Corpania Ideas

CAVEAT! I'm an amateur philosopher and idea-generator. I am NOT an investment professional. Don't take any of my advice before consulting with an attorney and also a duly licensed authority on finance. Seriously, this my personal blog of random ideas only for entertainment purposes. Don't be an idiot.

Friday, April 15, 2011

What's Right / What's Productive / What You Can Negotiate

Let's say you wrote a book and you found a publisher who likes it.
It's deal-making time...

- you might think you deserve 90% of the revenue from each sale (what's "Right")

- but you'll concede that the publisher has to cover his costs and make a profit. You run some calculations of costs, ROI, etc. and by your reasoning you think it should be 50/50 (what's "Productive")

- however the publisher has tens of thousands of authors clamoring to publish their books instead of yours. Consequently, he thinks he deserves 99% and you should be happy with your name in print and ice-cream sundae covered in pennies. You haggle back and forth until you come to an agreement where you get 4% (what "you can negotiate").

The problem with this reality is that only one of those criteria is useful in theory ("what's productive") and a different one (what "you can negotiate") is useful in practice.

Everyone has their own belief system (what's "right") and since most are based on spiritual religion (entirely separated from secular society) there can never be consensus in a diverse population. That is, unless you believe you can convert everyone to one belief system (hopefully yours). This tactic is the one held by fundamentalists of all religions that proselytize (radical Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, Oprah-watchers etc.) Luckily, America was founded on principles explicitly against that tactic.

Ok, so what's "right" in the abstract is undefinable and unprovable among people with different belief systems. So how do you take what's "right" and make it "practical"?

You can come up with your desired goals and find a community that comports with them. Whatever form of representative government you agree upon then has to balance the goals of the diverse population (since they are often at odds). Once there is a reasonable consensus of what the goals are there is still at least one more crucial step: criteria for measurement.

With objective, verifiable, measurement criteria you can determine if a given course of action (policy) is achieving its putative goals. It seems clear to me that this is the one step least vulnerable to subjective interpretation and inconsistency. If we both want the deficit to go down and, over 40+ years when your guys are in charge the deficit increases on a relative scale (the main fair measure) and when my guys are in charge the deficits aren't as bad --- then it seems that by that measure, at least, my guys are better.

Let's come up with all the criteria we think is relevant to the debate and start crunching the numbers. Because, I'm pretty sure that the supply-side nonsense has been definitively debunked because virtually all their promises of what would happen for America if they got their way (lowering taxes) didn't come to fruition. Instead more of the tax burden shifted from the rich to the poor AND companies racked up record profits WHICH THEY DIDN'T USE PUTTING AMERICANS TO WORK (or building infrastructure or anything particularly useful to the general public). Supply-side philosophy is predicated upon the now-thoroughly-disproved claim that "if the companies are given lots of cash they will spend it on employees and rebuilding America". The record hoards of cash just "sitting on the sidelines" is proof that "Supply-side Economics" is wrong.

Further proof can be found because virtually all of the Right-Wing's fear-mongering about Progressive/Liberal theories that, if ever enacted, would unleash nightmares - NEVER HAPPENED! They said that if Clinton raised taxes that there would be a recession and instead it was a record run of growth and prosperity.

To me, this is the most crucial point in the discussion. Life gets better for most Americans under Democrats and gets worse under Republicans. I don't know how anyone can realistically argue against this.

SIDE NOTE - If one side is continuously giving false information and its adherents repeatedly are proven to have incorrect information then that is crushingly damning of its side (IMHO). This comes back to my previous post related to redefining "lying" to include spreading incorrect information that, if accepted by the recipient, will benefit the propagator of that incorrect information.

Finally, we come to the the last key point - "WHAT YOU CAN NEGOTIATE"

You might think you're right.
You might think you can objectively prove that your way is most productive.
But we all still need to reach that legal consensus as codified in our laws/constitution.
So when extreme Tea Party Republicans are elected they can engage in more effective brinksmanship and thus negotiate better terms for its own selfish side.

I long ago joined the chorus criticizing Obama for being a terrible negotiator.

But the only way to guarantee progress is to give your negotiator better leverage.
That means supporting real progressives in primary challenges to overly conservative Democrats and then, in the congressional elections working really hard to elect many more Democrats over Republicans.

Ok, that was a "long way to go for a salami sandwich".
But the points are still important.

Be well and good karma to you.

p.s. What metrics/criteria are important to you?



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