Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Starting Over with What We Should Know About Free Riding

A large percentage of contemporary jobs are harmful, parasitic (free riding) jobs or are designed to reduce the harm caused by harmful, parasitic jobs.

So we suffer a) the direct costs of parasitism, b) the opportunity costs of parasitism, and c) the costs of fighting and repairing the parasitism.

If the only jobs available to free riders are productive and free riders ruthlessly rooted out, they are stuck begging, stealing, being fired or being productive against their desires. We should also create incentives to keep them from reproducing.

Politicslobbying, and mass media rank among the most destructive parasitic industries on a per capia basis, creating serious character defects. Social media riddle many individuals with insomnia and other mental illnesses. Lobbying is the most common career chosen by ex-Congress persons, a career chosen by roughly half of exiting legislators, up from less than five percent of exiting legislators in the 1970s. Lobbying increases their incomes by a mean of 1,452 percent. Almost all the top lobbying industries act highly parasitic. Comcast and most of the rest of communications industry have corrupt monopoly or oligopoly power.

Big religion helped fight atheistic communism but now supports cultural Marxism and stealthy, avuncular communism or the Randian gospel. The number of DC based religious advocacy groups increased from 67 in 1980 to 211 in 2010.

Medical specialists spend much of their time trying to reduce or prevent damage from drugs, nihilism, vehicles, militarism, alienation, multiculturalism, junk food, sports injuries, destructive status competitions, and various forms of hedonism. Drugs include alcohol and tobacco. If alcohol and tobacco were invented tomorrow, even the corrupt FDA would not approve them. The fortune of "heroic" John McCain came from his wife's father--drug peddling in the alcohol industry. Nearly all the supplement industry is parasitic. The FDA requires producers of red yeast rice to remove the ingredient(s) that reduce cholesterol. Purchasers of red yeast rice often remain unaware their supplement is an expensive placebo. It's not clear whether reducing LDL cholesterol is particularly helpful anyway, since the taking of cholesterol lowing statin drugs has little correlation with cardiovascular health. Triglycerides, pulse rate, blood sugar, blood pressure, and c-reactive protein are much better indicators of health than LDL cholesterol levels.

The health insurance industry is entirely parasitic. It should not exist. Lobbies limit the number of American students studying medical fields--escalating costs and leading to the importation of incompetent nurses and doctors from developing countries.

The Department of Homeland Security is mostly parasitic, designed to reduce the harms elites deliberately created with multiculturalism, while doing little to reduce those harms.

Much of America's military exists to serve the interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia, defense contractors, and other imitation allies. Western grand strategy seems partly based on Hollywood fiction. Any major war will likely turn nuclear. Russia's military is largely based on their massive nuclear arsenal, including tactical nuclear weapons. How many $94.6 million F-35s equal the military power of one tactical nuke?

Financiers--the self-described masters of the universe--provide small benefits, which they use to justify creating harms and opportunity costs dozens of times greater than benefits, costing several trillion dollars per year in economic harms alone. (If plumbers cost the nation several trillion in direct and opportunity costs every year, there would be mass outrage. Imagine getting a $29,000 bill to fix a clog.)

Most individuals in the education industry free ride. Administrators and support staff outnumber professors at some universities. Most professors in business, education, the humanities, and social sciences teach faulty worldviews. A large percentage of social science studies are not replicable. Most of the replicable rest are junk science due to small samples, unrepresentative samples, protocol violations, faulty study designs, failure to tease out alternative causal factors, etc. Instead of blaming themselves and colleges, graduates and drop outs in debt peonage support Marxism and blame the rest of society for failing to pay more for their miseducation.

Ethical individuals become alienated from parasitic jobs. But egoists adamantly assert that they serve the public, protecting society from people with pitchforks. It's astonishing how viciously smug progressives, Neoconservatives, New Democrats, and supporters of Hitlerism are.

Charles Murray estimated that affirmative action costs roughly $1 trillion per year many years ago. The direct and opportunity costs are far larger now.

Westerners working in low paying, ethically productive jobs are rightfully resentful, often having worse lives than individuals living in developing countries. It's easier to live on $3,000 per year in developing countries than $18,000 per year in the West, except for those living rent free with relatives.

Motor vehicles mainly serve to take individuals to parasitic jobs, to schools with harmful curricula, and to neighborhoods far from low functioning multiculturalism. The ethical costs of money sent to OPEC countries alone outweigh the benefits of internal combustion vehicles. It would be comparatively easy to design a society where only those working in rural areas would purchase personal motor vehicles.

Tragically, never before has so much beneficial knowledge existed, yet most of it is ignored or buried. If you search for the pros and cons of some medical procedures, most search engine results are ads or other propaganda, even if you reach page 15 in the results.

If a group wants to secede from a country or global system dominated by free riding, establishment economists would list costs, all else remaining the same. But all else shouldn't remain the same. The masses employed in parasitism should be fired and forced to get beneficial work, even if it means people with advanced degrees working in day care. Bans and strictly enforced regulations should eliminate many free riding jobs. Large taxes on negative externalities should rid most of the rest.

Brexit doesn't start over. It replaces globalist, multicultural power in Brussels with globalist, multicultural power in the UK. It has economic costs with few non-economic benefits.

If Texas secedes, it will be run by Rick Perry style multiculturalists in the short term. In the long run, it will be run by the likes of ISIS and La Raza. It would add a leaky border without ridding the free riding rot.

Evolutionary models point out that groups of altruists must separate from larger groups if they are to survive, as the percentage of individuals devoted to egoism increases. But we are human. We reason, sometimes poorly.  We can expel free riders. We can create eugenic policies to reduce the fertility of free riders and misplaced altruists while increasing the fertility rates of ethical individuals. Ethnocentric strategies out compete other strategies.

In short, ethical self-determination requires more than just separation from diversity. It requires a colossal re-ordering of societal priorities.

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