This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Are big companies likely to experience more fraudulent and mismanagement issues than small companies?”
This question touches on the core of the privatization argument, where people claim government inefficiency justifies a privatized alternative to a government service.
The larger the organization, the more people must be coordinated, and the more complex and inefficient it will naturally be. Whether it is a government operation or a privatized one.
Opportunities for corruption increase at scale per the degree of complexity of operation, which can hide corruption and the degree of reward available for effort expended.
The more opportunity there is for flying under the radar, the more attractive an environment becomes to the corrupt. The greater the reward, the more the corrupt will risk detection.
The larger the organization, the more vulnerable it becomes to corruption because the rewards are more significant, the chance of detection is reduced, and the effort expended is minimized.
For example, in a generic scenario, because it happens pretty often, it is a common tactic of fraudulent billing to a large company for non-rendered services by a non-existent company.
The larger the organization, the more significant the number of invoices it must handle. All are being funneled through a finance department with a large contingent of staff who cannot know the specific details of each bill passing through their office. They superficially review each invoice to determine veracity and establish a threshold at which the review process intensifies.
For example, if their threshold is $1000.00, the fraud can create a fictional company, send monthly bills under that threshold, and collect a monthly sum that can go undetected for extended periods. They will often be discovered when someone investigates the bill in detail, which may or may not result in charges, depending on how well one has covered their tracks.
In an accounts payment office handling dozens of bills per day, it can be easy to overlook something like copier maintenance invoices.
Setting all of that up requires inside knowledge of a specific operation, so I am not sharing this as an endorsement, only as a generic description of the type of fraud that can occur and does so in large organizations that would not happen in a small one.
The larger the organization, the greater the financial reward, which exposes larger organizations to ladder-climbing strategists more than smaller organizations, attracting people more interested in the quality of work, flexibility of challenges, broader scope of responsibilities, and deeper interpersonal relationships.
Larger organizations can become quite politically toxic, but that doesn’t mean smaller organizations don’t fall prey to the same levels of incompetence.
All of these are basic human behaviours we see throughout society, and ironically, they’re not much different than those we witnessed during our high school years. Sometimes, they are just as juvenile in their manifestations. More often than not, however, in large organizations, those underlying attitudes and behaviours one experiences within high school cliques are more subtle and sophisticated because they are more often among people with higher levels of education.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t people realize that it is plutocracy (our country being governed by the wealthy elite) that is causing our economic problems?”
People don’t magically “realize things.”
People must be educated, informed, and aware of circumstances and details.
They need to be walked through the information presented to them as if one functions as a guide on a tour, answering questions.
People also don’t respond to laments, particularly when entrenched in counterfactual bigotries that prevent them from apprehending reality through an objective lens.
In essence, if this is an issue of concern for you, which I’m glad to see it is, then you need to start banging drums and sharing information and details because there are at least 76 million people in the U.S. alone who are entirely so oblivious to what you’ve determined for yourself that they contribute to the problems caused by the plutocracy.
There are many reasons why many people support self-and-socially destructive agendas, and most of those reasons can generally fall into only a few camps:
They benefit directly from the corruption,
They interpret the economic problems of the victims of a corrupt system as personal failings,
They imagine themselves as potential beneficiaries of corrupt powers by supporting them,
They lack the wherewithal to do anything about the corruption, so they cope with what they don’t believe they can change by resigning to hate the more easily victimized,
They support what they believe is a natural state of a zero-sum existence encapsulated as a butchered interpretation of life often referred to as the “law of the jungle,” in which there are only predators and prey in this world,
They’re psychologically dysfunctional — which is an explanation that applies to all the preceding points,
Their education is woefully lacking — which also applies to all preceding points and leads back to the onus placed on those who know better by providing the support necessary to make positive change while also receiving a reminder that lamenting the sad state of affairs does nothing to change them. It does, however, give the broken among us a target to jeer and mock and use as an example to justify their corrupt interpretations of life.
Now, arm yourself with the information you need to fight as a keyboard warrior and do something more productive than issue lamentations to elevate humanity from this dank pit of misanthropy.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”
Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.
We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”
The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”
The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”
Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”
This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.
There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.
Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.
Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.
In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.
This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.
The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.
The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.
In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.
At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.
A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.
If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.
There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.
Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.
The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.
The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.
Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.
In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.
To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.
Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.
Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.
Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.
In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.
In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.
The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”
By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.
The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.
This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.
The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.
This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “Why would it be possible for people to live without the government?”
It’s not.
Without government, we would barely survive while struggling with anarchy and doing our best to avoid the bullies among us who would have free reign to terrorize anyone they please.
Life would be cheaper than it is now. Justice would be non-existent, and perversions of it would be meted out by force and without any form of protection for anyone without the power to dominate others.
Virtually all scientific and technological progress would halt. If government ceased to exist from this point forward, we would be facing a nuclear holocaust through much of the world as centuries-long enemies would no longer be restrained from indulging in their worst fear impulses. The mid-East would essentially be vaporized and rendered uninhabitable for the next century. India and Pakistan would decimate each other. Much of Eastern Europe would be bombed into rubble. China would decimate its neighbours and indulge in its most significant expansion across the globe… or it could fall apart into factions ruled by powerful interests within the nation whose infighting would also collapse the country and leave it vulnerable to external aggressors seeking revenge.
Whatever may exist of what you call home would have to be protected by traps and a twenty-four-hour armed security detail. You would sleep in shifts.
Your environment would be like living in a perpetual purge. That would likely last until we’ve culled most of our species and our numbers shrink from eight billion to a few hundred million within a few years at the outset.
Once we’ve burned ourselves out from a pent-up violence orgy, we’d start seeing primitive tribal infrastructures negotiating arrangements to secure our survival as a species. At the same time, we would find ourselves living in an entirely hostile world as we experience ecological collapse all around us from our careless mismanagement of the environment ramped up into overdrive from global conflicts.
We would make the world of the Mad Max mythos manifest and find ourselves severely humbled as a species.
As much as people may hate government and as much as many criticisms are justifiable, we need government for the simple reason that the one in five who currently manifest the mental health pandemic we’re living with is a perpetual threat to human existence.
Once we succeed at reaching a point of optimal mental health where we have overcome our psychoses, human society may evolve to a degree where government is as much an automated system as the rest of the industrialized world promises to be.
Until then, our best bet is to become more engaged in our self-governance as a collection of democratic societies — which, at this point, means “taking our government’s back” — out of the hands of the few with too much power and back into the hands of all of us.
Humanity’s worst threats have always been the few with too much power victimizing the many with too little power. This is why democracy was born and has dominated the landscape over the last century.
Sadly, those with too much power in today’s world hate it and are actively undermining it to send us all back to a medieval state of existence as a two-class society of rulers and serfs.
As much as many people may wish to mock democracy as a fundamentally flawed system while pointing out the advantages of an autocratic system, the reality is that we have never truly committed to making democracy work. If we had, we would do the necessary thing — equip everyone with the education, skills, and insights required to make proper decisions reflecting what’s best for all of us.
This last American election showed us that people are still trapped within the paradigm of what’s best for them personally in a zero-sum game that necessitates the existence of losers to support the winners.
The solution to our problems is not eradicating what we struggle with but fixing where we fail to make it work. That means improving our education systems by learning to value education on a level as if our lives depend upon it because they do.
The original format of the question this post answers was written as follows: “Which possible political system could replace modern democracy and have less flaws than democracy and still benefit the many?”
This question makes it seem as if how we manage our affairs and have a dialogue over how best to peacefully coexist in productive societies that encourage us all to achieve our best potential as individuals and as a society is just a matter of a change of clothing.
That’s now how this works.
Societies do not succeed or fail based on the system we use to govern ourselves.
Societies fail because we fail to govern ourselves as individuals.
Societies fail because human corruption leads us to failure.
Societies don’t fail because we pick the wrong system.
Systems fail because we fail to raise humanity from the muck of our primitive urges as individuals.
Haitians in Springfield are not living in fear today because democracy has failed them but because corrupt human beings have chosen hatred over understanding.
The only system that will ever work is the system that cures us of horrifying statistics such as one in five of us is a mentally unstable individual or 70%-80% of families are dysfunctional, or the primary cause of people leaving their jobs is because of abusive leadership in their place of work.
The only system that will work is the system of people who refuse to tolerate monsters corrupting human society, and that extends far beyond simple politics and well into every other aspect of human life and what we colloquially refer to as “civilization.”
The only system that can ever have a hope of working is the system that focuses on developing human potential, which means education, healthcare, and the ability to succeed on one’s merits in a system that encourages and develops our ability to achieve success through self-determination.
We don’t need to be ruled. We should know better how horribly wrong every other system has turned out to be. It doesn’t matter how messy democracy is because that’s not a problem with the system of democracy. That’s a problem with human beings.
We need to fix ourselves as humans and as a species sharing this mudball with billions of other species if we want any system to be stable over time.
Democracy as a concept is not “flawed.” It’s the best idea we have ever had. The problem is us. We must focus on being better individuals before we can better organize ourselves within any system.
We need to stop pointing the finger of blame at anything and everything that is not us and start taking some responsibility for who we are and what we are. If we can’t manage to do that, then we deserve to send ourselves over the brink and into oblivion.
thotbag 