Moonlapse's Private Blog

A haruspex?

 

I know exactly what you mean. I have the wierdest dreams and when I wake up I just don't know what the heck it was about. Somethimes I wonder the things I dream about are real, or they are just a bunch of blurs all put together.

 

Some people like dreams, but when I sleep and all you see is black that is what I like.

Heh. It was the full moon messing with ya.

Maybe an aspect of your mental exertions lately.

 

Moon, you do not agree with my criticisms of capatalism. What is your view of the monopoly breaking of the turn of the century in American history: the oil, steel and banking mangates?

First of all, I am very critical of state empowered capitalism. My view points are laissez-faire in the sense that capital should not influence state function and state function should not influence capital. My specific views on specific topics tend to be a long time in the making since I really need some sort of concrete affirmation which is time consuming.

 

Anyways, here are some of my extremely generalized thoughts:

 

The Civil War essentially started a homogenization process. Coal, the steam engine, new methods of steel production, and an influx of migrants were ideal for the spread of railroads. Railroads really progressed the homogenization. Before, trusts were mainly localized due to the logistical limitations of horse travel. The potential of capital spread with the railroads.

 

Another key element here is the popularization of the idea of purposefully structured, mechanical society a la Prussia. Much of this ideology finds its way into the legislative process and it remains there to this day. Why does the social structure of the pre-Civil War days, a purposeful departure from the English class system, morph into a pseudo English class system?

 

The point is, the corporate methods of management infiltrated society by way of government. Society is actually much more efficiently used and predicted when it is homogenized and stratified into different functional parts. Think about school, think about work, think about government, think about society. There's a common thread that was introduced in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

 

Anyways... this shift, by design, allowed a previously unseen concentration of wealth to be efficiently used to make progress, to make newer product. The way I see it, the people themselves would have eliminated the monopolies eventually, either through violence or coordinated non-violent efforts, or whatever. This would basically undo the 'progress' made since the Civil War. However, if the state assumes the role of overseer and manager of economic and social aspects, this dilemma is diffused.

 

This is actually to the advantage of corporations. The social transformation, by joint effort of state and corporation, continues and we all go through school, segregated by age and social group, managed by an authority figure who tells us the information we should know and has us answer the questions we are supposed to ask.

 

If we want to succeed in life, we need to succeed in this psychological factory and assimilate. We become excellent consumers, bits of predictable and easily influenced machinery in the regulated whole. We contribute to the concentration of capital instead of the diffusion, in order to make more innovative progress. We have a fundamentally unjust welfare system because the state has replaced the function of the family prior to the Industrial Revolution.

 

So essentially, I think anti-trust is less about equality and more about the transformation of early America into the wanna-be utopia of modern America. The casualties of this process were not Rockefeller, Carnegie or Morgan. Capitalism is fine, it works. Just don't mix it with authority.

I watched Pink Floyd's The Wall. Roger Waters has the same idea about the school system as you do- homogenization.

Hm, I still cant shake the idea that there are some monopolies which could be very dangerous. No one cares of a paper clip monopoly, but what of oil, power and weapons manufacture? If you removed all oversight on monopolistic moves in America, I am sure that in a matter of months most oil companies would have joined togeather. Oil companies have already used their money in this country, hire mercenaries in others to influence their way. Could you imagine what one conglomeration could do? Small corporations can be altruistic, but I know of no large corporation that really cares about much else than expanding its abilities. That is what they are made for, and what capatalism tells them they must do to survive.

 

Anyway, war is the true mother of invention, not total control. Hell just look at the Roman Republic and Empire. During the Republic the competion and the prohibition of consolidation of power was what kept men ambitious and doing great things. By the empire, you have little in the way of achievements or progress with a few exceptions.

 

I suppose you could be right about the fake Utopia, but it seems more like you have two choices on how the 'system' equlibrates itself. One you can try and control the inbalances, or two you can just let it go and have the violence and economic disruptions you mention.

If capitalism means competition, then I don't see it in the world. If free markets are capitalism, show me one.

In the current circumstances, yes... monolopies can become too powerful. This wasn't the case prior to the dissolution of independent agrarian families. The current system can't exist without fine tuned centralized controls, otherwise it would fall apart. Its a matter of being the master of your existence along with all the risks and hardships, or forfieting your mastery for the comfort of a utopian ideal. If there had been no controls on oil companies up until now, do you think so many people would be hopelessly dependent on cheap oil? How many independent innovators would develop homegrown alternatives? The fact that the government regulates before the citizenry take serious action reinforces the corporate state.

 

Do you think that ethanol is really the answer to oil, or does this sudden push for this particular solution have more to do with ADM... ever wonder why corn syrup is in everything instead of cane sugar? Ethanol absorbs water into fuel, is much more inefficient than gasoline and currently uses as much - if not more - fossil fuel energy to produce than the energy it creates.

 

True, war may accelerate invention, but the modern 'mother' is probably the positivist method. You don't necessarily need genius when you have a proven method. I tend to think that if the purposeful effort to bypass democracy in order to organize and control society as a whole in the nineteenth century has not happened, progress would necessarily have been made on a more individual level and at a more even pace. What I mean is that when society is readjusted to corporate methodology for the sake of progressive efficiency - factory schools, factory jobs, cubicles, mass media - then capital gets far more concentrated, increasing its widespread effectiveness - good or bad.

 

If you support social insurance, you necessarily support the corporate state - they are part of the same system and always will be. That is the utopian system where the eventual goal is to eliminate any real hardship from life. If you support self-sufficient family units, you necessarily support the complete disintegration of the economic-social-state bond and the idea that surviving, overcoming challenge and passing real knowledge and tradition to the next generation is one of the fundamental meanings in life. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the essence of the lives of our founding fathers.

 

Would you rather be the wild animal or the one in the zoo? Not everyone will answer this the same way.

You've got some compelling thoughts there Moon. Is there any way to return to the days before, or is empire our doomed future?

If there is, I think that it would take at least as long to undo as it has taken to get to this point. I think that people should purposely put themselves in control of their lives - there needs to be many more entrepreneurs to compete with corporations, people need to make sure that they and their children get an intellectual education (stay away from the TV, read some challenging literature) and always try to improve upon it. Spending more time providing guidance and insight to your kids should be your foremost obligation when you have them - intended or not.

 

How much of a child's day is taken up by school, homework and television/games? How late in life, if ever, do people learn financial responsibility? How many people try to find fulfillment in self-sufficiency instead of just aquiring the objects they see in advertising?

 

The thing I've learned to cherish most in my life was spending part of my childhood on a farm. I entertained myself using whatever I could find and even though I despised it at the time, the manual labor that I was expected to do as a part of the family educated me more than school ever did.