In a news conference soon after the release of the corral, Staff Superintendent Jeff McGuire said of the detainees, “To those people, I cannot apologize to them, and I won’t.” He called the situation “unfortunate,” but said officers had the right to detain the group.

Wait, what? Let’s hear that again.

officers had the right to detain the group.

I wonder where this right came from? I’m sure that some of us might recall that we learned at some point in our lives that the people being kettled also had a couple of rights. Let’s see, what were they again?

DETENTION OR IMPRISONMENT.

9. Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.

---

ARREST OR DETENTION.

10. Everyone has the right on arrest or detention

(a) to be informed promptly of the reasons therefor;

(b) to retain and instruct counsel without delay and to be informed of that right; and

(c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.

Now, we all know that law is written in code and that words don’t always mean what they seem to, so let’s be a bit clearer:

arbitrary
adj

1. Determined or founded on individual discretion, especially when based on one’s opinion, judgment, or prejudice, rather than on fixed rules, procedures, or law. See also abuse of discretion.
2. Absolute; despotic; completely unreasonable; lacking any rational basis. This type of decision is often called arbitrary and capricious.

So, by definition 1, which is clearly the relevant one (definition two is for “arbitrary and capricious”), section 9 of the charter reads:

9. Everyone has the right not to be detained or imprisoned based on individual discretion especially when based on opinion, judgment or prejudice, rather than on fixed rules, procedures or law.

And if we go back to that article, it tells why they decided to kettle people in the first place:

Chief Blair maintained on Thursday that the decision to box in the crowd of 250 was appropriate, claiming that major incident commanders were concerned for the public’s safety after 60 armed “black-bloc tactic” protesters were apprehended heading to the area.

Well, if I’m reading this properly, this means that, in their opinion, people were in danger, and they used their judgment and chose to kettle everyone. Whether police judgment about public safety was correct or not, they violated the charter rights of everyone in the kettle (and a few thousand others over the whole weekend), because they didn’t have a warrant and they obviously didn’t catch most of them breaking any law. There’s not much room to argue this. It’s straight definition.

For example, the police had every right to arrest and maybe lightly pummel the vandals on Saturday, when they were smashing windows and igniting cop cruisers. It wouldn’t have been tricky, because they outnumbered the black bloc at least 10:1¹. There was an established, lawful procedure in place for arresting people who were actively breaking the law, and nobody would have argued. Everything else was a lot less clear.

Also, does it matter that the police violated any one’s rights? In terms of enforcement, the charter gives everyone the right to take their complaints to court, “to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.” If it’s any indication as to what the court considers appropriate, some G20 detainees were released on bail conditions that violate their section 2 charter rights (expression, peaceful assembly, and association, specifically). So maybe don’t get your hopes up.

As Tim Garland from the Integrated Security Unit puts it, “If it’s serving the public good, yeah, it’s a violation of the Charter, but it’s a necessary violation. That’s the beauty of the charter, it’s a living document.”²

1. Apparently they still didn’t feel safe sending small groups of armed and armoured police against comparatively unarmed civilians in black T-shirts. As one Canadian Armed Forces member put it, “if you don’t want to get injured on the job… be a yoga instructor.”
2. “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” –William Pitt the younger

This sort of thing has happened before. Here’s the shape of it: some strange people start doing something. It’s misunderstood, except by a handful of people. That handful of people just happen to be “cool,” and so the whole thing draws more people, understand it or not. Eventually the strange people that started it get tired of it or the stuff that’s grown up around it, and they leave. The subculture stops evolving and turns into a historical edifice or parody maintained by people who mostly never understood it in the first place.

Everyone likes a bandwagon, and that’s why after the punks we have Punks¹, after raves we have Ravers, after hippies we have Hippies, after hipsters we have Hipsters. In all of these we have (occasionally very convincing) vestiges of the original philosophy, politics and attitudes that started the movements, but really, they’re just party scenes.

And hey, what is it that everyone hates about the Hipsters? The almost complete conformity under the banner of rebellion? The self-mockery? The shitty fashion? Wait, which party scene am I talking about again?

But to return to my original point: everyone accepts that it’s poor form to make fun of Punks, Ravers, and Hippies. They’re all adorable in a way, like lost puppies with strange hair. Hipsters are really no different, and if you leave them alone then all those negative attention seekers will move on and this mess will wind down to a niche just like every other dead party scene.

1)Yes, this is the same capitalization scheme used to discuss political philosophies, to distinguish followers a philosophy (like conservatives) from the party that forms around it (like Conservatives). It’s vaguely surprising how perfectly the distinction holds when talking about subcultures instead of political philosophy, until you grant that all of these movements had sound and subtle philosophical plumbing underneath them at the start.

I have always held that neither evidence, logic, reason, observation, math, nor any other liberal socialist propaganda technique constitutes a rebuttal of anything I believe based on supposition, gossip, superstition, illiteracy, or incomprehension.  Believing things that are verifiable has never helped anyone make good decisions, and there are studies that prove this [1, 2, 3]. It follows naturally that nobody should ever try to teach me anything unless I already agree with it or know it, and that goes doubly for any children I might have (because they’re chattel until they turn 18). It makes me so happy to see that the government agrees with me:

“This government supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education,” said Premier Ed Stelmach.

Awesome!

Now that we’re finally making some progress on denying the existence of evolution and homosexuality, there’s another issue that I’d like to raise again, because it’s lain dormant for too long. That, friends, is heliocentrism.

I’ve thought this for a long time, and had merchandise for it even.  But I think that the time to act has finally arrived.

We geocentrists have mountains of evidence to support the truth of our statements.  Even the scientamists will admit there’s nothing wrong with our view of solar mechanics: those lovely elliptical orbital equations of theirs still work if you make Earth the origin, they just get really huge and ugly.  And hey, you know what?  So’s your liberal heliocentrist face.

So let’s get out there and spread the word.  I want to make it as difficult as possible to teach that the Earth moves around the sun.  Write letters to your overpaid conservative wankjob bureaucrat!  March in the streets!  Spin fire poi while shouting, “This is the way the universe works, bitches!  Deal with it!”

1. Kiss
2. My
3. Ass

To begin with, the pope is certainly right about at least one thing: Condoms have been disappointingly ineffective in the fight against AIDS in Africa. In Cameroon, for example, the country the pope was flying to when he made his notorious remark, condom sales more than doubled from 6 million in 1992 to 15 million in 2001. Meanwhile, HIV prevalence tripled from three per cent to nine per cent. Botswana, one of the best-governed countries in Africa, was quick to jump on the condom bandwagon in the early 1990s. Its reward: about a quarter of its adults are infected with HIV.

It’s hard to even know where to begin here.  Condom sales in Cameroon more than doubled to 15 million in 2001 and the infection rate is increasing: the country had 16 million people in 2003, meaning that people were using about 1.88 condoms per year (two people use one at once, technically).  Botswana, a country of just under two million in 2003, bought about three million condoms in 2001.  That’s about 3 condoms per year¹.  I don’t know, maybe they sell reusable ones.  Maybe I’m just a huge slut and my idea of how often people have sex is hyperinflated.  Maybe priests are more in touch.  But clearly, condoms are a failure, and we should stop promoting their use.

Well, I wound up showing these numbers are stupid and misleading even before getting to the fact that they’re bad statistics, but they are: does promoting condom use cause an increase in infection rates, or does an increase in infection rates cause promotion of condom use?  Gee, that’s a hard one.

But wait, there’s more!  And “better”!

A shift in sexual norms? Partner-reduction? Hmmm, isn’t that what Pope Benedict is promoting? With, by the way, much enthusiastic support from African women who find the notion of faithful husbands rather endearing. And with some success. Uganda, for example, which has long emphasized abstinence and fidelity over condoms, has seen its HIV prevalence rate drop from more than 15 per cent to less than six per cent in 10 years. And campaigns to discourage multiple partnerships have also had encouraging results in Kenya and Swaziland, with corresponding drops in HIV rates.

Wow!

First of all, a “prevalence” rate is the percentage of infected adults.  Having the prevalence rate drop from 15% to 6% over a decade doesn’t mean you’ve stopped the spread of AIDS, it means one of two things:

1. 9% of your population has keeled over dead.
2. Your uninfected population has more than doubled.

I don’t know about you, but I’m leaning towards number two.

Also, over the period in question, Uganda heavily promoted the use of condoms.  And to boot, since they jumped on the abstinence-based bandwagon, the infection rate has risen again.

So seriously, for Chist’s sake (literally), learn some statistics.  Or, you know, go on deliberately misleading the general public at the expense of millions of Africans.

1) For amusement’s sake, looking for the numbers in Botswana brought up this article, which calls 3 condoms per couple-year “condom-flooded.”

Let’s consider J. Random Example 1.  I suggest opening this link in Firefox or Safari.  Search for “.”; in Firefox hit “Highlight all,” and I think Safari highlights by default these days.  What you will notice in J. Random Example is that this 17 paragraph article contains 25 sentences.  In an astonishing achievement for their writers, one paragraph even has three of them.

The point of this writing style is that it sounds free of analysis or opinion.  When you’re just stating facts one sentence at a time, you don’t have room to express opinion or bias, right?

But wait; let’s look at some of the imagery here.  How do they descibe the recession/economy: accelerating, soaring, overwhelming, relentless.  What they’re implying: the recession is an unstoppable, sentient thing.  There is talk of the human toll, which summons images of plagues and wars; jobs are slashed, the drop in employment is “sharp,” and industries, already “weak,” are being “bled.”  28% of the sentences in the article contain the word “cut”, its plural or its active verb form. This is the language of violence, and it is being inflicted on us and our buddies, Industry. Remember? They’re the family down the block that pays everyone and hosts the church bake sales.  And that Walmart guy, with his glowing smiles and warm hugs! How much longer can they/we stay alive?  Manufacturing is “sinking,” the “crisis” is “deepening,” the situation is “deteriorating.” We’re “falling into oblivion, and it will only get worse,” the outlook is “grim”; there is “no sign of relief.”

Wow, this is like Lord of the Rings! Specifically, the battle of Helm’s Deep. We’re the frightened women and children of Rohan, powerless and hiding in the caves; industry are the vastly outnumbered soldiers pitted against the seething orc-horde of insufficient credit and our only hope will be the timely arrival off Obama the White and the Rohirrim of tax dollars.

Yeah, there’s some unbiased reporting.

(For historical reasons, this article refers to the first global collapse of civilization on Earth in 2018.  For subsequent collapses, or for the 2416 implosion of Mars from overmining, refer to “Great Global Collapse (disambiguation).”)

By the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the Earth had developed primitive, post-tribal civilizations¹.  These civilizations were oligarchical, with hereditary ruling castes that distinguished themselves with claims of wealth, or divine or popular mandate². These civilizations were primarily guided by mysticism; at the time of the first collapse, the two predominant forms were bibliomancy³ and economics⁴.

The Economists in particular supported and fought for increasingly opulent acts of worship, which resulted in a sharp rise in the consumption of natural resources and the emission of pollutants.  It also caused a worldwide reduction in well-being, which the clergy excused with claims that those who traded piously, in the name of  Growth and Profit, would be provided for after death⁵.

Some evidence survives that suggests a small but significant number of dissenters argued that this worship would cause the destruction of the earth, the destruction of the biosphere, the end of human civilization, among other things⁶.  Evidence also survives suggesting that many of these dissenters were followers of a cult of “Scientists” who worshipped observation, statistics⁷ and repeatability.  We also know that their religion was heavily ridiculed by both the bibliomancers and the economists⁸, who waged a decades-long propaganda war against it⁹ (it is noteworthy that, at the time, the average human lifespan was less than one century) on a scale not seen for several hundred years after the collapse¹⁰. It eventually erupted into violence, leading to the burning at the stake of several thousands of Scientists in “witch trials,” most famously at Salem, where Albert Einstein¹¹ was executed.

Records show that the collapse began in earnest in 2012. By this point, its inevitability was widely known and even admitted by the leading mystics, who suggested only renewed faith in their ideals would solve their problems. For reasons that are not now understood, they refused to expand their ability to generate electricity, and the power distribution system in north America failed completely after a July hurricane forced several power stations offline¹². As an emergency measure, the grid was broken into smaller regional sections and hundreds of dirty coal generating stations were brought to account for the shortfall of local supply.

The resulting rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is attributed to the unexpected collapse of the Greenland ice shelf later that fall, which spilled into the northern Atlantic ocean and stopped the mid-Atlantic conveyor current. Without the temperature balancing influence of the current, Europe suffered the coldest winter since the previous ice age¹³, leading to energy rationing and thousands of deaths, and the equatorial regions and southern hemisphere faced record heat. Previously fertile regions were flooded by savage tropical storms or seared with drought, resulting in massive crop failures in South America, and Asia.

In the resulting famine, the North American meat farming industry struggled to feed their stock, and decided to feed it to itself, mixed with effluent from the deforestation industry¹⁴. This, combined with widespread misuse of medicines and bizarre farming methods are widely attributed to the appearance of the Delinquent Bovine Pellucidum Influenza. Marked by visible symptoms similar to leprosy and causing extreme aggression in the week prior to death, this highly contagious disease would claim an estimated five billion victims by 2050.

The reactions to these combined crises are difficult to ascertain, as the information surviving this period was largely stored on delicate wafers of magnetic material or on reflective discs that were vulnerable to oxidation¹⁵.  The bibliomancers suggested inaction and prayer, in the belief that the arrival of a saviour was imminent.  Excavations in the 25th century¹⁶ discovered recordings of hymns that identify this saviour as the “Funk Soul Brother.”  Accounts of what the Funk Soul Brother was supposed to do are not clear, but the belief in his timely arrival was widespread.  The Economists suggested that the ruling parties “continue to aggressively infuse capital to promote growth in key industries.”  No records clarifying the meaning of this phrase survive.  In the meantime, surviving evidence suggests that the ruling elite in north America staged fights between donkeys and elephants for the distraction of the public¹⁷.  Exactly why this happened before any preventative action is unknown.  Other responses are even more inexplicable: one group called “The Church of the Black Star” suggested that plenty would be restored directly from the lower digestive tract of the north American emperor, Hope Obama.

After the collapse, there are no surviving records except for those kept by a group who referred to themselves as “The Foundation.”¹⁸ After nearly a century of violence, most of the population had reverted to subsistence farming.  At this point, the Foundation spread out from its headquarters in the Nelson valley in the former state of Canada in an attempt to restore technological civilization.

1. See “Neolithic Cultures”.
2. See “Divine Right of Presidents”.
3. A belief that books—especially old, long and boring ones written by schizophrenics and edited by sociopaths—could reveal all truth. See “Neolithic Mysticism”.
4. A school of mysticism which claimed to conjure things by exchanging them back and forth until they got bigger. See “Neolithic Mysticism”.
5. This seems to be a recurring theme in neolithic religions.  For a more detailed discussion, see “Neolithic Cultures”.
6. For example, the return of a supernatural extraterrestrial named Elvis.  For more detail, see “Neolithic Scientism.”
7. For the branch of mathematics involving probability, see “Probabilistic Mathematics”.  For the practice generating numbers to support unfounded claims of causality, see “Pseudoscientism.”
8. Both schools wanted to know why Scientism didn’t explain the existence of their gods.
9. Most famously, the “Never Trust Something That Leads To Cellular Phones” campaign of 2011.
10. The campaign to create a chimpanzee nation on the asteroid 243 Ida was considerably larger and lengthier, lasting a full century and covering four planets.  See “The Chimpish Question”.
11. His “General Relativity” was wrong, but impressive for its time.  He is also believed to be responsible for discovering a method of creating beer with bubbles.
12. See “Hurricane Edison”.
13. Some people were proud that humanity finally made one of its own.  See “Recent Ice Ages”.
14. Many people made a living from cutting down trees so they could be cut into uniform blocks and left to rot in yards.  The parts that could not be cut into appropriately sized pieces were often ground to a powder and used to absorb sewage as well as feed animals and poor people.
15. See “Neolithic Tools”.
16. See “Excavation of Ancient New York”.
17. This was the most popular arena event since the Roman Empire fed Christians to large cats.  For more detail, see “United States Congress”.
18. This organization was deliberately formed in the  years before the collapse to preserve knowledge and speed the return of civilization.  For more information, see “Foundation, The (Post-Neolithic)”.

These questions kill a lot of my output.  Really, the number of things I can call myself an authority on is shockingly small.  There’s a slightly less shockingly small number of things that I could say I’m decently well versed with, but I have a really hard time getting pedagogical on topics where I assume my readership—and I know all four of you—are as well versed as I am.

There was a time when I thought it’d be neat to be one of the thought leaders of the blogosphere, or at least an occasionally recognized contributor.  A B-list blogger.  Even C-list, maybe.  I was never thinking that I would make a living of it, but the thought of having some form of meaningful discussion was pretty exciting.  But I’ve slowly started noticing that there is no meaningful discussion, at all.

First of all, everyone really loves their ideas.  Libertarians, commies, free-marketeers, yogis, christians and other frightened masses: they all have their own ideas about how the world works, or how it ought to work, and they all have a sort of logic to them.  But they also have a big steaming lump of problems; issues that they ignore or assume would go away if their idea had its day in the sun.  As a result, most of the discussion I see involves chewing the news from different ideological standpoints or straight up preaching, and it’s very rare that something shockingly insightful comes out of the whole mess.

I’m also starting to think that a lot of the discussions are about issues that it doesn’t make sense for me to form an opinion on.  The last time I blogged was about the upcoming depression, and that news hasn’t really affected me yet.  I suppose people who put a lot of faith into “the economy” and “growth” and stuff are feeling it.  I’m sure we all have an opinion about the kerfuffle in Gaza, but how many of you has it directly affected?  I’m going to guess that among the people who read this, the closest it will come will be having a friend who has family in some other part of the region.

This is actually bringing me to a point.  I have an opinion on the events in Gaza: it’s none of my business.  I can’t take sides, because for the life of me, I can’t understand what motivates these people.  The history of the conflict is so full of savagery from both sides and so steeped in the arrogance of colonial Europe that I’d rather just leave it alone.  I do believe that the US should be acting as a peacekeeper instead of backing Israel, and that will probably happen now that Bush is out, but I’m not going to say either side is bad or good or better or worse because the issue is too complex for that kind of reductionism.

The modern world is full of examples where serious harm has been done because people who believed they were right stepped into something that was none of their business.  The imperial quest to “bring civilization to the savages.”  Every ostensibly religious war.  Banning drugs whose consumption doesn’t violate the peace (and oddly having no trouble with some that do).  Abstinence-only sex propaganda.  The list goes on.

I don’t know if there’s an evolutionary basis for not believing other people can form coherent worldviews and make sensible decisions based on them, but it seems to be endemic.  We have an almost striking inability to appreciate the subtleties of each other’s viewpoints, and we make strawmen of them just like we reduce everyone outside of our monkeysphere to a stereotype.  In fact, I would guess that the number of viewpoints we can appreciate in a detailed way¹ is considerably smaller than Dunbar’s number.  I’m going to guess it’s less than five.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was usually one, sometimes perhaps even zero.  I can imagine tribes of apes having a dispute and forming shrieking, chest-thumping groups to intimidate the others into submission.  For some reason, it feels like our current discursive tools are the abstract descendants of this.

Now, if all of our discussions are boiling down to ideological chest-thumping, I’d rather opt out.  There are much more interesting things to do.

1) Let’s call this Reid’s Number.

Let’s trace some of the steps here.

1. The fed rate gets really low.
2. A bunch of banks, crazed by the cheap money, make a lot of high risk loans, many of which turn out to be bad.  See: sub-prime mortgages.
3. It becomes clear that these loans are bad, so instead of being counted as assets, they’re counted as liabilities.  It now becomes clear that they’ve lent way beyond what they can back with actual money¹.
4. The banks can no longer lend because they’re close to their reserve rate, which is the minimum ratio of assets to liabilities that was put in place, *cough*, to prevent banks in a partial-reserve system from lending like madmen.
5. Because the banks can no longer lend, every business or person that operates on debt financing is screwed.  Shockingly, over years of cheap credit, almost everyone has been convinced to start doing it.
6. “To let us lend again,” the banks say, “the government has to help us deal with all this bad debt.”  A plan is drafted to drop 700+ billion dollars into buying bad debt, which will restore bank reserves.
7. The US Federal Government issues 700+ billion dollars of bonds, which are bought by the Federal Reserve in exchange for cash, which they’ve just printed (well, electronically transferred).  Now, bonds are debt, and the government owes interest on that debt.

So where are we?  The government is a nearly a trillion dollars further in debt, and has gained nearly a trillion dollars of known junk.  The banks are right back where they started before the lending frenzy, and the Federal Reserve banks are up nearly a trillion dollars in bonds, which they can now sell for profit.

But wait, it gets better.

The Federal Reserve banks are owned by their member banks, which just happen to be the same ones that were doing the stupid lending in the first place.

And now the chairman of the Federal Reserve is saying “the banks need more capital.”

Someone, please fill in the facts that I’m missing so this stops looking like a shockingly transparent swindle.

1. *cough* I know, shut up.

Money Is Not Wealth

Once upon a time, people worked to feed and clothe themselves, to get or build or improve or maintain a house, etc.  Today, we work to make money.  The brilliant thing about money is that it symbolizes value: you exchange a good or service for some undetermined thing of equal value.  Say you sell an old paperback book for five dollars.  That five dollar bill represents about 2.5 bottles of pop, or an appetizer, or 1/80th of a pair of designer jeans; if you take the money out of the equation, the transaction looks like you traded your book for 2.5 bottles of pop.

In its pure “barter juice” form money guarantees that the trade will be more or less fair, and it’s definitely easier to carry around than a selection of barter goods.  Importantly, money in this form represents actual wealth, meaning a specific amount of goods and services.

Now, it gets hazier when we start talking about intangibles.  How much is electricity worth?  Or your time?  Or putting up with grumpy people?  Engineering skills?  Ideas?  Risk?  The capitalists would apply supply and demand.  There aren’t many engineers, but lots of stuff needs to be engineered, so their time is worth more than that of someone who lifts heavy things, because although there are also lots of heavy things that need to be lifted, there are also a lot more people who can lift them.  In fact, this idea of scarcity is the entire basis of how we decide something’s worth, and it turns out to be severely flawed.

Money Creating Scarcity

Consider the impending energy crisis: we’re running out.  We need to build more generating capacity.  There’s definitely no shortage of labour, and there’s no shortage of raw materials–who has heard of a cement or steel shortage recently, for example–and we know how to build new generating capacity.  But: power plants are expensive.  Who can afford to build them?  Not many people.  The supply is there, the demand is there, but they aren’t meeting up.

Also, to build all of this new generating capacity, we need a lot of engineers to design the plants.  But there’s a shortage.  Why can’t we train more?  Because there aren’t enough teachers.  Why aren’t there enough teachers?  Because schools can’t afford to pay them.  If we collectively need them, why can’t we afford to pay them?

Of course, we also need to learn how to harvest new forms of energy, and this needs researchers, which means people with Ph.D.s, and there are lots of them (still not enough), but a lot of them aren’t doing research because nobody will pay for them.  There aren’t enough positions available at universities or private labs to employ the ones that exist at the same time that there is a desperate shortage of research staff.

To some degree, this scarcity is maintained intentionally, because if there were all the researchers you needed, supply and demand would dictate that the price would go down, and there would be no reason to pay physicists and engineers more than you paid, say, a fast food worker.  Similarly, the reason nobody is rushing to make geothermal power stations is because if power were plentiful, it would be cheap, so its trade value would decrease and the people who built the plant wouldn’t be able to make their money back as quickly.

Oddly, the reason scarcity still exists is because supply and demand punishes abundance.  We have the capacity to make a house for everyone, and to furnish it, and put a computer with access to the internet in it, and even to provide some sort of mode of transport with it.  We don’t because if everyone had these they would have no trade value, and no trade value means no potential for profit.  We have the capability to solve our energy problem, but we don’t because abundance means no profit.  In fact, I challenge you to think of a single thing that we need that we can’t produce in abundance (oil doesn’t count, because we don’t actually need it for anything, we just use it for everything).

This is the central problem of the idea of supply and demand today.  If we were to produce stuff at full capacity, we would exceed demand for everything, and since abundance means no trade value and thus no profit, the profit motive holds back progress.

The Ass End Of The Deal

Now, there is one abundance that our society consistently maintains: an abundance of labour.  If you consult an economist they will talk about the devastating impact to profitability of low unemployment: if you’re running low on unemployed people, you start having to pay the employed ones more and treat them better because they start to have bargaining power, and that hurts profits.  Most people in low paying jobs put up with them because for every ten of them, there’s one person who is unemployed and would gladly replace them because they desperately need money to exchange for food and shelter.

This point bears repeating and elaborating: poverty in the developed world is deliberately maintained.  If there were no desperation, individual people would be better able to set a fair value for their work.  The total value that a corporation outputs is the sum of value of the work of its employees and the resources they work on, and the value it consumes is the value those resources.  Therefore, the only way a corporation can profit is by paying its workers less than the value of their work¹.

On the other hand, you can get a glimpse of what abundance looks like if you imagine being a capitalist who produces things to sell.  As soon as you have a design, you can farm it out to some factory in China, where there’s such abundant labour that it’s rotting in the streets, and you can get that design built into an actual thing for next to nothing.  Anything you want!  Chemicals, electronics, machinery, weaponry, all the decadent booty of the modern age!  It’s all there for a tiny bit more than the cost of the materials, if you buy a decent quantity.

Try to imagine this sort of thing, but applied to everything.  Better yet, imagine if we were able to forget about money, and just apply our resources to solving our immediate problems.  Imagine armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do than oversee coal plants being retrofitted with clean burners, just because, you know, that smoke sucks.  Imagine landfills being replaced with things like the Toshima Incineration Plant².  Electric cars, using those patents that the big car companies would have no motivation to sit on anymore. Hell, cities on the moon, if anyone still cares.

Anyway, enjoy your bailouts. Cheers!

1) They could also technically charge more than their product is worth, but no rational entity would buy that.  Imagine, charging $70 for a pair of shoes that cost $1 to make.  Ridiculous!

2) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/17/AR2008111702968.html

Here’s an idea that can change that: voters unions.

You set up a non-profit organization and draft a set of principles that define the group’s ideology. At the head of the organization is a group of people who examine issues which are brought to the organization and decide which action, if any, would be ideologically appropriate. To ensure proper scrutiny, the transcripts of these discussions are made publicly available, and individuals who presented issues discussed and suggested actions considered are notified. The group then lobbies the government to enact their decisions.

Why does the government listen? When people join the organization they sign a sheet of paper making the organization the legal trustee of their ballot, giving it the power to vote on their behalf. If the government doesn’t listen, it doesn’t get the votes. This is similar to the power of lobby money—getting votes—but it bypasses the money and campaigning part, and its certainty gives it even more power.

Here are a few reasons why this is a good idea:

1. It gives voters the same power to affect immediate change that corporate lobbyists currently enjoy. There’s no reason for the union to wait for an election year and demand campaign promises: it can go straight to the government, and say “do this now and you’ll get votes next election.” The degree to which a government cooperates determines how much support they will get from the union.
2. It blunts the power of corporate lobbying. More votes secured behind a union means fewer votes that campaign dollars can buy.
3. Aggregating voter power behind an ideological organization will give more force to ideologically motivated policy, since this is what the organization would be lobbying for. These policies are also decided by discussion on a case-by-case basis, so they’re likely to be well thought-through, and the public transcripts provide documentation of the justification.
4. The organization keeps a running tally of who it likes and doesn’t like, otherwise it wouldn’t know where to deposit its votes on election day. This means that in addition to remembering who went along and who didn’t, it remembers scandals, bad bills, and everything else that should affect political careers which individual voters tend to forget. Since ballots are being cast with this knowledge, scandals are more likely to end careers and representing constituents more likely to improve them. The lack of forgetfulness also reduces the effectiveness of campaigning and therefore further defangs corporate lobbies.
5. It simplifies political participation. Joining the organization is fire-and-forget. If an issue comes up that you are concerned about, you raise it and see what happens. If you don’t like what the organization does, you can drop out by sending a notarized letter revoking their trusteeship².

Creating and running an organization like this would have been extremely difficult years ago, but these days it would be a piece of cake. Submitting issues to be discussed could be done via the web, and meeting agendas could be generated by taking the frequently submitted issues. Discussions could even happen over email or web forums, allowing easy documentation, and notification of discussions could easily be sent to everyone who submitted the issues. The software would be easy. The organization would require a staff of perhaps 20-40 to operate on a national level; probably less for provincial and civic levels. It could be done.

1) It increases the voter’s power 100-fold, putting it evenly at 0.

2) Most professionals can act as a notary public, so this isn’t as tricky as it seems it might be. Still, developing this idea further would require finding a simpler way that still carried proper legal force.