Thursday, November 13, 2014

Let's Just Start Taxing Economic Policy Lobbying, Instead Of Sales & FICA Taxes?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)
Damage-Subtracted taxes, instead of Value-Added taxes? DST vs VAT?*
John Cochrane Explains Neo-Fisherism



Really? When is too much too much? Orthodox economics - like Aristocracy - has turned into nothing more than hoarding behavior. First people hoard static goods, then they soon hire academics to train shamans, create political-religions, and finally flood us with "economic" theory - in distracting attempts to hoard public fiat, and cultural perspective itself.

Personally, if I became President, I'd do something to seriously tax all this excessive economic theorizing that somehow accumulates as paid lobbying - unproductively dominated by "savers hoarding" instead of "labor producing" ...

... and get back to actively managing a highly dynamic economy based on more/faster/wider feedback based on better/faster/more cultural instrumentation.

Surely we must stop letting these hoards of Economic Policy beginners continue over-modeling an economy as an adequately described, static machine running at constant load.

A dynamic democracy is not a simple machine, it's an incredibly dynamic, rapidly evolving bio-cultural engine. Just stop trying to constrain our democracy & culture.

I've now read enough economics literature to stop reading it.

What do we need? Funny how those words cheques & balances come back to haunt us. :)

The original checks & balances intended by the Constitution were hacked within 8 years, when we let factions create political parties instead of sticking to our intended practice of finding consensus Desired Outcomes anew, with every year of changing context. The easiest time to betray any revolution is immediately, while rebels are still thinking that they won.

Disorders of hoarding behaviors in defined central nervous systems are continuously studied, yet those individual disorders are trivial compared to the impact of distributed hoarding behaviors in definable cultures, whether the cultural boundaries are defined by markets or nations. We won't address cultural hoarding until we invent new methods for training citizens to acknowledge and study it. By then, we'll have distributed disorders on a supra-cultural scale. Will the quality (including tempo) of our distributed discourse rise to meet that looming challenge, fast enough for humans to survive? Not if we don't start practicing audacious new methods, ASAP.

We need more methods, not models. And more practice, not just theory.


* A sin tax on public practice of economic theorizing, just like on other forms of gambling? Sure. Why is it ok for rich lobbyists to gamble with public policy, while poor people may only gamble their personal options in casinos (owned by rich people)? Yes, political parties are casinos, where naive voters are enticed to roll their dice - while not playing with House options, nor the Senate's. :(

17 comments:

Roger Erickson said...

Ok, if we could take a NMR scan of US market culture, during alternate periods of hoarding vs national growth ... what checks & balances would we see missing vs active in the alternate states of mass-behavior?

Hint: a different one, every time population or national culture changed by some order of magnitude

For an evolving culture, it's always different this time, in some subtle ways. Hence, the checks & balances used for staying within mounting tolerance limits have to change as fast as we-the-people do.

That's why Darwin called it Adaptive Rate, and didn't put a lid on the size of the methods list involved.


Roger Erickson said...

it's curious to review the descent of economics (or lack of pragmatic ascent);

does anyone know of any other academic discipline that's gotten that out of synch with reality?

some religious denominations come to my mind, but not really any other recent academic disciplines;

maybe leechcraft medicine 500 years ago, prior to development of sterile technique?

navigation, ~500 years ago, before Magellan proved (again) that the world wasn't flat?

astronomy, ~500 years ago, before mathematicians proved that earth circled the Sun?

(actually, militaries ... w every war it takes to demonstrate the reality of new weapons)

(not to mention class-based cultures, which still haven't dumped various Lords & Ladies)

We reinvented democracy 200+ years ago, but orthodox economics is still serving King George & the other aristocrats who think that they "manage" THEIR peasants.

We're still waiting on a long-overdue reinvention of our own Ivy League economics depts.

It's still a travesty - 81 years after Marriner Eccles first rubbed their faces in it. Amazingly, very little of the brown stuff stuck.

Potty training the economics profession. Now there's an apt analogy. :(

Roger Erickson said...

Yes, it's a given that orthodox economics is a quasi-religion, with all the trappings.

Yet why? Just because it's so close to the strings of cultural power, a taboo subject?

I still think that anthropologists could tell us more about "economics" in modern culture, if more of them would bother to formally study it's modern deployments. It'd be professional suicide for many, but it has to be done.

Can you imagine Harvard Economics declaring war on the ASU Dept of Anthropology? Who would win? Harvard could probably get ASU-anthro placed on the Terrorist Watch List - before they knew what hit 'em.

Roger Erickson said...

Steve H: "no i don't know anything close to economics. even psychiatry is more of a science"

then it's an anthropology phenomenon;
one old adage in anthropology is that when topics are too close to contentious issues about power, prestige & social standing, then they get walled off as taboo subjects, and then followed by agreed-upon orthodox rituals for skirting the issue

MacroEconomics, definition: ...

a method for NOT discussing reality, if you don't want to get shot by thugs, gangsters, aristocrats or emerging forms of Control Frauds;

in general biology, all those labels fall under the category of Parasites;

in business, they're called Free Riders?

in democracy, they're just called traitors,

Roger Erickson said...

So in summary, Orthodox Economics is a symptom of ongoing Control Fraud.

How are all categories of Parasite/ControlFrauds eventually managed - by adaptive systems?

By constantly developing resilient regulatory & re-purposing methodology.

We've "domesticated" every parasite from viruses to dogs to capitalists. We can domesticate banksters too.

Roger Erickson said...

Well, there we have it; another reminder:

“economics students are significantly more corrupt than others, which is due to self-selection rather than indoctrination. Moreover, our results vary with gender — male students of economics are most corrupt, male non-economists the least.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268100001116

Roger Erickson said...

and this too, courtesy of Bill Mitchell:

business and economics students (those who study a mainstream neoclassical curriculum) have stretched ethics
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126238854939012923

Tom Hickey said...

does anyone know of any other academic discipline that's gotten that out of synch with reality?

Anglo-American philosophy, partially owing to its own shortcomings and partially owing to liberal education falling out of favor.

The best work in philosophy has been done outside of academic philosophy for some time now.

Tom Hickey said...

Roger, in a word, "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is the Zeitgeist in the US and UK since Reagan and Thatcher. Conventional economics provides the foundation for neoliberalism not only as a political theory but also the basis of a socio-economic system. There's a huge investment in this global enterprise which is owned by the corporatocracy and operated globally through the intelligence services, which together comprise the foundation for the deep state through the revolving door and the bureaucracy that gives governments stability and continuity. This is well-worked out and tightly integrated system.

Tom Hickey said...

anthropology is that when topics are too close to contentious issues about power, prestige & social standing, then they get walled off as taboo subjects, and then followed by agreed-upon orthodox rituals for skirting the issue

Sums it up. Just look at the way that MMT economists are systematically excluded, along with other Post Keynesians, Marxists, Marxians, Georgists, environmental economists, economic sociologists, economic anthropologists, etc.

Roger Erickson said...

it's also self-assisted suicide

classic case of over-adapting to transient context

while ignoring, losing & constraining distributed resiliency

Tom Hickey said...

So in summary, Orthodox Economics is a symptom of ongoing Control Fraud.

Bingo.

The aim of parasites is to hijack the system for their own advantage. Parasites have to be good at disguising themselves from the immune system and overwhelming it if need be.

This is what's happening in the Empire now.

Roger Erickson said...

not to mention: Does Studying Economics Breed Greed?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201310/does-studying-economics-breed-greed

Tom Hickey said...

BTW, I include the judicial system under the bureaucracy that contributes to fixing stability and continuity of policy. As Elizabeth Warren has said, corporations control the courts.

Roger Erickson said...

Let's face it, though. This is std biology of adaptive systems, always observable from the level of molecular adaptation to the adaptation of human cultures.

When new, dangerous PROCESSES are being handled, there are always local+net dangers, profits and eventual ADAPTATIONS.

Parallel to the transition from danger to local_profit to aggregate_adaptation, there's a another transition, as described from the perspective of internal components looking out.

Of course dangerous PROCESSES are initially walled off & avoided by most. Then they're wielded by a trickle, then more, then everyone. By the time everyone is wielding the new PROCESS, it's no longer considered taboo.

The time that transition takes, from taboo to a mundane, domesticated status actually defines part of the net Adaptive Rate of that culture.

We're really talking about the Adaptive Rate of Americans, and the USA.

Is it still dangerous to possess static or dynamic assets? Not really. We even have FDIC.

So is it still necessary to deploy methods that keep JJ Sixpack from accurately discussing static & dynamic assets - i.e., fiat currency operations?

No.

We're on the verge of a cultural transition.

In all adaptive systems, dangerous new processes are treated as something dangerous ... until they're not. Once they're not, a phase change in culture occurs, and rapid deployment of methods from taboo to mundane status occurs.

Who's afraid of Fiat Wolf? Your great-grandchildren won't be. That's for sure. If they are, they'll have already been replaced ... by some other culture's great-grandchildren.

You can count on it. If'n ya know how to count.

Roger Erickson said...

Warren's little book on the 7 DIFs may well turn out to be analogous to Gutenberg printing the first Bible in something other than Latin.

How on earth did 1st-person reading of the Bible become taboo? That's a long story, with many lessons for readers wondering why so many topics about money, currency, static value and dynamic value are treated like black box taboos.

Henry Ford & Tom Edison had it right. There's no great mystery involved. Just obsolete cultural taboos.

Roger Erickson said...

7 Difs
http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf