Road to White Serfdom

[James Brody]

"Being black means being located. You only got one ghetto or another to hole up in." Willie "Junior" Armstrong. (Spillane, 1973, 55)
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Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian, a soldier in 1914 (he lied about his age!), decorated for bravery in the Austro-Hungarian army, and then a scholar and economist who earned doctorates in economics and law, had the instincts of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke and wrote the modern foundation text for individualism (Hayek, 1944/1994). The first edition talked mostly about Britain's moves towards socialism; later ones included America.

MacArthur and Wilson (1967/2002 - K- and r-selection) and Burt and Trivers (2006 - genomic imprinting) and Barabasi and Bianconi (2002 - emergent networks) tell the same story as Hayek but from the disciplines of biology and physics. Any of these thinkers can be seen as mad and, therefore, having to work in pairs: three or four clusters of madmen, however, move into sync and become sane when they talk the same talk.
The bad news: collectivism is with us, individualism becomes more rare, private, and trivial. More bad news: this prison feels so natural that it doesn't hurt so bad! The latest news, also painless and bad:
Farmers, almost forever, have taken loans in order to buy seed; truckers now take them in order to buy gas. (A $450 fill-up last year now costs $850 for gas that will last about a day-and-a-half. One fellow this morning took out $25,000 on his house so that he can deliver your groceries, kitty-litter, and flat-screen television.)

A stock certificate amounts to a slip of paper, credit cards are a slip of plastic - neither of them have enduring value but depend on Ponzi arrangements that produce value so long as there are believers. Bear-Stearns anyone? - $180 last year, $30 last Friday, $2 on last Sunday night. Could it be a gift or a curse that so little can stand for so much opportunity and so much imprisonment?

Auto loans, houses, tuition payment, zoning boards, insurance...and most of all, credit cards...are the bars to your cell and keep you where you can be found. Owned by difference in the amountt owed the real value of what you have, and, thanks retinal scans and biochips, you can still wander around and be located. Thugs in suits will use bioIDs and be seen as doing "the good thing."

Thanks to impulse and nonshared environment, you have a self-made cell.

Not a whole lot different from the '30s in Weimar Germany or depression-America. And as was true in Germany, artistic and sexual expression will elicit tyranny from traditionalists - ones whose daughters don't have STDs, insist that males have property before having sex, and arrange marriages for their children on the basis of reputation and assets.
None of the oscillations between individualism and collectives are forced: we simply wake up and discover a dictator when we are poor, hungry, thirsty, ill, or under attack. Such is so much part of our nature that we become grateful for tyranny.

JimB

References (the usual suspects!):
"*" Readable, available, for few of your inflated dollars!

*Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Bianconi, G (2002) Quantum statistics in complex networks. ArXiv cond-mat/0206433 v2 13 Sep 2002.
Bianconi, G. & Barabási, A-L (2000) Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. arXiv:cond-mat/0011224 v1 13 Nov 2000.
Brody JF (April 2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
*Hayek Friedrich A von (1944/1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago. Modern version with more bling: Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.
MacArthur R & Wilson EO (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Spillane M (1973) The Last Cop Out. NY: Signet.
*Vonnegut K (1961) Harrison Bergeron. In Kurt Vonnegut (1968/2006) Welcome to the Monkey House. NY: Random House, 7-14.

[James Brody]

I've argued for a little while that social networks show Bose phenomen: cut resource distribution and winner-take-all emerges in the shape of swarms, mass movements, and socio-political hysteria. There's now a thesis or dissertation to be had on the Interstates and in the airwaves around them.

First, truckers appear to follow a power-law, Pareto distribution: such networks rarely jam and resist random attacks while showing vulnerability to strategic ones. And the truckers are annoyed and the United States is very much a no-inventory, get it as you need it, society. Such is true for the mall, for your grocery store, and for your refrigerator .

1) Mary Peters (Director of the Federal Motor Commission for Safe Highways) continues to pass Mexican trucks across our southern border despite the clear wishes of Congress to stop funding for this experiment. Issues are safety, training, smuggling, immigration, disease, drug and alcohol abuse, and work schedules.

2) Diesel is over $4 per gallon, a fill-up is about $950 and lasts about 36 hours. Steering tires now cost about $1500, a set of four tires for the rear will set you back about $3500. Your bread, milk, and toilet paper will be hoarded and cost your more.

3) Ethanol is more costly to make than gasoline, delivers fewer miles per gallon, pollutes the air as much/more than diesel, and has farmers planting corn rather than wheat and South American Indians cutting down forests not for timber but to grow corn.

4) The 80 percent of drivers have strata: many of them now walk away from their debts by walking away from their trucks.

The truckers talk about a one-day, kill-switch demonstration before they zip down to Louisville, KY for the four-day, 37th Annual Mid-America Truck Show! The 20 percent will be there.

As for political progressives...they will simply do on a larger scale what already happens to the truckers. The good news is that you will live longer because they not only make you thinner but also smoke and fat-free. Adolph was immensely popular when he kicked hell out of big business, lowered consumer prices, and was kind to animals. He also needed somebody to hate, rob, and destroy in order to pay the bills...thus, German Liberation Politics!

JimB

References: (* particularly helpful)
*Aly G (2005) Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. NY: Holt.
*America's Trucking Network. www.700wlw.com, M-Sun, midnight-5am.
*Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Bianconi, G (2002) Quantum statistics in complex networks. ArXiv cond-mat/0206433 v2 13 Sep 2002.
Bianconi, G. & Barabási, A-L (2000) Bose-Einstein condensation in complex networks. arXiv:cond-mat/0011224 v1 13 Nov 2000.
Brody JF (April 2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Information at: http://rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/
Available at: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...FMT=&AGE=&CID=. Also Amazon & Borders: search "James F Brody"
*Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
*Hayek Friedrich A von (1944/1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago. Modern version with more bling: Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.