While The ML's/3rd Worldists Are Correct That The US Enjoys Imperial Privileges, There's So Much That

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

But prisons ARE a solution to interpersonal harm. The whole point of prisons is to give victims (and society at large) a choice between "murder" and "do nothing". There are some actually-existing prison systems that maximize the safety and welfare of prisoners while also accomplishing the basic purpose of prison- neutralizing the ability of its inhabitants to inflict suffering on other citizens without recourse. The US does not have one of these systems, sadly, but better prison systems are not just a fantasy. They could be achieved in a short time.

Also, "who decides who is an abuser? What about false accusations?" These questions can be answered by the court system and the rule of law. Again, very few countries (if any) have a truly fair and democratic justice system in practice, but it is possible to minimize false prosecution whilst ensuring that people who commit terrible crimes are disincentivized to do so again.

Prison abolition isn’t a solution to interpersonal harm. It’s meant to be a solution for the violence of prisons.

Yeah, the original guidelines were pretty awful, but this kind of reaction bothers me. The stuff about communication and building better relationships is great, but telling depressed or anxious men who are stressed out from any number of causes-say, intense competition at work, crippling insecurity, or unhealthy relationships with other men- to fix their problems via...more competition, more contact with other men, and greater submission to their current hierarchies seems like a step back.

Alternative, Scientifically-Literate Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men - Quillette

The American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” have received much criticism from journalists and professional psychologists. Much of the opposition has centered on the guideline’s attack on “traditional masculinity” and the privileging of activism over evidence-based treatment. One of the few redeeming features of the guidelines is their acknowledgement that men face unique physical, psychological, educational, and social challenges and are less likely to seek psychological treatment to meet those challenges. But the guidelines fail in their targeted goal of preparing therapists to help the men under their care. Throughout the entirety of the APA’s guidelines, discussion of evolutionary influences on men’s psychological development is either unintentionally neglected or willfully avoided (“testosterone” appears nowhere in the document and, out of more than 400 citations, only four mention either hormones or anything brain- or neuro-related). Whatever the reason, the fact that a sharp distinction is made between “sex” as biology and “gender” as “psychological, social, and cultural” experience suggests that the authors of the guidelines subscribe to the fallacy of …

I really don’t know what to think of this. We don’t need to explain why men and women are different with evo psych, when we just should take men seriously, and treat them as individuals, not as members of some kind of social masculinity movement/ideology, and take their suffering seriously, not just because of caveman-just-so-story cant-help-it determinism.

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)

There's always violence. We could just sieze control of the plants and factories and voluntarily scale back our consumption, production, and pollution over the next decade until CO2 levels stabilized. We don't need to sit here helplessly waiting for the fruits of our own labor to kill us all. Bonus points if we can support people in other countries doing similar things.

it’s crazy that im alive to witness major effects of climate change. like it always seemed super vague and it was always ‘the polar bears won’t have anywhere to live’ but this shit is going to fuck everything up bigtime.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.