme court, and a church for matters of family and society not matters of state.
Unfortunately, the church did not reform itself into a benevolent house government of natural law, nor did the state force it to, because the malinvestment by the church in it’s supernatural dogma was impossible to overcome. And so we both failed to add a house of ‘the family’ for labor and the underclasses, ad the church fell out of public policy. This resulted in parliaments and houses of government eventually subject to mob (underclass) rule and the frauds, sophists, and pseudoscientists who made those classes false promises.
If we maintained houses for the classes, and one for women, then we would be able to conduct trades (parliament = parley-ment = parley = negotiating conflicts) between the classes and genders rather than conduct all-out propaganda wars in public in an attempt to get the most ignorant to side with one class or the other.
As far as I can tell, a monarchy hiring and firing aristocracy to rule the state under that natural law, traditional law, indo-european law of trespass, tort, property, combined with Christian tolerance and charity) is the optimum form of government. My opinion is that we need only retain voting by direct vote, by economic contribution, when the monarchy wishes to raise taxes (revenues), and that those revenues be directed to stated purposes, not under discretion of the monarchy, and then some constant portion of revenues left to the monarchy to use at its discretion for the development of high commons (beautiful things).
And so, we will now either add houses or lose participatory government altogether – as predicted.
Taxation
The fact that we tax tradesmen and members of bureaucracies at the same rate is counter-progressive (regressive).
If you’re going to tax progressively (effectively a sales tax on market participation), employment in or as Laborers, Tradesmen, Professionals, Small Medium Businesses, Industries, Government should be taxed progressively.
However the single most detrimental policies have been:
(a) inter temporal redistribution and risk propagation (which is incalculable) rather than the Singapore/Texas model of forced savings and redistribution into personal health and retirement accounts (which is calculable – and reinvest-able).
(b) The redistribution of middle class reproduction to the underclasses due to (i) inability to self segregate, thereby forcing families to ‘buy their way’ into expensive neighborhoods and schools at the cost of increased female labor, and decreased rates of reproduction. (b) the taxation and burning of reproduction by the middle class to redistribute reproduction to the lower classes (that should either be sterilized or limited to one child.)
Because ‘white people’ can live extremely well in high trust high quality well maintained commons by purely voluntary labor, it is possible for ‘whites’ to spend very little on redistribution and commons production, and also work less if they can isolate themselves from less advanced (domesticated) groups. There is zero reason, other than interest rates on home and auto, and the need to buy overpriced housing in overpriced neighborhoods, for more than 10% overhead of GDP. White westerners with small arms, required service, some artillery and nuclear weapons can build extremely low cost per capita high quality commons simply because IT IS IN OUR NATURE. Heterogeneity (diversity) has destroyed western civilization. We let pandora out of her box when we allowed women to vote without first limiting the damage that they could do once loosed in the polity by compensating for their dysgenic impulses. Civilization occured because of paternalism: the use of competition and capital to limit the reproductive damage done by women’s intuitions.
Deep States and How to Deal with Them
Asking forgiveness for analytic exposition in advance…..
THE HIERARCHY OF MODELS:
1) Michels-ian View (Evolutionary): Deep state – a deterministic and necessary consequence of all human orders, because of the value and need for synthesis of information and provision of decidability necessary to concentrate forces of coercion (persuasion) – necessities that cannot be rectified.
2) Economists View (Systematizing): Deep state – a conspiracy of common interests – interests that must be rectified by the correct incentives.
3) Common Folk’s view (Intentional-izing): Deep state – a deliberate conspiracy of common interests – indicating immoral people with immoral interests that must be punished or replaced.
4) Ancient Folk’s View (anthropomorphism): The gods intend it so…. We are the Victims of the vicissitudes of the gods, and nothing can be done except to fight or submit to them.
THEORIES
1) The Chinese Proposition: the state is the most profitable and important industry and should be run as an industry, by the best people, selected from the best universities, and professionally trained with increasing responsibility from the local to the regional to the national level.
2) Fukuyama’s Theory: (German Model) That the professionalization of a bureaucracy prior to democracy, under continental law will create a deep state that uses prior restraint, and serves the public interest out of tradition and self interest.
3) The Anglo Saxon Theory (Classical Liberalism): That patronage leadership of the bureaucracies should provide a means of correcting and cleansing the bureaucracies. But as Fukuyama has shown, this leads to the opposite effect.
4) The American Theory (minimalism): the only means of preventing endemic corruption, and providing maximum quality of goods services and information is maximum privatization of all services despite the resistance by the bureaucracy (monopoly).
5) The Science: States that produce monopoly services as investor of last resort (or monopoly investor in the commons) can produce industries, and retreat into the german, anglo saxon, or american theory depending upon the degree of trust in the judiciary to resolve disputes between the citizenry and the service organizations. In other words, the problem is the degree of trust and trustworthiness present in the culture – which in and of itself is created by those courts.
GENERAL LAWS:
1) Iron Law of Oligarchy : oligarchies whether formal, patronage, kin, ‘specialized knowledge’, or ‘social networks” will evolve because decisions that concentrate resources (forces of coercion) cannot be created otherwise, and the organization cannot survive competition.
2) “Cthulu Swims Left”: any organization without a formal logic (law) to bind it, will exploit all opportunities for discretion to expand to the point of maximum rent seeking – until met by shock which it lacks the free resources to use in re-creating incentives necessary to reorganize under the new conditions.
3) Law of Maximizing of Rents: All organizations whether public or private will seek to maximize rents while providing the minimum returns to customers, creditors, and investors that customers, creditors, and investors will tolerate.
THE SCIENCE
Either we implement a strictly constructed, exceptionless, constitution of natural law (reciprocity) requiring markets in every aspect of life (association, cooperation, reproduction, production, production of commons (government), production of polities) with universal standing, universal application (rule of law), an insurer of last resort (Singapore Model), or we will continue (as we have) to deliver a private economy for association and reproduction, a mixed economy for the production of goods, services, and information, and a majoritarian monopoly economy, for the provision of commons whether goods, services, and information, and an absolute monopoly for insurer of last resort.
You can evolve a population through rule of law, if you can evolve a court through rule of law, but you cannot evolve a court through rule of law, if your system of law is discretionary rather than one of rule of law. In other words, it is not possible to produce a non-discretionary rule of law, and therefore a government of low corruption, unless you produce first a law that is not open to interpretation and ‘fudging’.
All societies require a system of government equal to their degree of imposition of rule of law. The problem is demographics, the percentage of people in a legally bound economy (the size of the middle class). As such we should expect to see small homogenous societies with strong rule of law and heavy redistribution on one end, and large heterogeneous societies with heavy corruption on the other.
And that is what we see.
