On Description & Explanation

“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be – though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain – because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.” – Spengler, Decline of the West

“Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical.” – Spengler, Decline of the West

11. Accurate description is the revelation of character without explanation, theory, or justification. 

12. A story is a theory of why something happened, the descriptions being pawns in a series of causes and effects. Man looks for the story beyond the description; he makes description into something ornamental and secondary. He can no longer see the connections made by accurate descriptions set alongside each other (the blindness of autism).

15. ¨Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.¨ – Wittgenstein

16. The criticism that description cannot stand on its own is nonsense. Man has been so conditioned by theory that he remarks: ¨But there was no story.¨ He cannot accept that character produced from accurate description comes from nowhere.

17. A story is a craving for generality. The darkness of this age is that story is looked to for revelation rather than character.

21. The Greek fascination with tragedy was the fascination with justice: a rightness of conduct which could not be made legible by the laws of the State, that even ran contrary to those laws. A rightness of conduct that men felt but could not make legible. Tragedy: the confrontation of purity in character with the historical argument of law; an insoluble confrontation.

24. The question is two part: Whether one can accurately understand the development in ancient Greece from a making of poetry about the world to a scientific breaking it down into law (both natural and moral/state), and, secondly, with this understanding, whether someone captured and enthralled by science and the state, born into it, can walk himself back into poetry. Can this development be undone?

29. The bourgeois attitude in philosophy is that which accepts implicitly the structures and confines set up by legibility: the subject-object dichotomy; the responsibility of the individual; the protection racket of the State; the written word; Reason and explanation; the tyranny of science; the naming and the breaking down of the world into elements. These bourgeois philosophers are dependents of the state and its program of scientific legibility and so are unwilling or unable to see outside it. Their work only confirms the State, making it an a priori assumption about life.

38. Even descriptions are shot through today with implied explanation. No one takes an accurate description seriously – it cannot stand on its own. They would ask for something more. It must be combined in narrative and made reasonable: things held together in the world by a string of arguments, equations and stories. Man sets out to prove that ¨everything happens for a reason.¨

41. In a scientific age, tragedy becomes impossible. The last eye and ear accessible to its message has gone.

Electricity & Writing

¨Socrates: But if these things are only to be known through names, how can we suppose that the givers of names had knowledge, or were legislators before there were names at all, and therefore before they could have known them?

Cratylus: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which were thus given are necessarily their true names.¨ — Plato, Cratylus

19. Names for the pre-literate Greek were an auditory divination, a myth-event, not entirely stable in meaning, received by men from gods. Names today are visual pictures: spelled, defined and administered to children by the state through mandatory schooling.  

32. To point out the parallels between science and the state, as both operate upon the principles of legibility, standardization and systematization, is to perhaps only propose another grand human narrative, one more general and meta than the last, and thereby seemingly more true. In the search for the one true story of man, of first causes and prime movers, one continues an old train of thought endemic to the West.

 

43. Still, it is proper to ask how the technology of the written word changed the language people spoke. Prior to the appearance of writing, was the language man spoke less rigorously logical, more emotional and impassioned, more religious?

46. Fred Nietzsche criticized his Birth of Tragedy saying it should have sung. Plato argued the poets were immoral and needed to be removed from his ideal city-state. Teddy Carpenter abandoned his anthropological project, equating the study of non-western, pre-literate peoples with a kind of criminal act. Perhaps the tragedy of philosophy is that it tries and fails to sing and to make poetry. Philosophy must finally reject the poetic or, in the acceptance that it can never sing, must itself go silent.  

55. They say now that poetry is one particular electrical action in the brain among many. They have observed it and measured it. The brain is like computer hardware, they say, and poetry one of many softwares. There have always been computers, for man has always been a computer.

58. Man conceives himself through his technology. The technology of the written word allowed for the standardization of names and the creation of narratives of causes and effects: the complexities of argument and logic. The technology was useful: it broadened the state and met his goals of enhanced security, property ownership, and law. It grew his material wealth, provided him with pleasures and expanded his empire.

61. Plato´s Socrates speaks of his daimōn, a rationality that guides him. Notably it is inaccessible to both gods and other men. By answering its call and accepting its guidance, he is separated from gods and men and made an individual. Philosophy would progress to internalize this force of rationality within man, to make it a feature unique to man. Later, to the systematic economists, rationality would become a core assumption about men in their arithmetic of global economic life.

75. The technology of writing began as an amanuensis and was slowly grafted onto man. Its logic and reasonableness became a part of his speech. The spoken word became secondary to the written. The eye achieved dominance over the ear. Man learned to speak in text.

79. What is called consciousness is the embodiment of the technology of writing. Consciousness does not appear to man as poetry or song. Consciousness appears as a voice, a voice of reason, an interior logic: a written voice.

80. Without the technology of writing there could be no subject, no individual.

81. ¨Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.¨ - Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962

85. The problems of other minds, whether the world is illusion or true, are the problems of literate men. The text was essential in the development of these ¨problems.¨

87. The historians tell of the Dark Ages, the centuries after the Roman empire had collapsed and men lived in small villages and feared the forest. These villagers were illiterate and state-less. Europe was sparsely populated and little was known of life beyond the village. Men were often without clothing and walked around shamelessly naked. Curiously, these men of the Dark Age were nameless. Was it coincidence that in the absence of the state men also lost their names? With this breakdown in legibility even in regard to himself, was it possible for a man to conceive himself as an individual?

99. The computer is the electrification of the technology of writing: the joining of his mastery of electricity to the older technology of writing. He sees the world through this enhanced electrical writing. He observes electricity in his own body and brain and believes he is not very different than the electricity and logic of the computer. He aspires to merge with it: to become reason, logic and legibility electrified and all knowing.

100. In the moving picture Lucy (2014) dolphins are depicted as using 20% of their brain capacity, compared to humans at 10% (brain capacity appears to be a measure of electrical activity relative to cerebral size). At 20% of its brain capacity, the film implies, a dolphin is physically endowed with functional sonar, which a human must manufacture technology to replicate. During the course of the film the protagonist Lucy expands her use of brain capacity and gains control over the laws of the world as detailed by science (gravity, fusion, etc.). Curiously, as she expands the use of her brain and becomes more reasonable, she loses her sex drive, empathy for other humans, any recognition of historical moral codes and ethics, and respect for private property. Eventually Lucy departs her body and merges with a computer. Finally, at 100% of brain capacity, she transforms herself from a computer into an electrical wave that can inhabit all living and non-living things, past and present. Man as computer hardware has made his final evolution into a supreme, immortal, all knowing and unbounded electrical rationality. The utopian dream is complete, the final step of his evolution from single celled organism.

The World To Come

1. The Muslim looks back to the past. Historical memory tells him of the time of the caliphate, the greatest moment of his religion and culture, when his empire was most expansive. For him the great moment of the earth has already happened and it is what he seeks to restore: a return to the future.

 

2. The Western man (secular) looks to an imagined future, to a perfection of democracy and technologically guided economy, in which everyone will have all the latest gadgets and live together in peace with little work, long lives, and never any pain. For him, the earth´s perfect moment is still to come and he need only teach other men to imagine it with him.

3. The Muslim, however, is without a belief in the perfection of life on earth. Perfection is only possible after death. This allows him to live with cruelty and slaughter and pain and loss. War and death are simply features of the earthly life. They put into starker relief the perfection and beauty of the world to come after death.

6. Secular Western man cringes at the cruelties and slaughters. All the world’s pain challenges his idea of the progress of his utopian democracy of consumption and happiness on earth. He has no answer for this challenge to progress. It does not seem possible to him. Without an afterlife, Western man is reduced to nothing if his worldview of progress is to fail.

8. Western man must imprison and declare war upon those who practice cruelty and slaughter. To protect his progress of peace and democracy and the values of consumption, he must practice in a more extreme and comprehensive way the brutality of his enemies. He must slaughter more thoroughly than his enemies. He must expand his surveillance, he must torture better, he must terrorize more efficiently so that the peace may last and consumption and democracy can take root.

11. Verily, the Muslim´s restoration of a once-existent caliphate is a more realistic and achievable objective than the globalizing of the entire earth under a secular democracy and consumption-based economy (never before realized historically). While both are totalitarian projects, the former is considerably more modest in scale. 

12. After Western man has had his idea of worldly progress destroyed, he will return to the idea of the afterlife and perfection and utopia in death. It will be too hard to live without belief in the midst of slaughter. He will need to become religious again. He will believe again and as fervently as the Muslim. He will relearn the longing for death and the life to come.

Beyond The City

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish."

— John Culkin, quoted in They Became What They Beheld

"In the beginning was the Word, a spoken word, not the visual one of literate man, but a word which, when spoken, imposed form. This is true, as well, of the Eskimo, but with one significant difference: the Eskimo poet doesn't impose form, so much as reveal it. He transfigures and clarifies, and thus, sanctifies. As he speaks, form emerges, temporarily but clearly, ´on the threshold of my tongue.´ When he ceases to speak, form merges once more with unbounded reality." — Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities

200. The great weakness of this age is that a man can speak of ¨picking¨ a religion; that he chooses to believe.

201. Mythology chooses men, not the other way around. Men are born into myth as they are born into a world. Myth lives on in the lives of men in how they comport themselves in the world. As men act, myth acts through them. It cannot be spoken of as something believed.

211. In a world torn apart by naming the gods are reduced and relegated, but so in equal measure are men.

 

227. Science is not the opposite of myth. As anything else it is nourished by its own mythical bed.

240. The great task awaiting men who have left the cities is to restore a world broken  apart through naming and categories: to see again as an illiterate child; to forget the accountant´s and scientist´s names for things; to see the world whole, where animals and humans, forests and rivers, gods and earth and sky dwell together.

246. If there is any such thing as freedom, it is that which a State cannot make an accounting of.

247. What appears to a citizen as irrefutable and unremarkable is likely what is most necessary to the sustenance of the city and the State.

A First Encounter With Surplus

The Indian's first contact with the world of surplus came through the European trappers. The white trappers wanted the Indian's assistance in locating game and also to have the Indians trap for them. But the Indian did not understand why he should want to do any trapping for the white men. Then the white trappers offered him sugar and flour in exchange for his fur. This interested the Indian. The sugar was sweet and addictive and he began to trap a little for it. Then the white trapper introduced the Indian to alcohol and that made willing trappers out of many.

The Indian soon abandoned or altered parts of his yearly hunting movement through the forest so that he could spend more time along his traplines near the white man's store. Gradually the Indian became dependent on the sugar and flour and alcohol and forgot the way to the distant parts of the forest. Still, he enjoyed trapping and he did not feel the white man had asked of him something he did not want to do.

But the white man wanted the Indians to trap more and bring him more fur. The white man raised the price he paid for fur, thinking it would encourage them. But, strangely, the Indian trapped less. It confused the white man of surplus. The Indian was only trapping to secure a particular quantity of sugar, flour and alcohol and higher prices paid for his furs meant less trapping was required of him. The higher prices allowed the Indian to go away from the white man's store and spend more time hunting and with his family.

So the white man dropped the price of fur and raised the price for sugar, flour and alcohol. This resulted in a great flood of fur to the white man. The Indians then became more tied to their traplines near the white man's store and abandoned more of the traditional hunting areas. The white man had the talented Indian trappers in his service.

The white man saw more of these Indians now and he discovered that whatever excess money after the purchase of sugar and flour was spent on alcohol and the Indians conducted wild, drunken parties. The Indians did not want to keep any of the fiat currency the white man offered them. It seemed to the white man stupid and wasteful, but since he had tricked the Indians with absurdly low fur prices and high prices for the sugar, flour and alcohol, this did not surprise him. 

The Indians reveled in their drunkenness, were proud of it even, and the shaman danced and had great visions. Alcohol was a wonder. The sugar was sweet. The flour was useful. The Indians drank and used all the flour and sugar and then they went away to their hunting areas. Though they spent less time hunting now, the hunt was still necessary for their survival.

What the white man had not understood was that all things go bad, but are replaceable if one has the skills. The forests were full of game, the rivers with fish, and the Indian was in communication with the gods that maintained the land and animals. Because all was provided to him, the Indian could consume everything today with little regard for the future.

The white man has begun to learn that even his fiat currency is no permanent store of value and that it slowly (and then quickly) goes bad. Despite the protests of the libertarians for the creation of a sound and stable currency, currencies throughout history have all eroded in value over time. There is no impregnable store of surplus. All currency surpluses degrade just as caribou meat or sod houses or seal skin boots or narwhale tusk spears. 

The care for surplus and its maintenance is, to the Indian, rather a joke as such quantities can be heavy and must be carried around with a man, either on his person or in his anxiety for their deterioration through inflations. Better to consume it today and acquire it again tomorrow, he says. Of course, one must have the skill to do it.

On Domestication 2

The next phase of man's domestication is to make himself digital, to make himself fully binary. The grand metaphor of man as computer hardware is being realized, he is becoming his metaphor. Government and corporate interests provide a software called Rational Economic Man for him to run, and they are able to look in on it, police it, make updates to it, and predict what he will do. Data can be taken upon him all the time, a profile constructed, and he can be surveilled for his own protection.

Just as animals were domesticated and then selectively bred to become productive for the farmer, man is being domesticated into what is most productive for the State and the corporations that oversee him.

He is told to think of himself as rational, scientific, self-interested, economic man. His only concern is to amass ever more security and things: a lifetime of pleasure purchases, from drugs and sex, to vacations and second homes and things he will rarely use. He will consider all life in economic terms, from speaking of the sexual market value of women, to referring to himself as a saleable brand, to the cost-benefit analysis of each of his decisions. What matters is only what can be monetized. Every act will have a dollar value, the only value permissible. Indeed, the only value of interest to the State (taxes) and corporation (profits).

Religion must be eliminated as irrational (unpredictable). Altruism, though permitted, must be given its particular channel. Mysticism and self-sacrifice must be wiped out. Love must be declared impossible. What is moral will only be defined as what is legal. Verily, the family unit—its privacy from State and corporate oversight, and allegiance to itself—must be broken apart. Man's only activity should be economic activity. Man must only express himself through the channels of work for his corporate family, respect for the laws of his government, and the continual seeking of purchasable pleasures from his corporate providers.

Big data can protect domesticated man. It can make him safe from terror. It can anticipate what will pleasure him and offer it to him before he imagines it. Science and economics will define the ways in which he will act, the laws of his life, the software which defines his possibility.

Conquistadors of Credit

After the physical exploitation of the earth is completed, stripped of its metals and petroleum, the bankers undertake the credit exploitation. This entails the offering of credit to the governments and citizens of the poorer countries — for the consumption of gadgets or creation of businesses or the building of infrastructure — and the long-term interest harvesting of the credit-based GDP growth that follows.

 

The bankers are the new risk-taking explorers of the planet and through securitizations, derivatives, and explicit State backing (tax payer guarantees limiting their downside risk), are able to strip wealth out of even the poorest inhabitants.

 

It all seems good and right in the beginning as the credit bubbles are created in the poorer countries, and the citizens are able to buy goods and services they were historically unable to afford. But the only real winners after the inflationary collapse can be the asset holders. And these assets will eventually be repossessed by the banks after the extension of credit has peaked, overall growth has flagged, deflation has destroyed those who were too leveraged, and the loans have now become unpayable.

 

It will be many generations before the collapse of the banking created credit-based growth model. 80% of the planet awaits the promises of growth offered by the banking credit apparatus. The Western world has been harvested, its economic soil deadened, the people and governments no longer able to accept further credit exploitation. But the impoverished rest of the planet is waiting and willing and the bankers have only just begun to exploit it.

On Domestication

4. The whip is the first law of domestication: the making into property of animals and men.

 

9. The beating of farm animals into submission: man's first practice of domestication—teaching him the usefulness of brutality—a domestication he would learn to perform upon himself and other men.

 

10. The hunter-gatherers banished a man from their lands, but the farmers (the early Statists) instead took custody of the man and through physical coercion attempted to change his behavior. For when all lands are owned—are the property of States and other men—there is nowhere to banish a man. Outlaws must be whipped in the public square, imprisoned (made the 'property of the State'), or put to death.

 

14. The hunter-gatherer had no use for the whip. He had neither animals nor men to swing it upon.

 

17. The first instruments of war were implements of farming, for the tilling of fields, repurposed to kill other men. The first weapons of war were made in the same blacksmith shops as scythes and ploughs.

Legal

(720 ILCS 5/24-1) (from Ch. 38, par. 24-1)
Sec. 24-1. Unlawful Use of Weapons.
(a) A person commits the offense of unlawful use of weapons when he knowingly:
(1) Sells, manufactures, purchases, possesses or carries any bludgeon, black-jack, slung-shot, sand-club, sand-bag, metal knuckles, throwing star, or any knife, commonly referred to as a switchblade knife, which has a blade that opens automatically by hand pressure applied to a button, spring or other device in the handle of the knife, or a ballistic knife, which is a device that propels a knifelike blade as a projectile by means of a coil spring, elastic material or compressed gas

 

http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-62014.html

The State, Morality and Freedom

21. Any manipulation or destruction of originary morality (how men relate to one another economically) inevitably serves the purposes of the State. The State’s laws become the default measure of what is moral between men. The State thereby controls morality. The State stands for morality. The State has a monopoly on moral life. What is right is what is legal.

 

22. A man sent off to kill for the State is an acolyte of a higher and holy power.

 

50. To be middle class is to be totally exposed; to have an edge on nothing--To be domesticated and servile to both a job, a way of life, and a government.

 

52. To have an edge is to have a skill that liberates a man so that no boss or government can affect him. Around his edge he develops his life as project. To have an edge is to be free. (Money is not an edge.)

 

55. The middle class (read: the indebted class) are the cubicle worker slaves of the oligarchs, enslaved by an interest rate or the fear of losing their middle manager positions. The lower class are the military class, the soldiers sent to give their lives in the oligarchy’s wars and expand its empire. The stability of the oligarchy subsists in both the middle and lower classes' voluntary acceptance of their social/economic position.*
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* The State's error in the Vietnam War was not simply in having a draft, but in sending middle class men to fight alongside the lower class. The middle class is a worker slave class, not a fighting class, and to demand that the worker slaves also give up their lives is for the State to demand too much. In contrast, the Iraq and Afghan Wars, the torture and indefinite incarceration of prisoners, drone attacks in multiple countries and a Presidential 'hit list' have resulted in very little public (middle class) protest.

 

Note on States and Systems

In places where a Western-style State does not exist there is still order be it the order of warlords or tribes or families. Appeals have been made to a large State as a means of protecting a population from the aggression of other States, and there would appear to be some truth to this. For certainly a State looks to procure for itself and its moneyed interests the assets and resources of weaker states, when it is expedient, through war or trade. The question of how a population without a State would protect itself would appear to be an important question.

But does the State really protect its population, safeguarding the country's resources for its people?

In Colombia, for example, because the domestic corporate elite remains underdeveloped, the State has aligned itself with foreign corporate interests to develop and take to market the country’s abundant raw materials. In doing so Colombian politicians have enriched themselves and no doubt provided employment to Colombian workers. But the greater part of the profits from these deals leave the country to foreign corporate interests. Has the Colombian State failed or succeeded in protecting its population?

The American State differs from the Colombian in that its privileged corporate interests are for the most part domestic ones, and, additionally, that it is better equipped to use war, treaty and tariff to promote those domestic interests. But both the Colombian and American State make the argument that their alignment and privileging of certain corporate interests is ultimately beneficial to the populace at large. It is the oft-made argument of a kind of trickle-down economic effect, one in which the immediate (and measurable) economic benefits to the ruling and corporate elite are argued to far outweigh the negatives for even the poorest of its citizenry. It must be noted that these secondary, trickled-down economic effects are mostly difficult to measure.

Indeed much of the American economic success can be attributed to a State highly skilled and committed to promoting its corporate interests abroad and working with other, comparatively weaker States, often with lesser developed corporate elites, to extend American corporate interests. The American State is the best among the State agents of plunder and it is no coincidence that it is backed by the world’s most powerful military (as well as an expansive prison system).
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Larger systems are constructed upon injustices. In dealing with aggregates, macro ideas, and anonymous others, the large system is unable to respond to the injustices committed against the few. It is only the threat of violence from those that maintain the larger system that contains those against whom these injustices are committed from rising up against it. A strong military is thus essential to the larger system, as much to deter violence from within as from without.

By contrast, within smaller systems, a family or small village for instance, any injustices are addressed immediately by the elite of the smaller system. One does not easily or profitably take advantage of one’s neighbor without consequences. Hence, smaller systems are more easily changed for the benefit of their membership and, indeed, smaller systems do not require military power to deter violence from within.

Additionally, the smaller system is more robust than the larger. In the case of its breakdown the effects are limited to a smaller number of people. The members of the smaller system are less specialized than those in the larger (with fewer members they are required to perform more tasks) and are thus less system-dependent and more able to survive should the system collapse.

Much of the larger system's power derives from that one cannot say exactly what it is.

Bellum De Pauci Contra Plures

9. The State comes to exist through submission. The strongest create the State to further their dominion over the weaker masses. They gain the acceptance of the masses by force and by hand-out, and beguile those masses to further solidify their power. The State does not exist without the complicity of the weaker masses.

14. Centralized government appeared when man realized his hoarding could be better facilitated through the threat of violence and imprisonment, rather than actually carrying that threat out: The realization that taking a percentage of a man's wealth over the course of his life is more efficient and lucrative than stripping him of his wealth and killing him today.

17. Hobbes argued that the appearance of the State ends the war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) replacing it with a broad peace. Indeed, the State provides the masses protection from being plundered by criminals and the oligarchs of other nations. But beneath this surface peace, the domestic oligarchs continue their plundering legally through institutions of their own design and within the continually shifting laws of the State.

20. The State exists to protect those who have hoarded, and those who have hoarded contrive the State to hoard still more. The State is a mechanism for plundering.

21. Contra Hobbes, the creation of the State does not end any existing war of all against all, but rather expands the war of the few against the many (bellum de pauci contra plures). Indeed, it is a war that the expansion of the State only proliferates, further concentrating power and wealth with the oligarchs.

25. The State expands through regulation, subsidy and taxation, thereby continuing a progressive liquidation of the smaller, marginal producers, and further growing the hoarded wealth of the privileged oligarchs. The State exists to facilitate a wealth transfer from those without explicit State protection to those with that protection.

26. When there is no longer additional wealth for the oligarchs to accumulate, or when the accumulation of more wealth might destabilize the society and incite the masses to revolt, the State will instead look beyond its borders, to accumulate the wealth of other, weaker nations.

29. The State exists to wage war and create new wars. The State is the apparatus of war and the will to war.

37. The democratic state, the communist state, the capitalist state, the feudal state, the distatorship state, et al. are each distinctions without difference.

Conscience & The State

39. Do not suppose that cooperation and competition are antithetical or opposite. Rather cooperation as learned from the good mother is the base foundation for all economic interaction. To wrong one’s trading partner, to hoard at the expense of others or at the expense of the exchange system itself, are each violations of the good mother’s originary example of cooperation. The good mother's example is a check on competition so that it does not begin to resemble some Hobbesian world of individuals in constant war with one another. The good mother’s example of cooperation allows mutual benefits to be maintained between trading parties in the absence of codified laws and regulation.

45. It is the good mother who develops and encourages conscience in the child. Conscience is cooperation embodied. He learns to feel his violation of cooperation and altruism physically. His conscience warns him with the racing of his heart, the sweatiness of his palms, the sinking feeling in his stomach.

48. Cooperation, altruism and the gift resist systematic codification in law. Indeed, the growth of the State and the expansion of regulation and law may be seen as a further factor undermining the institution of good motherhood. The State’s prohibitions are appealed to as a guide to economic interaction rather than conscience as developed by the good mother. The State, rather than the conscience of individual men, becomes the sole caretaker of the economic system, and any activity in accord with the State’s regulation is understood to be legal and just. Loopholes and other systematic abuse is legal and therefore acceptable. The State, rather than the conscience of individual men, is the arbiter of acceptable conduct.

Aphorisms: Entrepreneurs of the State

1. Without intervention by the State there would be economic prosperity.

2. Without intervention by the State there would be moral prosperity.

3. As the State grows through regulations, prohibitions and social programs a new and growing entrepreneurial class makes itself the beneficiary:

3-1. Think of the health insurers who will bring in millions of new policy holders under threat of federal penalty for not having health insurance.

3-2. Think of the accountants and lawyers who constitute the professional class of interpreters and explainers of federal accounting and legal codes, regulations and laws.

3-3. Think of large retailers such as Walmart, who support healthcare regulation and other business regulations, that while resulting in an increase in its own costs will do more damage to its smaller competitors, thereby gaining it market share.

3-4. Think of the environmental companies (green builders, electric car makers, windmill designers and such) who today lobby for environmental laws that will result in the economy being remade to their personal benefit.

3-5. And lastly think of the welfare mother, who by giving birth to receive State payments, is the entrepreneur of the ghetto.

3-6. These are all exploitations of one's productive neighbors made anonymous and guiltless through the facilitation of the State.

4. No work that exists as a result of State intervention can be considered economically productive, or moral.