Democracy vs. Totalitarianism

@doru, when a bottom up corporation excels then people will get confidence in the self governing models, right now its just a theory .

@Titanthinktank13,  You obviously confuse private production issues with public government issues.
This might provide a short introduction to the subject: http://mail001.blogspot.com/2011/03/open-society.html
 
Government must be controlled from bottom to the top to allow us to live. A top to bottom government looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1OZYoxaJ2Y
 
It is known that bottom to top governments do work very well. See ancient Athens and today's Cheran, also Switzerland and Sweden, to some extent.

When a democracy engages in large scale production, like war or some large industrial enterprise, which require large scale integration, then it is faced with the challenge of controlling those organizations, which, of course, must be top to bottom managed. If the democracy succeeds at that task, that is wonderful, if it fails, it is preferable to block the respective activity completely, rather than to fail under a suicidal totalitarian regime.

Coronavirus for Agenda 21

https://www.infowars.com/time-to-debunk-the-skeptics-covid-19-has-a-death-rate-that-is-about-34-times-higher-than-the-flu/
Time To Debunk The Skeptics:
    "Skeptics" again.

COVID-19 Has A Death Rate That Is About 34 Times Higher Than The Flu
    How does he know?

This isn’t anything like the flu
    Just keep repeating it.

COVID-19 is an extremely deadly virus, and nobody should be trying to downplay the severity of this outbreak. 
    Call to censorship.

By now, you have probably heard a lot of people try to convince you that COVID-19 is not that dangerous because the flu has killed far more people this winter.
    I have.

And that is true.
    He contradicts himself.

But what they aren’t telling you is that the death rate from the flu is extremely low.
    He contradicts himself even more. If the flu kills few people, and coronavirus even fewer, then it kills few people.

Tens of thousands of Americans die from the flu each year, but if this coronavirus spreads all over the planet the death toll will be in the tens of millions.
    When you compare flu deaths in the USA to coronavirus deaths planet wise, coronavirus has more deaths ... according to his personal unexplained forecast.

This coronavirus outbreak is likely only in the very early stages, and if it becomes as widespread as the flu, it will become a public health crisis unlike anything we have ever faced in modern times.
    The flu already covers the planet, coronavirus is just beginning ... only that the winter is close to end, and warm countries aren't friendly to coronavirus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_outbreak_by_country_and_territory#Outbreak_in_map .

The W.H.O. continues it’s concern for policing language instead of containing the coronavirus pandemic.
    Censorship for lack of arguments.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization announced that the global death rate for COVID-19 is now 3.4 percent…
    3% of reported cases have died. This literally means nothing. What is the percentage of reported cases out of the total population? The same in the case of flu. They don't tell. So the 3% figure means nothing.

I have a feeling that number will continue to go up, but for the purposes of this article let’s assume that number if accurate.
    We all have feelings. 3% means nothing.

As for the flu, the CDC says that there will be between 32 million and 45 million illnesses in the United States during this flu season, and somewhere between 18,000 and 46,000 deaths.
That means that the death rate from the flu this year will be about one-tenth of one percent.
    Finally numbers. 15% will have the flu, .1% of them will die.

So can we please stop with the comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu?
    No, we are just beginning. We still need the percentage of people infected with coronavirus out of the total population.

COVID-19 is at least 34 times more deadly, and experts are warning that up to 70 percent of the global population could ultimately catch the virus.
    This means that the real number of deaths in Wuhan, with a population of 8 million, is 8,000,000*.7*.03 = 168,000. This is 110,000 more than this estimate: https://beforeitsnews.com/earthquakes/2020/02/covid-19-chinese-billionaire-whistle-blower-claims-wuhan-coronavirus-death-toll-is-over-50000-2732967.html . Or the experts (technocrats) are lying again? Because the epidemic in Wuhan is already receding: https://www.davidicke.com/article/565171/china-closes-1st-pop-coronavirus-hospital-built-10-days-last-group-recovered-patients-discharged .
    I expect the reported coronavirus cases to have been only those with severe symptoms, so many of them (3%) have died. 70% could ultimately catch the virus, but few of them will show symptoms and few will die.

If that happens, we will see a death toll in the tens of millions at a minimum.
   
Here in the United States, the death rate is running well above 3.4 percent so far.  Out of 118 confirmed cases, nine victims have died so far…

I have a feeling that the death rate in the U.S. will go down once we start testing more people, but we will see.
    Yes, this is what I said.
    And I don't think that the government has the right to test anyone it wants.
    Also, he has contradictory feelings: I have a feeling that number will continue to go up. The death rate is 3%. He has a feeling that it will go up, and another feeling that it will go down when more people will be tested.

At this point, coronavirus clusters are starting to pop up all over the nation.  For example, the number of victims in Santa Clara County has now risen to 11…
    Victims meaning what? Many people have mild or no symptoms. Tests are not that accurate.

Over on the east coast, a newly confirmed case in New York City is making headlines.  Authorities are telling us that it is a “community spread case”, and this particular victim just happens to be a lawyer with a firm in midtown Manhattan…
    Be afraid, be very afraid!

Before he was finally diagnosed, was he spreading the virus to countless others in midtown Manhattan?

We shall see what happens in the coming days.

    ...

As I discussed yesterday, the U.S. has been much slower than other nations to conduct widespread testing for the virus, and it looks like that was a major mistake.
    Call for totalitarianism.

Down in South Florida, one woman was recently told by her doctor that she probably has COVID-19, but officials refused to test her for it…

As Dr. Matt McCarthy has said, this refusal to test probable patients is a national scandal.  There is no excuse for this sort of negligence, and it has the potential to create all sorts of problems.

At this point, fear is spreading like wildfire all over the nation.  Due to concerns about COVID-19, Twitter is asking “its entire workforce” to “work from home”…
    We are doomed.

Other companies are taking similar steps, and this will inevitably slow down the economy.

But this could be just the beginning.  If you can believe it, one NBA owner is actually saying that the NBA could eventually “ban fans” from games if things get bad enough…
    Which is, of course, Agenda 21: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZC0NOljRWQ .

I hope we don’t get there either.

Because once we start banning public gatherings, we won’t be able to go back to normal until this pandemic is over.

And sometimes pandemics can last for a very long time.  The Spanish Flu pandemic lasted for three years and killed tens of millions of people.  If what we are facing is similar, then all of our lives are about to change in a major way.
    Agenda 21 totalitarianism.

Sadly, some people are saying that if they get the virus they will actually purposely go into large crowds to try to spread it.  Here is one example…
    Divide and conquer. People should lose their minds out of fear. They should turn each other in to the police state.

How sick in the head do you have to be to say something like that?

We live at a time when hearts are growing very cold, and it is only going to get worse as time rolls along.
    You wish.

Hopefully by now most of my readers understand that we need to take COVID-19 very seriously.
    Yes they do.

This isn’t anything like the flu.  This is an extremely deadly virus that has the potential to kill millions of Americans.
    Or not, as you said. The death rate will go down once we start testing more people,

Let us continue to keep praying that this outbreak will eventually subside, but let us also continue to brace ourselves for a worst case scenario.
    Let's.

Let's face it: propaganda or bioweapons, deep government enterprises aren't better than shallow government enterprises.

Nazism == Marxism

6:15 Ukraine genocide

11:20 Marxism (communism) - Nazism, new man

14:10 socialists advocated genocide

16:08 Karl Marx:
"Classes and races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way." People's Paper, April 16, 185? 1852
"They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust" Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 42, No. 1. 1981.

16:57 Nazism = Marxism (communism)

18:37 Nazism = Marxism (communism)

next, parallel posters

45:59 Jews from Nazi Germany delivered back by USSR to be killed

52:32 Soviets decrease the number of Jews in their government, culture, etc.

#communism #genocide #socialism #totalitarianism #marxism #nazism #nazi #ww2 #holocaust

Holocaust

My grandmother bought the house where I'm living today sometimes in the 1930's. It's a duplex house in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, a country in Eastern Europe. Next to our house there was a Jewish family. The Jew was a construction materials entrepreneur or so. Next to the Jewish family and sharing a wall with them there was an officer in the Romanian army and his wife. His daughter baptized me. We know each other pretty well. My grandmother was not living in the house at the time. She rented a cheaper flat and used the difference between rents to pay back the rest of the loan she took to buy the house.

I know this story from my mother, who knows it from her mother: late in the 1930's, there were groups of poor uneducated (obviously NWO controlled - my note) Romanians who were organized like a militia, very much like antifa and Islamists today. They were called "legionari". They were moving freely through Bucharest, the capital city. One night they came to the Jewish family to kill them. The Jew knocked in the wall and his neighbor put on his uniform and he came fast out and talked the gang to leave the Jews alone. Then one day the Jew came home and he did not find his wife and his son. He thought they have been killed and he hanged himself. In fact, they were out in town. Later on, after the communists took power, the widow and her son migrated to France. I met the son, who now is old, back in the 1990's, when he returned to recover his house, which has been stolen by the communist regime after he emigrated.

Also, my mother told me that when she was small and she was living together with her parents in the countryside, she got ill and her father called a pediatrician from the nearby town. Because the pediatrician was Jewish, my grandfather was forced to obtain a special authorization from the city mayor for the Jewish doctor to be allowd to leave the town to see my mother. It was a hard winter and transporting my mother to town would have endangered her life. Segregation and confinement always precede genocide.

There are also trustworthy depositions about Jews being forced out of their homes and into long walks into uninhabited lands, where most died. They could not stop to help their elderly which fell on the ground first. Also, there were Jews packed into train freight carriages, so crowded that they all had to stand, and left there until many died of thirst, hunger and exhaustion.

I don't know what happened in Germany, however Romania was completely controlled by Germany at the time, Romanian policies about Jews were German policies, and, unlike Romania, Germany was an advanced industrial power back then, so it makes sense to believe that the Nazis have actually used industrial means to exterminate Jews. There are also testimonies and images about the extermination camps, but I can't verify them directly.

I also believe that, after war, the NWO lied about the extent of the genocide, but this is a different issue.

I have no doubt that the NWO engineered the Holocaust and WW2. It created the Great Depression, it promoted rich Jewish bankers as responsible for it, it tortured and killed middle class decent Jews in large numbers, it forced anti-Zionist Jews to accept to move to Israel and it imposed totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe for 40 years. This typical divide and rule NWO strategy used the fact that the Jews were forming a separate society from the mainstream and they were diligent, well educated and successful.

Even if these testimonies were missing, your open claim that Jews should be killed is evidence strong enough that they have been killed by Nazis back then.

Also, if you deny the Holocaust, you should stop using Holocaust memes to threaten me, because, by doing so, you contradict yourselves.

If you try to repeat these crimes, you will meet resistance.
However, what should worry you most is the fact that the NWO never lets its criminal servants live.

#holocaust #nazis #ww2 #genocide #nwo #divideandrule #control #totalitarianism

The Big Breakthrough

Once a young person learns something well he will never change his belief through reason.
https://vimeo.com/261982713 (censored on YouTube)

That is why population control can be achieved through education control.

That is why heavy censorship is not required by NWO.

Our youth is prepared for self-destruction.


Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave:

THE COVERT CURRICULUM

As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was "nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands." If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education.

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the "overt curriculum." But beneath it lay an invisible or "covert curriculum" that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased.

Mass public education was clearly a humanizing step for-ward. As a group of mechanics and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, "Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind." Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line.

Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis by Chris Marker (English Subtitles)

Human Rights Diversion

Human rights are a closed circle. They are just enough to enforce themselves.

Freedom can be protected only when we protect each other's rights. This requires voluntary cooperation between equals to promote their common interests even against superior centers of power.

For voluntary cooperation people need to speak freely, to travel freely, to associate freely and to make business freely. These rights should allow them to govern themselves freely.

While Internet surveillance directly threatens our free speech right, the establishment promotes bogus human rights as a diversion. The right to sexual identity and rights for handicapped people are on the list. Of course the right to sexual identity may be a part of free speech, when the community allows it, and of course the community should decide to offer facilities to handicapped people such that they can live and even contribute to the society, but these fringe consequences of human rights are nothing but a diversion as long as human rights are broken and communities are not functional.

It is time to learn some economics, if you want to live.

1. Specialization

We are much more productive when we specialize in producing only a few goods than when we produce ourselves everything we need. This makes us wealthier when we specialize. Today we are too many to survive without specialization. We would be unable to feed ourselves without specialization.

2. Exchange

Since we are specialized we need to exchange goods. We exchange goods which we produce for goods we need. Exchange is much more efficient when we use an exchange medium. We call the exchange medium "money". In an economy based on specialization which uses money there is a "double circle", products travel from producers to traders to end users to producers, and money travels from producers to end users to traders to producers.

A product is scarce when the amount people want to buy, also known as demand, is bigger than the amount people want to sell, also known as supply. A product is in surplus when the demand is smaller than the supply. When a product is scarce, those who want to buy it offer higher prices for that product. This sends a signal to the producer, who will be motivated to produce more. When a product is in surplus, those who sell it offer smaller prices to sell. This sends a signal to the producer to decrease production.

Money is a product like other products, there is a supply and demand for money. People who need money to run their business demand money in return for their goods. Money is supplied by whoever owns the money printing machine.

3. Economic policies

In theory, money should be neutral. That means that when the money supply in an economy changes, all prices in that economy should adjust to their new equilibrium levels, and this should not influence the economy. In practice, people suffer from imperfect information, limited information processing power, risk adversity and some reason failures, such that changes in money supply greatly influence their economic decisions and therefore the economy. You can read here about the adverse effects of deflation, also known as negative inflation: http://mail001.blogspot.ro/2015/07/economics-as-weapon.html .

Because people are not perfectly rational, there is a need for a well designed money supply policy, also known as monetary policy. When business is weak, the money supply should be increased. Newly printed money should go to those in need, because they provide a foreseeable and stable demand, making investment decisions easy and increasing employment. With no such policy, it is probable that resources and people will remain unemployed, causing long-lasting misery. When business is strong, it may be good to keep the money supply stable to prevent overuse of resources and excessively risky investments. Also, keeping money supply stable when the business is strong maintains people's sensitivity to monetary policies during weak business periods.

Another economic policy available to governments is changing the tax level. This acts to some extent similarly to the monetary policy. A decrease in taxation is relatively similar to an increase in money supply, an increase in taxation is relatively similar to a decrease in money supply.

4. Power

Normally we would expect to see the people controlling the economic policies in order to ensure their well-being. They don't. Those who control monetary policies control people's livelihoods and they have countries as property. It is enough to suddenly decrease money supply to make business weak and money expensive, print some money for themselves, and use that money to buy the economy. It is possible that the Great Depression and the current crisis were created this way.

The only way for the people to control economic policies is to voluntarily associate with their equals in order to promote their common interests: http://mail001.blogspot.ro/2015/12/theory.html . Whatever institutions we create, the bottom line is always reciprocal care. You can be murdered with impunity by a center of power, no matter how many backups you provide for yourself, if people around you don't care. Involvement must be personal.

5. Responsibility

There is no way people can live well while they are irresponsible. However, they do try:

A. People want to live with no money. Abolition of money would cause huge suffering, and many would have to die, because a barter economy would be much less efficient then the current money using economy.

B. People would like to live with no banks. Banks are intermediaries between savers and investors. When a bank lends money, usually the investor does not spend it immediately and the money remains in his account open by the bank. Therefore, the cash remains in the bank's vault, and the bank can lend part of it again. This way the bank increases the money supply in the economy. In effect, the bank provides, to some extent, some services which were offered by money: it keeps track of debit and credit.This is called "money multiplication". This policy also exposes the bank to bankruptcy, because whenever the savers or the investors want to use their cash in an unexpectedly large amount, the bank will be unable to provide it. People who fail to understand economics believe that this is unfair and they would like to have no banks.

C. Communism. In communism there is only one firm which owns the whole economy. From an economic point of view, there is no motivation to produce, because nobody profits but the CEO. From a political point of view, resistance is futile, because power is concentrated at the top. Those who are unable to be responsible within the current "capitalist" environment are stupid enough to believe that anybody will listen to them in a totalitarian society. From a practical point of view, we have the examples of the USSR, see https://www.bitchute.com/video/G1OZYoxaJ2Y/ (THE SOVIET STORY (WITH TRANSLATIONS)), and North Korea, see Google.

D. Because these "policies" proposed by concerned citizens obviously fail to work, there is the idea that they would work on a global scale. This is not true. Communism and moneyless economies could work only when:
a. people become able to know the needs of other people at least as well as those people themselves,
b. people will care about other people at least as much as they care for themselves.

Also, it is not possible to implement such a system on a global scale without making it work on a smaller scale before. People would not know how to proceed into such a maddening project. Consensus on such an abstract idea would be impossible. All other social changes took place in time, they succeeded only after endless corrections and negotiations, and none of them actually covered the whole society. Keep in mind that bigger projects are more complex and risky then smaller ones. I hope that people will never consent to such a suicide.

E. The free market economy is criticized for the creation of war, poverty, bad economic incentives and the destruction of the ecosystem. The free market is an institutional tool. No tool will ever take any decision in your place. The free market efficiently allocates resources, and it should be used for that. If you want to have peace, decent wealth sharing, good economic incentives and a healthy ecosystem, then YOU will have to defend them. If you break our basic individual freedoms as the Germans, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Koreans did in the past, then you will discover the hell irresponsible people deserve. 

Theory

We are too many and the ecosystem is too badly damaged to allow us to live outside a society. In order to live in a society we need rules to coordinate our activities, for example a common language and economic activity rules for property and currency. These rules must be created and defended by people.

There are only two ways to create and defend these rules:

1. A powerful person or group of people can impose the rules, keeping other people weak, divided and economically dependent. This is the case of a vertically integrated society. In such a society the patron to client relationships are more powerful than the peer to peer relationships. This situation describes a stable social equilibrium because the patron rewards informers and punishes those who associate to defend their rights. This social structure generates a propagandistic public discourse.

2. A voluntary association of equals can impose the rules. In this case the peer to peer relationships are stronger than the patron to client relationships. This is the case of a horizontally integrated society. This situation describes a stable social equilibrium because the association provides security and government to its members and it excludes those who betray its interests. The members of the association meet and communicate regularly, get involved into local administration and politics, initiate business ventures and address public problems of their society. Usually there is a large number of associations which pursue sometimes contradictory ends. This social structure allows and requires a rational public discourse.

These two social structures are stable over thousands of years in spite of powerful exogenous factors. Even though each individual's motivations to support the current social structure are weak, they are ubiquitous.

Bibliography: R. D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993

Economics as a Weapon

Within a modern economy there are two important economic policy tools: the money supply and the level of taxation.

The money supply is the money the central bank makes available to individuals and firms which operate within an economy. There is a market for money, just like for any good, which determines the level of prices. If the money demand is stable and the money supply increases, then we see a rise in the level of prices, known as "inflation"; if the money supply decreases, then we see a fall in the level of prices, known as "deflation".

Deflation has a number of interesting effects on an economy:

1. In order for an economy to adjust to a lower money supply, all prices should decrease, such that the economic activity could continue with a lower amount of money. A shop owner, for example, will see that his clients lack the cash required to buy his goods as before and he has to lower prices. This means that his employees' salaries, prices for his acquired goods, utilities and rent should also decrease. The employees' utilities and rents also should decrease and so on, until all prices adjust. As a result, the economy could function like it did before the money supply decreased, but with lower prices. However, THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. Some prices are "sticky". The building owner usually is rich enough to keep the rent high, even if this means that the building will stay empty and he will actually lose the rent over a long period of time. The utilities suppliers usually are large enough to function as monopolies and they even continue to rise prices in the middle of the recession. This squeezes the shop owner into bankruptcy. The unemployment increases, the production of goods decreases. We have recession.

2. Potential investors see that their money are more valuable every day. They are no longer motivated to invest the money, unless the business opportunities offer profits above the deflation rate and at a very low risk. Keeping paper money is safer than starting a business, especially during a recession, and now they get a profit by keeping paper money. This decreases investment, and further decreases the money supply, since more money are effectively withdrawn from the economy. As a result, unemployment increases and production decreases further. The circle of disinvestment and recession can continue for a long while.

3. Inflation acts like a tax: an increasing level of prices devalues any cash in the economy, while allowing the government to spend the newly printed money just like any other public money. Unlike a regular tax, inflation taxes undeclared money, money kept in a suitcase under a bed, as well. Deflation has the opposite effect, it rewards black money. In a country with a poor tax collection rate, like Greece, this effect alone can blow up the economy, because the government can no longer tax income as efficiently as before.

4. There is a psychological effect of low money supply. When you see money entering your pocket, and you expect more money to come tomorrow, you plan to spend or invest it. When you see that money supply is tight, you save even more than it would be rational to do. This goes beyond the rational planning in point 2. This strengthens economic booms and recessions, making them worse.

5. A government needs to face unexpected adverse shocks, like bad weather or financial attacks from global speculators. If that government can not print money then its ability to answer to such adversities decreases. When financial global speculators know that a government is unable to answer, the attack becomes certain, because its success is almost certain.

6. When a government prints money in the right amount and at the right time, and spends it the right way (which basically means helping the poor within the society), the economy will grow. As a result, the money demand will increase, and the price level may not even increase at all. This is what happened in the USA, which printed large amounts of dollars, as opposed to EU, which applied tight money supply policies. Today, the dollar grows stronger against the euro.

Taxation also has an optimum level which in Greece has been exceeded by far. In Greece, lower tax rates would increase tax revenues, because the economic activity would increase.

These simple statements are the conclusion of any economics college first grade Macroeconomics textbook.


I remind you that money supply is only paper, printed paper. So why are we having this problem of lower money supply in Greece at all?

Greece is less efficient and more corrupt than Germany. As a result, there is a level of euro money supply which would bankrupt Greece and allow Germany to function. Now ECB knows precisely what that level is. After five years of austerity in Southern Europe the German economy also bordered deflation. ECB reacted on the spot: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/02/us-global-economy-idUSKBN0L60AT20150202 (risk of deflation in Germany) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-22/draghi-commits-ecb-to-trillion-euro-qe-plan-in-deflation-fight (reaction).

Syria Proposition

Western governments should organize a peace conference with Middle East regional powers, because the war in Syria is a regional war and not a civil war. As a motivation, the West should offer a credible recovery plan, that would create business opportunities for most parties involved. If a regional power rejects a correct peace and shows its muscle, then the muscle must be bombed. Also, more aid for the refugees. They know better than us what is going on in Syria and they must be part of the solution.

Summary

1. We need to use the new IT technologies to monitor, control, and influence our gov't's decisions in real time. (Toffler)
2. We need to support our interests against the interests of large centers of power, like governments and corporations. (Robert Putnam)

Syria: My dear 50% non interventionist Western citizens

Syria is not a problem of the Muslim world. There is only one world, and the Middle East lies on its most important fault line. Moreover, the Middle East society is vertically integrated. This is bad enough, but there is more. The conflict is hugely amplified by your dependence on oil. Western interventions in the Middle East have been intense and uninterrupted for a long time now. This created tensions which are big and concentrated, largely against you. In Syria, for example, both sides would like you better dead, and they don't make a secret out of it: Khomeini and Al Qaeda. ONLY THE SYRIAN CIVILIANS, caught in the middle, would like to live decent lives in a Western style democracy. Your decision to default on your (rather impressive) responsibility for those people's lives may well be the last straw before your payday. It is imperative for you to care and support peace negotiations among regional powers in the Middle East, even if that means for you to give up some of your interests and support financially, politically and civically the establishment of decent societies in the Middle East. About the racist and Christian fundamentalist components of your position, I better keep my comments to myself.

All Together Now

An open society is not stable. (In an open society public decisions are made through rational discussions between members of that society.) People always try something new, and if they are on their own, they will change their society. Electronics and Genetics are only the last important change, turning our global society upside down, in a long string of changes promoted by open societies in a short period of time, starting with the ancient Greeks. And it only gets worse, the speed of change increases every decade.

Open societies are usually horizontally integrated (see Open Society) and they can cope with change much better than their poor counterparts, the closed societies, which are usually vertically integrated (VIS). (In a closed society change is arrested by dogma, terror, dictatorship, and it takes place in convulsions, at large time intervals.) You can't imagine how disruptive have been these new technologies to the Russian and to the Chinese societies, for example.

After the fall of communism globalization resulted. This allowed the rich Western elites to extend their area of interest to the whole planet. Horizontally integrated societies (HIS) find it now much more difficult to control their governments, because their governments colluded with multinational corporations and became stronger than the horizontally integrated societies which enabled them to conquer the planet in the first place. Also, communism is no longer a danger, such that the poor can be taxed to subsidize the rich during the economic depression.

Technological change places direct pressure on HIS's, too. According to Toffler, political institutions should change to adapt to the new technologies. When large businesses and government officials use the Internet to move their billions around the globe at the speed of light, they can not be controlled through a vote on paper every four years. Example: at the New York Stock Exchange, powerful computers intercept online buying orders and use their speed to buy those shares before the online order is completed. As a result of the increased demand, the online user buys the shares at a price a little bit bigger then when he placed the order and the difference goes to the one who owns the fast computers. Such problems can't be regulated through a four years vote on paper. And it is not about money only, it is about power, because the very way we protect property is in question. Digital private information, satellites, drones, we can't control them when we vote on three issues every four years. The problem of citizens' control over their governments in HIS's is serios enough to make the control of the Internet by large corporations and governments the main political issue of our time (for copyright protection, of course).

Lack of global government is also a major problem. Because of technological advances we do now have a global society and economy, but no global government. By global government I don't mean a centralized government, I personally support a distributed government, as I will soon explain, but we certainly need some government. For example it becomes clear that we need some population control policy. It would suffice to tax everybody's income with some percentage and distribute the money to mothers with one child. This should be enough to cover the cost of raising one child. With such a policy in place, very few women would choose to bear more than one child. But we can't do this. The pressure on our ecosystem is increasing to a point where people will support our traditional population control strategy: yet another war.

The solution is to voluntarily cooperate to solve our common problems, to govern ourselves a little bit more. Just as the French analphabet, superstitious and violent peasants had to learn basic mechanics and how to read the paper in the morning before they go to vote, we need to learn some more basic sociology, economics, political science and we need to begin to control our governments in real time, imposing limits on the mistakes they make on daily basis. I thought that it should be easier now, when we accept reason and science as the basis of our decisions, than it was in 1780's, but it is not. People continue to support well documented policies that destroy our economy and society. Why? Because the global society is vertically integrated. Every little individual is motivated to be stupid, to support austerity, to shut up when he sees injustice, to be irrational in the way he thinks, and so on. As I said here, there is no rational discussion in a VIS, only declarations of loyalty.

Reform

http://www.copyrightreform.eu/sites/copyrightreform.eu/files/The_Case_for_Copyright_Reform.pdf

This is the first time that I read such a long piece of writing on the computer screen. Really. The action does not fade after the first few pages. By the contrary, it only gets better.

The Third Wave

Alvin Toffler published his book The Third Wave in 1980. He classifies societies by the way they produce wealth:

• societies based on agriculture  
• main asset is land  
• most goods produced locally  


• industrial societies  
• main assets: raw materials, energy sources (coal and oil), markets  
• mass production, standardization, synchronization, centralization (pyramidal integration)  


• third wave societies  
• main asset: information  
• modularization, flexibility, small scale production becomes feasible, the speed of the economy increases  

More details here: http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm.

Toffler analyzes societies by dividing them into a number of spheres: political, military, religious, educational, cultural. He states that it is important to have such spheres harmonized within one type of society. While our economy enters the Third Wave, our political sphere is lagging behind and it fails to fulfill its function. As an example of the inadequacy of our political sphere he cites the “Pueblo incident,” which is a result of overwhelming information pressing on our political system. It seems that one high rank civil servant found a 1000 pages report on his desk one morning and he was forced to use it to assess the risk of the mission by noon. Our current political system is modeled following an industrial era mechanism: regular check through standardized mass voting, upward filtering of representatives into parliament, committees and government, concentration of power. The solution is to share the public decision process among people. Toffler proposes the use of Third Wave technologies to set up temporary flexible teams, real time discussions, voting and polling.

Open Society (continued)

 

I have no words to describe the evilness of a vertically integrated society (VIS). The worst kind always wins. Not only that equals sabotage each other as well as possible, but the person in power does not feel safe unless it is able to prove his power again and again. This proof takes all negative shapes one can imagine: it is the power to destroy, to impose absurd public decisions, to arrest change, all to make the powerful person feel a bit more secure in his position of power. Even if the powerful person was well educated before he took the power, he will be forced to change if he wants to survive. There are no rational arguments in a VIS, only declarations of loyalty. A rational argument requires a civic society able to listen and judge that argument. This phenomena takes place at each and every level of a VIS, starting with groups of two people and ending with the whole society. This situation describes a stable social equilibrium. Besides the reason and the experience which soon teaches every person the right strategy to survive, this attitude is also sown into every individual since birth. I watched a three year old being taught not to acknowledge the presence of neighbors.

Vertically integrated societies have a tendency to change unexpectedly, when one single person, usually deprived of any free intellectual challenge, suddenly decides to change policy, or when rather regular but always unexpected popular uprisings erupt. These uprisings always fail in the long run, as people do not cooperate with their equals on a regular basis, but simply choose new leaders to solve their problems, and preserve the social structure. A VIS is unable to enforce contracts beyond the discretionary and always unexpected will of the great leader. This renders the economy hopeless, but also it gives to every international treaty involving a VIS the value of the paper on which it is written – and nothing more.

Horizontally integrated societies (HIS) show a few defects themselves, as follows:

- Racism: as problems can be solved within the community, where people know and control each other well, and the community is defined by small but overwhelmingly important details like the accent, body positions and eyes color, efficient HIS's are usually hermetically closed. Larger scale problems require larger scale cooperation, but such problems are delegated to remote high rank politicians and many of them fail to be solved.

- Inertia: a problem needs to sink in before people tear off from their valuable private time to solve it. In a HIS, a problem is postponed until it becomes stringent, and then it is dealt with it very intensively over a short period of time. The solution, generated by the very middle class people who are affected by the problem, is usually good and feasible, such that people can ignore such problems over a long period of time, after which the problem resurfaces in a new form.

- Flattening: it seems that societies which are well integrated horizontally have a tendency to censor people who are well above or well below the average from the point of view of competence and performance.

Open Society

There are public goods and there are private goods. An example of a private good is bread: you buy bread and you own it. It is a good idea to own your food, it is healthy for your individual rights. Public goods are non-excludable goods. This means that you can't exclude people from using them. Non-excludability means that you can't charge people who are using public goods. For example, national defense. Even if one individual has never paid his taxes, he is still protected against foreign invasions. For example, a KGB agent walking on a street in Switzerland is very well protected against foreign invasion, even though he did not contribute at all to Swiss national defense. Public goods are often underproduced. When an individual buys a public good he will enjoy it together with many people who did not pay for that good. As a result, an individual will not buy a public good unless most other people will also buy that public good. Without such a guarantee, nobody will buy the public good, and the public good will be underproduced. For example, many towns lack green spaces or clean air.

Good government is a most important public good. In fact, in order to have private goods (which is a good idea), one must have a good government. Public goods precede private goods. In a jungle, one can not have private goods. He can have some goods, if he knows how to fight to protect them, but they are not private goods. Private goods are recognized and protected by a society, through some form of government. Good governments provide lots of public goods, like green spaces and national defense, but who provides the good government?

There are two ways to provide a government:
I. A powerful individual can provide some government. This is the case of a vertically integrated society (VIS). In such a society, the client – patron relationship is stronger than the peer to peer relationship. Equal individuals or families compete with each other for the favors of a powerful person. This is a stable equilibrium because the powerful individual keeps his subjects divided and weak. If one subject seeks the cooperation of another, he will be turned in, the one who turned him in will be rewarded and he will be punished. This type of government provides some law and order and contract enforcement but it suffers from discretionary authority and many other inefficiencies.
II. A voluntary association of equals can provide some government. This is the case of a horizontally integrated society (HIS). In such a society, the relationship between equals is stronger than the client – patron relationship. This is a stable equilibrium because the members of the association identify those who don't play by the rules and exclude them from the association. The members of the association can rely on an intense exchange of information with their peers. Please note that the association has to be voluntary. If it is compulsory or paid, then the one who imposes this restriction or provides the money is in power, not the association. Money itself exists within a government, such that it can not precede the association.

The above two paragraphs summarize the results of several decades of research which are published in: R. D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993. The book is written in a social science jargon and makes use of some advanced statistics, which probably contributed to its undervaluation. In my opinion, this book contains a most important advancement in science, equivalent to the Newton's law of universal gravitation. One can see the application of this finding for a group of five people sitting around a table and for a nation of many millions. The production of public goods like security and a stable ecosystem are currently the main challenges for our survival over the following decades. This theory has finally allowed us to take conscious action to solve such problems and I believe that the theory already influences government policies.

Wikileaks

The cables in the latest Wikileaks release "date from 1966 up until the end of February this year" (from Wikileaks, it took me 20s to find it). For my country there is one single cable in that release. My country is Romania, a NATO member with an important geogstrategical position. There are American military basis in Romania. It was a transit point for American military resources during the war in Iraq. Romania neighbors Serbia, and it allowed American military air passage during the American intervention there. Yet Wikileaks published one single cable, which addresses the issue of ... adoptions. It is obvious that Wikileaks has handpicked cables which do not endanger anybody, but are relevant for the correct information of the citizens. Those who say otherwise do not know how to use the Internet to verify their arguments, and therefore they miss completely the relevance of this story, as I am going to show you in the next paragraphs.

We do everything on the Internet. We work, communicate, buy and sell, manage our bank accounts, make friends, live virtual lives. We do everything on the Internet, except politics. We still read newspapers and vote every four years. The distance between the way our societies function and the way we control our governments could not be bigger. Our societies are fast, well informed, active 24 hours every day. We control our governments every four years, through a yes or no question! This difference means that our governments are on the loose! We should use the Internet to monitor more real time public data, to discuss new politic strategies, and to make more real time political decisions, which our governments should be forced to take into account.

This is a problem of power sharing. There is a new world, the Internet, and some people will control it. Our governments moved in, secret organizations moved in, only we, the people, are missing. If we fail to control the Internet and to use it to manage our societies then a strong imbalance of power will result. Powerful people will make public decisions against the common interest of the members of our societies, and, as a result, our civilization will be in danger to free fall. The Wikileaks story shows that the revolution has started. We should make it succeed as nonviolently and as smoothly as possible.

"Making Democracy Work"

Mr. Leonardi,

I wish to ask you what do you think about this ideas:

1. Popper defines two categories of culture: the open and the closed society
2. It seems to me that in your book "Making Democracy Work" you suggest that a community appears around a culture which is difficult to change later, during the life of the community, from one of the above mentioned categories to the other one. Indeed, it seems that one community must briefly disappear before a new community can appear under a culture from the other category.
Community - a group of people that solve public problems in common, according with some social rules named "culture"
3. Daniel Goleman, in his "Emotional Intelligence" book, in chapter 16, describes a program that was successful in American ghettos. If you want, I can try to summarize for you the information about this very promising program. Of course, I do not know from any other source about this program, but the rest of the book makes sense to me, both from a scientific point of view, and also from the author's target point of view. And, anyway, the solution to the problem of modernization of traditionalist societies without using violence (which is pretty ineffective, as one can see in any former colony), passes through education. I believe this should be obvious.

Note: Popper confesses that he never met any person who lived only under democratic regimes who understood his theory about the open society. You will realize that it was vital to explain to westerners what is at stake. The main problem in a totalitarian society is not that you are starving, literally, but that you are dehumanized. If you become a human, than you are tortured and killed.

Now I shall try to summarize Popper, for point #1:

According to Popper, in his book "The Open Society And Its Enemies", we can divide cultures into two categories: the totalitarian one, in which people do not cooperate to solve common problems, but wait the solution to come from a superman savior who should put everybody to work, and the democratic one, in which citizens care about public matters, being, by the contrary, suspicious about their momentary leaders. The first culture is collectivistic, which means that the interests of the group (nation, tribe, family) have precedence over those of the individuals, the second one is individualistic, which means that the state institutions have the main function of protecting the individual rights of the citizens. The first culture is always at war or revolution, the second is usually liberal and tries to solve problems one by one in a rational way. The first culture is essentialist (the nation has a soul and it is eternal), the second one is more formalistic: it establishes common targets which are verified using statistics. The first culture is specific to feudalism, the second is specific to technologically advanced societies. (There have been original touches :))

So: are these common rules a possible culprit for lasting poverty in otherwise advantaged regions (no foreign threats, some material and know how transfers from wealthy regions etc.?)
And could education for students between 14 and 19 years old provide a solution?

As a comment, have you noticed, like Popper, how closed are most intelectuals to new ideas, even when they should be most interested, according to their profession and published articles? I can explain this through fear of retaliation from their narrow group of interests. Anyway ...

BBC - Rebate

EU, and, for that matter, the world, should raise taxes and transfer money to well chosen points in economy. Those taxes can be on income, individual or GDP, or GNP, or on the value added, or on property, or a combination of these, and should show equal tax rates among nations. The transfers should go in several important places, not all of them to agriculture.

Politically, there should be, let's say, three elected rooms, one with representatives proportional to population, another proportional to GDP, another proportional to income per capita. It is important to allocate political decisions among these rooms in a way that protects lives of people (unbearable decisions are not made) and still initiatives are followed. For example, in US, the Senate can defend, to some extend, the interests of smaller states, which are less represented in the Congress.

First of all, there should be transfers to the individuals, rather than agriculture. Then, there should be macro motivated transfers, to initiate projects that would not spring from private enterprise.

As a rule, Europe went wrong. Continental Europe made bad decisions, like small inflation for euro, during a recession, and UK has not proposed anything sensible (even though they could, coming from a healthy capitalist economy and a good school of economics), while it preferred to stay out of the game. All players lost. Another problem with euro is that there was no provision for fighting recession on small regions, since national currency inflation was no more possible. For example, there could be regional tax reductions (rebates) or money transfers.

Another obvious problem is the complete lack of feedback to and control of the EU administration. Top officials gained financially and politically from the increase in value of euro while they were cutting social aid in EU countries. The Constitution draft provided indeed institutions for a more efficient production in EU, but when I looked on the Internet I had a surprise: the social assistance was to be provided according to whatever national law is in place. First of all, the Constitution is above the national laws, so the five lines chapter could have been missing altogether, and secondly I could not find any link for a comment, feedback, or forum on the official page containing the Constitution draft. Better control systems of the EU administration could use IT technology and Alvin Toffler's proposals in his book "The Third Wave".

It would be a good idea to reduce subsidies for agriculture in Europe, while passing the money saved to the poor. That should allow for higher quality and diversity of food on the market, and higher standard of living for most people. However, in places where bureaucracy and justice are costly (inefficient), one could expect big companies taking over small farms, in spite of the fact that new technologies make small farms economically feasible. Big companies and big bureaucracies make good friends. Still, a small and gradual reduction in subsidies for agriculture should be tried, I think, provided that the money saved from this go to the poor to make up for the inevitable increase of prices for food.