The earth going forward

In a nutshell, the earth going forward will be affected by what human beings do.  This is why the era we are entering is now dubbed the Anthropocene.  There are two major trends going on right now: (1) technological maturation and (2) Stress on the ecological system.  (When I think of ecological stresses it's not just climate change that comes to mind; I also think of the acidification of the oceans, declining insect populations and biodiversity, destruction of the coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, antibiotic-resistant diseases, and other readily googlable troubling phenomena.)

(Also, any educated person these days should be considerably familiar with ourworldindata.org.)

In the light of exponential growth in technology which is now seeing AI or machine learning going mainstream, advances in robotics, nanotechnology on the near horizon, lab-grown meat becoming affordable around this year (which can only put some size dent in the consumption of meat grown even in organic and therefore more resource-intensive and therefore more expensive processes, along with the methane produced from such processes), production automation making goods and services ever more affordable (counteracting to a great extent supposed disemployment effects), and any number of other advances, it becomes very difficult to envision the future of humanity with much detail beyond a few years from now.  The most significant of the advances would probably be in the area of AI, for the same reason that intelligence-capable human beings mark a rather radical departure from nature's and life's original courses.  And you have to imagine AI helping humans solve problems in conjunction with their use of all the other new emerging technologies.

Climate change and other actual or potential ecological crises would definitely be a major problem going forward, if present human trends using present technology continue.  But the latter is not going to happen.  Do we really have any way of telling what the earth is going to be like in half a century?  By then will biodiversity be engineered by humans, the coral reefs restored, agriculture moved to laboratories, etc.?  How about any advances in human culture, e.g., philosophy (and therefore superior rationality, and ultimately Aristotelian-caliber rationality or intellectual perfectionism) for children becoming mainstream?  Will AI help humanity transcend its addictions to rationality-undermining facets of social media, which people are already well becoming sick of and looking for solutions to?

This seems to be a good time for bets to be placed as to whether this or that ecological challenge will be met by technological advances, and when.  If people have too little information to go on to make such bets, then that just reinforces my point here: we really don't know how the earth is going to look going all that much forward.  And maybe that's the source of present-day anxieties.  (We may be living dangerously, with all the psychological consequences of that.)

We might try to go 50 years into the past for some guide to what we might expect to transpire over the next 50 years.  51 years ago, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.  (It was also one year before man first landed on the moon.)  There was inevitably some amount of speculation on Kubrick's (and author of the book version, Arthur C. Clark's) part, such as the form that advanced AI might take, with the eventually villainous HAL 9000 ("I'm sorry, Dave...").  But there was only so much that could be done even at the level of speculation, which the film's "mysterious" ending is meant to convey.  As Kubrick explained in interviews at the time, the Star Gate sequence and the resulting Star Child are meant as symbolic and/or allegorical depictions of humanity taking a "leap" to a higher level of being.  (The musical cue from "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Richard Strauss's musical tribute to Nietzsche's novel, appears in the film where the ape advances into man, and then when the man advances into the Star Child, which Kubrick directly refers to in interviews as a kind of superman.)  But the symbolic or allegorical treatment is replacement for literal depictions of futuristic humanity or contact with alien species (represented indirectly by the black monolith), because at that point we just wouldn't know.

This reveals a problem with a lot of non-Kubrick science fiction.  Take even such lauded sci-fi as Blade Runner, which occurs in Los Angeles of 2019.  At that time, there would be humanoid replicants who almost thoroughly successfully mimic human beings.  Somehow, humanity would have gotten to the point of creating such replicants without first thinking through the implications.  But it's precisely such cultural resources as Blade Runner that gets humanity to first think such things through.  It's why the year 1984 came to pass without the world becoming like Orwell's novel.  As China begins implementing its "social credits" system here very soon, it invites warnings and comparisons to Big Brother.  (It's hard to tell whether the concerns here are overblown.)

Another common element in a lot of sci-fi, save perhaps for Star Trek: the futures depicted are often dystopian -- i.e., that humanity misused its technology with the result often being that a tyrannical government or corporate entity used that technology to control or dehumanize people, use them for gory entertainment purposes, consume them, limit their lifespans, manipulate their minds, and so on.  Even with Star Trek and Star Wars, we see wars occurring, but what would motivate beings who are that technologically advanced (and, presumably, intellectually advanced as they use their technology to learn how to become more morally and aesthetically perfect?) to go to war?  The movie Independence Day (1996) depicts a hostile alien race - which has mastered interstellar travel - coming to earth to use its resources.  Perhaps going forward, humans will increasingly demand that movies with such dubious and intelligence-insulting premises not be made?  That alone would be a cultural improvement, and less wasteful of storytelling resources.  And becoming smarter and more efficient with resources is just part of humanity's technological improvement.

The same year as 2001's release, Paul R. Ehrlich foresaw doom with his book, The Population Bomb.  In 1980 he made a wager with economist Julian Simon, "betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. ... Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period."  This strikes me as an instructive example of doom and gloom coming up against what Simon referred to as the ultimate resource: “skilled, spirited and hopeful people who will exert their will and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”  In short, the human mind.

Which is to say, that one's level of anxiety over the future of planet earth is probably inversely proportional to one's confidence in the ability of humans to use their mental capacities to solve problems.

I can't say that I'm all that anxious about the condition of the earth going forward.

(My anxiety, if that's what it is, is more about how even intellectually- and culturally-advanced humans would manage to discover lasting meaning if/when they have all that extra time on their hands in a 'post-scarcity' era; I just hope beauty would always remain fulfilling, seeing as how 'living to kalon' - for the sake of the beautiful or noble or fine, where our values or needs are in harmonious proportion in a hierarchy (and wherein we discover our unique form of self-actualization or eudaimonia) - is ultimately the best theoretical accounting for our widely-shared commonsense standard of value that I can think of.  Perhaps that means humans eventually becoming essentially aesthetic-creative beings.  Is that what Nietzsche had in mind with the 'overman' idea?...)

Obama, Warren, Krauthammer and the rich paying their fair share

First, Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

And then-president Obama:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.) 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

And now Krauthammer, laying the smackdown on the pretentious redistributionist crap above:

"Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad."

(column reproduced and read by yours truly in his magisterial collection Things That Matter)

The rich already pay a greater share of their income in taxes than the non-rich.  That means they're already paying a greater share of their income for the same public services available to everyone else, i.e., they're already paying more outright for the same services.  They just made better use of it than the others did, using their brainpower.  But that's not enough for the "progressives."  (About the only thing "progressive" about leftists is how steeply progressive a tax structure they support.)  The above arguments from Warren and Obama purport to show how paying a lot in taxes is merely giving back for the support one has received, but they're actually disguised arguments for redistribution (the sine qua non of distinctively Democratic tax policy).  What they should do is explain to everyone in straightforward and plain terms, in light of Krauthammer's point, how Steve Jobs' wealth should be forcibly transferred to other people who didn't create the Mac and the iPad.

If they want to get advanced in their arguments, they should explain how Rawls trumps Rand (the intellectual who more than any other dramatized and explained the role of the mind/intellect in wealth creation) on this point.  Perhaps in the process they can apply Rawls' point (from section 17 of A Theory of Justice -- do a search on "superior character" at https://genius.com/John-rawls-a-theory-of-justice-excerpts-annotated ) about not deserving a superior character that "depends in good part upon fortunate family and circumstances in early life," and see how far they get with that with the American people.  (Compare/contrast with Rand on character.)

(A person less intellectually corrupt and less full-of-himself than today's "progressives" might bring up the following: The rich have more wealth to protect from would-be criminals or foreign invaders, so it only makes sense that they pay a commensurate amount in taxes.  That would justify a flat tax, at best, not a progressive tax structure.  Moreover, it's quite reasonable to ask whether it takes a thousand times as much money to protect a billionaire's wealth than to protect a millionaire's wealth.  What if the billionaire could get a better wealth-protection package from a private provider than what he can get from the state?  Supposedly that isn't an option given that the state provides protection as a 'public good' (and assuming that no voluntary funding mechanisms for public goods are available).  But under libertarian justice this hypothetical private alternative serves as a proper baseline against which to determine whether the person whose wealth is being protected is getting a fair return on taxes paid, i.e., isn't being made to pay more than what is necessary to cover the wealth-protection costs.  Just because a person's wealth is vulnerable to predation in a state of nature, doesn't make it okay for the state to take part in some measure or other of functionally-unnecessary predation itself under the guise of protection.)

Socialism vs. freedom, in a nutshell

In a nutshell?  Socialism in its original sense means the abolition of private property "in the means of production," to be replaced by some form or other of social control of "the means of production."  If you see the modification of the term at the supplied google search link - a necessary modification to reduce the perceived moral and economic ugliness of the idea - the meaning has mutated into "production, distribution and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole."  In other words, if there is a considerable amount of regulation of an economy, then it (apparently) now falls within the range of socialist ideas, although I prefer the term "socialism-lite" so as to highlight the morally odious socialist elements of a broadly leftist/"progressive" vision of a just economy.

In her landmark essay, "What is Capitalism?", Rand presents a shortened, nonfiction version of much of the "Galt speech" in Atlas Shrugged.  The theme of Atlas Shrugged?  "The role of the mind in man's existence."  The strength of Rand's case for capitalism stands or falls with her arguments concerning the role of the mind in human existence -- in the case of capitalism, the role of the mind in the process of economic production.  It is this role that socialists of whatever stripe seem to have a very poor grasp on.  Evidence of this poor grasp is how socialists/leftists tend to react to Rand's writings themselves (i.e., quite cluelessly, resting content with caricatures or downright smears), but a wider body of evidence is available: how do socialists treat the subject of entrepreneurial creativity and vision?

Many of the richest people in capitalism-lite societies of today are visionary entrepreneurs, who create value-added using rare and hard-to-replace skills.  At the margins, these value-added skills are rewarded handsomely, which is how (in this age of advanced wealth accumulation) the top-net-worth individual[*] can surpass the next individual on the list to the tune of billions of dollars.  It is this combination of skills and the usual monetary incentives that explains how we now have four "tech" companies well within striking distance of $1 trillion market capitalization each.  (In the true spirit of Making America Great Again, we should be following the lessons from the successes of the MAGA giants, i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.)

In the literature of the Austrian economists, entrepreneurship is front and center in explanation of market processes in constant 'disequilibrium' moving toward 'equilibrium' as, e.g., arbitrage opportunities are discovered and exploited.  (Israel Kirzner is one such economist who treated this subject in much detail, applying basic Misesian observations.)  Rand adds the dimension of creativity to the entrepreneurial process.  Creativity is a unique function of human consciousness: in essence it involves taking existing elements and generating some new or original combination of them.  (The following is a tentative characterization of creative action.)  Creativity happens in almost any human endeavor where abstract thought is involved; from there it is a matter of magnitude, and some humans have demonstrated greater aptitude in this process than others.

In other words, what Rand was getting at with Atlas and "What is Capitalism?" is: the primary means of human economic production is the human mind or intellect or reason.  All the other means of production in form of (the productive value of) land, labor, and capital are consequences of this primary.  (We're assuming, of course, a value-added situation beyond that of the primitive humans.)  It is this basic feature of human economic life that socialism of every variety fails to recognize or appreciate.  In consequence, what socialism involves is some measure or degree of control over the human mind.  As Rand put it, via Galt, "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."

As she put it elsewhere, "a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

(I like to play games in my head along the lines of "What's your all-time starting five" and not just when it comes to NBA basketball.  So, like, in the NBA a good lineup of candidates for the starting five would be Russell or Abdul-Jabbar at Center, Lebron James and Larry Bird at the Forward positions, and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson at the Guard positions.  Now, what are good candidates for an all-time starting five in the realm of "intellectual defenders of the capitalist system."  They would include: Rand, Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman.  Now, if we liken it to another sport, hockey or soccer, we would have a goalie, and I'd have Rand at goalie.  Every argument against capitalism you might come up with would have to get past Rand-the-goalie.  When you get to Rand -- assuming you somehow managed to get past the Mises-Hayek-Nozick lines of defense -- she'll have a response invariably along the lines of "Man is an end in himself."  Or: "Man has a right to exist for his own sake."  Or: "My life isn't yours to dispose of."  The rest is the anti-capitalist going through various rationalizations to either deny these statements or mutate them somehow into a defense of socialism(-lite) along these very same morally-undeniable lines.  "Doesn't the capitalist dispose of the lives of a company's employees?" etc.)

What is to happen with entrepreneurial talent/vision in a socialist framework.  More pointedly: how does one go about providing incentives for entrepreneurial talent to be forthcoming?  Even under a "market socialist" framework (basically, a mutation of socialism from its original meaning - central ownership, planning, control - to something involved "social ownership" but subject to market processes, as a supposed response to the Mises-Hayek criticism of central planning), if what is sought is long-term economic prosperity, certain rare and marginally-very-valuable talents will have to be involved, and the judgment involved has to be exercised freely in accordance with the requirements of the creative intellect.  If what is sought is efficient financing of production projects, you need financial talent and incentives sufficient to bring that talent to market and directed toward its most optimal uses.  How does all this happen without essentially "devolving" into the very tried-and-true capitalist process?

The socialists may not still profess to adhere to a labor theory of value (although getting them to drop that theory may have been like pulling teeth), but their chief focus is on a category they call "the workers" (subordinate employees).  Do entrepreneurs do a lot of value-added intellectual work?  From what I've been able to discern, this seems to be an issue discussed very little in the socialist literature.  If we applied Marxoid phraseology (without reference to at-the-margin value or rarity), entrepreneurial labor could be categorized as multiplied or intensified unskilled or simple labor.  The less-clueless socialists will still want to distinguish between entrepreneurial or organizational talent on the one hand, and the finance-capital end of things on the other.  But what about financial-capital talent?  Is it discussed at length in socialist literature?  (If it is, it must be hidden well from view, with other themes and concerns pushed to the fore.  The main concern/theme driving all of it seems to be: inequality in the process of production.  Talents are, after all, "distributed" unequally.)

The capitalist ethos (espoused by Rand first and foremost) holds that private property rights are essential to human freedom, in terms of the products or consequences of individual value-added creativity.  In the case of the "tech titans" we might have the CEO owning a lot of the company's shares, in effect playing the roles of both entrepreneur/organizer as well as financial capitalist.  Along the lines of Locke and Hegel and Rand and others, property is an extension of self or personhood.  In some sense, the personality of a "tech titan" is heavily invested in the enterprise.  But does anyone really need a billion dollars (discovered via the loathsome leftist Leiter's blog) to properly express their personality?

It'd sure be nice to resurrect Rand in her prime to see how she would handle this kind of question.  She'd pick apart certain assumptions of the question, perhaps use the phrase "context dropping" or "blanking out the cause of the effect."  But I'm not her, I am merely me, and here's what I've got so far:

Say a tech titan reaches a billion dollars net worth.  (This is not like a billion dollars cash in the bank, it might be nearly tied up in stocks that couldn't all be liquidated at present market prices.  It's almost surely not a billion dollars that's going to be blown on hookers and coke, as good as that might be for the bottom line of hookers and coke merchants.)  So if Ocasio-Cortez and the other enlightened progressives have their way, this tech titan won't be able to amass a net worth more than $1 billion, at least not as long as there are human beings somewhere going without health insurance.  (What are we actually supposed to infer about the latter from the former, anyway?  Is one the cause of the other?  That means that our modern economy is accurately characterized as more like a zero-sum situation than a win-win one [tech titans offer comparative advantage, using talents not directly at the disposal of "the workers", . . . ].)

(Without delving into the preposterous, just how would a committee of average-100-IQ "workers" manage to develop a company like Apple?  Again, one only need read Rand for the essentialization of the principle involved here.  It's on the same order of preposterous as imagining a committee of average-100-IQ intellects coming up with the grand-scale integrations of a Karl Marx.  Ohhhhhhhh, so now the role of the mind in man's existence becomes more clear, all of a sudden, to the myopic leftist.  Keep in mind, though, that Marxism proper doesn't place primacy on the human intellect but on "the material productive forces" of which intellectual products - including Marx's theoretical edifice itself - are consequence or superstructure.  In the last resort, of course.  And this is the leading contender for best socialist theorist to date, no less.)

Anyway, let's say I have a billion dollar net worth and any extra amount of wealth over that is confiscated (to pay for children's health insurance or whatever most noble cause).  I could just sit on my ass after that and create no more value-added.  But what good would that do anyone?  No matter, my marginal tax rate is 100% because in the last resort that meets enlightened progressive understandings of fairness, and so I can either sit on my ass or continue to create value for free.  So why should the tax code create preference for leisure time over production?  In one case (sitting on my ass) my life is still exclusively at my disposal, but in the other, doing win-wing comparative-advantage consensual capitalistic acts, the state can dispose of 100% of my marginal proceeds, i.e., my time, energies, effort, talents, mind, person.  (Nozick makes a similar point about a tax-code incentive for leisure over production in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 170.  It's basically a common-sense refutation of the moral premise of punitively high redistributive taxation, just right there.)

What part of "Man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and he has a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses" do the leftists/socialists not fucking understand?

So, in a nutshell: Private property is an expression of man's mind.  Socialism foolishly flouts this moral principle; pure socialism flouts it purely (see: Mao, Great Leap Forward.).  Socialist moral theorizing implies the preposterous.

(If it can be established that "capitalism causes global warming," i.e., desire for economic prosperity causes global warming, and if it can be established that warming-mitigation technology could not outpace the warming itself, then and only then would you have capitalism characterized by a monumental negative externality or non-win-win scenario.  But the socialists were basically making preposterous assertions about capitalism before global-warming became a big issue, putting their credibility in tatters.)

[*] - I'd sexistly say "guy" . . . well, why not just say "guy," since we appear to be at the tail end of a bell curve of a certain kind of intelligence, dominated almost all by men . . . a fact that cannot be sexist.  (Speaking of which, if we're going to rank-order the greatest women philosophers in history on the basis of a full accounting of their strengths and shortcomings, we'd better be sure we've got the right criteria for measurement.  What did Prof. Hospers find so fascinating about Miss Rand in particular, again?  All-time starting five, at least?  And what about . . . All-Time Starting Five Philosophers, period?  What shall the criteria be?  I need to become more of a student of the history of philosophy to know for sure, but I already do know that there can be both a lot of great stuff in Rand and in the rest of the philosophy canon; need they stand over and against one another? ^_^ )