Pro Commerce

Internet friends and dissatisfaction

I have detected an ennui, a dissatisfaction among people I know.

This ennui seems to be unrelated to stage of life, success in business, or any other obvious factor.

My son is leaving the Bay Area with his wife to travel around the United States for three months to see if there is a better place to live. They call their trip "the search for intelligent life."

I think I know the problem.

The Internet is the problem. On the Internet my intellectual companions are readily available and scattered around the planet. One is in Jerusalem, another in Tel Aviv, a third in Calgary, several in Tokyo, another in Venice California.

These are now important friends with whom I am comfortable.  I need my regular contact with them.

Therefore I am impelled to feel that my life in San Francisco is inadequate because I do not have these friends as close physical companions.  I have plenty of friends and a few locals who are really close.  But I’d say half of my vital friends are only via the Internet.

I think that my ennui and that of others is because of the wonder of the Internet.

We can't possibly have the kinds of close relationships that are important and have those relationships be local. The Internet has spoiled us in a strange way.

Jews, class and merit

Many people over many centuries have tried to understand the root causes of Jew hate.

I have succeed. I have found the two elements that, when joined together, explain cross cultural differences and within culture differences.

The issue is merit.

Wherever Jews are in the active commercial world, they provide a major social challenge because they promote merit. The society must find a way to deal with this meritocratic-demanding population.

As I have pointed out in the past, societies that have strong inherited social class structures are particularly subject to Jew hate. I have also pointed out that Jew hate is a class of paranoia and significantly disables the people and societies that have this brain disease.

I have finally realized that these two observations fit together. Societies that have strong hereditary social class structures are threatened by meritocracy.These societies promote paranoia as a way to describe the disruptive presence of Jews, with their merit.  Promoting Jew hate paranoia is the mechanism that hereditary class societies use to support their upper class survival.

There are several societies where this is not the case. In the United States (and to a lesser extent in Canada) hereditary social classes disappeared in 1960 at the same time Jew hate diminished rapidly.

In Japan, China, and Hindi India, Jew hate has always been minimal. In Holland, Denmark and Finland Jew hate has been minimal for a long time because these are non-hereditary social class societies. In Sweden, where an effort has been made to diminish social class, Jew hate is limited. In Norway, where Jew hate is strong, hereditary social class is also.

Japan, China and Hindi India have 2000 year old social class structures that have mechanisms for accommodating merit. Therefore, Jew hate is not necessary.

Jew hate is dominant in the rest of the world: Latin America, the remaining parts of Europe and nearly all of Arabia and South East Asia. In Southeast Asia, the Overseas Chinese are the Jews.

In Malaysia we have a nearly perfect case. There are virtually no Jews in Malaysia or in adjacent Singapore. In Malaysia, which only joined the commercial world after World War II, the government and the ruling class have deliberately created Jew hate. In Singapore, Jew hate is absent because the population is primarily Overseas Chinese.

The largest landmass with little or no Jew hate is sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa). The reason is straightforward: modern commerce has not developed. Meritocracy in a non-commercial world doesn't exist and is therefore not a challenge requiring Jew hate.

Final evidence: the far left in the United States and Canada has a case of Jew hate. The reason is that these people support an anti-merit ideology that worships government jobs and unions. These are two environments in which merit is irrelevant. Only seniority matters. Consequently the far left love of government and union jobs is reason for Jew hate. Jew hate is hatred of meritocracy.

Your comments are welcome on this centuries old issue.

Google is the first universal

It was awhile ago that I realized I had created the world's first universal currency. I developed the MasterCard financial vehicle that was the first credit card to be open to all banks.  That allowed it to become globally universal.

I just recently realized that Google is the first universal human commonality.

Anthropologists have spent many decades trying to find universal commonalities among the diverse people on the planet. Other than a few biological functions, like eating, there are none.

Google is the first universal human commonality. Everywhere on the planet human beings use Google to find information.

The only credit I can take for Google is its initial success. Google's front page, from the beginning, has always been blank... without advertising.  Google has always subdued the visual impact of the paid marketing on its information pages. Since I am the most prominent person to have promoted and published a book on marketing without advertising, I will sneak in a little credit for myself.

There is not much more to say about this except as a disclaimer. I have held Google stock for many years and will continue holding it.

Memorial day for people killed by socialism

I propose to the new, hopefully Republican Tea Party Congress, that it is time to create a specific Memorial Day to honor all the individuals who have been killed in the last century by socialism.

My reason is simple: it is time to make the American public and other people in the world aware that socialism is a synonym for killing citizens.

It is worth debating the fact that Nazism was a National Socialist movement. That starts off with 40 million people killed. Next are the Soviet Union and China and the numbers are very loose ranging from 40,000,000 to 80,000,000. There are many more to throw in and they would always be interesting to debate about.

Isn't it time to make Americans and the world aware of the historic consequences of our experimentation with strong centralized government?

We need a Memorial Day to remember and honor the tens of millions killed by socialism

Hippies and love of business

More than just an anti-statist ideology, being a hippie meant you wanted to start something on your own whether it was a commune, health-food store or another form of new business.

Hippies were fanatic friends of new business and saw the only way to change the world was through new businesses. Not a shred of Lefty love of government in them.

Again I know this personally because my book The Seven Laws of Money brought hundreds of new hippie businesses to me for advice. They also knew that I had founded MasterCard.

I created the Briarpatch network made up of more than 1000 hippie businesses at its peak in the mid-1970s. The Briarpatch network was known throughout the hippie world at the time.  It symbolized the hippy love of business.

I was invited to help start similar networks in other parts of the United States and overseas. I was invited to Western England, Amsterdam, all of Sweden and France. I also spent many years developing a Briarpatch network in Japan where organic farming was extensive. Everywhere I was invited there were small businesses ready to blossom. They simply needed to hear the idea that businesses could be open, honest and loved.

The most important part of the Briarpatch was the fact that hippies loved business. Hippies found business to be their only clear and honest vehicle for bringing about change in the world …. and they were enthusiastic.

The few hippie businesses that grew large included Nolo self help press, Greens vegetarian restaurant, Body Shop, Apple Computer, Patagonia and Whole Foods.  The hippies create the organic food movement, health practices from accupuncture to yoga, rock music, Eastern religions explosion, New Age shops of every kind... and countless businesses and classes that were never seen or imagined before 1970.

It was hippies anti-statist values combined with their pro-business values that together defeated the future of Leftism.

I was there, at the center of the storm, I saw it. Today I am one of the fortunate beneficiary.

Hippies brought down the Left

This will be the first time you have ever encountered this idea.

In an earlier blog I pointed out that the peak historic point for Lefty thinking and Lefty projects was 1959. I now want to explain why the Left has been in decline from that point on.

I  identify two minor reasons: the beatniks and the Civil rights movement.  And the single major reason: the vast hippy generation. Over 20 million young people.

The beatniks were the young generation of the 1950s. What is interesting about them is that they did not borrow the socialist pro-state theology of their predecessors and the dominant view of the world at the time. They created a world of nihilism. It was mostly black, dirty clothing, beards, poetry and perennial wandering.  I knew nearly all the prominent beatniks because they stopped at my dormitory in the mid-50s at the University of Chicago.

So here was a new generation that did not accept the previous Lefty ideology.

At the same time, the civil rights movement in the United States was beginning and spreading. It's greatest power came from black churches in the South and Jews in northern law schools. It was a movement against local government that was unable to get support from any government. It was a non-statist local moral movement. Again it did not draw support from classic Lefty ideology. It had a few Lefty ideologues as hanger-ons. In fact one of its targets were the many Lefty racist labor unions. Nearly all labor unions were segregated, everywhere in the U.S.

The greatest shock to the global lefty success of 1959 was the emergence of the hippies in roughly 1963. Here was an entire new generation that numbered in the millions, tens of millions by the 1970s, who were in complete open rebellion against everything their parents stood for. The hippies were for drugs and sex and music. They, we, believed we could create an entirely new society based on honesty, cooperation, new personal visions and pleasure.

That sure as hell had nothing to do with Lefty statist ideology dominant in the world. From that point, 1963, on the Left was doomed.

The hippies were antithetical to the Left because they believed in creating their own new world of new foods, new health, new books, new houses, new schools, a new green lifestyle, new honesty and new personal visions with the help of drugs and music.  I was there as you can see from reading many of my hippie blogs. And the Whole Earth Catalog.

The hippies brought a global end to the Lefty vision that began with the French Revolution. The hippies traveled everywhere on the planet and carried an anti-state pro-individual ideology to the ends of the earth. They even had a guidebook: Lonely Planet.

The hippies killed the Left.

Wisconsin progressive upset

I am a little late in analyzing last week's Wisconsin recall election.

Now we all get the benefit of a little bit of thought which is entirely absent from the paid professional media mavens who are supposed to make intelligent comments.

All of those professionals saw some way to treat this election as exceptional and unexpected. Either the Left blaming the outcome on money, which seldom explains why elections go the way they do and the Right seeing public hostility to unions and grassroots success courtesy of the Tea Party.  Everyone considered this process unexpected because Wisconsin is a progressive state that created Robert La Follette Jr. and Sr. and the Progressive Party a century ago, exactly.

All wrong. Wisconsin was and still is a Progressive state. It is important to understand the origins of the Progressive movement. They are the same as the Tea Party. Americans wanted a Democratic government that was not corrupt. The Progressive movement was a series of political reforms intended to eliminate corruption. The most famous and most significant was the introduction of civil service.

A moment's thought will allow you to recognize that the corruption that was eliminated by civil service is exactly the same corruption we have today with government unions having compulsory collective bargaining and compulsory wage garnishment for union membership. Union money goes to bribe legislators to give union members higher wages. Pure corruption.


There we have it. Wisconsin was Progressive and remains Progressive. Fortunately for all of us. They are helping us all realize that the current Democratic Party-union-corruption must be ended and will be ended.

Serrano outcome: failure

You can Google this. No one before me has noticed a significant fact of history.

The California Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that the local funding mechanism of California, that relied on property taxes for education was unconstitutional because it resulted in great variation in the quality of schools based on the wealth of the geography.

The case, called Serrano v Priest,  was brought by a friend of mine, Sid Wolinsky. This was a monumental case. The outcome has been a complete Lefty failure.

Today, 40 years later, the entire funding for schools K-12 comes from State revenue, just the outcome Serrano prescribed.  Part of this was because of a tax revolt in 1978 that forced schools to rely on State funding when local property tax was severely cut back.

Are the schools in California more equitable or better than 1970?

No. No way.  The Serrano Lefty idea was that unequal distribution of money creates unequal educational outcomes.   Wrong.

Students' culture creates unequal outcomes in education.

Perfect legislation- part 2

Continuation from the previous blog.

‘Start with the premise that nearly all government is intrusive on individuals and businesses and generally irrelevant or harmful.

That means perfect legislation would diminish the impact of government intrusion.’

My second piece of perfect legislation would take most rule and regulatory actions out of the legal system and out of agency enforcement.

A perfect piece of legislation would require that every rule and regulation that is listed on the 3' x 6' notice described in the previous blog would require a clear path for adjudication within the agency responsible for enforcement. Such adjudication procedure would not require lawyers and would emphasize arbitration by independent authorities. Such a path of adjudication would include internal appeals.  A similar process operates in the California Labor Dept.

No rules or regulations could be enforced or taken to court until the procedure within the relevant agency had been exhausted.

Those of you who have dealt with the EEOC or any similar agency, will know that such required internal process before going to court will make sure that less than one out of 1000 cases will ever make it to court. Few will ever be enforced.

I called this and the previous suggested legislation the Hallelujah Laws.  

It is my hope that such simple legislation would get nearly every government body off the backs of the citizenry and still allow a portion of criminal laws to be enforced.

Perfect legislation- part 1

Start with the premise that nearly all government is intrusive on individuals and businesses and generally irrelevant or harmful.

That means perfect legislation would diminish the impact of government intrusion. At the present time the California government and the federal government each passes or creates 200 new regulations every year. For all states that number, in a decade, is astronomic.

To me, perfect legislation would make sure that 99% of rules and regulations are un-administratable and 1% might be available for citizens and businesses to use when necessary.

Here is my first piece of legislation:

All businesses, buildings and moving transportation that is open to the public must display all laws, rules and regulations pertinent to that site on a 3' x 6' paper in 11 point type. For moving vehicles the paper must be available in fold-up form.  

If the relevant agencies that govern that site cannot fit their rules on the paper, then no prosecution can be brought against citizens or businesses on the invisible rules.

The logic of this legislation is obvious. In a democracy made up of decent citizens and a decent government all legal limitations on an individual or business must be clearly visible to the relevant party at the relevant time.  That is at the core of the Miranda Rights which have survived all court tests for 50 years.

This proposed new law clearly supports the Bill of Rights notion of no bill of attainder.  You can’t be punished for what you didn’t know.

Can't we have such decent and necessary legislation?

The movie part of the brain

This year's Oscar night made graphic improvements that I appreciate. Additionally, there was no effort to insult half of the viewing audience with Lefty hate comments. Surprisingly, the presence of the French film crew for The Artist resulted in the first historic Oscar record of someone saying 'I love America.'

That is not what I want to comment on. There were many graphic  interludes with comments on screen by celebrity actors discussing the privileged, brilliant and socially meaningful importance of film. I disagree.

I think that films and novels actually stimulate a part of the brain that is associated with pornography.

It is part of the brain that is an entertainment source, but has no connection to reality. That is why I compare it to pornography which is always fresh and new and stimulating and a person who observes a great deal of pornography will not be able to use the experience to seduce a real person.

I have one example of the detachment of film experience from reality. In the 1980s when I was protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor being so close to the ocean and on top of a seismic fault I personally saw many protesters taken behind the prison-bound bus and beaten on the head with batons by the California Highway Patrol.

This matched exactly the police treatment of protesters in the Salt March in the movie Gandhi. I handed out fliers outside of the Gandhi movie describing the identical situation to the offensive footage in the movie. Out of hundreds of people who talked to me, not one understood that reality in California was identical to the footage they found so offensive in the movie.

I would venture to guess the same would be true of people coming out of a current Holocaust film.  Not one would connect their film experience to the fanatic six year-long rantings of Ahmadinejad in the daily press.

Even thinking back to the hundreds of novels I read, I must confess that I doubt anyone of them has prepared me to deal with reality. That includes The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Brothers Karamazov etc.

I repeat.... The part of the brain that enjoys entertainment is not connected to the rest of the important brain functions.  Hollywood films are entertainment and nothing more.

The most important right

 

The following blog was originally one of my Monday original ideas that I posted over the past two and half months. But I could not see how certain it was a unique idea to me. The other 11 ideas were byproduct of unique experiences that I had. I was also uniquely able to distill important observations from my experience.

While this seems to me to be an original and important idea, I'm not so confident. Here it is without my certainty that it is my original idea.

For all individuals and peoples, self-defense is the core human right. It underlines and is a priori to all other rights.

This right is not self evident. It is the right that underlies all of the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, regularly called the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is a meta-cover for the core right of self-defense. It includes the freedom to act and believe as an individual and seek redress for problems, to keep arms to have privacy rights, to have legal protection against the state in a personal sense and at a governmental level. The Bill of Rights restrains the government and society in which the individual lives.

The simplest evidence that this is a core principle is that wives and slaves never had the right to self-defense.

The personal and family right to self-defense is somewhat restrained by the circumstances under which it can be exercised. The intent of the attacker should be clearly evident, the means and opportunity of the attacker should be similarly evident. Self-defense is further moderated by the response of the defendant who should avoid excessive destruction, if possible.  

A nation has similar rights and I have written about this here.

 

Original ideas - 11

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

11. Commerce has a direction. Commerce promotes individualism and maximizes each individual's unique talents.

I come to this conclusion by simply looking at the social environments that generate commerce. These environments have very distinct characteristics. The first is that commerce thrives in the society with the greatest social diversity. That means an immigrant society and an urban area.

Commerce thrives on meritocracy and honesty. Societies that reward meritocracy and honesty in the social milieu, ignoring or over riding class and social structure, are the ones that have long-term thriving commerce.

While many societies love technology and some favor open markets, these two propensities in the population can drive significant commercial vigor.

I have a book on this subject: Commerce.($2.00)

It is my unique understanding of commerce that allows me to see that commerce promotes individual authenticity. A society that promotes individualism, recognition of individual merit and freedom of individuals to develop their own authentic qualities is the society that will thrive and support commerce energetically.

 

Original ideas - 10

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

10. There are three distinctly different kinds of commerce. Since I have been giving advice for half a century to thousands of businesses it is obvious to me.

The three kinds of business are: trade, industry and clientry.  

Trade is universal on the planet. It is the sale of cigarettes between prisoners. It is the flower shop where the owner goes to the flower Mart every morning. It is also Mitsui and Itochu with hundreds of billions of dollars trading lumber for coal for pork.  Trade is always designed so that each single sale provides enough net revenue to replace the product sold and survive to the next sale.

Industry is what has changed the world over the past two centuries. An industrial business is designed to lower costs. Costs can be lowered in many ways ranging from the most important, achieving economies of scale, to implementing technological innovation, to applying marketing ingenuity. A local business, Lowes, can be part of a large industrial company.

Clientric businesses have one objective: to maintain a lifetime relationship with the customer. Such a clientric business could be a dentist, a graphic artist, a lawyer and it can also be a large firm like an investment counselor or an international bank.

Each of these three forms of business operates differently because the objectives are different.

 

Original ideas - 9

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

9.  Social Thought is an all encompassing world view. All institutions including language are organized around ideas, concepts, images or metaphors.

The first use of this term was by the University of Chicago for its Committee on Social Thought.  The Committee began after the Second World War.  Its use of the term Social Thought referred to the core Greek ideas that shape the modern world. My use of the term is broader than the University's Committee.

My use of the term originated from reading Mary Douglas's book How Institutions Think. Prof. Douglas is the mother of the idea.  My role was to clearly identify the concept and to promote it in intellectual circles.

I began my national public radio program, Social Thought, that covered 40 stations nationwide and the armed services network, in 1988. The program ran for nine years. The list of the program guests is here.

My relationship to the idea of Social Thought is to have recognized it, named it, exemplified the breadth of it and promoted its vital function in intellectual and academic circles.

To quickly understand Social Thought think of the invisible hand of the market, that is a metaphor that organizes economic thinking.  Think of the metaphor for the term 'over' which has a common image when referring to over the bridge, the movie is over, the ideas are over his head and the bank balance is over drawn.

We structure our world on metaphors, ideas, images and concepts. The mechanisms for the human mind and our common behavior is social thought.

Original ideas - 8

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

8. In a voluntary society, most of the things we do are the result of social sorting.

Social sorting explains where you live, where you work, what organizations you belong to, what media you pay attention to, who your friends are and pretty much what happens to you during your life.

Social sorting has three components: the flag, the screen and the overflow.

The flag is what attracts you to each institution. Sometimes the flag is obvious and a strong draw, such as the desire to become like a friend of yours who is a captain in the Air Force. Sometimes it is merely the PTA of the school your second child goes to. Often where we work is based on what we know about the company or the field of work.

The screen is what allows us to become a member of the institution. Sometimes it is very strong such as getting through the employment interviews or passing the New York State bar examination. Sometimes the screen is unnoticeable such as attending a baseball game or registering to vote in the Green Party.  Buying a particular house may only require good credit or being blind to the hazards of living near a high school.

The overflow is the final determinant of your membership or participation in any institution. At work, the day comes when you know you are not appreciated or you don't belong and you quit. In a membership organization, you just know that time has gone by and you have made few friends so you leave. You just stop going to a particular coffee shop and don't really know why, it just doesn't feel right any more.

Nearly all of our choices and accommodations in life are the result of these three mechanisms in social sorting.

A full description of social sorting can be found in my book Gods of Commerce published in 1997...... beginning on page 34.  

Original ideas - 7

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

7. Participatory design is a difficult concept to explain. It is not necessarily openness or transparency. It is rather the opposite of proprietary.

In my books and articles and lectures I have cited many examples. The first is the RCA 45 record player which was designed to be proprietary in operation and content. This is contrasted with the Philips tape cassette, which was openly licensed to everyone at a low cost. RCA was stuck with the teenybopper record market, very small. Philips got 1/3 of the gigantic participatory tape market that they created.

Polaroid got a teeny specialized market. 35mm film from Kodak and others fit in every camera with every type of lens and was the dominant film.  RCA failed again with its proprietary video disk and proprietary content.

Apple has always been proprietary and rarely got 2% of the global PC market. In contrast, the apps on the iPhone were a stunning success because they were participatory in nature. The Android apps turned out to be even more participatory and more successful.

The lesson never changes.  Go proprietary and you will have a smaller market than the participatory market will generate. The reason is simple: thousands of minds and innovators who work in the participatory mode can be more in touch with the market than dozens who work on the proprietary level.

Original ideas - 6

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

6. Advertising is generally ineffective.  People often respond to this truth with an apparent confusion. It has been my insight that eliminates this confusion and makes a big difference in marketing.

My distinction has been the source of a $200 billion corporation.

Advertising is the entire category of messages that are put in front of you like dog poop on the sidewalk. Advertising is a scatter gun approach that hopes to reach a select small target audience by saturating the public. Called 'banner ads' on the Internet. For me to say it is ineffective is trivial, since economists have been measuring its irrelevance for 70 years with countless colorful examples.  Advertising is effective in a few instances where word-of-mouth is not available: advertising is effective in influencing children and plays a role in decisions for tourists.

What people confuse with advertising, that is indeed effective, is listing. Listing is putting relevant information for customers and prospective customers at a place where they are looking for it. Yellow pages have always been a listing. And always been effective. Signs on the building are a listing, flyers in the neighborhood of a business are listing, signs on a product are a listing.

Most of all, a listing is what Google AdSense offers. It is clickable information at the point in which a potential customer is looking for that information.

Google's success comes from its opening page which has no God damn ads. It is clean and simple. This communicates trustworthiness and competence. Google goes on to generate tens of billions of dollars by being the biggest listing business in the world. A Google listing is where you are looking for that information.

I wrote about this (with Salli Rasberry) in the book Marketing Without Advertising, in 1984, based on a class I taught beginning in 1980. Roughly 20 years before Google. The book has gone through 6 editions and has been a staple in the computer world since it was first published.

Most people to this day do not understand the difference between advertising and listing.

Original ideas- 5

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

Several years after publishing the book on random selection of legislators, Citizen Legislature  (also online), I came to an unusual understanding about government.

In the book my co-author and I ended up recommending that the US House of Representatives be a random legislature while leaving the Senate as it is, an elective body. The reason we gave in the book was so that Americans would have a chance to compare a truly random body to an elective body. We were certain the random body would be preferred.

The argument had been made to us by Robert Gnaizda, my closest friend. We accepted his argument.

With years to think about it, I came to a different conclusion. I concluded we had been right to argue for the existing Senate but the reasons were different.

My reasons were new and unique. I came to believe, and have written about it, that random selection will result in a truly representative group of people, As People.

I came to understand that people also exist in many sub institutions.  I am a private pilot, I am an airplane passenger, I am an international traveler, I am a heavy user of the Internet, I am a user of gasoline, gas and electricity. I have active interests and an active role in many institutions.

The political organism must include my sub institutional interests.  Lobbyists already exist to represent many of my sub institutional interests.  It was at this point that I came to realize that we need an elective body that is heavily influenced by lobbyists and money because such an institution represents a true voice of our society that we as individuals would not and do not speak for on a regular basis.

An effective government must have both our complete personal-individual needs represented as well as our institutional needs.

That is a unique understanding on my part that comes out of my original thinking on random legislative selection.

Original ideas- 4

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

 

 

4. I did a number of public opinion surveys of San Franciscans in the early 1970s. One time, a friend of mine asked me why the public attitudes that I had measured were so different from the legislation coming out of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I explained to my friend that elected officials were not representative of the public. They were a self-selected group of egotists who responded politically to their special interest supporters.

It was at this point that I realized a representative group of public officials would have to be selected at random to be truly representative.

I had done many surveys over the previous decade and personally interviewed many ordinary Americans. I was always impressed by the respondent’s native intelligence, insight and coherent understanding of their world.  I like ordinary Americans.

Shortly after that conversation, in the fall of 1975, I wrote an article for the Co-Evolution Quarterly suggesting that legislators be picked at random like juries.

Several years later in response, a close friend, Ernest (Chick) Callenbach joined me in writing the first book  (also online) on the subject. We had a great time writing the book because of a common Great Books education at the University of Chicago.

Random selection of legislators dates back to Athens which had such an institution for 200 years. No other similar institution existed in the intervening time.

Over the decades since my original article and book the idea of random sampling for legislatures and other political bodies has gained some support. Along the way a number of screening mechanisms have been introduced.

Part of the reason I was so able to rapidly appreciate the value of a truly representative political body, was that I had worked for the California legislature as an analyst in the early 1960s. I was never impressed with the elected representatives.

I do not support any screening mechanisms of a public random sample based on the statistical meaning or random sample. People who do not want to come to the legislature represent people who are part of the public and needn't come to the legislature.  They will come when their ox is being gored.  People who have mental or other disabilities also need to be members of the random legislature. There is never a way to know their interests unless they participate. It is in these ways that I continue to uphold the core idea that random sampling is the only true form of representation.

 

Original ideas- 3

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

3. I learned the best way to help a startup business in the spring of 1974.  To get away from my business office that year, I rented an empty room with a beautiful view and access to the roof on a pier in San Francisco.  

Often small business people would come to me for  business advice. I had been a banker, founder of MasterCard and was treasurer of a very popular Methodist church.

My pier office was intended to give me some privacy, but without telling me, my secretary began sending all the small business people with questions to my office on the waterfront.

With the publication of my Seven Laws of Money in the Spring of 1974, the number of small business people coming to me for advice became a tidal wave. Some days, more than 20 people arrived seeking advice on their small business startups.

When some of them began talking at the same time it became obvious that small business people could help each other more than anyone else could help them. The outcome was the creation of the Briarpatch Network.

I immediately hired a coordinator (Andy Alpine), an accountant and an insurance man. As new people joined the Briarpatch the coordinator put them in touch with similar businesses or businesses with similar problems. Once a week a team of advisers and I would visit half a dozen of the new members at their worksite. We all used common resources.  The Briarpatch grew to several thousand members over a decade, with a peak of 600 at one time in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My approach to helping startup businesses was confirmed six years later when I was asked to help start new businesses in Sweden by a Swedish government agency. I was taken to the town of Philipstadt  where a group of 30 small businesses were together to hear me. I talked for awhile.  Knowing that my English was painful for them to listen to, I stopped and asked each one to stand up and tell one thing that could help their business. After everyone had described their need, such as a truck going to Stockholm on Mondays, I told them to take a break and talk to each other.

The din was overwhelming. They broke into Swedish and everyone talked to everyone for an hour until lunch when they continued.  There was no longer a need for me to talk. Everyone was so wildly excited that someone in their town had the resources and willingness to help them.

I used the same mechanism in Western England and in Paris and Lyon (it failed in Western England where everyone demanded that I "create jobs", it worked in France where it became focused on lending classes). The Swedish project was so successful that the German Marshall fund copied it in Germany and later funded similar projects in the Midwest of the United States.

I wrote about most of the details of small business and startups in my 1984 Honest Business book. The core idea is that businesses can help each other most effectively in their early stages, an idea built into the popular start-up incubators.

Original ideas- 2

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

2.  Money is language. Money is not A language like French. Money is language like human speech is language, like bees dancing is language, like birds singing and like deaf individuals signing are language.

Money is language. It has rules, it has grammar and it has a wide range of attributes. There is negative money (a parking ticket) and positive money. It can be used as an incentive and as a disincentive. It can be practiced as a great art or abused in a criminal or profane manner.

I wrote a book in 1974 (with co-author Sally Rasberry) that sold over 100,000 copies and was a bible in the hippie world.  The Seven Laws of Money are in fact laws of money. They can be broken only at personal expense in ways never before described. Laws five and six are that: money cannot be given away nor received as a gift. This is why foundations usually don't reflect the donor’s intent and why trust fund kids are usually a mess. (A fairly good summary of the Seven Laws is here).

The subject of money as language was a chapter in my 1990 book, Discourses. The grammar of money deals with accounting, honesty, reliable repayment of debts and understanding the context in which money is used.  Giving someone a dollar for a cup of coffee can be a generous act, and insult if it was someone's home, an ironic statement or gratitude.  The chapter is here.

 

Original ideas- 1

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.(All twelve)


1.  I was the key founder of MasterCard (1967) which was itself the original source of the modern all-purpose credit card. Here is the history, with detailed references.

The unique idea that I began with and which has not been appreciated to this date is that a successful new financial instrument, in this case the general purpose consumer credit card, must not be proprietary. The original general purpose credit card was created by Bank of America (BankAmericard), only available through Bank of America or its affiliated banks. When MasterCard was emerging as a card that any bank could offer to its customers, Bank of America changed its vehicle to the modern Visa card, open to all bank customers.

Moreover, at an early date in the introduction of the modern credit card, I realize that no national government could play a role in the ownership or operation of the credit card if it were to have a useful global function.  I successfully pushed for international open transactions without governments playing a role.

I believe that these Insights remain applicable to all commerce and are now understood in the open source software world.

 

Our ideas are new since 1944

If like me, you have looked into the history of conservative ideas, you have found that they didn't exist before 1944.

That is rather strange, isn't it. 

The traditional teaching about conservative thought begins with Edmund Burke, an Irish blow-hard politician who's writings are virtually unreadable.  If Burke said anything, it was late in his life in opposition to the French Revolution which as he rightly saw it: destroyed old traditions without understanding how those traditions bound the good and healthy elements of society together.

The first real thinker in the modern conservative tradition is Joseph Schumpeter who conceived the market as a destroyer and creator.  However, Schumpeter was not himself a conservative; he expected the market to generate a bureaucracy with harmful consequences.

The first two powerful conservative thinkers were Raymond Aron and Sidney Hook. Aron was driven out of France because of his anti-communism. Sidney Hook, a New York philosophy professor, based his powerful thinking on his own anti-communism.

Most of the powerful conservative thought came out of anti-communism, including the great fiction writer of the same period, George Orwell.

The Neocons were an even later edition of modern conservatism, basing their understanding of modern conservatism on the failure of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.

Modern conservatism grew out of a synthesis of anti-communism and a recognition of the failures of the "Great Society".  It is a fresh and original body of thought, too new for most people to grasp.

As a consequence, when talking with Lefties, I am constantly filled with sympathy for them.  These poor sad Lefties are stuck with outmoded 19th Century ideas in their heads with no concept of how their static minds have been left in the dust. They have missed out on the new realms of thought.