Reciprocity

Posted on May 17, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, if I were to name my personal philosophy, it would be the philosophy of reciprocity. I believe in reciprocating while setting a higher standard. The golden rule is also a form of reciprocity and is a core principle. Not merely reciprocity in action but in attitude and attribution as well. Reciprocity is hard wired into us, so when we see it being violated, we have an instinctive reaction to it. When we see reciprocity in action we call it fairness, and when we see reciprocity violated, we call it unfair. This philosophy leads us to several conclusions… the way we treat each other is improved when we reciprocate, reciprocation creates positive incentives, and if we accept the golden rule as a standard, reciprocity will lead us to less violence, crime, war, suffering and poverty. All simply by treating others reciprocally.

Reciprocity is when we treat others as they treat us, but is more than that, it also extends into, thinking about others as they do us and holding them to the same standard as they hold us. This is where the Right of self protection comes in. If someone intends to kill you, you have the reciprocal Right to do them harm, (as long as their actions and intentions would clearly lead a reasonable person to conclude they intend harm), based on their actions. Reciprocity need not be absolute, since bringing any idea to the absolute makes it absurd, so reciprocity must be tempered with understanding. Sometimes people are angry, had a bad day or are sick. We must consider these things as we deliberate our reciprocal action.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is reciprocal in nature. First we must think about how we would like to be treated. Then treat others that way. This is a form of pre reciprocation, since our actions are designed to encourage others to act the same, or in other words… reciprocate. If we accept the golden rule as a standard of conduct, then our actions improve the lot of Mankind, when we do unto others as we would not have done to us, we lower the lot of Mankind. Since people are at heart reciprocal we can expect them to act the same to us as we do them. When we act good, others will tend to act good and when we act bad, others will tend to act bad as well. The more reciprocal the community is, the more our actions effect the lot of Man, for the good or for the bad.

Fairness highly correlates with reciprocity. Imagine someone who is treated very well… then turns around and stabs his or her benefactor in the back. Almost everyone has an instinctively negative reaction. The inhumanity cannot be denied and so we react appropriately. The saying returning evil for good means just that. To do evil to one who has done us good. Hypocrisy is a blatant violation of reciprocity. When we see someone acting hypocritical our gut tells us they are bad people. This is because hypocrisy is not simply a violation of reciprocity but of the golden rule as well. The hypocrite not only returns evil for good, but treats others in a way that would make them furious, were they treated so. We all know in our hearts that to be fair, one must be reciprocal, and not to be reciprocal is to be unfair.

Most of us want a better world. To make it better it is best to improve that which we can… rather than tilt at windmills. We can demand others change all we want, but the only people we really have the power to change, is ourselves. Yet if even a few of us make a small change to the good, the whole is improved an order of magnitude, by the multiplication effect of reciprocation. When we reciprocate we are being fair, when we treat others as we would have them treat us, we are encouraging positive reciprocation, and when we practice reciprocal attribution we discourage evil. You and I can make a difference, we have an amazing ability to change the world for the better… if only we practice reciprocation and the Golden Rule.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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The Good and Evil That Surrounds Us

Posted on May 14, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me… we live in the best of times and the worst of times. Capitalism has created prosperity that is at an all time high, with less people suffering from famine than ever before in human history, while at the same time the elite tell us through their monuments, actions and policies, they seek to reduce the human population by 70%. We stand at the cusp of becoming a space faring race even as our governments gear up to militarize space. Our access to information is unparalleled while our leaders go about regulating our access to it. The ability to speak to an audience has never been better meanwhile, the state builds a surveillance apparatus, one that makes 1984 look like play school. The stock markets are just off an all time high inflated by unlimited money printing, monetizing debt and stock buybacks. Travel around the globe is cheaper and more readily available than any other time in our history, even as Christians in the Middle East and Whites in South Africa are trapped and slaughtered.

One can look at only the evils in our world but that is an exercise in navel gazing and can only lead to a nihilistic mindset. It isn’t hard to only see evil. Heck it is impossible to miss. Evils surround us, from abortion to unchecked corporate power, so it is only reasonable to see it. To focus on it however, like it is the only thing out there is like staring at your elbow. It is there, and we should be cognizant of it, but in the end such an endeavor is a waste of time and is not at all utile. In other words… we miss the important when we focus on the unimportant, our elbows… or evil. Plus, people who never change focus become myopic, unable to clearly see anything, outside their narrow field of focus. The person who only sees evil must become evil, for we are what we eat… and think.

Alternatively, one can look at only the good, but that leads to blindness and Pollianish thoughts. While the person who only sees goodness, must in time become good, yet to look at only light blinds us. What utility is it to be good and blind? That blindness and goodness is often called being Pollianish. Which is to say that someone only looks at the goodness around them, and so becomes good, then projects that goodness in themselves on the world. Such people are easy marks and are often taken advantage of. It is never a good idea to project oneself onto the world. The world never actually reflects us. To understand the world however, takes more than simply being good, it takes perception. Perception is the ability to see and understand, which can only happen when one sees everything, the good, the bad and the ugly.

It only makes sense to open one’s eyes to both the evil and the good in our world, only that way can someone have sufficient perspective to really see, and then reason, finally expounding to the world the results. Only when we look at both good and evil around us are we able to see the interplay of them, recognize each for what it is, have minimum susceptibility to propaganda and indeed think for ourselves. Seeing only evil, or good, allows people with nefarious intent to manipulate us into acting against our own best interests. Once a person sees that… they start to have power. Power not only to resist the manipulations, but help our fellow human beings resist being manipulated. Moreover, until the elite regulate the internet to silence us, now is the best time in human history to get your opinion out. Make a difference, not with violence, anger or intimidation, but with reason, love and compassion.

We do indeed live in extraordinary times. We are surrounded by great good as well as horrific evil. More children than ever before survive their first 5 years even as 60,000,000 babies have been slaughtered, prosperity fills places it’s been absent for decades while socialism creates poverty in places blessed with wealth, billions of dollars of largess flows into the Middle East and is squandered on perpetual war defined by hatred… our world is certainly filled with both evil and good. As every great hero is defined by his villain, and it is in relativity that we understand magnitude… there would be no goodness without some evil, but I suppose we can all agree that it takes very little evil to define a great deal of good, just as a great deal of evil makes a small piece of good… heaven.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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We Need The Right People in Charge…

Posted on May 9, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, any system of government that needs the “right people” at the helm, is one that can only end in despair. Since “right” people are so few and far between, the likelihood at any given time, is that the “wrong” people will be in charge most of the time. Moreover, no one that espouses that their system needs the “right people” in charge, specify the qualities of a “right person.” So even under perfect circumstances, say… the “right’ people are in charge at the outset, sooner or later they will pass on, and the wrong people will take over… then all Hell will break loose. This is on of the primary faults of socialism. Since socialism is at it’s core autocratic, those running the despotic state must be saints, else they will bend the state to their own wants and needs, abandoning the interests of society at large. Once we understand this, socialism, and indeed any system of government that requires saints be the leaders… is doomed to fail, and fail spectacularly.

Logically however, one cannot claim the problem is the people or leaders, since people and leaders are all human beings, and any mechanism must take into account the material it is made with, you cannot build a sky scraper from clay, but clay is excellent material for building pots and bowls. When building anything, it is of the utmost importance to take into consideration what one has at hand to build with, and bend the system to it’s constituents, not the constituents to the system. Any framer of a system of government must consider that people will always be in charge, and take measures to minimize the negative effects of having bad people at the helm, while trying to create incentives for good people to take those positions.

The argument we hear over and over, why socialism has resulted in so many millions of deaths, by induced famine, internment, executions and terror… is that the wrong people were in charge. The assumption being that if other people, saints, had been the leaders, those nations would not have gone off the rails. We constantly hear from Marxist apologists that the Soviet system was flawed because of Stalin, but in fact history teaches us the system was built on sand anyway. Lenin sent the Bolsheviks town to town, slaughtering in the most horrible ways, anyone who stood against him. Such a system, one built on terror, has it’s foundation in sand. Apologists will even claim real socialism has never been tried! Yet they never explain how the state can control the economy without having autocratic powers.

In truth, this is one of the fundamental debates during the Enlightenment, ie… how to limit the people in charge so government works for everyone, rather than only for those in power. Because lets face it, people who seek power over others… are looking to use that power. Constitutionalism was the means to limit the elite the Enlightenment stumbled upon. Constitutions were to be the framework of government so the people could know what to expect, and what the leaders could legitimately do. Sadly, that expedient has become so corrupted by the elite, that all a constitution does today is give the usurpers an aura of legitimacy. Because Constitutions only limit those willing to be limited, and follow them, and not at all those unwilling to.

The secret to building a truly human hearted system of government, is to create it in such a way that the quality of those in charge will naturally be high, and that strictly limits the power of them, realizing that human beings are what constitutes both the people and the elite. We must also consider that those who care nothing for power but want to be left alone, (Thrasymachus’ common man), will not seek office in the first place, yet they are exactly who should have power, while those who want power, (Thrasymachus’ great men), will suffer any cost, indignation or burden for that power. Therefore, if a system requires that only saints be the leaders then, cannot long last, and will inevitable usher in human suffering on a grand scale.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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The Religion of Marxism

Posted on May 7, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, progressivism, as well as socialism, Nazism and Marxism, are in fact religions. They meet all the criteria of a religion, they have sacraments and they have absolute faith despite evidence to the contrary, they even have a prophet, Marx. In fact socialism is one of the largest religions on the planet with many secretly worshiping at the alter of it, while pretending to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist etc… Their real affiliation is to socialism. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if they admitted it but in fact socialism is an insidious underground religion. It’s tenets claim to be human hearted while in fact their true quality is diabolical. That is why socialism in all it’s evil incarnations is so hard to kill… it is a faith, and not a reasoned attitude.

Just as Christians have sacraments, anointing the sick, last rights, marriage, the Eucharist, penance and holy orders, the Marxist religion has sacraments as well, abortion, hypocrisy, violence against unbelievers and the goal is total government. Hypocrisy is their equivalent of holy orders, the double standard, one for them and another for everyone else. Hypocrites are their priests. Abortion takes the place of the Eucharist. Making the Marxist religions exactly like Moloch worship. Masked violence against unbelievers is how they demonstrate their faith. While the sacraments of most religions seek to elevate the human condition, the Marxist religions seeks to subject humanity to it’s totalitarian rule, and insure few if anyone goes to Heaven.

Marx is the prophet of socialism. Whether or not they admit it, progressives, socialists, and Marxists worship the man. He is held in the same esteem by them as Mohamed, Buddha and Christ to the openly religious. Nazism however is like Mormonism, with Hitler as their prophet, and is despised by true Marxists as a blasphemy. Listen to the way they talk about Marx. They are more reverent about Marx than the Pope is about Jesus. They build monuments to him, make pilgrimages to his grave and even in their hearts pray to him. Marx is a prophet in the theme of Mohamed or Quetzalcoatl, religion spread by conquest, lying to unbelievers and enforced by violence and terror. The Communist Manifesto is more accurately their scripture.

All the Marxist denominations are diabolical in action, effect and intent. Unlike most religions, which are based in love of their fellows, the Marxist religion is based on hate and envy. They hate the bourgeoisie, libertarians, marriage, peace, prosperity, freedom, and especially Christianity. They will find common purpose with anyone who is also filled with hate. Rather than seek to lift people up, socialists seek to make everyone like ants, lowly, belly crawling and expendable. They look at their fellow man with utter contempt and loathing, seeing nothing but an automaton that needs to be reigned in and controlled. The Marxist religion is one that has resulted in the slaughter of over one hundred million people in less than a century… making it the most violent in human history.

As a result, discourse cannot overcome the Marxist religion, it must be utterly discredited, it’s followers called out for who they are and what they worship. You cannot reason with a zealot, especially one who accepts abortion, hypocrisy, violence against unbelievers and lying as sacraments… let alone trust anything they say. It’s like sleeping with a rattle snake. Diabolical in nature and violent in practice the Marxist religions, progressivism, socialism and Marxism, seek to lower, never elevate, and is spread in our schools, law, media and culture. They are the opposite of Christian… which is why they so despise Christianity and Christians. What makes the Marxist religions so dangerous however is that it’s most zealous adherents are the elite around the world. So recognize progressives, socialists, Nazis and Marxists for who they really are… religious fanatics willing to lie, kill and die for their religion.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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The Oligarchy of Judges

Posted on May 3, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, the very people our Constitution tasks with it’s protection, are the ones who are it’s greatest threat. I mean of course judges. They, en masse, have abandoned the idea of limited government, individualism, fairness and equality under the law, and instead have embraced, unlimited government, administrative rule, collectivism, bias and arbitrary rule. These same people and their sycophants in the media that calls itself unbiased, demand we abandon our founding principles to be replaced by the principles espoused by Marx, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Lenin, Che and Fidel. Even as they use their high positions to undermine our Constitutional Rights, they demand the rest of us give up our free speech Rights, and shut up about it. Judges seeking to destroy our republic, and replace it with autocratic administrative government, with socialism as the economic system, will not tolerate criticism. They, like all would be despots, realize their actions are those of villains and as such, if enough people took notice, their plans for world domination would be foiled, like any other fake ghost on Scooby Doo.

Most of the framers of our Constitution were lawyers with some farmers and a very few businessmen. They believed that lawyers would always be a force for limited government, freedom and individualism, that is why they made judges so powerful. A defacto aristocracy. The founders placed the Supreme court as the final arbiter of what is Constitutional and what is not out of their faith in lawyers. Sadly, throughout the history of our republic, those same judges have ruled against our Constitution as often as they did for it. The reason our nation was not made a democracy, is because the founding fathers understood that democracy is simply the tyranny of the majority over the minority, the reason they didn’t make us a dictatorship is because, dictatorship is full on oppressive, and the reason we are not an aristocracy is because aristocracy always eventually falls into oligarchy. Yet we have become an oligarchy in all but name, due largely to the judges that have brought us here. The oligarchy of lawyers.

Most judges today openly admit our Constitution is flawed, and should be changed willy nilly by fiat when they say it is a living breathing document, which of course really means, it should be changed by unelected judges as they see fit. You know… to keep up with the times. Yet as times change, people remain the same, and our Constitution was written not to control the people, but government officials. Officials like judges, who don’t like their actions being limited in any way, who have worked tirelessly for centuries to pervert our government. Now, the extremely limited federal government under the original intent of our Constitution, has become absolute in it’s power, as the state governments have become extremely limited, so now we are controlled and officials have unlimited power. Judges today have no sense of shame. They openly admit their hatred for our Constitution even while on foreign lands. Like Ginsberg did in Egypt, when she said she would not use the US Constitution as a template but the Marxist South African one instead.

Their training at the hands of progressives, who are in everything but name Marxists, minus the revolution, is paying dividends. The new class, those with advanced college degrees, run the show today and are near unanimous that freedom, limited government and individualism must go away… so they can have the absolute power they so richly deserve. The new class believes itself smarter than the rest of us, because lets face it, they have advanced college degrees, they believe themselves better, because they were smart enough to get those degrees, and more moral because they have been taught how great socialism is. The new class runs our corporations, media, government, teaches our youth, adjudicates our court cases, run our ad agencies and it they have their way, will run our very lives as well. New class progressives are deeply in love with the power of government to do all sorts of “good.” They have no problem doing evil, because to a progressive, the end justifies the means.

Imagine for a moment how hard it will be for Trump as President now that everything he does must pass muster by over seven thousand judges. If any one of them has a problem that order, rule or decision is overturned until other judges decide to allow it to stand, or usurp the role as President. Judges abhor the separation of powers, it limits their role in human affairs. Talk about biting the hand that feeds, judges have turned on our Constitution,…and care nothing for the fact that their power comes from that document. They have become so brazened that they have taken the mask off, and freely admit they detest of our Constitution, every time they say it is a living breathing document. They regularly make rulings that fly in the face of logic, constitutionality and precedent without blushing. Not once has a judge deemed a progressive, changed sides to rule in favor of limited government, individualism or original intent, but many if not most who were supposed to be originalists… have. Yes, our judges are the biggest threat to our Constitution there is, and they know it. Maybe that is why we are not allowed to criticize them, our criticism might awake others and foil their dastardly plot.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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The University Scam

Posted on April 30, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me… student loan debt will be the economic millstone around the necks of this generation. The debt was made government, (and debt to the government cannot be forgiven by bankruptcy), and so it must eventually be paid off, either by the person or their heirs when they pass, therefore, no matter the situation, everyone must pay it off, in contradiction to the very idea of why borrowed debt is forgivable by bankruptcy. Even as the debt itself was made unforgivable the cost of university education has exploded, the cost per year of college today in real economic terms, considering inflation, is much higher. So the amount of debt a student need take on has increased exponentially. Meanwhile the value of that asset, a college degree, has dropped precipitously. Rather than teach students how to be successful in the world, universities now teach them to be Marxist warriors, striving for the utopia that can never exist.

The value of a college education is directly tied to it’s utility. If it costs say one hundred grand, then it’s value should be weighed against something else that could have been purchased with the money. Put into stock that pays a five percent dividend on a monthly basis, that money could theoretically pay the investor four hundred fifteen dollars a month, for the rest of their lives. Invested in a business, one hundred grand could easily be leveraged to start anything, from a manufacturing firm to a corner store with a cache of largess in case of an emergency. That path would probably lead to a high income even if the original business failed. This is because the education in the real world that one gets from starting a firm, is more suited to understanding how to succeed in the same, real world. Yet with so many people having so many degrees in this and that, the utility of that degree to open a door is decreased as the cost of it increases.

The easier it is to go into debt for university expenses, the more people will go into debt, driving up the demand and thus the cost of a college education. Government taking over the student loan system drove down the cost on interest of those loans and at the same time made them easy peesy to get. This led to a large uptick in the number of people seeking a college degree. That increased demand led to increased cost. The extra money has gone into administration, wages and plant. The cost of college goes up at a healthy six percent a year, and has done so for decades, which exceeds the consumer price inflation (CPI) by a wide margin. It is shocking, the absurd amount of money universities have in endowments, endowments that pay absurd rates of return. What s truly laughable though, is that until this year and the GOP tax plan…endowments have been tax free! So when government took over the student loan system, it made student loans very easy to get into, and impossible to get out of, like a spider web.

The reason we have bankruptcy laws is to give risk takers a way out if their plan goes awry. Otherwise innovation would grind to a halt. It is just that means of getting out from under, that levels the playing field so that entrepreneurs can invent cars, phones, lap tops, wind mills and I pads. Take away the ability of the individual who seeks to start a business and many will not be started. Since the ratio of failures to startups doesn’t change the less startups there are, the number of firms that succeed will also go down. Lowering the demand for labor, thus wages and producing fewer goods and services reducing overall GDP. Yet that is exactly what the government has done by taking over the student loan system. They have created a system whereby, the entire concept of bankruptcy is overturned, making every student a slave to student loan debt. Unable to take the chance to star a business and so those new inventions may never be built, lowering GDP.

The student today is paying far more for a product that is of much lower quality then someone did only a few decades ago, and rather than complain about the absurd cost, students demand government pay for more of it. Today students graduate university and cannot hold down a job, are an emotional train wreck, have to be retrained how the world works and with egos the size of a planet. Even as the real cost in terms of unforgivable debt is increased, the quality of a degree decreases and therefore it’s utility as well, the negative effect on the culture, economy and drive to tyranny cannot be understated. Education is critical in any society that purports to be enlightened. Reason and discourse have to be the arbiter of what is right, not authority. Universities today teach authority and students lap it up without thinking. The result is that many colleges today have become the enemy of our civilization, prosperity and peace.. because they are placing millstones around the necks of our youth as they wade into the troubled waters of life.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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Profligacy and Thrift

Posted on April 26, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, Governments the world over, are encouraging profligacy and waging war on thrift. In traditional economics, savers provide the banks with capital that they transmit to firms and people to make investments, the banks are the transmission of the economy, but today money is printed from the air… so who needs savers? If you have some money in savings, even under your mattress, you have much less stress in your life than someone with nothing but debt. This makes you, if you are a saver, someone who is not utterly dependent on others, the government, your parents, or outright charity. Having savings makes someone more independent, savers have the ability to pay for attorneys to fight for their Rights, while spendthrifts do not, and savers can leverage their savings to have more input on how other money is spent. This all adds up to the fact that people who save money tend to be more individualistic, harder to manipulate and more problematic for oppressors, so punishing saving is also punishing political undesirables.

The war on savers is being waged with near zero rates of return, and in some cases real negative rates of return, threatening to seize bank accounts to make banks solvent, turn real earned money into virtual money with no more value than Crypto currencies, and taxes on interest. The real rate of return is the interest rate minus the rate of inflation. When interest rates are near or below the rate of inflation, (and remember the real rate of inflation is often disguised) the real return is at or near zero, throw a tax on the interest without subtracting inflation… and the return on investment goes below zero. Other ways government and banks collude to defraud savers, is when a firm like Wells Fargo is find a BILLION DOLLARS, and no one loses their job, but the bonus checks go out on time. The guilty are rewarded and government gets a fat check, all at the cost to savers, people who went without so they could invest it, and perhaps be able to retire. Gone… into the black hole maw of government greed.

When money can be printed out of thin air, why do we need savings at all, other than of course, to keep up appearances. The Federal Reserve (FED) has a monopoly on printing money in the US, despite Constitutional requirements to the contrary. While the FED does have a connection to government, it is not a government agency, it is privately owned by the banks, chartered to protect the interests of banks and run by bankers. Moreover, the FED can print money out of thin air, and due to the intricacies of the fractional banking system, the corner bank can too. Whenever they make a loan they create money. They don’t have the money in the vault, they make an account in the borrowers name and credit that account with the money. The system goes back to gold banks, they would loan “gold” in the form of leans on the gold in their inventories, usually multiple times on the same gold bars… which today is called hypothecation and rehypothecation.

The independence of savers is something that displeases the elite… bourgeois, new class and political. Nothing makes filet mignon taste better than knowing the little people are eating bugs. If someone has some savings tucked away they can splurge now and then, giving access to gargantuan SUVs, glamping, adult toys like snow mobiles, vacations, even filet mignon… making all those things, common. Those who save money are able to defend themselves or others, when our Rights are trampled by government bureaucrats and cronies, which impudently makes it harder to trample on people’s Rights. If you wanted to be prince, wouldn’t it be easier to subjugate people who are already dependent, slavish, hedonistic, materialistic and ignorant? They would be far easier to reduce to less equal than, people who are independent, individualistic and able to defend their Rights?

You can’t even make a spurious case, with a straight face, that governments today do not encourage profligacy. Every new government program that comes out is intended to mitigate the negative consequences of debt. Interest rates hammered down, credit cards in the mail, government guaranteed loans, student loans, car loans, heck people even take out loans to go on vacation! Even as governments encourage spending and debt, they discourage saving, skewing the aggregate debt load on society in favor of debt. From waging war on savers to encouraging profligacy government must have an end game. Assuming they know what the are doing, and since they themselves will talk all day long how smart they are, being so educated and such, they must have a plan. Since all governments made up of people tend to become ever more despotic as they age, we can see that the trajectory of our governments has indeed started veering autocratic, and with that in mind the war on savers makes more sense.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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Any Organization’s Chief Asset

Posted on April 23, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, one fundamentally important thing, the corporate form of business organization often doesn’t understand, is that what makes a company profitable… is quality employees. The theme today is, to squeeze the employees in as many ways as imaginable, to extract as much profit per employee as possible. Like many ideas that catch on… this one is false. This is because, when management squeezes the employees, the best ones leave and the poor ones stay. It is as simple as that. The result is, management has to pressure the remaining people to pick up what the most productive employees, no longer do. That is the way large corporations die so suddenly or become zombies, they squeeze out the best employees, and the more that leave, the more that company needs bailouts, zero interest loans, bankruptcy protection, tax incentives, pension fund raids, wage concessions, cronyism, etc… Every firm out there has one thing in common, whether they sell, fabricate or merchandise, their success or failure depends on getting quality employees… and keeping them.

The square root of the employees will do fifty percent of the work… in any company, group or organization. That is called Price’s Law. This is hard to conceptualize, that such a small portion of the employees do so much of the work, but it has been proven empirically. If we think about it, that is why small businesses are more efficient, because the square root of a small number, is higher as a percentage of the whole. The square of nine is three, which is one third, while the square of one hundred is ten, which is one tenth. The numbers become ever more discouraging of efficiency the larger an organization gets. In a corporation of ten thousand people, only one hundred do fifty percent of the work. So we see clearly, that if we accept Price’s Law as true, then we must also accept that the larger a company gets, the less efficient it will be. Moreover, that the larger a firm, the less percentage of good employees need to be pushed out, before it must become unprofitable.

Even small improvements in Price’s Law, result in huge gains, while small erosion of Price’s Law destroys a company. Since the exact number of employees that make up that square root are unknown, and that number is never exactly the square root, any firm that can push the number of productive employees, even slightly above the actual square, get a huge advantage over their competitors. Likewise, those who push out even a few productive employees, will be at a large disadvantage to the competition. To get only one back can require perhaps dozens of employees hired, depending on the size of the organization, but to lose ten is easy as making their work conditions worse than the competition. The competition always wants your best employees and will often pay head hunters to get them from you. Plus, the drain of good employees puts ideas in the heads of those that remain, maybe they could make more money, get better benefits, better work conditions, etc… somewhere else.

The best managers with the worst employees could not turn a profit in a monopoly, while the worst managers with the best employees could not help but turn a profit, even in perfect competition. Take the joke about the company boat race. Firms A, B and C had a boat race. You work for company A. Each puts four rowers and one steersman, except Firm A, thinking that the managers are the key to success, put two steersmen in their boat. The race was on, The boats of firms B and C pulled ahead of company A’s boat. Row as hard as they might, the three rowers just could not keep up with the four in the other boats, and the two steersmen kept steering the boat in different directions, wasting whatever speed the rowers could generate anyway… So Company A came in last place. Knowing in their hearts that good management is the key, the next year company A wised up, and put three steersmen into their boat…

The dominant paradigm of corporations today, that employees are a liability, needs to be turned upside down because, employees are the principle asset any firm has. Calling an asset a liability is not simply mislabeling a thing, it is misallocating it, and that always leads to the inefficient use of opportunities, strengths and the means at hand. Corporations are especially susceptible to treating employees as liabilities, because the people that run them believe themselves superior due to their credentials and education, and so hold others in contempt. Obviously, companies that allocate their resources efficiently are far more profitable than those who don’t, but before a resource can be allocated however, it must be correctly categorized. Arrogantly holding one’s chief asset as a liability, is the reason so many corporations fail, and take with them their shareholders hard earned savings. For a firm to be profitable then, all it need do is value their employees more than plant, equipment or patents, because the employees are the ones who will implement those things, well or poorly… depending on their quality, and their quality depends on the best ones not being pushed out… especially in a giant corporation.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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The Unholy Alliance of Corporations and Government

Posted on April 19, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, using government to stifle the power of corporations, is like smothering a fire with natural gas and oxygen. The principle argument from citizen progressives is that corporations have way too much power, and we need to reign them in, to that end they are willing to put up with ever increasing government power, to balance the influence of those corporations. They believe that if only the government was strong enough it would topple evil corporations and restore liberty to the rest of us. While it may sound like a logical plan to the innocent, the reality is that the very power progressives seek to limit, corporate power, is created and enhanced by government. It is the power of government that corporations harness to destroy competition, control wages, stifle innovation, and enhance the pay of executives. Progressives in government know the truth, but seek a true Marxist government the world over, total government, and are willing to exploit the power of corporations to achieve it.

Under conditions of laissez faire capitalism, corporations would have a very hard time competing with innovative small companies, and sole proprietorship firms. The huge overhead of executive pay in and of itself is a giant road block to effective competition that small businesses don’t have. By their very nature a corporation, run by executives, (agents) for the stockholders, (owners), is inefficient. Innovation is at the bottom of the hierarchy of goals. The cost of bringing a new product to market is exponentially higher for a large corporation than a small business, as is the cost of labor, the infrastructure, (buildings, plant, equipment, office products and vehicles), becomes less efficient and is always underutilized by corporations, while infrastructure by small businesse is always efficiently utilized by small businesses. This is because small businesses don’t have a large margin to draw from to keep trucks, dozers or office space idle. A small business run like a corporation would quickly go belly up.

Government regulations, designed to hold back corporations, actually holds back small businesses instead. If a startup threatens a corporation’s bottom line, the corporation has two options. They can lower the price point of their products and increase quality… or go to government to shut down the competition. Which is why the return on investment for lobbying is far greater than for plant upgrades, innovation or even advertisement. Obviously, going to government is much easier for an executive to do, since he can chat up a politician on the golf course about the “dangers” of that small business. The executive might say, the public is at risk from trucks, equipment, and tools that are over utilized, employees are endangered by the lack of safety equipment, the water quality is lowered by the lack of expensive filtering technology, all of which the small business cannot afford, along with a plethora of other sophist arguments. Then the politician gets a huge campaign contribution and viola! The more efficient competitor is crushed by the bureaucracy.

Executives rarely ever suffer punishment for crimes against shareholders or the public. Barely a month goes by without some large corporation getting a billion dollar fine for some illegal activity… yet executives almost never go to jail. In fact, the people responsible for making the illegal decisions get rewarded with bonuses while the shareholder is punished. Deutsche bank was recently fined billions for manipulating the price of silver, but not one executive lost his or her job, let alone faced jail. That manipulation resulted in trillions of dollars of damage to small investors but the government of the US found it expedient, to punish the shareholders of Deutsche bank, rather than the people who broke the law. The same thing happens regularly to JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo who was recently convicted of stealing money from the customers by opening fraudulent accounts in their names, and others too many to list. Government and executives collude to steal from shareholders and the public.

Government is run on money and large corporations have the money. Politicians need money for their ever more costly campaigns. One only need have a whit of common sense to ask, “why would someone spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job… that pays two hundred thousand for two to four years?” That is a negative payout. Unless there is a hidden payoff… and we all know there is. Powerful government creates the principle agent dilemma. The agents, (executives and politicians) screw the principles, (shareholders and the public), along with government officials for their own benefit. Everyone wins… well, except the people and shareholders. Politicians are in the pocket of corporations and if you think they are likely to bite the hand that feeds them… you are special.

It cannot be denied that in reality the more power government is given, to limit the power of large corporations, the more power large corporations and government will wield against the people… but that is the true goal, isn’t it? To evolve government to absolute autocracy, ideally in the hands of administrators, (bureaucrats) and extend it the world over. To that end a little chicanery is in order. The elite have always believed that the ends justify the means and no place is this more true than in government. Increasing the power, scope and reach of government only serves the executives who are the puppet masters of our politicians and bureaucrats. You only need look at the principle agent dilemma that government has set up against shareholders, that corporate money greases the wheels of big government and regulations are designed to limit competition, by creating a barrier to entry for entrepreneurs. So go on believing government needs more power to limit the power of big business, and continue to try and smother the fire with oxygen and natural gas, lets see how that works out.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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Law Versus Goodness

Posted on April 16, 2018 by john

Dear Friends,

It seems to me, I am neutral on law and order, but am strongly for goodness. Law can be used both for evil as well as good, and so where law is used to promote good, I am all for it, but where law is used to promote evil, I am against it. Which goes a long way to explaining my political beliefs as well. Since I only see law as a means and not an end, I am ambivalent to it and would rather less than more, which makes me a libertarian. Sadly, law is more often used to promote evil rather than good, which is why only extremely limited laws, criminalizing violations of natural law, should be allowed. For example, laws against theft, murder, rape, slavery, etc… Laws that serve to advance the interests of a faction above the rest of society are by their nature, laws that promote evil. The libertarian ethos, that laws should be limited so that good can blossom and evil wither, are in my opinion better than, a spiderweb of incoherent laws that criminalize everything making everyone a criminal, so that evil can blossom and goodness be restrained. The spiderweb theory however is far more progressive.

Machiavelli suggests in his book, The Prince, that he is a law and order guy and neutral on good versus evil. In one passage he said that orderly tyranny is preferable to chaotic freedom… since under despotic rule only the aristocracy felt the jack boot, while business can be conducted, but under chaos, one cannot leave the house without danger and so everyone starves. He would exchange good for order, while in the short run that may appear to be a wise choice, in the long run it is the worst option possible. Since evil always leads to suffering, otherwise it would be good, the longer evil is allowed to grow the more suffering will result. Saying that minimizing short term suffering, so that much more can be had in the future, is not as wise as exchanging a little suffering in the short term, for much less in the future. Like getting a broken tooth fixed, it is better to suffer through the dentist, than to suffer weeks of agony with a raw nerve in your mouth.

Laws are a means to an end, that end can be goodness or evil. To confuse law as an end is a common fallacy. To say laws are a means is to say that laws are like tools, they are used to make something different from what it was. A chisel for example turns a block of wood into a statue, tool handle, chair, etc… It takes something that exists and changes it’s form to something that didn’t exist before. Well controlled a chisel can create these and many more good things, but poorly handled, it can ruin far more than it creates. Imagine someone who has never handled a chisel before… using one on a Stradivarius?!?!? Laws are no different. In wise hands they create goodness and are utile, but in evil or foolish hands they create chaos and poverty. Moreover, to complain it is the chisel that ruined the antique furniture, or deign the chisel supernatural, because it was used to create a finely hewn statue, is to misunderstand the role of a tool versus the hand that wields it.

People believe chaos is turned into order by laws, but in fact, order is the natural or ground state of human groups, and chaos is introduced through intrusive, inhuman hearted… laws, regulations or mores. Customs and courtesy are merely the acknowledgment of how successful people interact with others. Since we all want our children to be successful, we impart those truths like custom and courtesy to them, which promotes order outside law. Laws on the other hand are usually enacted by people who seek to order society as they would have it… rather than as the complex system would order itself. The result is that law often serves evil rather than good. It creates chaos by creating pernicious incentives and leaders that set bad examples. Leaders that set bad examples have to make numerous laws to keep the people from following them into perversion, robbery, lying and profligacy. Which, if the people do and become reprobates like their leaders, chaos would result and all of society would collapse.

So I am ambivalent on law and order and instead seek goodness. Law is only a means to goodness but itself has no intrinsic value, but where law is used for evil I am firmly against it. Law does not necessarily promote order, as is commonly thought, but often actually creates chaos. When it is used to keep the people from following their corrupt leaders, law is become hypocrisy, which makes all of society and everyone in it, hypocrites. The only good laws are those that comport with natural law and never to hold people back. A family has a yard sale every Saturday and some people become offended. “They have made it a business!” Some loudly complain. “We need to pass a ordinance that all yard sales need a permit!” Others say… and soon the town has passed a law that does not promote anyone’s interests, damages the interests of a family who is probably poor, and makes it that much harder for anyone, let alone the politically disfavored in the community, to have a stupid yard sale! Laws that promote good, I am all for, but those that promote evil should be done away with.

Sincerely,

John Pepin

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