Our Evil Economy

Consumerism: What It Is, How It Happens, How to Think About It, What We Can Do About It.

The Reality of Monopoly in the "Free" Market

Monopoly is not some perversion, but just the natural state of a market in maturity. One business is the best at what they do, and therefore win completely. Monopoly is not one business in control, but how mature businesses in the market operate. This is why it's preferable to have a benevolent monopoly business than a collection of powerful businesses trying to maintain themselves in a competitive market. This is what we utilities are. They are better for everyone compared with asymmetrical competition. That promotes corner cutting, sabotage and corporate propaganda. Asymmetrical competition promotes Rent Seeking, exploiting the market and the consumer for profit at the cost of economic efficiency for everyone else. This is the end result of the Corporatocracy we live in today.

An effective model for regulation of utilities is especially important in high entry cost markets. Infrastructure markets like railway and energy or now, online userbases. There is no way for a startup to compete. Even say, if fusion nuclear starts to work, to only way to bootstrap that with enough stability and risk management is through a massive government energy program with billions of dollars and extensive oversight. No one wants a rushed nuclear reactor from an underfunded startup.

Startup markets and mature markets are wholly separate and should be regulated radically differently. In startups it is much more likely to have a product/strategy based competition aka: "free" market. Versus a mature market where it is business/brand competition aka: propaganda/power market.

Its tragic that very few people understand this accurately. Most business at scale is closer to a pyramid scheme than true competition because doing good work is a lot harder than convincing people what you “have” done is worth spending money on.

For example: cast-iron skillets require no maintenance, improve flavor of food, are easy to clean and last forever. Teflon pans by comparison, cannot be fixed after they wear out, leach toxic plastic compounds into your food, wears faster in a dishwasher and wears out in a few years even if cared for properly.

Teflon is somehow standard in the American kitchen, 99% of why is an effective ad campaign and corporate power making them front and center of the kitchen section of your local grocery store. In a product based market, cast iron is radically superior, it should win a direct competition, right? Wrong, it’s not competing in a product based market.

In reality Teflon is a better business to be in because the customers are on a constant treadmill of buying new products as they wear out. This is profitable. Selling a cast-iron pan that lasts for generations isn't. Businesses that make the superior cast-iron product can't compete with Teflon's 'superior' more profitable business model. They can take all that extra profit and spend it on acquiring business 'power', brand recognition and advertising saturation. Teflon is a household name, some people have never even seen a cast-iron pan, think it's some kind of outdoor thing. (Cast-iron is actually useless for backpacking, too heavy, more propaganda to make entry for cast-iron harder)

This is the modern market in a nutshell. One possible solution would be that well-formed, wise regulation for food safety could obliterate Teflon pans, improving health, economic efficiency focused on what's long term valuable, and improve environmental impact. All of cast-iron is biodegradable or recyclable. Iron is a simple compound found in nature. Apply this kind of logic to the world and see the problems we truly face are everywhere and all the same.

This is Consumerism. Consumerism is the real problem. Not government, capitalism, regulation, free markets, communism or any other bullshit, the issue we need to fix is a system that produces consumerism as the outcome.

What Corporate Sabotage Really Means

To understand how Sabotage is actually done, is to know there is little risk to companies that partake in sabotage, it's all done by methods sanctioned by the system. There are multiple kinds of sabotage, all "legal.” There are many techniques available to big business to maintain its rent-seeking, consumerist monopoly.

Using the patent mechanism is one, the first line of defense. Patent a method that is long term effective, but less consumer treadmill viable. Good for the economy overall, but bad for the big business in its small cut of the market. With massive catalogues of patents, corporations have a lock on that less consumerism friendly techniques, and only use it in ways that can't grow in the market to maintain the patent indefinitely. Then they abuse the courts with protracted lawsuits and expensive lawyers, a process only big business can afford. Not all regulation methods are wise. To me it seems like patents aren't a good idea, basically.

Another mechanism is buying up any startup that is beginning to create a long-term valuable to the "consumer" product that would crash the market (*Some* Market Disrupting Startups) but benefit the larger economy and people in general over a long period of time. Anyone in a startup who doesn't have rock solid ethics will sell because they will see that their business cannot compete with propaganda and doesn't have a massive profit potential since it is a one-time success until the market is saturated. After the first period of success, there will be only a trickle of new sales for the rare replacement or new customer discovering the market for the first time. The big business can pay them more than their business could ever make them, it is still cheaper to the big business than crashing that specific market with a long lasting superior product better for the customers and overall economy, but worse for the business.

Third option is massive ad campaign and propaganda saturation, brand recognition. [Brand®] you can trust!™ (Ignore the interesting new product behind the curtain of our Official Product©)

Fourth option. Steal their idea, "discover" a previous "patent" for a similar "product" with fancy lawyers, sue into bankruptcy.

Fifth option. Buy out individual talent, hire their best guys at inflated salaries and give them a boring low risk job.

Sixth. If all else fails. Hire a P.I. to "investigate" the startup until a scandal can be found or created that causes a loss of trust that destroys the business. Either internal, skimming money or external, cheating wife or "scumbag" startup leader "sexually assaults" new female "intern". Public faith lost in personality pushing new business idea forward.

Corporate Sabotage isn't some dude sneaking in pretending to be a scientist and breaking their fancy laboratory and destroying the new secret formula that will change the world.

Final option is to enter their market with a similar "product", (but intentionally inferior in some specific way), advertise against the new competition and undercut the startup until they go under. Big Business "product" is cheap and inferior but similar enough that it becomes a proxy for the new startup's superior product in the minds of consumers. That undercutting "product" Tars the quality product with a bad reputation in comparison with the treadmill Corporate® Standard-Product©. The sabotage "product" might have the same advantage as the startup product but will also have a subtle disadvantage that becomes ever more annoying over time. Frustrating the customer into thinking; “Never again! I’ll go back to What Works™.” (Some "cast-iron" today is pot metal and breaks, like, immediately)

Breaking It All Down

To the Free-Marketeers, Don't get stuck on the one point where I agree that the regulations as it exists is not helpful. I know patents are just a tool to accumulate corporate power, and create hugely wasteful conflicts between the likes of apple and google over obvious phone design features.

In most discussions “muh free market” is just an excuse to ignore everything else said about economics and obfuscates and confuses nuance in a discussion. Idiots who can't get outside their ideological programming are the reason we can't fix the problems that are obvious to anyone who thinks about them with any depth.

The point isn't about regulations. Patent or otherwise. It's that large corporations can and will sabotage the smaller competition that provides a superior product. AND

(This Is Important)

The "free" market as many imagine it, a market without wise regulations, will devolve into Consumerism. Monopoly is not the problem. Look into Peter Thiel, the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire, he understands Monopoly and Competition better than anyone. In many cases, a single emerging Monopoly is only an indication that consumerism and rent-seeking is about to begin happening in the market as the Monopoly struggles to maintain its power. As long as the Monopoly has no real risk of competition it will be benevolent. A good Monopoly that can be profitable without rent-seeking and conversion to a consumerist product model.

Consumerism is the real problem. It prefers cheap, disposable, environmental damaging, harmful to the customer, bad for the broader economy, altogether inferior products in comparison to altogether superior products, because making inferior products is more profitable for the business.

Here is the Truth; the market, (almost any market “free” or otherwise) is a market of competing businesses, not competing products.

Best Products for Business Profitability

• Cheapest

• most breakable

• obsolete product that gets “better” with each version

• can be sold over and over again

• to repeat customers

• at the highest price

Products with these features win in the business competition, because they pass more money through the hands of the business selling them because these features create a consumer treadmill. This product then becomes the product that wins in the so-called "free" market with unregulated product competition, because the company making the superior product went out of business.

Product quality and efficiency of product manufacture to reduce costs don’t matter for a startup entering the market to introduce competition to a monopoly market. What matters is a business plan that makes money at the cost of everyone else, competitors, customers, the broader economy, the environment, human wellbeing, the "freeness" of market in which the product is sold. Nothing matters except the "makes money" part.

There are rare circumstances where a product can take a market by storm because it is truly superior to the alternatives. Usually this is not the case. In a free market, tooth and nail competition with no regulation, the entire deck is already stacked against the startup. A “free” market doesn't favor new products or new businesses.

In reality, the mature grow old and die, creating space for the young and fresh to take their place. We have stories of vampires, those who steal vitality from those around them to avoid growing old. Rent-seeking and consumerist business models are the Vampires of economics. Stealing from everyone else to stay at the top. The “free” market is freer than reality, this is why is doesn’t work.

Yes, most regulation is bad. Any idiot can see that. Most regulation benefits big business because the lobbyists of big business write the regulation. But people who have no comprehension and just talking points are making the whole discussion more stupid and confusing with their "muh free markets" drone speak. The "all regulation bad" mindset does nothing to help with the clarity needed to figure out and implement wise regulation.

We can create intelligent regulation that carefully promotes the few kinds of market scenarios that create better products, and control the vast majority of market forces that produce the destructive and Consumerist kinds of product and business model outcomes that are killing us and destroying our planet and concentrating all wealth in the hands of a few bankers and greedy megacorporate managers. We could design a system where wealth goes to the people who work hard, better themselves, their products, and the world.

Here’s the breakdown of how this situation really works. Any regulation that big business wants slips through unnoticed. Anything that they don't want, {read: good regulation} gets false-flagged into free market extremist groups. Internet “Free Market Warriors” who then stir up a storm about how we shouldn't have "any" regulation, but only apply that logic to this "one" specific instance and become a carefully managed anti-regulation lobby for Big Business. Only ever triggered to impact the regulations big businesses don't want to pass through. This is the net result of the two-party system. Neo-Liberals versus Neo-Cons where both sides serve elite consumerist rent-seeking business interests.

Now, however, is the good news!

People ARE waking up!! Many are confused and since they never had a firm grasp of the situation, take the most extreme position, rejecting capitalism outright. Others have a more nuanced view and want to careful figure out the right method to fix it. People such as Eric Weinstein of the #IDW.

Be Warned: If you are in favor of ending regulation but don't have a detailed understanding of corporate politics, you a brainwashed drone. Even if you “Understand Economics™” it doesn’t mean anything you know is worth knowing. While we humans can definitely appreciate mechanisms and obvious principles and legal systems with a few best practices; actually "Understanding" economics means little. Economics is an emergent process that we ride into the future, it is bigger than we are. This is why central planning doesn’t work. We don’t "understand" economics, but we can be propagandized into different ideological camps which can be manipulated from both ends to the benefit of the financial elite.

I've explained exactly how people have become drones in great depth, the question is... Now that you know you are one, are you going to develop a more open position where we can collectively talk with nuance about the problem, or will you shut down and revert back to your ideological programming?

What It Means to Solve the Problem

When it comes to regulation, I want wise regulation. I'm not arguing that much of the regulation we have is actually good, when it is obvious most is bad. I am not arguing that competition cannot be good, true competition is good. Most of the "competition" we have is between businesses and more specifically business models, not products. The best business models in our market, (most markets end up here) is the "rent-seeking" and the "pyramid-scheme" model. This is what is often described as "Late Stage Capitalism."

All the big internet companies have moved from "buy a product permanently" to "rent-a-ware" because that business model makes more money. Nothing to do with the quality of the product delivered to the customer. The product is demonstrably worse, costs more money over several years and is designed so it won't let you use it without an internet connection.

This is Consumerism. This model of business is going to destroy us and our planet.

For the process oriented of you out there. It doesn’t matter specifically how we fix the consumerism problem. Whatever works is the best solution, because it is a solution. The only bad outcome in my mind is all of the negative long-term impacts of consumerism that will eventually destroy everything worth caring about in this world. We will destroy ourselves with no clear way of stopping ourselves, if we stay on the consumerist treadmill.

If someone can demonstrate that what libertarians call the open free-market will have market forces that trend away from Consumerism and toward something better I would be in favor of what they call the free market. Personally, I don't care about the production of wealth much. We could live like our ancestors subsistence style in the forest without a care, if assholes weren't still continually cutting it down, maybe we could. However, living in a forest isn't a viable option to solve the economic and lifestyle problems billions of us have surviving in Western Civilization.

The system we have now IS leading us into the nihilistic misery of the rat-race economy, the inevitable massive environmental collapse of population expansion and pollution, the mass starvation that will follow that, then the apocalyptic nuclear war that will end it all. This will happen if we don't turn away from the cliff. If we don't fix the economic mechanism away from pollution and consumerism, we will all die. This is the one certainty of which we can be supremely confident.

We should be open to anything. Communism has been repeatedly proven not to work, doesn't solve anything. Therefore it’s not wise to be a Communist.

What people call the Free Market always eventually leads to the same kinds of cooperative monopolistic consumerism that we should all despise. So it seems it’s not wise to be a Free-Marketeer.

Some take this to mean capitalism is bad, but there is a middle alterative that looks hopeful. A wisely regulated market should be massively beneficial for everyone. What we need is to make the thinking around this clear.

That's where my money is to fix this situation, clarify our thinking on the economic problem we face, then collectively figure out who has the ideas on how to fix it.

But, before we move on, let me put one final nail in the coffin of the unregulated market ideal.

Free markets left unattended have too much potential for mistakes made by humans to lead to problems that will demand regulation when they reveal the flaws into which we have stumbled. Human psychology is not immune to stress. If the market crashes, in our fear we will decide to try and control it so that doesn't happen again. Regardless of how theoretically "perfect" a free market is or how ineffectual the controls actually are, we will develop a system of regulation eventually.

The wise thing to do is actually figure out how to manage the system, the economy and the markets in a way that is stable, benevolent and successful. If people weren't up their own ass about how "perfect" free markets are we could have a nuanced discussion about wise regulations. We could strip out the 90% of regulation that is stifling and robustify the 10% that's incredibly powerful and good for the overall economy.

Blind ideologically assured libertarians and free-marketeers who absolutely refuse to have any nuance about the discussion make fixing the overregulated, underbalanced clusterfuck we have impossible.

I don't give a good goddamn about how much money people make. If you have a bit of security and food there's nothing that can make you miserable but yourself. We don't need a billion dollars each.

Not a problem if we do, money is nice, I have a lot of it. Really, everyone in the west does, compared with the rest of the world. However, if the process of getting that money dooms our future children to a hopeless hellscape, or destroys the natural beauty and biological diversity of our home, this planet and all that lives on her, it's morally required to burn it all down.

I do not want to become an SJW. I would rather be hopeful we can fix the problem. But fucking idiots shouting about "Muh Free Market Would Totally Work, Guys!" are blind to this situation. Brainwashed into thinking the free market is a good "God" that rules all things benevolently and could never become a corrupt tyrant.

This mindset shirks our moral responsibility to other human beings in the rest of the world who suffer in sweatshops. Working fingers to the bone for pennies so shirts and shoes are 30$ cheaper because that's what the global "free market" allows. We also have the human moral responsibility to all sentient and conscious life on this planet as sapient beings, part of a collective species with the power and technology to destroy every lifeform existing here, down to the protozoa.

It is challenging to be reasonable when the conversation is little more than throwing out talking points that have no interest to anyone but the ideological masters. "Muh free market" is a slimy cesspool of idiocy. This is literally the communism of the right.

Any market that becomes dysfunctional becomes "That wasn’t really a free market. muh gubment intervention."

Just like the communists have "That wasn't real communism. Muh capitalists interfered."

God I hate this kind of discussion.

The position that an unregulated free market would solve all problems is unfalsifiable. No one can never reason a brainwashed freemarketeer out of their position by creating an example of a "true" free market that failed.

There has never been a free market that failed, because there has never been a free market.

The only true free market is all of reality and all that exists within reality, including the natural laws that govern existence. The government is part of this true free market, as is all regulation. Everything that exists always exists in a perfect immutable free market. This is the ideal in contemplation, at some theoretical abstract level never truly touched by the minds of man, the platonic ideal. But what is actually under discussion when we talk about the “Free Market” is a market from which we artificially remove the natural regulation and structure that develops during the ongoing market process. This is what most people mean by a "free market." The artificial removal of naturally developing constraints.

Everything within nature has mechanisms to manage competition, preferring to cooperate if possible. Competition within cooperation, as in, the development of personal excellence, is a good thing. Competition to the exclusion of cooperation is warfare and cruelty without limitations. This is not a good thing. Unregulated brutality is not a desirable outcome for the economic system we build for ourselves.

The problem with the "magical" free market that solves all problems is that the only way you can create and maintain one is with magic. Only magical thinking can possibly get you there.

It's an idiotic utopian idea. As soon as something goes wrong, (and I'm sure you will concede that a free market allows the potential for mistakes to be made,) people will react in fear and want to stabilize it. Bamn. Regulation. Except, it won't be well thought out, structurally sound and carefully architected to benefit the lot of us on God's green earth. It will be whatever kneejerk reaction people have, then slowly massaged and manipulated into a power concentrating clusterfuck. You know, like what we have today.

This is what happened with the New Deal and the Great Depression of the thirties and just about every other economic event throughout all history.

When the free market economy as such, crashes, everything devolves into tribal warfare until the population is small enough to be supported by the naturally occurring resources. This is the true "free market" solution, death. Natures evolutionary answer to a market crash, by the way, is War. The solution that will win in the end if things are truly unregulated. Destruction of every enemy that isn't your own group.

The alternative to War is we can step in with some way of stabilizing things. Maybe it's a new idea for a product, rebooting the economy, if we're lucky. Otherwise we can muddle through with some kind of rules that make things more equal and fair; so that people feel willing to go heads down, nose to the grindstone and do the hard work of repairing the economy. With regulation against cheating and the unfair accumulation of wealth through power we can work our way out, instead constantly worrying that others will steal what we have.

But the best option by far is to have some vision and long-term thinking. Given the opportunity and an ounce of wisdom and good faith, we can think the problem through from the ground up and create a multi-dimensional system of regulation that balances the many concerns at hand in a stable and adaptable way we can all agree to live under. This seems to obvious thing to do, given our situation.

The Process of Finding the Solution

Instead of arguing Free Market unregulated Capitalism Vs. Centrally Planned Communist Socialism, it is possible to be more nuanced and reasonable. For anyone wanting to improve the structure of the economy, the whole conversation is always incredibly frustration inducing no matter how nuanced and careful people are with what they say. Any Sophistication Immediately gets pidgin-holed into one of the two black and white extremist camps. Immediately shutting down the ability for anyone to think out-loud about the problem and approach it with enough creativity and approximate roughness to begin developing a legitimate solution.

One problem we have backward in our thinking is; who produces the solution vs what the solution should be. I think we could have a reasonable conversation exploring what would be a good way of regulating big business. If we get passed worrying about the moral integrity of regulators as the starting point of discussion we can get on with the process of understanding what we should do. The idea that only "philosopher kings” can be involved with creating wise regulation means only elite technocrats who will manage and oversee the problem without flaws could possibly be better than total anarchy. This is a false option. We are all part of the economy, we should all be involved in the discussion and solution. The problem should be discussed on an open floor, not handed off to the black-box of elite regulators.

Getting stuck on who has the solution is only a shield that prevents anyone from overcoming the brainwashing and then trying out thinking about how to solve the problems and take action. Before we get to economic mathematics, lawyers and dense, unapproachable economic theory we need a rough verbal outline that anyone can grasp in a reasonable period of time and apply to the economic world they see around them. This rough sketch of how things should work should be enough of a guideline that it is possible to detect when an economic entity of one kind or another is becoming corrupted. The general understanding in the populace should be at least an early warning system that everyone participates in, even if it doesn’t have the clarity to provide hard and fast solutions.

Proper regulation isn't impossible. But understanding it is hard. However, the idea that regulation is actually impossible is baked into so much of our thinking about it. Much of that is subterfuge by the power structure. It is true that economics is very emergent, which means we can't directly understand it, just a few underlying mechanisms. But we can recognize the dysfunctional market forces and control or at least manage them if we attune our attention to the proper subjects.

Therefore, having a basic understanding, at least enough to play with wise regulations and iterate them with real world experimentation is easily within grasp. The ongoing refusal among the general populace to go deeper, past black and white thinking, is the real problem. No one bothers discussing this kind of stuff except the kinds of people we don't want to implement it. As in the bankers and the Communist central planners.

If normal people thought about economics and the problems created within economics we'd be able to tell roughly if a new regulation was an attempt to improve things in good faith or an intentional manipulation of the economy. From there we would be able to gradually and pragmatically develop the institution of people and regulations that would address our problems through time in a way that is both progressive and reversable. We cannot have that growth take place without engagement by everyone, even if that engagement is only at the superficial emotional level. We don’t need everyone to be indoctrinated into a theoretical camp, just to have a voice and respond to events with that voice.

The results of collective thinking are powerful, if tuned toward a problem in a slightly sophisticated way. That’s how the market itself works, trade and bargaining price is a process of collective thinking. We can solve the market with a different market. With a bit of good faith and willingness to engage with our problems forthrightly, Free Speech can develop a regulatory solution to Free Market problems through time.

Mechanisms of Improving the Situation: Changes to Culture

When it comes to addressing the problem of consumerism emerging in the market, we need to go into a relatively deep discussion of some evolutionary psychology which is deeply important to the situation and the understanding of which gives us some powerful tools to resolve the problem. In short, our psychology is built to blindly accept and even need disposable environments.

Watching our fruit eating primate ancestors is fascinating to me. They will take one or two bites of a fruit and then drop it unfinished at the slightest distraction. This is relatively complex to breakdown as a behavior but contrasts interestingly with carnivores who fiercely guard a kill. We are both.

A monkey will partly eat a fruit and then drop it because this keeps the juices of the fruit from getting onto their hands, then becoming fertile ground for bacterial colonies. The plant wants its fruit to be juicy because that wet stickiness becomes an incentive for the seeds to reach the ground after getting dropped. Habitually dropping half-finished foods also creates a buffer that can be utilized during the lean times. If the majority of food resources are wasted, habitually, during lean times that waste can be cleaned up, with the prerequisite attendance and effort, and provide an increase in the viable quantity of food consumed. Reducing population fluctuation and stress due to environmental and seasonal variability. This is a very evolutionarily wise adaptation, actually.

This also creates a powerful psychological dynamic, disposability becomes a proxy for wealth and success, an indication of abundance and prosperity in the environment. The more disposable and trivial certain elements of the environment are, the more we sense that things are going well, that we are successful and that it is time for relaxation. This is part of why big spending feels good. Not having the ability to discard things, having either a moral obligation or existential necessity to hold onto trivial things builds a starvation mindset. The ability to be looser with value breaks that starvation mindset.

There is a second dynamic built into this, one that is less tangible but incredibly interesting. Its what I call the King of Thieves Archetype, classically embodied in the story of Aladdin. Aladdin has no personal wealth, no property. He doesn’t need it. Instead his personal worth comes from the ability to interact with the world around him efficiently and effectively. Gaining whatever he needs by using his mind and body to turn everything around him into something useful at a moment’s notice. But as soon as the situation changes, discarding whatever he has, to remain unburdened. He is described as the Diamond in the Rough. He is the archetype of the virtuous ascetic, traveling monks, minimalism, philosophies of virtue over material wealth all interplay into this archetype. In this situation status, individual value and sense of worth isn’t obtained from material goods, but personal excellence. This is much of what makes the ideal of the Noble Savage so appealing.

As Aladdin moves through the world, he only takes what he needs in the moment. The King of Thieves is the thief who takes the least from the world, not the one who steals more and more, never satisfied, collecting ever more trinkets. Therefore, Aladdin alone can reach the lamp.

We can incorporate these two dimensions into our model of the world. A world that has so much we can discard things at a moments notice, also allows us to be minimally invasive, avoiding the accruement of material, instead developing internal virtue and competence.

We are apes, instinctively built to habitually discard things, but we are also carnivores, we have the ability to imbue things with deep significance and value worth taking with us and protecting. Hunting and tool use developed hand in hand, the ability to make and carry tools with us on our journey is deeply human. We are not in any way trapped in the constant cycle of discarding everything we have, lusting after the next popular faddish trinket, only to lose interest soon after we obtain it.

As both apes and carnivores, we will of course still have property; personal items we will own individually, and value highly. But instead of those things being a buffer between us and the world, a castle with walls, a house with property, money in the bank and so on, what we have will trend toward being symbolically and sentimentally valuable. Beautiful and hand-crafted items, gifts from friends and previous generations, deeply imbued with sentimental meaning and fulfillment.

Beyond sentiment, the second path to value is through personalized items we have Total Ownership of; a concept I’ve created which describes a combination of mastery and personalization. Something tailor made for you individually, but also which you have a complete understanding over and ability to adapt and change. Total Ownership means that what you have becomes like a part of yourself. Immensely rewarding as internalized value, yet not the same as emotional sentiment. Total Ownership means that what you own is fully integrated and internalized. You have authorship, therefore the ability to discard the specific instance of the item and create and modify it again almost whimsically. Total Ownership creates deep value and simultaneously freedom from the object in question.

Mechanisms of Improving the Situation: Regulation of the Markets

It seems to me the focus of our regulation should be to regulate mature products and businesses in a more utility like domain. Certain products are fully evolved and unlikely to change in a significant way, and certain manufacture processes and designs are in a similar state of maturity. The only real competition is corrosive, refining the methods of exploitation, the real competition is between who can be the most evil and devious in the market.

This is a difficult problem. Those who are cheating don’t want to get caught, so they will be subtle and hard to detect. We also cannot get too rigorous and draconian with the regulation because then the regulation becomes the source of cheating and corruption. A more rigorous and oppresive regulatory structure also represses true innovation and the development of better solutions that can disrupt the mature market. We need a balanced system that is easy to maintain, fun to participate in for the business owners and workers while being resilient and resistant to cheating, corruption with the ability to recover after such problems develop over time.

What I have as the solution to the regulatory problem is more like a conceptual overview and inspiration for what the eventual system would look like as we investigate how to build it. A low resolution ideal to metaphorically map onto the end result we aim for as we develop our model.

In a mature business the product concept and manufacture process are fully developed, unlikely to change. But usually the system is very distributed and there are many local instances. Core to worker happiness in a large system is individuality, both personal and as part of the cooperative unit in which they participate. One of the least desirable aspects of globalist consumerism is the bland plastic sameness of it.

Here is the idea; allow locality much flair. Adherence to the process core tenants is closely observed but flair, ability to play with process without disrupting it’s goals is allowed, rewarded and even maximized. This ensures an intuition of process is maintained instead of blindly following rules, the Cargo Cult problem. Having a system that encourages flair allows adaption to local idiosyncrasies and the creative adaption that can produce innovation while maintaining overall integrity of the business or utility. This also allows for instances of individuals to have personal power and freedom, keys to long-term psychological wellbeing. This creates incentives that avoid degradation into oppression and middle management tyranny.

Here is an understanding which is vitally important, most business right now is built on systems of burnout and replacement. This allows for strict adherence to rigid process rules and is therefore more productive than a methodology which is stable and beneficial to its participants long-term wellbeing. For a benevolent system to compete effectively and become self-repairing, the goal we want, the potential for these oppressive business practices needs to be eradicated. Either by providing a desirable alternative that competes and wins over the worker loyalty. Or by banning those practices outright where they are found. Both require carefully understanding the relationship between complex forces and availability of opportunity in many parts of the world. Banana Republics allow for the destruction of alternatives to participation in the oppressive system which cannot be escaped, except by death, itself prevented by suicide nets. There is no competition for what kinds of lives people can choose if all the jobs are by businesses that operate in the same way. It used to be people could return to a subsistence lifestyle if the alternative provided by civilization was inferior, without true wilderness left this is not longer an option.

With that explained here are some of my thoughts. We can likely only build system of best practices through time, iteratively, step by step, recognizing and reversing errors as we make them. Long term I suspect the regulatory mechanisms will be broadly tight in regards to what upper management is allowed in terms of business model and strategy, but will allow lots of flexibility for individual instances, local or creative startups.

Flair is the peacock’s solution to seeing what’s easily hidden through time. Adherence to process is difficult to see, because it's subtle and easily distorted in individual instances. Cheating can be easily hidden and hard to detect, especially by an observer that cannot devote enough time or brain power to understand and individual instance in depth before moving on to the next one. This continual movement avoids corruption setting into the observer, but makes that job harder.

By allowing a lot of leeway for play and experimentation outside the underlying process structures, what becomes similar between individual isolated instances is the process structure, and only the process structure. Separate that from the image presented and allow observers to see many different images with the same underlying process structure and the image can be separated from the structure and the observers can become highly attuned and sensitive to small disruptions in the process. This allows both intuitive detection and rational analysis of the rigor and maintenance of the process through long periods of time. This is the mechanism to avoid corruption of a process.

Almost all oral traditions are structured similarly to this general model of flair over process, because it is the most survivable model of maintaining cultural continuity beyond a single generation or inspired leadership. There is still a lot to be rationally understood and examined about how this works and how to reliably build it into our world. This is a very rough first draft of the idea, but the potential has a lot of depth to it, and needs a thorough contemplation by many minds to become fully realized.

These are my thoughts on the economic problem we face, Consumerism, and the solution to it over time, wise regulation and a cultural shift towards human wellbeing and right living. Hopefully this write-up is enlightening and beneficial to people, and can start the process of opening up the broader dialogue about how to address solving the problems we have allowed to develop in the world and systems we live in each day. Now all we need to do is be willing to choose to create a better world.

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