Throwing a Stone at the Megastate

or, Who's Robbing the Store?


James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University
Department of Economics & Political Irony

“It is better to throw a stone at the right time, than to give gold at the wrong.”
—Socrates Ruggles

In a book published in the dark ages before 2000 A. D., one of our Nobel Prize winners (in chemistry, which means he doesn't know any more about government and politics than we do), wrote a book that I do not recommend for several reasons. He correctly suggests, however, that your government is composed of individuals who are looking out for themselves, and not really “minding the store”. He writes:

When we were children, we thought our parents were taking care of things. Sometimes they were. As adults, we like to think there are some very wise people, usually older than we are, taking care of the planet and us. As a result of this wishful thinking, a lot of people make a living under the pretense of doing just that.
It would be naïve to think that individuals working in government agencies charged with taking care of us, or even in nonprofit foundations with lofty names, are altruistic toward us. They aren't sharing our genes. They aren't our parents. They are attending to their own biological imperatives and their own personal needs. Only when “ours” and “theirs” overlap do we get attention.
[Kary Mullis, “Who's Minding the Store”, in Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (New York: Pantheon, 1998), p. 101.]

I would like to suggest that not only is no one really minding the store, it is being robbed. After all, as he points out a little later in the book, talking about the kind of people who promote global warming, climate change, and ozone holes, on the basis of no science, he remarks: “Your planet is in well-fed hands.” (p. 109) They really are in this for themselves. I suppose our Nobel prize winner has his own motives also, probably to sell books.

This self-interest does not apply just to national or global politics—all politics is local. The guy running the dog-pound, or the “Free Store” is just as self-interested as the chairman of FEMA, or the FDIC. We need to keep turning these guys out of office, and getting new ones (who will be just as incompetent as the old ones were when they started), making sure they have no connections with the former bunch. There are no experts. Barak Hussein O has proved only one thing. That any idiot can be President; you don't even have to have been born here. “Throw the rascals out” was a phrase first coined by a very wise man—unless it was Adam and Eve's Landlord. If so, it is proof that even your ancestors in a direct line didn't always have your best interests in mind. They were in it for what they could get for themselves. Whether stealing apples (persimmons?), or making legalized heists from the national treasury, no one is looking out for us. We need movements like the Teaparty to remind the leeches in government that we are not fooled by their so-called expertise. The party is over, and the playhouse is about to be broken up—for now. It will have to happen again and again.

So, what should our stance to the government be? So far as I can see our two major parties today are both wrong. The people in control of them both espouse Big Government, and Big Spending. They may disagree on exactly how to spend this largesse, and on social issues; but it comes to the same thing regarding the role of government. The politicos of both parties agree that the government should do virtually everything. At the other end of the scale, shading off into Anarchy, are the Libertarians, and others who think that the government should do almost nothing! The lines are going to be drawn on which of these two kinds of government we are going to have; but these will not be the two major parties.

The people know that there should be a government, and that it has a legitimate function. That function is very much smaller than the one is has assumed under the two major parties at present. Even a government a quarter of the size of our current mess is going to be rich and powerful, but it will not have complete control of our lives. In the early days of our country one of the major parties was the Whigs. Eventually this party became irrelevant, and ceased to exist. The other party, the Democratic-Republicans, eventually became two (or more) parties. They at one time broadly represented most voters. In a sense the modern parties are largely a sentimental hang-over from earlier days. Both are largely irrelevant, and even if names are retained, they will both eventually cease to exist. We are now in an era in which “conservative” and “liberal” (not very good names at best), is mostly about values, but the real issue is what kind of government are we going to have! This in itself is a primary value, but it will, in the end, determine how all the others are to be dealt with. Our arguments about government are largely misplaced because there has been a “revolution” in economics that has not yet been grasped.

People and politicos alike (remember there are no experts, even among those who claim to be minding the store) still think that wealth depends primarily on making things and moving things; but the truth is, it is no longer possible to make large profits from such activities. Even the control of money does not guarantee this. (zero interest rates!) Land, labour, and money capital, the traditional sources of wealth, increasingly yield less and less return. In the modern economy what drives profits and produces wealth is knowledge and information.

When I worked at FedEx the company thought it important to keep us constantly informed about the affairs of the company. Most people think that FedEx is primarily concerned with moving things; but the chairman, Fred Smith, in one of his video-casts to us, said something that proves the contrary. He stated that the most valuable product of FedEx is information. Remember that the next time you are trying to track a package. Google seems to be doing better than U. S. Steel, and Government Motors right now. The late Peter Drucker, who was one of our foremost economists, said that the knowledge-based economy does not operate like the traditional theories assume all economies operate. Knowledge cannot be quantified like steel ingots. Our statistical methods do not tell us much about it. We don't even have a theory, as of yet, about how knowledge drives the economy, though it is obvious that it does.

We need an Economics of Knowledge. Peter Drucker writes:

We need an economic theory that puts knowledge into the center of the wealth-producing process. Such a theory alone can explain the present economy. It alone can explain economic growth. It alone can explain innovation.
[Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, p. 183.]

Knowledge work, Drucker points out, requires the very opposite of central planning and centralization. Big Government is the major factor inhibiting the growth of the economy at the present time. He points out that even the terms used, such as centralization and decentralization, are not economic terms; they are terms used in management. Big Government cannot manage. It cannot help in the current damming of productive energies, but it can surely hinder. The Megastate has become the master of civil society; it endangers life, liberty, and property. All knowledge is created by individuals (not committees, not group-think), and any threat to the sources of private wealth endangers the creation of knowledge-capital. We must set economic limits to what government can do, and thus free the private sector to produce the knowledge that will be the gateway to the future.

How limited do we want the government to be? One of our new writers (I have lost the citation for the present) says: “One could imagine a democratized political, economic, and social system that still contained within it a few formal and informal restraints, sacrificing some energy and dynamism in favor of other virtues, such as transparency, honesty, equity, and stability.” I think a party espousing such a view would speak for me, and for many others. Perhaps enough to counter the Big Government crowd. What we want is not the “Nanny State” that can cater to our every whim, but a government we can respect, to preserve our basic freedoms.

When the government is limited to the proper size there will be less trouble in monitoring it, less to steal, less encroachment. This is what the real issue is at present. It is grass-roots movements, like the Teaparty, that have grasped this, however dimly. The major parties ignore this insight at the peril of splitting, and their ultimate demise, and nothing we can do will stop it.

Written 21 Aug 2010.

Big Bone University: A Think Tank, Research Institute, & Public Policy Center
Established 2000 A. D.
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
Big Bone, Kentucky
jkduvall@gmail.com

I suggest that not only are people who run agencies of the government robbing us, often through legal means, such as the false “compensating tax rate”, but that the government is robbing the economy. It is stifling the sources of growth while pretending to stimulate growth. Sectors of the economy, such as transportation, industry, and banking, that no longer drive the economy are given deference over the private initiative that is not so obviously “economic”, but such “stimulus” is at their expense, and hurts their growth. Innovation today is in private sector knowledge work—knowledge industries, research, technology, information, and education—and none of these are a primary function of government.


AQQ: Archival Quality Quotation:

“The primary fantasy of our time is to escape catastrophe by building an ark or founding an apocalyptic colony far removed from the collapse of civilization.”
William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth (1974), p. 58.