I did some work today for a very large multinational company. I met the CEO, briefly. He’s netting well into six figures, and maybe 7 figures. This company’s headquarters is in another country. I got to thinking about this.
The people who work there are all capitalists, whose “capital” begins as labor, and can expand, through savings, into “excess” money, that can be invested. The people who own the place contribute information. All companies start as ideas. Ideas start in the heads of specific people. All new projects consist in information–which is to say ideas that are followed, developed, altered as needed, and which gradually enable corresponding material enactment, in the form of production lines, new versions of the product, etc, etc.
Economic development begins as an idea, as li, as an idea for a new form (see my previous post). It becomes embodied in chi, which here is both the physical means of production–the stuff–and the energy of the people running it, their labor. Logically, if development begins with ideas, then they are the source–the Fountainhead, if you’ll excuse me–of all material development.
The next conclusion, then, is that those systems which reward innovation and creativity will, in the end, be most wealthy.
Socialism, in this rendering, then, as a system for the subtraction of information, and the enfeeblement of personal imagination through the ubiquitous use and thread of the use of force to ensure compliance, is NECESSARILY a system which leads to poverty. Manifestly, this is what happens, so I’m not doing anything but stating the obvious, but I am trying to put it on a slightly more mathematical footing.
Goodness, in my rendering, is the effort to innovate on the level of personal identity, which itself is the result of perceptual capacity. Such innovations are in the direction of greater personal felicity, with less and less need for material support. Goodness is an expansion of li, with a corresponding decrease in the need for chi, which is to say all the economic goods we think will make us happy, and which generally don’t.
I had more to say, but it felt like a long day–even if maybe I’m just a wimp–so I’m going to call it a day with the blogging.