Cheating, oligarchy - and an uneven playing field

Below, I'll weigh in in why it doesn't matter at all if some in the FBI or on Mueller's team dislike Donald Trump.  But first, let's talk about te great news being celebrated by the world's owner-caste, right now in Davos. Their biggest investment has paid off.

Now that the Tax Cut for the Oligarchy has passed, watch the pattern of the last several decades play out. The GOP has controlled Congress for all but two of the last 24 years, setting new records for indolence, sloth and corruption, as respect for that institution plummeted and only cheats like gerrymandering keep their grip on power. 

But they are always hard-working - even manic - on one topic. They can be relied upon to deliver "supply side" gifts to their uber-rich lords. For example:

"GOP mega-donor Charles Koch and his wife donated about $500,000 to Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) joint fundraising committee, days after the GOP tax plan was passed... lowering the corporate tax rate and estate taxes....  He and his wife also gave $237,000 each to the National Republican Congressional Committee on the same day..."  

Drain the swamp? There have never been better days for K Street lobbying firms.

To be clear, some tax cuts are different than others. It would be harder to argue against cuts that were actually aimed at achieving - in real life - the fantasy goals of every Supply Side gift to the rich. When cuts are targeted to incentivize R&D, or investment in productive capital, or export sales or job growth, these things historically happened, resulting in economic stimulus on the "supply side." So why did this GOP tax cut (and nearly all of the others) do none of those things?  Not even some infrastructure spending that might prevent a recession?

As Adam Smith described... and every sane economist knows... most plutocrats won't invest in such things, when they get a big new slug of cash. Instead, it nearly always goes to inflating "rent-seeking," passive asset bubbles. (Anyone notice the stock market? Or how passive rentier income was way-advantaged in the Tax Bill, over wages or innovation?) 

The top trend subsidized by Supply Side "reforms" -- after skyrocketing wealth disparity -- has always been ever-shorter ROI (Return of Investment) horizons.

Note: that's diametrically opposite to the long range view of guys like Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, who got super rich by working with engineers to deliver better goods and services. Guess which political party these innovator billionaires are never part of?

== Real entrepreneurs know this... ==

Fully 50% of our economy derives value and function from the prodigiously creative innovation that Americans performed since before the Second World War. That trait defeated Hitler, ended the Depression, won the Cold War, built a great middle class and - more importantly - kept the greatest general peace the world ever knew. It made the U.S. so rich that we could uplift most of the planet through our ironically-beneficent trade deficits: buying anything the world wanted to sell us and thus transforming their nations, cities and lives.

It took us to the moon and made our existence vastly more interesting, putting all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips! Those who would directly undermine our national penchant for innovation are - therefore - at-best fools and at-worst outright traitors.

And you know that I mean the “T-word” literally. It is the only conceivable explanation for the Mad Right’s outright and open War on Science — along with every single other fact-centered profession.  There is only one reason for them to do that… to eliminate any competing elites who might counterbalance a return to 6000 years of feudal power.

New York Times

Now look at an article Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We're Missing, by David Leonhardt in the New York Times - which included a national map that uses one metric — number of patents per 1,000 children — to elicit obvious… well, just look at the map and see what thoughts are roused.

Now I have some reservations about the article itself. It hollers so, over the glass-half-empty that the author fails to note how full it is! This is the core insanity of liberalism. If writers like this were more balanced - giving us glimpses of good news, as well - then Fox & idiots would not control the narrative, so.

Consider this: right wingers -- and the prevalent Dumb Wing of Libertarianism -- sneer at liberal efforts toward equal rights for all genders/races etc. They deride this great project as based on sappy do-gooderism or else sanctimony. They style themselves to be the “practical” ones.

But what is practical about wasting talent? What could be less “libertarian” than pre-biasing a child’s outcome based on traits for which she had no choice, and thus preventing her from proving herself with accomplishment? Thumbing the scale so that the number of skilled/confident competitors is minimized? That was the trick of feudalists for 60 centuries, and shame on every faux-libertarian who justifies it! Even if Ayn Rand approves, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek despise you.

There are many aspects to this problem, such as the failure of our leaders to stand up to those overseas who steal our innovations hand over fist. Some of that is to be expected - Americans were I.P. thieves in the 19th century - but the insatiably rapacious extremes of recent years are so predatory that they are tantamount to war. Tantamount to stupidity! Because the predators - unable to engender their own creative caste - are killing the goose that has laid their own golden eggs of development. And my biggest disappointment about Barack Obama was how tepidly he addressed that travesty.

Arnold Toynbee, arguably the greatest of all historians, said that the one trait shown by almost all nations that failed or collapsed was when they stopped investing and heeding their own "creative minorities."

Which leads us back to the glaring generality… that the wing of American political life that should care most about the health of innovative enterprise has become its worst enemy. Again, the recent Tax Bill wages open war on every single aspect of American ingenuity, creativity, science, R&D, and innovation, top-to-bottom, so systematically that its true author must have been some foreign despot.

== Prosecutors gotta prosecute... ==

As promised, here's the polemical point that no one seems able to make, in defense against the latest Fox-Mad harrangue about the Mueller probe.

Does anyone in politics or punditry have three neurons to scrape together? Trump supporters scream “bias!” because some at the FBI, or Fusion GPS, or or Robert Mueller’s team may have - despite Mueller’s scrupulous efforts - displayed distaste against DT or even Republicans. “Bias!” 

Alas, Trump opponents should have a trivial answer - one that no Democrat or journalist or independent public figure has spoken, to my knowledge. That answer is… “So?” I mean prosecutorial bias? Horrors! … Um, not!

Dig it, our justice system - like markets, democracy, science etc. - is designed to be adversarial! There is no need for investigators or prosecutors to be completely disinterested or impartial, so long as they follow well-know standards of conduct and eventually, before trial, subject their behavior to defense discovery and scrutiny. Eagerness to “get that guy” is their job!

Take Ken Starr, whose relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton cost the taxpayers upwards of a hundred million dollars, put the nation through hell, and finally came up with just one thing: a husband desperately fibbing about some consensual-adult 3rd-base infidelity in a hallway. That… was… it.

Sure, the whole Starr Chamber witch hunt was disgusting political theater, but among all the decrepit lunacies of that affair, the least noxious one was “these investigators blatantly dislike the guy they’re investigating.” Starr and his pack committed innumerable lies, torts and even criminal offenses. But enthusiasm for their goal was not one of them. So long as a skilled defense team has full access to every action and datum… and so long as the courts are fair and unbiased… then prosecutors should certainly want to succeed at prosecuting.

All of the current, desperate confederate whining against Mueller et. al. is far beyond hypocritical. It isn’t remotely logical! And it is a sign of the microcephalic stupidity of liberals, that they are unable to pause, perceive this counter-meme - and a myriad others - and actually respond with knife-like logic. 

Caught between evil-treason on one side and stupidity on the other… what can we do?

Well, get more folks to subscribe to Contrary Brin!

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== Addendum: Hayek would be so mad, by now... ==

I mentioned him earlier: How ironic that Friedrich Hayek is generally dismissed as an apologist for elimination of all market regulation, yet the liberal (leaning-Keynesian) economics site - Evonomics - explores Hayek’s views on both market theory and evolution with considerable respect. (Evonomics is also the one place, online, that most often studies and lauds Adam Smith!) In this conversation, several leaders in both economic theory and evolution start by praising Hayek’s revelations that markets are about information and how over-regulation is inherently fraught with errors that stymie the crowd- and open-sourced wisdom of markets.

Alas, Hayek thereupon was lured to the opposite extreme, as his arguments were used to justify elimination of regulations that kept markets flat-open-fair and competitive. If 500,000 civil servants are too narrow a clade to allocate economic resources well, then how is an incestuous, conniving-secretive and conspiratorially greedy CEO caste of golf buddies supposed to be more wise? 

Hayek’s criticisms of socialism applied cogently to Leninist regimes, but as these scholars point out, they’re much less meaningful when aimed at Norway.

“Regulations” that break up power concentrations (e.g. anti-trust action vs. monopolies and duopolies) are not suppressors of competitive enterprise, but rather gave birth to its golden age… as our parents in the Greatest Generation well-knew, before those beneficial and stimulative regulations were chopped away by right wing “reforms.” (Followed by collapsing growth rates.)

Hayek’s greatest failing? His inability to refer to the other great enemy of market enterprise, feudalism, which wrecked far more nations and economies than poor, dumb socialism could ever dream of. A flawed and stupid system that wrought hell in 99% of past cultures, feudalism is rooted in human temptation to cheat, and it appears to be roaring back. And the shills who work for the lords are - alas - really good at oversimplifying and misquoting Friedrich Hayek.

The fundamental is this: if markets work best when the maximum amount of information (and least deception) is acted upon by the widest diversity of market participants... then liberal policies that intervene to ensure all children get education, health care and infrastructure are best -- not for “goody-two-shoes” reasons but for entirely pragmatic and Hayekian-capitalist reasons! 

And "conservative" policies that empower a narrow caste of 5000 secretive-conniving golf buddies are the worst enemy that free and creative markets could possibly have.

Republican Salvation...Raise the Gipper!

Are you a Republican - or do you know one - who is sincerely fretful about the GOP’s ticket for the coming quadrennial?  Well, there's good reason (on many levels.) But it appears there is hope!  Or at least a fun wish fantasy, written and published with stunning speed by a master science fiction author, John Barnes. In a quick-topical (and hilarious) shortie-novel that’s set right now!  In the few weeks before this year’s Republican National Convention.

RAISE THE GIPPER! is more a sudden piece of performance art than anything else. Staged precisely for a given moment in time, it fits into the tradition of such old-time favorites as The Mouse that Roared and Rally Around the Flag, Boys.

And it gives Republicans their utter wish fantasy, especially after wading through a primary season filled with dismal choices.  Picture the scenario -- Ronald Reagan, risen from the dead, tanned-rested-and-ready (hampered only slightly by the lack of a pulse) to lead the GOP to victory!

Think it’s all one-sided? Well, Barnes has some clever fun at the expense of flakey, Gaia worshipping, PC-vegan lefty-liberals, too!  It’s a rollicking good time. Try some free sample chapters! (Or get it on Amazon.) And support performance art.

Is it understandable that some Republicans nurse dream-wish fantasies? One is tempted, indeed, to dream up alternatives to the current presumptive nominee -- whose prep-school pranks included the deliberately traumatic bullying of helpless adolescents. Yes, there is forgiveness.  But character is generally persistent, unless you see major life reversals that indicate a true change of direction. And in that case, would he not have sought out his victims, later, to make amends? Or shown compassion in his business affairs?

Oh one can sympathize. Raise the Gipper, indeed!

== From the Transparency Front == 

As you surf the Web, information is being collected about you. Web tracking is not 100% evil -- personal data can make your browsing more efficient; cookies can help your favorite websites stay in business. But, says Gary Kovacs, it's your right to know what data is being collected about you and how it affects your online life. He unveils a Firefox add-on called Collusion to do just that. It is a prime example of where we need to focus our attention in net-age battles over freedom and privacy.  Not in futile efforts to regulate the mighty and police what they can know, but rather in forever-enhancing our power to look back... and thus to hold the mighty accountable.

But shouldn't the light shine both ways? Read a scathing appraisal and denunciation of banking secrecy, of tax havens and the way at least seven trillion dollars vanish from the world’s books. For example: Nothing in offshore havens happens on a small scale. Almost any statistic flunks the red-face test. Consider the British Virgin Islands, home to about 30,000 people and 457,000 companies. In China, it’s said you haven’t made it until you have your own subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, which holds more assets belonging to Chinese nationals than any foreign location except Hong Kong. "The secrecy laws in these tax havens are at the root of serious crimes: fraud, money laundering and international terrorism," writes Robert M. Morgenthau in The New York Times.

There’s more money on deposit in the Caymans than in all the banks in New York City combined. Do you hear echoes of The Transparent Society? Or my novel Earth, in which the whole world finally gets fed up and storms the banks to make the records public? No issue is more powerfully important than tracing who uses these infamous dodges.

(Or more germane, when we seek to judge whether a one-time spoiled brat bully has grown up.)

What, then, can be done about all this? Plenty — if we act now. Nobody leaves their money offshore forever. The United States can direct its banks and their foreign subsidiaries not to engage in financial transactions in havens that have no transparency and no disclosure of the true parties of interest in financial transactions.

A bill has been proposed in the United States to prevent the use of shell corporations to hide the true ownership of assets owned here. This legislation would provide a model of openness for other nations to follow. Unfortunately, the legislation is bottled up in our own Congress. This should not be. America needs to set an example of financial accountability and insist that the world follow.

See my article: Transparent Ownership Treaty: Individuals and Corporations Must Openly Declare Ownership.

=== Political Miscellany ===
A study of economic mobility in the US by state shows a pattern that will probably be all too familiar to readers of ContraryBrin. All the out-performers except Utah (7 of 8) are blue states. All 9 under-performers are red states. So much for the idea of the liberal elite keeping the masses down and so much for the idea that Republican small government and deregulation creates a culture of opportunity.

Possible link between maternal obesity and low childhood intelligence. Gee wiz... will we ever see a single datum that the denizens of Red America, who proclaim so loudly that they know better how to live and raise kids, are ever right at all, even once?  About anything whatsoever?

Companies are making billions from selling and reselling your personal data. Now, HP is seeking to patent a personal data stock exchange where you could get a cut from sharing your personal information on the open market. Are you willing to exchange your health records or friend lists or automotive GPS locations in exchange for money? And what if companies buy only the cheapest data. Is that data biased or less valuable? One can picture this in several positive ways. (1) people get paid for what is happening anyway, (2) it establishes a reasonable range for a reasonable property right and defies the extremists at both ends, (3) it establishes that grabbing personal information secretly isn't just a privacy violation but a tort action and act of theft, (4) it creates a market industry whose interest lies in making consent and commerce the order of the day.  #4 means that Big People Making Money will be incentivized to protect YOUR right to seal info, not have it be ripped off.  Ah, but there are drawbacks...

Our ability to monitor our planet is at risk; aging Earth-observing satellites are being replaced too slowly, and older satellites are failing. By 2020 we may only have 25% of our current observing capacity. The shortfall comes as a result of funding cuts, canceled missions, lost satellites, failed launches and a shortage of launch vehicles to deliver new satellites to orbit. We have an urgent need to gather data on our planet to better understand the changes taking place on earth. (And yes, some of the funding cuts were targeted directly at missions that would have settled climate change. Those proclaiming "the science isn't good enough yet!" are among those who have torpedoed the science.)

== Finally, some wisdom from a dour genius ==

 'Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old--generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. 

'The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem--how to prevent power from being abused--remains unsolved. 

'Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. 'If men would behave decently the world would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds.'

- George Orwell ("on Dickens")

Also: 

England, wrote Orwell, is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory.