Greenfield: The End of Control

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog ^ | Saturday, June 15, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

[Louis Foxwell]

Saturday, June 15, 2013

The End of Control

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

We utilize systems to achieve goals whether it's defending the country or fighting poverty or making the trains run in time or achieving political change.

Modem systems are systematic creatures that aim to achieve goals by maximizing control over all the subsidiary elements of the problem.

So if you set out to solve poverty, you need control over all the social and economic elements that either cause poverty or could be used to ameliorate poverty. Those elements include the sum amount of national wealth for the purposes of wealth redistribution, the rate of  unwed teen pregnancies and any forms of racial discrimination... and that's just for starters. Even poverty, which would seem like a rather simple phenomenon becomes a system which takes into account tools like abortion, progressive taxation and discrimination laws.

The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every string touched spreads vibrations everywhere. Solving even the most minor problem requires solving all the problems and the only solution is the absolute power of the system.

Socialism relies on systems as means to achieve social ends. The systems develop policies that control as a means to achieve those ends. 

When the ends are not achieved then the system responds by intensifying the depth and scope of the control. Increasing control is the only solution of the system to failure. 

And so the system changes from pursuing control as a means to pursuing control as an end.

Socialism, like most systems of government derived from it, has enshrined control as an end in and of itself. 

As O'Brien said in 1984, the purpose of power is power. And control is just another word for power. 

Systems may be formed to achieve moral ends but they are no more moral in and of themselves than a hammer. The longer a system exists, the more it comes to exist for itself and its power becomes its own end. 

A hammer exists to hammer. A hammer in the hands of a man is a tool, but a hammer that exists for its own sake is a destructive force. A bureaucracy exists to regulate to achieve a specific end, but a bureaucracy that exists for its own sake is tyranny. It seeks to control for the sake of control. It wields power for the sake of power. 

It insists that its ends are moral, but as they are not achieved, the true end of control is revealed. 

Socialism begins with control to achieve social ends only for control to become the end. And that leads to the end of freedom.

An institution vested with power becomes an institution of power.  The response of the left to this inevitable fact of human history is to insist that granting unlimited power to their institutions will have different results because their purposes are moral. But moral purposes can only be vested in people, not institutions. Ideology can take control of institutions but once control is achieved then the ideology comes to exist for the sake of the institution. That is how the grand ambitions of the left died in China and Russia. That is how it may die in Europe and America.

As a system becomes its own purpose, it uses the purposes of others as camouflage. It promises to solve problems that it has no intention of solving as means of extracting resources from those who want the problem solved. 

Initially the system may be run by those who do want to solve the problem and see the system as the only way to do so but as the system grows and spreads their motives become mixed. 

Bureaucracy is the essence of the system and exists to keep track of and implement its many rules. The rules are the tools of control and their purpose is to make the unpredictable into the predictable. 

The rules start life as the means but as with all means of tyranny they become the ends by which the bureaucracy exercises its power. 

Rules in a bureaucracy operate on different levels. On one level they are meant to achieve a socially responsible end, but on another they benefit the allies of the bureaucracy. On a third level they exist to justify the expansion of the bureaucracy and to allow it to wield its power. On a fourth level they define status within the bureaucracy. 

So for example an environmental initiative may be intended to lessen pollution levels on the surface but also rewards environmental groups and consultancies whose lobbying enhances the power and funding of the EPA. On a third level, the EPA now uses the initiative to expand the scope of its authority and request more funding to hire more people in the D.C. pecking order between government agencies. On a fourth level, this influences the pecking order within the organization.

The EPA is an environmental organization but it's an organization and in the long run when the institutional long marches have been completed, it is the organizational part that will matter more,

The left provides tyranny with the social motive to come into being, but in the long run the left Is only the midwife of tyranny. Its ideology and activists dismantle democracies and burgeoning democracies and replace them with tyrannies. 

Whether it's Islam or a conventional oligarchy or a cult of personality tyrant, the left's role is to act as the virus that kills the host and then allows it to be fed on by predators in the hopes of infecting them in turn. 

The left injects bureaucratic collectivism into a healthy state to control it, but in the long run the bureaucratic collectivism will outlive it as it becomes the end for which the left was only the means.

[Louis Foxwell]

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[Louis Foxwell]

The first principle of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. Greenfield exposes the evil that thrives just under the skin of government. It intends to destroy all that it touches. We are in the thrall of government that has become our worse nightmare and our greatest enemy.

[txhurl]

All the several states have to do is..... stop sending checks.

No taxation without representation.

Let the courts try to prove we are sufficiently represented.

[Carry_Okie]

It insists that its ends are moral, but as they are not achieved, the true end of control is revealed.

For a bureaucracy, failure justifies more power. Thus means become "The End."

So for example an environmental initiative may be intended to lessen pollution levels on the surface but also rewards environmental groups and consultancies whose lobbying enhances the power and funding of the EPA. On a third level, the EPA now uses the initiative to expand the scope of its authority and request more funding to hire more people in the D.C. pecking order between government agencies. On a fourth level, this influences the pecking order within the organization.

To continue (because Greenfield doesn't get it) allow me to quote myself from a dozen years ago:

Both claimant and agent are thus motivated to focus upon those transformation products that are most difficult to control, because it is those properties that are most likely to convert the use of the asset to that which they prefer. The fight between landowners, regulators, and activists then degenerates into increasingly trivial arguments regarding specifications, measurements, and enforcement that have increasingly large financial consequences for the owner. Remedial measures thus structurally diverge from an objective assessment of the total impact upon environmental health because that was never the claimants' primary objective.

Rarely does either acquiring interest consider the possible unintended consequences of their actions, among other reasons because they have little experience in actual operations and no accountability for the consequences. The legal process is thus alienated from its purpose to establish justice, just as the regulatory process is directed away from ecological health. There is little civic accountability for maintaining a successful balance among competing interests, indeed, very likely the contrary is true. Problems are sources of civic claims by which to control the entire economy, a motivational structure antithetical to the very purpose of regulation.

As claims proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.

When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).

Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.

When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.

This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more externalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.

The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by extending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accountability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.

History teaches that this is not a good thing.

A socialized commons is an evil to the environment because the resource is under a controlling agent with no structural motive to prevent or eliminate ecological problems. Quite the contrary, civic management of the environment not only doesn't work, it has every reason not to work. As ecological problems worsen and resulting economic crises deepen, the power acceded to government agencies expands!

It doesn't matter whether the commons is the environment, childhood education, or transportation, that's how it really works.

[rockinqsranch]

Eliminating the various departments that have been established by Congress under the control of the Executive Branch over the many years would eliminate the need for a vast majority of the bureaucracies in support of those departments, BUT I won’t hold my breath. One would have to have the intestinal fortitude to withstand the racist outcry that would ensue, and I don’t see such a SuperPol anywhere in the mix.

[Carry_Okie]

Forgot to include the source for the above quote.

[Carry_Okie]

Eliminating the various departments that have been established by Congress under the control of the Executive Branch over the many years would eliminate the need for a vast majority of the bureaucracies in support of those departments, BUT I won’t hold my breath.

You'd better not. Most of those powers are mandated by treaty.

[expat1000]

The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every string touched spreads vibrations everywhere. Solving even the most minor problem requires solving all the problems and the only solution is the absolute power of the system.

This is an astonishing insight into the mindset and tactics of the liberals. You can see it when they go out to protest - at the G8 meeting, right now for example. There are signs protesting everything from Gitmo to nuclear power.

[Vendome]

Property has become a political term that in America just do not fit under our social construct.

The only way to win the war is to steal monies from makers and give to takers.

It’s a term of relative nature and seeks to make everyone the same but, removes personal and properTy rights to achieve it’s aims.

It is amoral and completely wrong.

[Vendome]

I should add that it amputates avarice, self determination and ambitions.

Wrong to impose that on a group of peoples as it steals from others.

[FreedomPoster]

Jerry Pournelle codified the essence of what Greenfield discusses here with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

All the rest the Greenfield discusses here falls out as corollaries from the above essential maxim.

[marsh2]

We are on a journey now to monetize environmental impact of every use and product. This requires the creation of a public trust “ownership” over every physical thing. Use is seen as an impact for which the public must be compensated through the issuance of allocations and “credits” - which can be traded in exchanges benefitting very rich people.

http://users.sisqtel.net/armstrng/ecosystem_services.htm

The Great Transition - the Great Revaluing - make good things cheap and bad things expensive. Building social and environmental value should be the central goal of policy-making;

the Great Redistribution - redistribution of both income and wealth would create value as resources are moved from those who do not need them to those who do. Goal to share working hours and tasks more equally. Foster a redistribution of ownership to create a form of ‘economic democracy’, where company shares are progressively transferred to employees in a resurgence of mutual and co-operative ownership forms.

Great Rebalancing - markets but where pricing reflects true social and environmental costs and benefits, and a broader definition of “public goods”

Great Localisation moving real power away from the centre to devolved “democratic” (stakeholder) bodies.

Great Reskilling returning to appropriate scale for agriculture, manufacturing and the arts.

Great Economic Irrigation taxing environmental and social ‘bads’ such as pollution, consumption and short-term speculation. consumption taxes reflecting the social and environmental costs of goods

Great Interdependence wealth transfer to developing countries. New Economics Foundation http://www.neweconomics.org/

Stewart Wallis on the Great Transition video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRD0ZppzRo&feature=player_embedded

[Rich21IE]

ping

[trebb]

Exercising control is an attempt to exert God-like power over others in order to elevate yourself. It is intoxicating and corrupting because they lack the special ingredient necessary to wield that power in a proper manner - humility. Imagine if God was not so humble Himself - no free-will and we become mere puppets, a science project rather than part of a Divine Plan.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Louis Foxwell.

So if you set out to solve poverty, you need control over all the social and economic elements that either cause poverty or could be used to ameliorate poverty. Those elements include the sum amount of national wealth for the purposes of wealth redistribution, the rate of unwed teen pregnancies and any forms of racial discrimination... and that's just for starters. Even poverty, which would seem like a rather simple phenomenon becomes a system which takes into account tools like abortion, progressive taxation and discrimination laws.

The fact that gov't has been beating on these without positive results prove beyond question that none of these are connected with poverty, and have been implemented only as a creeping form of totalitarianism. Politics is always and only about power.

[Carry_Okie]

We are on a journey now to monetize environmental impact of every use and product. This requires the creation of a public trust “ownership” over every physical thing.

Nonsense. That a socialized pricing system exists doesn't make it so. Just because Gretchen Daley came up with a flawed theory doesn't mean that the observations upon which it is based are totally wrong. Her observation was correct, but her corrective action was an abomination. That a bunch of crooks jumped on her bandwagon only makes it worse.

You still don't get it. A true mitigations market would be a boon to private property owners. If people want the results of the management services they provide, they should pay for them instead of running to mommy government demanding they be forced to provide it free in the name of public safety.

[rockinqsranch]

“......Most of those powers are mandated by treaty.”

The Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the EPA, etc. were all caused by some need established by a treaty with some foreign entities!?

[GladesGuru]

While at first interesting, the harsh reality is that your post 12 is predicated upon collective decision making.

That was tried by the Pilgrims during the “Starving Winter” and discarded after it killed nearly half of them.

The issue remains to day just what it was, is, and will always be - Centralized or individualized.

Does the collective decide or the individuals involved?

The Founders chose the individual, operating within the bounds described in the Founding Documents.

History shows they were correct.

Do you side with the Founders?

[blueunicorn6]

Greenfield is brilliant.

[Carry_Okie]

The Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the EPA, etc. were all caused by some need established by a treaty with some foreign entities!?

The powers they wield were, yes. The decision not to disband the DOE was an agreement between Reagan and Gorbachev as recounted in Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book the deliberate dumbing down of america. The legislation authorizing the powers of the EPA specifically cites multilateral treaties, particularly Section 1531 of the Endangered Species Act.

If you wish to understand how this all started, start here.