Pragmatists Learn From Everyone

Notice that gerontocracy (rule by the old) is not represented below. That's because nobody actually believes in it as an ideology, as a way that things ''should'' be. Like murder, gerontocrary is an unfortunate circumstance that we suffer from.

Useful concepts from across the political spectrum

Anarchism:

• Authority (of one person over/for another), inequality, and totalitarianism (aka micro-management) are inherently evil.


• As it happens, they are also inefficient. Any activity, including a workplace, is best structured in an anti-authoritarian manner.

Conservatism:

• Security, Prosperity and Family are separate from freedom and are more important towards happiness than freedom.


• Freedom can be deferred and submaximal freedom may be best. Freedom can be imperfect so that a free choice to enter into a relationship may not be freely unmade either easily or justly.


• "Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it." source


• Economic realism, it makes no sense to tax things you want to promote, like income and employment.

Libertarianism (Georgist):

• Land is a public good. Land can never be a private good except at the forbearance of society.


• All public goods ought to be taxed for the benefit of society. Primary resources, including oil and land, should be taxed to the max.

Social democracy:

• Democracy works to benefit society.


• Radical egalitarianism in politics requires radical egalitarianism in economics.

Socialism:

• Cooperation works better than competition.


• Labour theory of value: excess value can accrue to customers just as well as producers (or under capitalism, to capitalists)


• Entitlements (Static Freedom).

Totalitarian Communism:

• From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.


• Crushing inequality and insecurity can't survive indefinitely. Justice for the masses must prevail. (Contrary to Western opinion, what preceded, and followed, the USSR was worse than it was.)


• Standardized goods simplify life, leaving more leisure time for the things that matter.

Liberalism:

• The entire human rights hierarchy, which is a technocratic issue actually.


• The economy suffers from pervasive externalities, transaction and sunk costs.


• Freedom to innovate is necessary to progress. (So's leisure but anyways ...)


• Social security is necessary for individual risk-taking, hence to innovation and progress.


• Procedural freedom (Dynamic Freedom).

Technocracy:

• Technical questions are best left to committees of experts, or groups of people who can be made into experts for the duration of the judgement.


• Most people are magical thinkers incapable of abstract reasoning. They aren't fit to make technical decisions at all.

Fascism:

• Hierarchy is efficient and conducive to fast decision-making.

Nazism:

• Liberal, largely atheist, Jews control many of the more prosperous and advanced sectors of the economy. Including Hollywood in the USA.


• Most people are not equipped to be citizens. (The fault of fascism but anyways ...).

Clandestinism:

• "Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means." source. And in the Army, normal politics involves multiple murder.

Jingoism:

• Murder and criminality are effective and rewarding.

Monetarism:

• Positive interest currency causes inflation which is a shadow tax on citizens' money.

Alter-Monetarism:

• Currency is a public good which can and should be taxed.


• Negative interest currency is the best possible economic policy. It is a decentralized economic policy.

Developmental economics:

• Real wealth consists of, but is not limited to, factories, robots, generators, engines, mines, fields, bridges, viaducts, roads, trains, train tracks, trucks and ships. It specifically excludes coloured pieces of paper, integers in a special computer, bars of a shiny yellow metal, tasers, billy clubs, prisons, tanks, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, nuclear bombs, or other things which cannot be put to any productive purpose.


• Finance is the enemy of industry


• Use-value is different from trade-value. Real value is use-value. It isn't a conserved quantity. It isn't tradeable. It obeys no known laws. Yet it rules economics. Ignoring use-value leads to excess, decadence, corruption, economic stagnation and eventually economic collapse.

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Originally published at The Adjunct (minor additions)