Snowmageddon 2012

We did not get as much snow yesterday as expected BUT

Today was supposed to be a melt day with highs in the 40s. Looks like the Canadian cold beat the Hawaiian heat.

It has been snowing pretty much all day. Much worse than yesterday, which was supposed to be the bad day. The photo above is what the backyard looked like this morning.

Looks worse now. The poor dogs simply do not like the yard with the snow higher than their bellies. I guess I can not blame them

I want to see David Brin on a national stage discussing these thoughts

Is Libertarianism Fundamentally about Competition? Or about Property?
[Via Contrary Brin]

Some folks have heard me beat this drum. But it’s a fresh-enough thought – going to fundamentals that run deep beneath normal politics – so that I am moved to raise it yet again. In part because someone recently asked me, as author of The Transparent Society: “Can transparency and libertarianism complement each other?”

Now let’s have the simple answer first. Yes. A sane, better-focused libertarianism would be utterly compatible with transparency. In fact, it should be the very top priority.

Both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek proclaimed that markets are healthy in direct proportion to the number of skilled and knowing player-participants. Indeed, one chief indictment against every  pre-modern economic system is that nearly all of them were based on “allocation” of resources by elites. Allocators are inherently knowledge limited and likely to be delusional, precisely because they are few.

Just to be doubly clear on that: almost all previous cultures used GAR – or Guided Allocation of Resources – as their guiding economic principle. Whether the allocation was done by kings, feudal lords, priests or communist nomenklatura, it was nearly always the same: decisions over how to invest society’s surplus, which endeavors to capitalize and which products to produce were made by a small clade of delusional elites, as wrong in their models as they were sure of them.

Starting with Adam Smith – and later fervently preached by others, including Hayek – the notion of FIBM, or Faith In Blind Markets, began to compete against GAR.  The core notion? That the mass wisdom of millions of buyers, sellers, voters and investors will tend to emphasize or reinforce better ideas and cancel or punish bad ones. Delusions – the greatest human tendency – will be quickly discovered because no longer will some narrow group be able to nurse them without question.  Hence, getting back to the original question: the more transparency – and the greater the number of participants – the more people can come up with relatively accurate models and act upon them… or acutely criticize flaws in the models of others.

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I agree with David. Many liberals and libertarians would find common cause if things were stated simply. ”Will this help to increase the number of skilled, vigorous competitors?”

There is a role for government – to help insure the fairness of competition. Capitalism without fairness devolves into plutocracy. We have had too many years without fair competition.

We need to work our way back.