Down with corporations?

Sure, corporations squish the little guy. Sure, they squeeze customers for everything they can and can have a bad affect on our morals, ethics and spirit (not in a religious way), but the fact of the matter is that we would not have half the technology we have today if corporations did not exist. The funding and motive just would not be there. And in the long run, technology is the ONLY thing that can improve our standard of living. Think about it…

What is money?

Money is a representation of a person’s ability to produce within the economy. Say you have too much meat but not enough wood. Without currency, you can only get wood from somebody who needs meat. But with a currency, you can get wood from anybody who has it and wants your money. So money represents an individuals ability to produce.

Now there is obviously a value that represents the total amount of production in an economy, so in the same way, there is a limit on the value of production an economy can have. This means that, in terms of purchasing power, there is also a finite limit, so there is a finite limit to money.

The way this amount is distributed can be changed (google the lorenz curve), but ultimately you can only ever play around with the same amount of productive value.

Technology, however, has the ability to increase purchasing power. When some kind of production takes up less value, you can of course afford more of it. Like the manufacturing of clothes becoming cheaper because machinery can be used to make them. This means that your purchasing power, no matter how equally or unequally it is distributed, has improved.

Where would we be?

In the UK in the early 20th century a socialist revolution was occurring where a man named Roundtree was raising awareness of the poverty levels of people living in England. Obviously the wealth distribution was very unequal but he estimated around 50% of people living in the UK were eating less than 1 meal a day. This was just before the industrial revolution (the start of big corporations). Compare that to modern day absolute poverty levels, then try and argue against corporations.

Yes, I agree some things are bad, but, as with almost anything, the solution is not to completely remove it but to modify it.

Education is bad for you!

In such a globalised world competition is EVERYWHERE. Think of a business idea and 99% of the time a quick google search will tell you its already been done. Theres over 6 billion of us after all! So people who want to do something original, start a business, invent something… your going to need to be pretty different. The term “thinking outside the box” fits here quite nicely. While everybody else is busy being sane and fitting in, for success, your best bet is doing your best to be wierd and wonderful. Outside society thinking freely without the constraints of social conformism.

How does this link in with the post title you ask? Well, quite simply, education and the curriculum is designed to spew out kids with the exact same standardised skill set. How can you expect to be revolutionary and achieve great things if the changes you are making to the current system are going at the same rate as the feet of a monged out heroin addict?

It’s not just a coincidence that the majority of millionaires dropped out of school (I don’t know the exact statistic, if somebody does please let me know).

Schools should be taking this as a signal that they need to let kids specialise in the things they are interested in. I have noticed that since I have left college (in the UK, the US equivalent of High School) at about the age of 18 I have been much more active in teaching myself. Mandarin, the s tock market, forex, science, anything. Compulsory education leads to rejection. Anybody who has tried to control a child in any way can tell you that they don’t like it. The social norm should involve indoctrinating children to understand the enormous value of education at a very early age, then make education completely optional. This would result in children being far better and faster learners, more obedient, more specialised and more free-thinking. Each child should be given the opportunity to take lessons in the basics like Maths, English, Science, Politics and Economics (I’m talking at the age of 6 or so, because if we HAVE to live in a democratic society – see earlier post – we should at least educate our voters so they understand what their voting for!).  There should also be a large amount of artistic creative expression but that is a topic for another post.

The beauty of voluntary education is that people suddenly become more intelligent. Trying to teach people involuntarily is like getting water out of a stone, but doing it when they are genuinely interested is like getting water out of a lake. A video on TED.com explained how an incredibly enthusiastic professor taught 11 and 12 year olds physics (without the complex level mathmatics – they did’t have the base knowledge for that) to A level standard (18 year old exams in the UK) simply by getting them interested! Such a simple key technique could more than half the education budget while doubling it’s positive effects!

The sad thing is, a similar kind of outlook to education is already being done in Steiner schools (http://www.steinerwaldorf.org.uk/whatissteinereducation.html) but the masses are generally too closed minded to accept this and reject a good set of results and statistics on the basis that it is different, unfamiliar and scary.

Why Democracy does not work.

Pretty controversial topic… if you said this kind of statement to 70% of people in the world (especially in the USA)  they would be shocked and tell you your wrong. Why? Because people are stupid, which is the fundamental reason why democracy does not work.

(I don’t claim to have an alternative, however I have heard that Plato had some very interesting ideas about political systems.)

People do not know what they need. It’s just a fact. Stupid people see everything subjectively. To really see what you need you have to be objective. Take what economists call “demerit goods” for example. These are things like alcohol and tobacco that are damaging but over-consumed. It’s the Government’s responsibility, as a group of intellectually enlightened people to discourage us from over consuming such goods. They do this by spending money on education, policies designed to minimize consumption, taxation (well, not really, but that’s a topic for another post) etc.

So now we have proved that the Government is designed to be an objective body that manages the country for the good of the people. To do this effectively therefore, it must be separate from the people’s desires because the people’s desires are subjective.

Now the key concept of democracy lies in the empowerment of the masses through their power to vote.

This is the same as being wheeled into a surgeon’s operating theatre for a heart bypass, looking up and saying “in fact, don’t worry doctor, I got this one, you go have a tea break”.

We delegate our best interests to professionals for a reason.

Suppose a couple of whizz kids in a think tank stumble upon some revolutionary information that proves with *literally* 100% effectiveness and reliability that learning to play an instrument to at least grade 4 guarantees you to earn over $500,000 a year in 10 years time.

If you say this to the masses they will dismiss it because it doesn’t fit the pattern, it’s different, it’s change, and change is scary. They dismiss it despite the fact that the data is 100% reliable. This, again, is subjectivity.

Suppose now the Government put it to a vote that learning an instrument to grade 4 is compulsary for everybody in the country, you can guarantee it would be vetoed because the politicians are controlled by the masses, and the masses are stupid.

This is what is fundamentally wrong with Democracy. We delegate power over ourselves to professionals for a reason… democracy takes that power back.