Money While Sleeping
On Tuesday, the Funch-man continued the
thread we've been building about how we might release individual productivity
from the constraints of capital that not only funds productive
energy but, well, capitalizes on it. Capital, of course, is enthralled
with receiving money while sleeping. It's useful to remember that the Latin
root of Capital means
head. Apparently, being in charge of the resources is more interesting
than deploying
money to
do something
useful.
It's too
bad the capitalists don't just give us good head. (Hey. It was there.)
This isn't an anti-capitalist rant, despite appearances. Everybody is
enthralled with money-while-sleeping. Each
age works to remove its most prominent scarcity and, having succeeded and therefore
become irrelevant, holds on
with its
skeletal grip until the tendons dissolve, like Nazis at the end of Raiders
of the Lost Ark. The lack of capital in a society is an overarching
problem that seems impossible to resolve, so it rightly captures a society's
imagination until it is solved. It is our current religion. The problem then
becomes one of prying away the death grip of the previously indispensable technocrats
and
their clergy.
Perspective Here's an illustration of what a blessing it
is to have abundant capital: Hernando
de Soto has written eloquently on the
subject
of hidden capital in
the
so-called
third
world countries,
in The
Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere
Else and The
Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. Aside from
the remarkable coincidence of his name,
it turns out that the current de Soto is a Peruvian economist whose foundation
is discovering and cataloguing the trillions of dollars of undocumented
capital lying around in the so-called third world countries that don't
have the infrastructure
to identify it, document it, mortgage it and build an economy based upon
it. In fact, their
capital is illegal. ("The more people the ILD researchers
talked to in the shantytowns and rural byways of Peru, the more they realized
that it was not so much that the poor were breaking the law as that the
law was breaking them.")
Resourceful people in
the so-called third world countries want homes and businesses like we all
do. Since it takes a decade or so to wrest
a business license or an unencumbered
building lot from the bureaucracy, people just invest in their businesses
and homes anyway, and not bad ones. But they are squatters and their capital
is undocumented so it's not real,
right?
No
wonder these are "poor" countries. What would America look like
if you subtracted the housing stock and small business from the resource
base?
A virtue of de Soto's important work is that it suggests how
important and difficult it is to create the capital that we now enjoy in
abundance. It's hard to realize that we are standing on the shoulders of
giants when the grasping descendants of those grasping giants can't see the
universal benefits of the universal abundance that's the obvious next phase
after the age of
capital rationing we're now leaving.
So here's what Freeman says:
The real thing that would make a difference would be the information
about how to organize people and resources efficiently and effectively,
without needing investment capital and without needing managers. I.e. the
knowledge of how to bring the elements into synergy, without requiring
the one guy with all the money to be in charge.
I'd suggest that the knowledge of how to bring the elements into synergy must
be instantiated into the edges of the system, specifically as a web application. "Capitalism" may
connote to some a massive conspiracy of the haves vs. the have nots, but in
fact, it's just the process of alert
people
observing each others' techniques and applying them to emerging opportunities.
It's a
lot like viewing the source of a web page or mimicking an open source data
architecture. It may not seem to be an edge-based system, but that was the
genius of capitalism - spreading resources to the edges instead of leaving
it in the state treasury.
We need a system that instantly rewards productivity because it is biased
to move money from a confident buyer to a proven seller who is capitalized
to respond immediately, as no corporation can. We need to leverage the existing
capital stock that's within 6 feet of you as you read this: broadband, a CPU,
a reasonable chair and a world of ideas, techniques, possibilities and your
wealth of experience.
Gift Withholding Tax
Above all, you, I and every other blogger and bloggee needs to put our gifts
in front of each other, as Flemming suggested in Free
Economy. What is the
cost to society when we withhold what we might freely provide to others? It's
the general tax on our habit of withholding our gifts from each other. What
protocols are required that would motivate us to lighten up, loosen up and
share our talents as freely as do the open source folks?
For starters, we need to register with each other in a kind of economic blogroll.
The blogroll I imagine would describe each of our skills and invite us to deploy
them freely for others' benefit, but with the understanding that, if found
satisfactory, there'd be a reasonable payment made. The blogonomics I imagine
would also cause
each of
us
to publish our transaction details as readily as we already publish our discoveries,
opinions and recommendations.
If blogs are conversations and markets are conversations, aren't blogs markets?
If so, we just need to enhance and standardize those little contribution icons
we're starting to see on some web logs.
Hell, we could even give the new Blogonomy a catchy name. How about "Xpertweb"?
1:54:25 PM 
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