Pro Commerce

City Creation

Several cities have been created in the modern world.  The modern commercial world is the substructure and a modern city has been built on top of it.  In two cases the modern city is built denovo on the land of a Bedouin tribe by the tribe and only tribal members are citizens. Abu Dhabi and Dubai. (Photo below.)

During my life I have watched the actual growth of Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Singapore.  I have also visited Hong Kong over many years.

Tel Aviv and Tokyo are vibrant cities with great vitality and creative artistic communities.  But that is of no matter to the question of interest.  What does it mean when a modern city gets built on a tribal or clan social structure? 

The builders of Tel Aviv were modern technological people, maybe the leading such people on the planet. Tokyo was built on the oldest continuous culture on the planet that accommodated modern commerce in the 19th Century by importing commercial social structures from Europe and America.  

I’ve thought long and hard about this question and have no conclusions.  It appears that modern commerce only needs facilities and logistics that support trade in order to create a functioning city.  Hong Kong and Singapore only needed educated workers with a worker disposition, they already had an excellent harbor.  Abu Dhabi and Dubai imported the workers, use vast oil and gas for energy and rely heavily on air traffic transportation. (Photo: Singapore below.)

All these cities need a modern legal structure with private property rights, but not much else. Communist legal structures seem inadequate. Havana and Caracas turned into slums without Western legal structures and so had Budapest and Prague when I visited during the Communist reign.

Does innovation occur in these dynastic modern cities? Yes.  It would appear that innovation is possible in any technologically modern city regardless of social hierarchy or non-communist politics because a great deal of innovation is based on technological modifications and modest improvements.

What it took to create the modern commercial world was extraordinary and historically unique.  But once it is created it seems capable of thriving almost anywhere.

Tribes with Modern Commerce

I just finished an excellent book by Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. The WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

I’ve read many books that seek to explain the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Among my favorites are 

• the ones that point to the early 1600s Dutch, a unique non-hierarchical Protestant society that created many of the tools of modern commerce and 
• then conquered England in 1689, to plant the commercial models there.  
• Max Weber expanded this into a general connection of Protestantism to the Industrial Revolution. 
• The subsequent movement of a stonemasons guild in the 1700s into The Order of Masons which expanded from England to most of Northern Europe, spreading science, technology and democratic forums.  
• Next was the English experimentation in agriculture in the late 1700s that released a free labor pool to support newly formed water and steam- driven factories and urban areas. 

Henrich’s contribution is to find the force that moved much of Europe, over the period from 400CE to 1400, from tribes and clans to a large population of independent individuals.  It was the Roman Catholic Church with an unremitting teaching that advocated two person monogamous non-relative marriage that was the vital source of this change. Henrich further finds the Cistercian Order of monks, that grew to thousands of abbeys throughout Europe while promoting this monogamous teaching plus advocating for the value of hard work. From that point on Gutenberg and Protestantism played a major role.

Much thanks to Henrich for this important contribution. Sadly I wasted a great deal of time with his psychological testing of every detail using data from college student psych labs which is absurd.  Seventeen year-olds in college answering questions on computers do not represent any larger universe. He also uses anthropologists’ data which I find equally unconvincing. A European with crayons, paper and simple questions in a tribal setting gets no meaningful material to generalize.  All such research gets the results it sets out to get.

All these studies that I like to explain the Industrial Revolution are missing the key ingredient that I explain in my book The Most Important Book in Human History.  The European empires in the 1700-1800s allowed the second and third sons to escape the innovation- stifling primogenitor of their homelands. Colonialism was a source of innovation from those who escaped Europe. The greatest escape from hereditary family domination was the Great American West in the mid-1800s.  The breakdown of the stifling hereditary family is the source of modern innovation. To this day hereditary elites, the world over, stifle innovation.

Henrich’s book allows me to examine the modern world with the stunning modern commercial success of many tribal and clan societies.  Nothing could be a more startling example than the United Arab Emirates; two gigantic super modern cities Dubai and Abu Dhabi with a population over 5 million are run by two Arab Bedouin tribes. These are super modern cities with only tribal members as citizens.

There is also Hong Kong, notoriously run by 51 tongs, and Singapore run by one family from one canton.

See the next blog above.

Public Accommodation

Yes, I have been censored on Facebook and Twitter. I consider it an honor.  Just as I considered it an honor when I was placed on the first ‘No-Fly’ list.  I even had my friends throw a party in my honor and present me with a medal to celebrate my ‘No-Fly’ distinguished award.

Therefore I enter this discussion of how I, an honest reputable prominent, successful
American can be censored by two billion-dollar corporations in the 21st Century.

The whole debate on the mechanisms necessary to enforce the 1st Amendment to the Constitution and eliminate political censorship on public media seems to be based on a lack of understanding of the history of commerce.

The basic law that is being violated is the law of public accommodation, a law that is more than 2,300 years old.  The law was created by the Roman legislature two centuries before the CE common era to deal with the problem of ferries across rivers in Roman territory.  Ferry boat operators seem to have been applying their own discretion to what people and goods they would transport across rivers.  This stifled trade and created rewards and punishments that were entirely arbitrary, in the hands of a vital service.  

The Roman public accommodations law required ferry boat operators to carry everyone who wished to travel.

Now that law is obvious and our generation seems able to ignore an obvious reality.

I hear statements like ‘these are private companies.’  What is the relevance of that? None.  

Even private membership clubs such as the San Francisco Olympic Club, which was men only, before the 1970s was forced to open for lunch to women because business lunches were an important part of conducting business in San Francisco. That obvious and decent legal ruling applied to all lunch clubs with 200 or more members.  

Yes, that puts me in agreement with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Jack Phillips (definitely no relation) case, whose bakery wouldn’t sell a cake for a gay wedding. He is open for business; he can always su bcontract baking a specific cake to another baker.

In order to settle the big tech censorship issue Congress can insert the words ‘political opinions’ into Title II of the Civil Rights Act. 

42 U.S.C. §2000a (a)All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, political opinions or national origin.

If there is any question that a public media site open to the public is covered by the law here is the paragraph that makes that issue clear: 

42 U.S.C. § 2000a(c) For purposes of this section, "commerce" means travel, trade, traffic, commerce, transportation, or communication…

That settles the issue.   Get two words inserted into existing law.  Get a court order against these behemoth buffoons.

Cooperation

I had two eggs for breakfast this morning.  It took the joint efforts of over one million people, cooperating to get me those two clean, safe, fresh eggs.

How do I get the number ‘millions?’ 

Start with the grocery, with its stockers, checkout staff, administrators; It took minutes or seconds of each of their work schedules to provide the two eggs safely.

Then there is the dairy sales and delivery staff and administrators, the thousands of people in the warehouses, trucking companies and finally the single farm with thousands of chickens that requires a whole ladder of workers and staff. 

Then there are entire industries that bring the food to the chicken farm for the chickens and the growers in many thousands of farms that provide that chicken food.  None of this counts the infrastructure that needs constant work to provide the electricity, water, gas and telecom. Tens of thousands of people are required to just do the daily maintenance.  There is also a government structure involving inspectors, regulators and lawyers.

This reality has shaped my life.  No ordinary Lefty and few others can see this picture clearly and honestly. Two stark realities are the backdrop for appreciation of this million person effort: Commerce and tradition.

Modern commerce is a global cooperative decent mechanism to create most of the world we live in.  Commerce is the mutual voluntary beneficial exchange of goods and services that use a standard of accounting and pricing (money). I was the person that made this financial exchange a global possibility ( international credit cards.)  All the underlined words are significant because commerce is the most extraordinary development of the human species that allows humans to survive and generally thrive as a large and extended species.  

Although the species has internal wars, the general species survival is made possible by commerce.  In contrast to the warring element, commerce is cooperative and allows the extraordinary diversity of the species to work together and cooperate.  During the past century there have been many experiments in state- based planned regimented exchange systems. The USSR, Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, North Vietnam and Cambodia. All were failures. Total failures with mass murder and starvation.

That is the first reality that honest people need to recognize and appreciate.

The second reality is that the human species builds social institutions slowly over time that allow for commercial and non-commercial cooperation.  These include legal structures, family structures, language, traditions, dance, criminal reward and punishment structures, personal identities and dozens more that are invisible and substantive but not recognized. 

Compare an American environment to that of a tribal Palestinian or Wolof in Senegal. The American is generally monogamous, willing to work long hours, tolerant of a wide range of other people's behavior, very unlikely to commit a crime but when he does there is a complex impersonal structure with millions of people involved to evaluate his behavior and punish him if warranted. He buys merchandise and services from the entire planet and there are large populations of fellow humans cooperatively involved to assure the safety and contractual delivery of his purchases.  He has educational and health facilities readily available to him as well as access to abundant and varied food, housing and transport.

What is evident, to anyone willing to consider the matter honestly, is that the environment of an American has developed over hundreds and even thousands of years from the two tablets of Moses in Sinai to the mobile telephone transmitters within hundreds of feet of his presence anywhere. All these institutions have evolved. They were social group constructions and they were hard to come by.  They are built on tradition. Tradition includes engineering that has a thousand years of testing and failures to build on. 

The individual who thinks he can change, improve or modify these social creations is seriously befuddled.

There Is No Otherside

The whole ‘wokie movement’ is just angry unhappy people without any substantive thought holding them together.  They see that most poor people and homeless are black and they can’t  admit to themselves that it has to do with out of control black criminality, lack of education and dysfunctional families.  They see great income disparities and they are envious;  they blame our society, despite the same pattern which exists all over the world.

The genuine problems of our society are monumental; they were created by the Left. Therefore the Left can not see them.  

• We have an out of control government bureaucracy, a severe problem that is now recognized by half of America as ‘the deep state.’  This horrible, malicious enterprise was created by 90 years of Democrat control of government.
• Some key agencies of the government are totally incompetent verging on criminal: the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the IRS.
• Our schools at all levels are inferior by global standards. Unions fight to keep them substandard.
• The government and schools are, at all levels, a handmaiden of unions that abhor meritocracy. Meritocracy IS AMERICA. No ifs, ands or buts.

These are real, deep and intractable problems throughout 21st Century America.  The Left can not acknowledge these horrors because they are the creation of the Left. The Left can only raise a trivial and ignorant platform of answers: ‘wokieism.’  Blame America itself for the Left’s 90 year reign of human tragedy and the creation of an historic calamity.

What is Culture?

Aside from anthropologists, virtually no one knows what ‘culture’ is.  I didn’t know, after a decade of global travel, until I was in my 30s, what ‘culture’ is. 

‘Culture’ is the entire world that surrounds each person, including language, posture, worldview and all the implements of daily life.  Like a fish to the body of water it inhabits, we are each so immersed in our culture we don’t know it exists. Each culture is bounded by language, sometimes geography and usually by kinship. Some people, like myself, followers of Sapir-Whorf believe that different cultures are so different from each other that genuine mutual understanding is not possible (The Sapir-Whorf thesis has been written out of textbook anthropology.)  When we deal with a different culture we can only see the parts of the other culture that are part of our own.  

I’ve spent fifty years visiting and traveling in Japan, and every year I find some new Japanese behavior that I had never seen before.  It is unique to their culture and invisible to me.  For example when the Japanese see a rainbow they see two different core blues and have different names for each.  We don’t see them. Look at a ‘rainbow’ flag. One stripe is blue, not two. 

The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is somewhere between ignorant and absurd.  A girl in Boston putting Japanese fabric over herself has nothing to do with a Japanese kimono which takes a Japanese a half hour each day to put on and another half hour to care for including stitching together and taking apart, sometimes daily.

Dealing with non-Americans (or the many subsets of American in the U.S.) is always a troublesome area because nearly no one knows what culture is and how intractable cultural differences are.  My best example of this is native Americans.  Five tribes in Washington own casinos and have significant wealth as a result.  Not one of these tribes uses their money the way standard American culture proscribes.  None of the tribes have paved streets, street lights for night time, they still have washing machines and motorcycles on the front porch or front yard. Definitely nothing resembling suburbs. A few tribes spend their money getting medical training for tribal members, others spend their money on their own retirement facilities.  

One of the most stunning cultural blindnesses is the presence of street people (‘homeless’) in the U.S. and their absence in Japan.  In Japan there are homeless people, people who don’t want to be part of the society; many who couldn’t be if they wanted to. They live in secluded parts of the big parks with water and bathrooms but out of sight of everyone.  In the U.S. and other Puritan countries we allow the homeless to mingle with us, daily, because we view them as temporarily out-of-sorts; all are considered potentially productive members of society who are victims of some abuse, childhood abuse, medical troubles or addiction. Just given the right help, support and inducements, they will be productive members of society.  That is the Puritanical view; the Christian Protestant deep cultural view we live in. That deeply felt belief is part of our culture.  Irrational and wrong, but not subject to examination or debate.

There are many similar deeply felt worldviews that are part of our culture in addition to words, images, conceptions that are not subject to examination or even comprehension.

In all my thousands of blogs, when I use the term ‘culture’ that is what I mean.