Pro Commerce

Good things to do for your city

I’ve taken an unusual tack.  

I assume that all the Lefties that surround me and promote white privilege are people of good will with a tired 170 year old ideology that hates commerce and lives in a zero sum world of class hatred. They don't have anything better.  No ideas.

What they need is a clear path to a pro commerce policy agenda based on a positive sum world. They could be good people doing actual good, if they have some direction.

So here are some local policy recommendations with that positive world in mind.

Make your city tourist friendly, shopping street friendly and new business friendly.

Start by moving all the street people (commonly called ‘homeless’) to a safe area with sanitation and eating facilities.  An area such as a little used golf course for example.

This is important because street people and their filth seriously damage tourism and shopping.  They make important amenities impossible to create. Amenities such as water, toilets and seating for the ‘clean’ population of tourists and shoppers.

Immediately create widespread access to water, toilets and seating for a safe and appealing city. Also for decent treatment of old people.

Develop and implement a significant tourist appeal program.

• Maps and guidebooks in a dozen common languages, especially those that don’t use Roman letters.  Plus a dozen less common languages.
• Publicly  place identifying signs and symbols everywhere in the five most important languages for water, toilets, seating, public transportation, hotels and restaurants.
• Have telephone numbers for public information in two dozen languages.
• Create kiosks in all major tourist areas with native speakers of major foreign languages.
• Review all traffic and pedestrian signage to make sure it is meaningful to all tourists.

Develop and implement a positive program to support retail walking streets and neighborhood retail.

• Extensive and safe parking facilities close to all shopping streets and retail neighborhoods.
• Appealing walking streets with continuous retail and comfortable resting facilities.
• Tax all walking street front footage that is not interesting to walking shoppers. Examples: garage doors, street level billboards, hospitals, churches and empty store windows.
• Have extensive street and sidewalk cleaning programs.
• Encourage interesting and lighted signage.
• Encourage eye level information about food and beverage store options.
• Support all retail that promotes conviviality such as coffee shops.

Create government facilities that issue new business permits in three days.

• Put all permit agencies in one place with all tax and utility permit stations.
• Create severe penalties for any and all agencies that delay new business or business expansion permissions
• Be especially vigilant to support new technologies and very reluctant to restrain new technologies.
• Encourage national brand stores in all tourist areas.  Tourists are comforted by business names they recognize.
• Eliminate all discriminatory legislation that singles out businesses for any reason, including zoning restrictions.  Most current restrictions penalize low income workers and minorities, like the absence of car washes, cigarette-magazine stores and pay-day loan stores.

Review all legislation on the books that discriminate against low income workers such as minimum wages, no smoking zones and traffic and auto ownership barriers. Low income workers are a necessary and integral part of urban commerce.

Review all legislation on the books that discriminate against entrepreneurs and people who are successful at business such as ‘high income” taxes, transfer fees and penalties for capital gains. Hostility to successful people is counter productive for a healthy urban commercial environment.  Entrepreneurs are not stupid; they know when people hate them and when elected officials lie to them.

This is just a start.  Get to work all you do gooders who want to improve urban life.  

Not a Conservative or Progressive

The overwhelming qualities that dominate the categories of conservative and progressive are ones I don’t adhere to or frankly detest.  I am a pure pro-commerce person which is incompatible with both.

Commerce, has its conservative component.  The category of trade is very conservative.  It thrives in a stable world with stable horizons, but is capable of doing well in anarchic conditions including war.  Trade finds a way to buy and sell in all circumstances from a prison to a drug deal in the Facebook executive offices. 

Trade is fine in a stable conservative world, it also does well in total anarchy.

Modern commerce fails in stable traditional societies with hereditary elites.  It only finds life and innovation in the very few meritocratic societies.

The most dynamic component of commerce is industry that thrives on innovation, creating social change and reorganizing society.  No businesses are perpetual and stable. They are always being started, dying, merging and expanding. All qualities that are not comforting to conservative ideology. Disruption is the core nature of modern commerce.

For the same reason progressivism is anathema to modern commerce.  Progressives believe in the fundamental improvement of man by government.  Modern commerce came into existence without government support and can not thrive where a government is strong. Modern commerce has no direction.  Improvement of humans is not in its lexicon. It is chaotic, non-ideological and directionless. The exact opposite of progressivism.

Moreover, progressivism loves unions, seniority and government.  Modern commerce has a core value of meritocracy. Nothing could be more alien to the progressive world. Meritocracy has nothing to do with improving humans.  It recognizes the genius and talent of existing humans.

I am a pro commerce person not a conservative or a progressive.

Women and rape #metoo

There is a reason the judicial system doesn't pay attention to women who have been raped.

We are in the clutches of an hysteria about women and sex called the #metoo movement.

It is in some ways connected to rape but the connection is tenuous.  In most public cases, of which there have been nearly 50, as I write this blog, most consist of consenting sex or sexual advances that are unwanted, at least afterward.

This is a chance for me to comment on the nature of women, the law and sexuality.

Nobody clearly understands the relationship of women to their sexuality.  Let me explain.

Survey data shows that more than 70% of what women tell survey interviewers were rapes are not reported to police and recorded in FBI statistics. (320,000 women told interviewers that a rape occurred to them in U.S.,(1.2 per 100,000 women); roughly 100,000 of those women actually reported the rape to police at (0.4 per 100k.)

Of those reported less than half result in convictions. That means jail time for 16% or one out of 6 rapists.

In a detailed case study in Southern Virginia, more than than 80% of rapes were not reported. Of those reported, less than 40% were pursued to a criminal conviction. With a final 12% of rapists serving criminal time. One out of 8 in a reliable study.

Frankly, I think the detailed data is more accurate than the general national FBI data.  

Considering the number of rapes that occur and the number of men who are reported and the small proportion of those who go to trial and are convicted one can see where there seems to be a lot of smoke and not much fire.  I can see where the police and prosecutors treat this as a crime that is hard for the justice system to pursue.

To put it another way, real rape doesn’t fit into the justice system very well.  Sexual harassment is inherently more ephemeral.

The #metoo movement is evidently hysteria where men can be accused of being men, and only celebrities get punished,  

Also men in the workplace probably get punished on occasion too because the accusers can get monetary settlements.

From my perspective, men and women have inadequate experience with heterosexual sex and a great many of such connections are confused, bungled and a complete mess.  It is hard for the justice system to deal with men and women learning how to have comfortable and pleasurable sex.