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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 42 Government and the Process of Design Change by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR November 26, 2007 - 1 - Those
in control of government are using the same methods to advance and
otherwise improve government power
over citizens as corporations such as Apple Computer or Honda Motors
use to advance and otherwise improve their
products. Broadly speaking, these methods are intelligently
applied iterative and incremental
design change. That
is not a comforting thought, because such methods are extremely powerful,
well-understood, and have a long history of getting the job done. - 2 - Nature
itself shows us many iterative and incremental processes. Evolution is an
iterative and incremental process – change a bit of DNA, see what
happens, repeat – for more than three billion years so far. The results
are all around us, and they are awe-inspiring. On
the other hand, evolution is "directed" or "designed"
only in that what does not
reproduce disappears, and what does
reproduce continues – which makes biological evolution slow and
inefficient by human standards.* Natural evolution precludes (or at least
makes staggeringly unlikely) sudden major redesign of the entire organism
or even of large portions of an organism. Evolution in the natural world
leads to kluges that
even a novice designer would avoid – for example, sperm
whales that hunt squid at great depths yet which cannot breathe
underwater. Even
if a deity or some Advanced Intelligence actually did the original design
job for life on earth, from that
moment forward, life has been evolving – as we can see in real-time
with bacteria and viruses due to their extremely fast reproductive cycles;
antibiotic resistance and the appearance of more virulent versions of
known pathogens are two unhappily-common examples. Incremental changes via
mistakes in the constantly repeated task of copying DNA for reproduction**
are evolution's stock-in-trade – the tool with which nature creates new
versions of existing organisms ("Monarch
butterfly 6.3 – now more resistant to GMO
contamination!"). Software,
automobiles and other human artifacts are designed in surprisingly similar
fashion, in that (typically) several rounds of changes – often a great
many rounds in an ongoing process – are made to improve the product. But
because intelligence actually is
involved in the design of such things, these human-designed creations
evolve quickly and can be easily redesigned in part or in whole; done this way, a
sperm whale would have gills. Intelligent
(human) design does not preclude error. New products are sometimes less
wonderful than their predecessors: Microsoft
Windows Vista is a current example, many would say. Mistakes and
miscalculations are part of life. When
allowed to function freely, the market culls these mistakes and life goes
on, as consumers spend their finite supply of money on products that they
prefer, leaving suppliers of less-favored offerings to improve, or to lose
customers and eventually go out of business. On
the whole, this process of intelligently-directed iterative and
incremental design creates astonishing advances very quickly. For example,
I bought a one-gig
RAM upgrade for our laptop today; the price was $49.98, on sale from
$109.98. Twenty years ago, when gas
was 89 cents a gallon (I paid $3.39/gal yesterday), a gigabyte of RAM
cost – well, more than a trillion dollars, let's say, since such a
futuristic product as a "one gig RAM upgrade" did not exist (here's
a quick look at what did exist
in the computer market of 1987). One megabyte
of RAM – about a thousandth of a gigabyte – cost much more than $49.98, even without adjusting for inflation. Most
PCs of the day were running with 640 kilobytes of memory or less – a
mere speck by today's standards. 10 MHz or 12 MHz in a 16-bit CPU was
pretty much the upper limit for mainstream desktop processor performance;
the original IBM-PC introduced in 1983 and the 10MB-harddrive-equipped
IBM-XT ran at 4.77 MHz. The computer I am writing this on operates at just
over 3,000Mhz – and it cost less, even in nominal terms, than my first Kaypro
computer (dual floppies, no hard drive, 64K of RAM, 8-bit processor
running at just over zero MHz, CP/M
operating system, built-in monochrome screen with no graphics – a
bargain in the early 1980s for $1,595). Moore's
Law is a vivid
example of the power of human intelligence applied via iterative design
cycles and incremental improvements, but it is hardly unique. Wherever the
market works without much government interference (be that interference in
the form of government regulation,
government price supports,
government-enforced monopolies,
government-required and -enforced licensing,
government subsidies to business,
government contracts,
government-funded and controlled research,
government agencies replacing
some or all of an industry, etc.) – whenever that
can be avoided, the market creates products and services that people actually
want enough to pay for voluntarily. Improvements, when desired and
possible, come quickly when government does not interfere. The
"voluntarily" part of all this is crucial, because free
choice is what culls bad products and services from the marketplace.
"Bad" can mean poorly made or poorly designed or dangerous or
poor value for the money or anything else that people are not interested
in purchasing. But when government
provides bad services or creates the conditions leading to bad products
from businesses, the consumer is stuck: You, the taxpayer, are forced to
pay for whatever is causing the problem, from drug
prohibition causing dangerous street heroin, high prices, violent
criminal empires, and police corruption to the FDA
preventing you from saving your own life with a promising but
not-yet-approved cancer therapy. When your money is taken by force and
spent by others, it is foolish to expect that you will be pleased with the
result. High-tech
electronics (almost entirely unregulated by government) have gotten vastly
better and incredibly cheaper
in the last few decades, while high-tech products regulated or paid for or
otherwise interfered with by government have done the opposite in one or
both of those metrics; medicine (both pharmaceuticals and health care
generally) comes immediately to mind. Over-the-counter vitamin and other
supplements bear out the rule of thumb: In America, where these products
are largely unregulated (for
the moment), supplements have gotten cheaper and better – and are
incredibly safe
and effective – while in Europe, where supplements (the ones you can
get, anyway) are heavily
regulated – they cost
much more, often several times more, than in America. CODEX
and other attempts to "protect" consumers from safe and
effective vitamin and other supplements represent corporatism at its
worst: Good for big Pharma and the Sickness Industry; bad for human
health. - 3 - Government
oppression evolves and strengthens by iterative and incremental processes,
using the same techniques that other human organizations use: repeated
cycles of small changes and occasional large jumps or shifts in design or
focus. In the market, this
process leads to better-satisfying both business owners and consumers,
with most of the risk shouldered by business, as long as consumers can
freely say "no" to any offering. Again, the choice
element, which leads to failure for organizations which do not please
customers, is what makes the process work in the market – that is, in
society generally. Lack
of choice is what prevents government from working well from the ordinary
citizen's point of view. When customer choice
is replaced with customer coercion,
customer satisfaction becomes
unlikely. The
evolving design of, say, the Honda
Accord, is aimed at pleasing customers so well that customers will buy
more Hondas, thus also pleasing Honda stockholders. Constant application
of the process of reviewing the product and making small improvements (a
slight increase in fuel economy or chassis stiffness or sound deadening,
for example) combined with occasional major changes – all seeking to
make the product better from the standpoint of both customers and
stockholders – leads to dramatic improvements over time. If Honda stops
pleasing customers, Ford or Important
questions are: who sets the design goals? Whose interests are being
served? Who has control over the evolution of the product? In
a free society, it is customers who have power and whose interests are
ultimately served; customers have the power to say "no" and thus
to put any firm out of business if it does not provide something worth
buying at a price worth paying. Any child who runs a lemonade stand
quickly learns that she cannot charge $100/glass and stay in business, and
that repeat customers require lemonade that actually tastes good. No
matter what the business owner wants, it is the customer who is in charge
– absent government-supplied coercion in one form or another (licensing,
regulation, price supports, tariffs, monopoly legislation, managed trade
[e.g., NAFTA] that favors special interests while being represented as
"free trade," and so on). That
government becomes "better" at oppression and corruption rather
than "better" in the sense of improving the protection for human
rights, or in the sense of otherwise enhancing love and freedom, tells us
everything we need to know about who really has control over the
institution of government. From
the income tax to the War on Drugs; from the growth of America's
militaristic intrusions around the world to the corporatist feeding frenzy
epitomized by the lobbying industry, one can see the time-tested method of
intelligently applied iterative and
incremental design change at work – small changes (almost always in
the direction of more government control) constantly applied, with
occasional larger changes. In most cases, these assaults on love and
freedom are small to start with
and grow over time; WikiPedia
tells us that "In 1913 the tax
rate was 1% on taxable net income above $3,000 ($4,000 for married
couples), less deductions and exemptions. It rose to a rate of 7% on
incomes above $500,000." Few
people had incomes of $3,000, much less $4,000; with twenty dollars then
worth, by law, roughly an ounce of gold, even $3,000 was equivalent to
(3,000 / 20 X 800) $120,000
today, with gold at $800/ounce. "The
overall average annual income for the average [ Rarely,
"the people" – that is, people outside
of government and who are not among the corporatist and other power elite
– have the chance to reverse
this process of ever-increasing tyranny. This is at best a temporary and
partial fix for the problem, since the structure of coercive control
remains and thus those who benefit from it redouble their efforts to bend
the power structure to their advantage. Still,
when people have the chance to reduce
tyranny – that is, to increase love and freedom – they are fools
not to do so. Most readers know my thoughts on the matter in regards our
present situation: in the ------ *
One might also say that evolution is directed by the quantum, chemical,
and other chrematistics of the materials being worked with; basic
chemistry and physics are the framework within which DNA must assemble and
reproduce, and in which organisms must survive if their species is to
continue. ** Other sources of change to DNA exist beyond simple errors in copying, including damage from free radicals and from cosmic rays and background radiation. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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