On Capital Materiality; The Phenomenon of Hording in Scale

Popular political philosophy since the cold war ended has taken something of a beating and devolved through the media zeitgeist into an economic existentialism advocating an absolute pursuit of self-interest to the exclusion of belief in social reality except as self-interest. It is something of a juvenile way of abnegating social, political responsibility. Society does exist in a concatenated state even as the individuals of it pursue their own self-interest. Like a football team the populous must have a fundamental game plan to win prosperity and security a viable ecospheric habitat. Unlike a football team the populous can and should pursue its individual interests with liberty and non-militarized uniformity.

Aristotle might have been more concerned with real politik and the prevention of the polity decaying into pure democracy and mob rule, or the more evil prospect of Aristocracy trickling upward into being oligarchy than today's economic existentialists of conservative bent, yet Americans today have exacerbated their historical trend against intelligent philosophical thought and just moved into a popular philosophy of super-sizing material things and capital in general.

From a pragmatist's point of view one needs material things to serve particular functions. Housing must be adequate to provide secure shelter and serve personal and social economic efficiency. Lifetime is limited so one doesn't want to tangentialize material possessions and become encumbered with maintaining a mansion or even a bureaucracy as the primary life experience. There are many experiences possible in life that are of equal or greater worth than just a few super-sized material items.

So one looks for other reasons why one must super-size possessions such as homes or SUVs and might discover than social equality or keep a defense parity against the advantage and opinions of other citizens is one of the basic causes for escalating personal investments in standard and predictable ways. Socially the opportunity cost for seeming to be living counter to a prevailing popular opinion may be financially significant. Social economic inertia drives the masses under the influence of concentrated power and wealth superiors along unsustainable social ends.

Value theory is a philosophical activity cognizant of the real value of goods or things, situations or circumstances, relationships and so forth for an individual and a society. Value seems to cohere within utility even if when utility is satisfied values for inessential items may arise to dominate a society. When societies compel individuals by circumstance and opportunity cost to buy very much oversized housing at high cost it has over valued non-utility and may create social dysfunction that spreads like waves outwards through the economic value exchanges into social regions unable to afford the luxury of investing in non-utility. If Americans were to build concrete dome homes with secure interiors, exteriors and adequate privacy and ecospheric integrity in the yard for a fraction of today's cost of quarter million dollar middle class homes perhaps Americans could save more for surfing, biking, sailing, skydiving or composing a poem. Some Americans could become inventors at home or learn a new field of science. The trouble generally is in developing more efficient and better quality housing at a lower cost as a fundamental effort and value of society.

If one could afford a decade's worth of food supply for one's home it still might be unreasonable to get more than a month supply. If a home is far larger than is useful within the context of one's life shelter and living needs it is as much a wasteful hording venture consuming one's time as if one buys far too large a boat to get to the other side of the river and spends years paying for it.

Aristotle and Polity; Moderate Government for the Advantage of the Poor/Pres. Obama's Tax Cuts for the Rich

I am re-posting some comments that I wrote in January 2011 on the President's failure to reasonably negotiate in the interests of demos of the United States. I would also like to point out a good article on Aristotle summarizing some of the main points of his descriptions of politics and especially democracy.

Ordinarily people have a misunderstanding of Aristotle. This 13 page article of summary is worth reading even if only to learn the difference between a polity and a democracy, or how Aristotle believed that Aristocracy transitioned destructively into oligharchy.

http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_aristotle_democracy?page=7&greekEncoding=UnicodeC

In this article Aristotle is found to have the opinion that polity-s sort of representative democracy, is the most moderate and therefor, I would think, best.

Fork in the Political Road-President Obama Advocated Regan Quality Tax Cut Extensions

January 28, 2011 04:13 PM EST

The public debt of the United States is about 14 trillion dollars today. If the tax cut extensions had been allowed to expire the budget would have naturally balanced in two years. Since the tax cuts the President anticipates federal budget deficit the next decade at which time it might be reduced to 50% of todays.

By 2015 the public debt will be out twenty trillion, and interest on that debt will be more than a trillion dollars annually. Right now interest on the public debt is about 3/4s of a trillion annually.

http://www.federalbudget.com/

President Obama, in order to be responsible needed to be a Harry Truman kind of 'the buck stops here' guy and veto any tax cuts. With additional federal budget cuts the public debt could have started dropping in 2013. With the tax cuts and a balanced budget, any budget cuts would have enabled direct reduction payments on the debt principle reducing interest payments as well.

The corporate world is already having record profits in many areas. The rich are getting richer. Jobs are being outsourced. Illegal aliens still come and go by the millions. High unemployment will continue for several years. Fundamental national political accountability has been breached with global corporate interests taking precedence. The federal government in 2008 and 2009 bailed out the corrupt rich with trillions of dollars of financial help and left the jobless to twist slowly in the wind.

The employed are making good money and can afford to pay taxes; the unemployed don't have to pay taxes except from leftover earnings for which they might receive amnesty. The rich need to be taxed at pre-Reagan cut rates.

I write about this issue with pragmatic concern. In Anchorage Alaska there were created 500 jobs net growth in 2010, 1000 new jobs are anticipated in 2011.

A reform of American capitalism is needed as a general an oligarchy, anti-financial monopoly action, low entropy ecological economic are required too, and full employment rather than making America another Mexico or India ruled by elite financial globalists needs to be the goals of a 4th political party in the United States of America.

The Existential Drift of U.S. Conservatives/Union-Leader Endorsement of Newt

Though Mitt Romney is a better candidate, the Union Leader could not endorse him perhaps because most of their subscribers aren't Mormons. Perhaps they were thinking of their income bottom line more so than of whom the best candidate would be in 2012.

There are few real conservatives these days-they are generally globalists in some form or other and inimical to U.S. national interests. Even if they are morally conservative, politics is preponderantly more about economics than morals (all things being equal and excluding the Ghengis Khans, Mengeles and so forth) which should be something more of a personal area that flows upward to the people collectively.

One may wonder if conservativism in the United States has evolved to mean economic existentialism and collapse of social realism as a political concern. With leaders that believe their are no consequence to group behavior economically, environmentally or politically the consequence is sound bite talk show quality candidates with no comprehension of the world today or America's role in it. Newt Gingrich is sort of a co-founder of the 90's economic infrastructure corruption that is paying off now. He did of course have a lot of support.

Obamacare is a Costly Trick for Corporatism

Obamacare requirements that all citizens purchase health insurance is a fundamental corruption of the role and relationship of government too the citizens. The U.S. Government may serve to provide free health services as a safety net for the people yet it cannot decree that the citizens should pay money for services to other citizens, groups of citizens such as businesses through law.

U.S. courts may of course find in civil suits between individuals on monetary issues as the case may be. The creation of health insurance exchanges that poor individuals are required to use to buy insurance from, or from any other source is simply a trespass by the federal government on the fundamental rights of the citizens to be free from bills of attainder and control in their empirical lives. It is more of a violation of privacy than any abortion theorist might ever advance in its support.

The notion has been advanced that expanding the insurance risk pool would lower health care costs for the middle class. That may be true, yet that is a financial context the government has zero right to engage in. If the middle class wants lower health care costs or emergency medical services for those that have used up their insurance benefits it should reasonably create a free public health service for the poor, veterans and those that have no other recourse for their medical condition. Removing the incidentalcosts of providing health coverage for the unisured would in itself lower the overall health care costs of the United States if all other economic factors were favorable.

If the middle class want to have a million dollars worth of health care insurance apeice and want to pay for it by conscripting the healthy, uninsured youth of the nation into a mandatory insurance risk pool creating thereby greater profits for the corporate insurers they would still have no assurance that the corporate profits would not just flow up to CEO's taking tens of millions of dollars of stock options. Neither would the youth having a significant chunk of their paychecks (if they are employed someday) for services they don't use be very happy.

As a matter of logic it makes little sense to remove capital from the poor and the middle class and make them pay corporations thereby eroding the potential for business development and savings, investments and so forth in the long run. When the corporate world began to eliminate employee health insurance it began the progression toward the day when all American citizens would instead be required to pay them for insurance by law instead. As the leadership of the Democratic Party has vacated its traditional concerns for health coverage universally for the poor and failed to make rigorous income standards for social security that would not pay those in retirement more than the average working American it has become fiscally irresponsible in general rather than exceptionally.

Obama Sues to Prevent States from Supporting Federal Law

The Obama administration has added Utah to the list of states it is suing to prevent state law reinforcement for federal law making illegal immigration a criminal offense. Utah is the latest in the states Attorney General Holder has filed suit upon to prevent the U.S. States from arresting and detaining persons wanted for federal criminal activity. It was such recalcitrance to let the several states be apprised of federal law breakers and to arrest and detain them for federal transfer that allowed an Oklahoma highway patrolman to make a traffic stop on a 9-11 hijacker and let him go because he wasn't placed by the N.S.A. on the federal watch list.

Federal law is fundamental created to provide laws the states individually are not capable of promulgating such as trans-state legal jurisdiction. Federal law is not intended to be a shield to defeat the ability of states to have a government in conformity to the will of the people of the several states. The people of the United States have supported federal immigration policy in the past that has required aliens to enter the country on a legal basis in accord with numbers and standards set by the Congress of the United States. The history of incompetent federal executive administration of the laws passed by the Congress is not brief, however it is not the right of the President to sue the states in order to prevent their reinforcement of federal law.

http://politicons.net/obama-sues-utah-to-halt-enforcement-of-tough-immigration-law/

Persons entering the United States unlawfully have committed a criminal offense that is of federal stature and applicable in all of the 50 states, territories and insular possessions. The individual states may reinforce federal law and support it with the arrest of federal criminals or not as the case may be. It is not however an promulgation of a different immigration policy to reinforce existing federal immigration policy by arresting persons found to be in violation of federal criminal statutes.

As a practical matter law enforcement officers have since the start of electronic and radio criminal data bases checked to learn the status of persons of interest that it contacts in the ordinary course of law enforcement. Persons hitch-hiking, standing on street corners, leaving federally controlled areas in a suspicious manner and so forth have been asked for I.D. and given a quick background check for warrants. Such checks that show that the individual contacted is not an American citizen or lawful resident or visitor enfilades the illegal immigration status of a federal criminal. Holding the fugitives for transfer to U.S. Immigration officials is then the reasonable, responsible course of action, as would be holding a federal fugitive from Wall Street corruption until eventually some federal official wanders over to take a look see.

Alaska Installs Ocean Acidity Measurement Buoys

Too much carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere increases the acidity of the ocean via precipitation and an increase of carbonic acid running off from the land as the carbon reacts with minerals (rocks). Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks installed an acid measuring buoy in Alaska waters this year and are requesting a budget for a few more measuring units for the coastal waters of the state.

http://www.aoos.org/first-ocean-acidification-buoys-deployed-in-alaskan-waters/

Many politicians are deniers of global warming and don't really expect a mass extinction to occur if there is to much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.They don't regard it as a human need to swiftly end the fossil fuel era and move to more intelligent, better for the U.S. competitive international economy with economic-ergonomic advantage for American wage earners transportation infrastructure. One must remind oneself occasionally that the American dream for the establishment is sleep-walking somnulent lateraled mobility in four wheeled fossil fueled cars while the world goes to the new mass extinction era. Power is the ultimate truth to the auto-highway clan.

If electro-magnetic mass drivers could move Americans around at a couple thousand miles per hour former fossil fuel car drivers could still have the illusion of driving a car across America. It would be possible to fabricate virtual reality units with all the sensations of driving a car at 70 m.p.h. within the mass driving compartments. Even if the passenger/drivers arrived across the nation in two or three hours they could remain in the debarking facility for a few days until enough time had passed that they could keep the illusion of having driven a four wheeler.ent transportation choices.This is understandable.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/technology/Mass+extinction+high+ocean+acidity+study/5377124/story.html

On Free U.S. Public Health Care for the Poor, Veterans and Those With Medical Coverage Gone

Public health care through federal facilities for the poor, veterans and those gone broke would still let the privilaged afford to spend copious cash on costly high tech health care and insurance. It would relieve the sufferring and create a healthier American public.

Free, quality public medical care for the nation's poor, veterans and those that run out their insurance or medical coverage would still let the rich and middle class spend on free enterprise medical care so they can live two or three hundred years as they desire or whatever and yet those that are not wealthy could still have a healthier life and be readier to continue productivity without loosing their lot the first time anything substantial arises to insult their health.

Unfortunately the Congress just isn't practical these days. One can not imagine the founders of the nation unable to form a budget and rely upon automatic cuts imposed by some pre-existing condition. What a joke--no one has the practical guts to make things work well in congress anymore. They seem to be industrial and aesthetic existentialist following the flowers of foreign investment opportunities.

Actually except for Mitt Romney the Republicans just don't seem really to care about fixing the nation well since the rich are getting record profits anyway, and that they believe is the way it should be. Trouble is the Democrats are millionaires too and don't give a damn about securing the borders and tightening up the U.S. job market either.