How Decentralizing Institutions Will Unite the Left and Right

Via The Daily Bell

“Big government is the problem!”

“No, big business is the problem!”

What if their coexistence on such a large scale is the real problem? They each rely on the other for power. A corporation is a government creation, with legal definitions which protect it from market forces. And government laws and regulations are largely designed by corporate special interests.

It is a vicious cycle which arguably fits the definition of fascism. The government doesn’t own the means of production, but it regulates industry to the point that it might as well. A corporation can work through the government to make any law or regulation it wants which will give them an unfair advantage or kill a competitor. The government even directly hands corporations money in the form of bailouts, subsidies, and grants!

At this point, it is impossible to disentangle big business and big government. So when we talk decentralizing institutions, it is not just the government which needs to be split up.

Of course, many on the left seem to think the government is the institution needed to reign in big business. This is an absurd contradiction; government is what made big business the cronyistic monster it is today.

Likewise, we cannot expect the market to reign in government. Current market conditions prove the easiest way to turn a “profit” is by cozying up to the government, not by pitting your business against it.

But the left and right should agree that having a choice is better than being forced according to the whims of the majority. Or has the left learned nothing from the election of Donald Trump?

There is a dangerous meme on the left that government can solve all problems if the right people are in power. They claim the people control the government by voting, and that over the long run, the majority will do the right thing–as long as the left has control over public education, the media, and free speech.

But the right also believes a dangerous meme that business will always be properly regulated by market forces. But just like the voters, the consumers will not always steer industry in the proper direction. The main difference is that you can withdraw your support from business… in theory.

The marriage between government and industry makes voting at the ballot box or with your dollar a dubious solution. But the smaller and more decentralized institutions get–whether business or government structures–the easier they are to control.

Local business and local government will always be more responsive to voters and customers. The key is being able to withdraw support in favor of an actual alternative choice.

Unity Through Decentralization

The internet has centralized society more than ever before. Yet this unity did not occur by way of conquering armies and imperial empires. The internet provided a platform for natural order to emerge out of chaos. It is a place for voluntary interactions.

The internet–and technologies based on it such as the blockchain–provides the unity needed for modern communication, coordination, and economic transactions. The ease of forming voluntary groups allows decentralization of power to be a real possibility.

Kirkpatrick Sale is one leftist arguing for decentralization of government and industry. He recently released a book called Human Scale Revisited. This is an updated and slimmed down version of his 1980 book Human Scale.

The heart of Human Scale, then and now, is Sale’s judgment that “to save our planet and its civilizations…we must work toward a decentralization of institutions, the devolution of power, and the dismantling of all large scale systems that have created or perpetuated the current crisis. In their place, smaller more controllable, more efficient, more sensitive, people-sized units, rooted in local environments and guided by local citizens. That is the human-scale alternative.”

The more decentralized government gets, the more decentralized business will become. People have more control over smaller governments. People are less likely to support bailouts and subsidies for “special” companies when they can’t imagine that someone 14 states away is paying for it.

Already we have some degree of control over how large companies can get. I grow a solid percentage of the food I eat. I make my own soap, deodorant, and toothpaste. I gladly shop at thrift stores and flea markets. Local beer, and family owned restaurants are the highlights of my nights out.

The point of failure is that the government can still steal our money and hand it to failing car companies, crooked investment banks, and manipulative oil companies. They can still bar entry into the restaurant and beer industry. They can threaten me if I buy, sell, or trade goods such as raw milk with my neighbors.

Decentralize the seat of government, and the people can choose to not associate with governments which do such things.

If 50 countries stand where the United States once stood, we would have actual options and true competition. It is easy to move states to live under a better government–I already did it, from Massachusetts to Florida. But the benefits are still marginal with the overlords in DC.

Precedent

For 800 years, “surviving ups and downs and feasts and famines, [Lucca] was one of the most prosperous places on the entire Italian peninsula, not to mention the entire European continent.” That came to an end with Napoleonic imperialism, but its experience produced “Lucca’s Law”: “Territories will be richer when small and self-sufficient than when large and dependent.”

Perhaps in the age of communication, where anyone can be a journalist with their phone and good timing, we can hold war lords and pillagers accountable for their actions. Could early exposure of their crimes stop the next Napoleon, Hitler, or Mao? Small territories could remain free if the ever more connected people of Earth have lost their appetite for bloodshed.

Or maybe I am naive, and this period of relative, yet unprecedented, peace on Earth is only the calm before the storm. Tell me what you think in the comments.

Paul Craig Roberts Warns Of "Ever More Official Lies" From The US Government

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The false reality constructed for Americans parallels perfectly the false reality constructed by Big Brother in George Orwells’ dystopian novel 1984.

Consider the constant morphing of “the Muslim threat” from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to al-Nusra, to ISIS to ISIL, to Daesh with a jump to Russia. All of a sudden 16 years of Middle East wars against “terrorists” and “dictators” have become a matter of standing up to Russia, the country most threatened by Muslim terrorism, and the country most capable of wiping the United States and its vassal empire off of the face of the earth.

Domestically, Americans are assured that, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, that is, flooding the financial markets with newly printed money that has driven up the prices of stocks and bonds, America has enjoyed an economic recovery since June of 2009, which must be one of the longest recoveries in history despite the absence of growth in median real family incomes, despite the growth in real retail sales, despite the falling labor force participation rate, despite the lack of high value-added, high productivity, high wage jobs.

The “recovery” is more than a mystery. It is a miracle. It exists only on fake news paper.

According to CNN, an unreliable source for sure, Jennifer Tescher, president and CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, reports that about half of Americans report that their living expenses are equal to or exceed their incomes. Among those aged 18 to 25 burdened by student loans, 54% say their debts are equal to or exceed their incomes. This means that half of the US population has ZERO discretionary income. So what is driving the recovery?

Nothing. For half or more of the US population there is no discretionary income there with which to drive the economy.

The older part of the population has no discretionary income either. For a decade there has been essentially zero interest on the savings of the elderly, and if you believe John Williams of shadowstats.com, which I do, the real interest rates have been zero and even negative as inflation is measured in a way designed to prevent Social Security cost of living adjustments.

In other words, the American economy has been living on the shrinkage of the savings and living standards of its population.

Last Friday’s employment report is just another lie from the government. The report says that the unemployment rate is 4.4% and that June employment increased by 222,000 jobs. A rosy picture. But as I have just demonstrated, there are no fundamentals to support it. It is just another US government lie like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, Russian invasion of Ukraine, and so forth and so on.

The rosy unemployment picture is totally contrived. The unemployment rate is 4.4% because discouraged workers who have not searched for a job in the past four weeks are not counted as unemployed.

The BLS has a second measure of unemployment, known as U6, which is seldom reported by the presstitute financial media. According to this official measure the US unemployment rate is about double the reported rate.

Why? the U6 rate counts discouraged workers who have been discouraged for less than one year.

John Williams counts the long term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) who formerly (before “reforms”) were counted officially. When the long term discouraged are counted, the US unemployment rate is in the 22-23 percent range. This is borne out by the clear fact that the labor force participation rate has been falling throughout the alleged “recovery.” Normally, labor force participation rates rise during economic recoveries.

It is very easy for the government to report a low jobless rate when the government studiously avoids counting the unemployed.

It is an extraordinary thing that although the US government itself reports that if even a small part of discouraged workers are counted as unemployed the unemployment rate is 8.6%, the presstitute financial media, a collection of professional liars, still reports, in the face of the government’s admission, that the unemployment rate as 4.4%.

Now, let’s do what I have done month after month year after year. Let’s look at the jobs that the BLS alleges are being created. Remember, most of these alleged jobs are the product of the birth/death model that adds by assumption alone about 100,000 jobs per month. In other words, these jobs come out of a model, not from reality.

Where are these reported jobs? They are where they always are in lowly paid domestic services. Health care and social assistance, about half of which is “ambulatory health care services,” provided 59,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality provided 36,000 jobs of which 29,300 consist of waitresses and bartenders. Local government rose by 35,000. Manufacturing, once the backbone of the US economy, provided a measly 1,000 jobs.

As I have emphasized for a decade or two, the US is devolving into a third world workforce where the only employment available is in lowly paid domestic service jobs that cannot be offshored and that do not pay enough to provide an independent existence. This is why 50% of 25-year olds live at home with their parents and why there are more Americans aged 24-34 living with parents than living independently.

This is not the economic profile of a “superpower” that the idiot neoconservatives claim the US to be. The American economy that offshoring corporations and financialization have created is incapable of supporting the enormous US debt burden. It is only a matter of time and circumstance.

I doubt that the United States can continue in the ranks of a first world economy. Americans have sat there sucking their thumbs while their “leaders” destroyed them.