Parlor Wit

[With relevance to the post below]

Rufus T. Firefly, Leader of Freedonia, encounters Chicolini, Freedonia Minister of War:

Rufus T. Firefly: Awfully decent of you to drop in today. Do you realize our army is facing disastrous defeat? What do you intend to do about it?
Chicolini: I've done it already.
Rufus T. Firefly: You've done what?
Chicolini: I've changed to the other side.
Rufus T. Firefly: So you're on the other side, eh? Well, what are you doing over here?
Chicolini: Well, the food is better over here.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023969/quotes

Exchange Theory and Social Cooperatives: Budarin

Implied in much of the previous discussion is the philosophical position of “Exchange Theory”. I would summarize the major premises of “Exchange Theory” as being that

1. people, whether by choice or necessity, engage in social interaction;
2. social interaction of any kind involves a conscious or unconscious calculation of benefits and costs, or expected benefits and costs;
3. the benefits and costs being calculated include the material, such as money and imprisonment, and the non-material, such as honor and dishonor; and
4. the objective of this conscious or unconscious calculation is to manage benefits and costs so that benefits outweigh costs to the greatest extent possible.
   

As mentioned in the previous post, the social cooperative is created to provide benefits, and logic demands that the social cooperative function in a way that creates and maintains the benefits for which it was founded. Therein lies the need for pragmatic management.

It must be remembered, first, that people are constantly assessing and reassessing the benefits and costs of their associations, often in the light of potential alternative associations. Second, the social cooperative must attract and keep members in order to create and maintain the desired benefits. So how does a rational social cooperative do this? Through judicious distribution of benefits and costs [“carrots” and “sticks”, if you prefer], and by keeping an eye on the common good. The social cooperative must offer more benefits than costs to its members, especially in comparison with other potential associations available to them.

The U.S. as a social cooperative has been particularly appealing for generations because of the many benefits it has given its members, such as many personal freedoms, relative economic wealth, and several forms of member support, such as Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and minimum wage requirements. At the same time, its costs have been relatively lower than in most other places, in terms of taxes, social unrest, and physical danger. That is not to say that its benefits and costs have been equally distributed. It has been one objective of democratic policy to correct this, and it makes both logical and moral sense to do so.

But the U.S. social cooperative will always be subject to competition with other social cooperatives, and always subject to threats to its existence, whether those threats are physical or economic in nature. In this regard, I note that Conservatives have long tried to diminish member support as immoral and wasteful, and Authoritarians have written off entire groups of people as less deserving of benefits and support. It is my contention that, in order to compete with other social cooperatives of similar status, the U.S. social cooperative must maintain the highest level of benefits and member support possible without jeopardizing its economic security, and ensure that these benefits are as widely distributed among members as possible, in order to ensure its continued existence.

Parlor Wit

“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Managing the U.S. “Social Cooperative”: Budarin

Once a Social Cooperative has been formed, two questions arise concerning its management: “Who will be the final authority?” and “What will be the basis for their decision-making?”

In authoritarian social cooperatives, the final authority will be vested in one person or a small sub-group of the members. In democratic social cooperatives, final authority will rest with the members. The American state is supposed to be democratic, but it is being run as if it was an authoritarian social cooperative, with one “Decider” enacting the agendas of small sub-groups of the population.

On what grounds will management decisions be made? That will be up to the final authority. Decisions can be made on the basis of religion, revelation, ideology, nepotism, pragmatic consideration, or some combination of these. A determining factor will be the purpose for which the social cooperative arose.

Reason demands that pragmatic considerations be foremost. After all, the purpose for combining into a Social Cooperative is not to turn around and dissolve it, but to create and maintain the desired benefits. Rational management of a Social Cooperative would therefore act so as to create and maintain the benefits for which it was founded. To downplay or disregard pragmatic considerations is to threaten the entire enterprise.

This is a further problem with the current U.S. administration: there are too many decisions being made on the bases of religion, ideology, and The Decider’s personal revelations. The danger of decision-making on such grounds, to the exclusion of pragmatic considerations, can be seen in the daily news. Far better it is to manage on the bases of experience, realities, and insights obtained through scientific inquiry. These are more likely to ensure the continued production of the desired benefits, and thus more likely to ensure the continued existence of the U.S. as a Social Cooperative.

Parlor Wit

"Rufus T. Firefly": I got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.
- Groucho Marx, "Duck Soup", 1933

The Social Cooperative: Budarin

Democratic political philosophy has long used the metaphor of the Social Contract as its premise. It has proven to be a good analogy for discussing the relationship between an individual and the social group in which the individual is a member. But to clarify the character and nature of the second party to the Social Contract, I would like to evoke another metaphor.

It is my proposition that when the individual engages in a Social Contract with other individuals, what they form is a “Social Cooperative”. That is to say, their individual “Social Contracts” add up to create a “Social Cooperative”, in which each member is an employee-shareholder. The smallest social cooperative is the family. The largest social cooperative is the State.

What does a Social Cooperative produce? The whole purpose of combination into a Social Cooperative is to produce certain benefits for the employee-shareholders. It is up to the individual members, as employee-shareholders, to define what those expected benefits will be.

Though it can take a variety of forms, the State as a social cooperative is generally expected by its citizens to function as a not-for-profit public service cooperative. The benefits expected by the citizens include, at a minimum, physical and economic security. If it cannot provide these, the existing Social Cooperative will be dissolved, one way or another.

As discussed in an earlier post, the “Founding Fathers” of the USA wrote down, in effect, the expected benefits of the social cooperative they were creating. According to the Declaration of Independence, the new State would be expected to secure for its citizens their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I believe it follows logically that the national government of the USA would be expected to produce benefits in the forms of policies and programs relating to such things as public health, public education, civil rights, environmental protection and labor laws. These would be benefits which would secure the rights described by the Founders.

In future posts I will explore further the implications of this metaphor.

Responsibility for the Common Good: Tomasky

John Dewey's pragmatic vision of democracy, discussed below, touched upon a principle of reciprocity in democratic political philosophy. There is, in this vision, a latent expectation of an exchange: the democratic social group provides the freedom and opportunity for the growth of the individual; in exchange, the individual is expected to contribute back whatever he or she is capable of contributing to the social group, for the sake of the common good.

Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect spoke of this in a recent article, "Party in Search of a Notion." I think the following excerpts give you the gist of his argument:

"For many years -- during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society -- the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today’s. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea -- the philosophical principle -- that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest.
....
"The Democrats need to become [again] the party of the common good."
....
"There are potential dangers here and they should be noted. A too-aggressive common-good framework can discard liberty and rights; after all, Bush uses a conservative kind of common-good rhetoric to defend his spying program (he’s protecting us from attack). Democrats have to guard against this; a common good that isn’t balanced by concern for liberty can be quasi-authoritarian (“coercive,” as the political philosophers call it). Common-good rhetoric and action must be tethered to progressive ends and must operate within the constitutional framework of individual liberty against state encroachment."

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11424

But how and where do we draw the line between the demands of liberty and of the common good? I'm working on that post now.

Parlor Wit

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
- Woody Allen
http://www.woodyallenquotes.com/woodyallen7.shtml