But without a start ... we're finished.

I'm not talking about jobs going away. Or not just that. Because of course they are, and they're going to go faster.

(Just a side note: all those economists and pundits you see or read talking about "recovery"" aren't idiots. They're paid liars. Specifically, they're being paid to keep us cattle headed peaceably down the chutes to our dates with a hook and a sharp knife.)

No. What's going away is the entire concept of jobs, as traditionally thought of and constructed. And what's more, it needs to.

We need a new model to replace the old, dying ways. And I need you to help me figure out what it is. What they are, because one size never fits all. And then put all those new models into action. Soon.

I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Makers. I shouldn't be, evidently; it got me worked up so I had to come try to relieve some of the emotional/mental pressure when I should be sleeping.

(This is why I call this blog Tragic Waste. I need sleep. I have things to do - such as my real writing, which also pays, and more importantly is my avocation. But apparently I need to do this too. It's apparaently a vice I cannot yet control.)

I'm at a point that really set me off - obviously, I guess. I'm not going to go off and try to describe what's happening, here. The point is, either Doctorow or his characters aren't getting it (based on various evidence, I suspect his characters.) They're basically trying to build a decentralized base - with the same old massive hierarchy pyramid still standing on top of it. And that just won't work.

The thing is, centralization is going away. It's breaking down and going away. It's been kept shuffling along for years, a zombified corpse, animated by habit, ignorant and complaisant media, and animated by the awful energy of inflation. And now parts are falling off the thing and it's done.

Hierarchical bureaucracy is breaking down. Partly it's being out-competed by distributed systems of creation. Partly it's an ancient illusion that's coming to pieces before our eyes, like a mirror shattering in slow but accelerating motion.

We're losing centralized authority, centralized power provision, centralized medical care, centralized defense - centralized employment. The Government/Corporate Complex is crashing down. The proprietors are torn between cashing out and heading for their high-tech bunkers and imagining that wizard DARPA technology will miraculously save their wastrel, incompetent fat asses and force the slaves to stay on the plantation.

Your job is going away.

But here's the thing: people will still have needs. Obviously. Food, shelter, water, power, entertainment. People will still have the means to provide those things. Crops will continue to grow whether Archer Daniels Midland tells them to or not. Nails will fasten wood, machine tools will cut metal.

The means of producing wealth - to fill those needs - will continue to exist. What we need to do is start finding our own ways to produce it - to provide for ourselves the only way it's possible: by providing for others. To provide for others the only way that's possible: by providing for ourselves.

Here's the trick: we need to learn to do it without the permission of our employers. Without the paycheck. Without the benefits. Without a boss. To do it for ourselves and one another.

What we need to do is figure out how to make the transition - from the managed, centralized economy to the true marketplace. Like, now.

What I envision is a world of free agents - of independent contractors - artisans, individually and in small groups - producing, exchanging with one another, coming together to cooperate on greater projects, splitting apart to recombine or seek separate paths, ceaselessly, flowingly. Without needing The Pyramid, if you get my drift. Without needing that hierarchy to tell us what to do, how to do it, why we can't change, why we shouldn't be  so selfish as to desire to benefit from the fruits of our labors.

But how do we get there?

The process is going to be organic. It has to be. It cannot be imposed - that's what's breaking apart, that imposed order, like a cement block pierced by a million tiny rootlets. But we need to start cultivating the process. And in a hell of a hurry, yes.

It shouldn't be that hard, should it?

Here's the problem: I don't know how. I've been thinking about it, agonizing over it, off and on for about fifteen years. And I haven't come up with a neat solution yet. Maybe there is no "neat" solution.

But there is a solution. There always is.

Rather, there are myriad solutions. Infinite solutions.

But I can't see them. I remain too limited.

So ... I'm crowdsourcing the problem. Crowdsourcing freedom.  Real freedom: the freedom to live, and choose, and create, and exchange, and share, and grow. What the real economy has always been about.

I believe the real economy - the real free market, not the government and plutocrat-managed shell-game that's been masquerading under the name for a century or more - inevitably will reassert itself. I believe it inevitably is. But we are in for hard times. Soon. If you'd like to survive them, would like your loved ones to survive them, you need to start figuring out what part you can play. And what parts the rest of us can play: it'll be a joint effort.

Please share your ideas. With me. With each other. Then start doing something. Don't just talk or write or make comments on blogs. Do.

Help?

The most effective means of transferring wealth from the productive classes to the plutocrats is inflation. Government is now dealing with the inevitable consequences of long-term inflation. Of course, the only thing they can do about it is what the US is in fact doing: inflate more.

All the bad behavior by Wall Street, the banks, and the other usual suspects was subsidized, hence encouraged, by the US government, whose partners in crime they were. (The US is massively subsidizing such behavior again, under the guise of "stimulus," i.e. direct transfer payments to the rich.)

How much of this is "capitalism" is a matter of semantics. I'm inclined to agree with Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" formulation myself.

The collapse certainly has nothing to do with the markets being "too free." They've been manipulated every step of the way. Meanwhile it was the hard money and real free market types (not the neocons and their conjoined equally-evil twins, the neoliberals, passing off their mercantilism-warmed-over as "free markets) who predicted the meltdown all along.

Mainstream economists, who cheer-led the inflationary bubble and predicted it would expand forever, now tout the Bush/Obama Rich-Only Recovery as "green shoots." One wonders how much of this is innocent stupidity, and how much is paid.

The above is a slightly-edited version of a comment I dropped on John Robb's excellent Global Guerrillas blog. Robb is a most insightful and incisive writer on the continuing collapse of centralization. He really is a good guy, convinced he's doing good work - although he seems sadly unable to recognize that what he's really doing is struggling desperately to preserve centralized power for the ruling class by somehow incorporating decentralization into top-down hierarchy.

Fortunately for us all, that's self-contradictory, and thus can't work for any length of time (indeed in the longer term it hastens the very thing it's intended to forestall.) Unfortunately, by adopting some of his suggestions our rulers could inflict substantial additional harm on us. So it's fortunate they won't listen to him.

Ultimately, Robb makes the same mistake as everyone who uses "we" when they mean the United States: he thinks that means all of us, but it really means those who operate the government for their own private interests. Which is everyone involved in running it.

Postscript: if he's bothered reading any of the several comments I've left on his blog, Mr. Robb probably thinks I'm a total lunatic and dangerous. As a nameless North Vietnamese colonel allegedly said to Colonel Harry Summers, "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant."

That's not the narrative we're taught, of course. Nor what most of us believe. Even "libertarians" and other believers in the real free market tend to accept that progressive taxation is meant to ensure more equal outcomes ... when the truth is the very opposite.

Why? Habit. Time to break it.

The simple singular fact of politics is that anything government does, it does for the primary purpose of increasing the wealth and power of its proprietors. Who, by the way, are never "the people" at large - the very fact democracy is designed to hide.

What "everything" means here is everything. If taxes are raised - and if taxes are lowered. If regulations are imposed - or abolished. All of these actions, apparently contradictory as they are, represent at the most the temporary ascendancy of one or another faction of the ruling class.

More usually, it's a shell game: mountains of paper designed to do nothing but hide business as usual. If it's not meant to cover another ruling class grab at power and wealth.

Here is the Big Truth, that I'll repeat over and over - a million times, if need to - until it actually enters your awareness:

The only purpose of government is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.

Anything else is a lie.

Good one.

Given that what DeLong and Paul Krugman and their fascist troll ilk are peddling - economic "stimulus" and the nonsensical notion that we can spend ourselves rich - is nothing more than a slathering of whore's makeup over history’s greatest known transfer of wealth to the very wealthy. Which wealth, by the way, is going to be ripped off our bodies like skin, through the miracle of hyperinflation.

To be sure, the Republicans clamoring in opposition to the bailout are ethics free hacks. Leaving aside the fact that's a truism - nobody gets elected to national office without being one - let's recognize their stance for the cheap ploy it is. The Republicans know the American people are largely wise to the fact this is all egregious socialism for the rich (a tautology anyway); they're just pandering. Of course they favor the bailout: they're employed by the same people the Democrats are, and that isn't the voters.

And after all, the bailout was one of the final pet projects of George W. Bush.

This is a trick the Democrats have proven adept at: vocally opposing Bush's war against American liberties at home and todo lo mundo abroad - and then voting for every stinking scrap of it, from funding the war waged against Iraq in total opposition to US strategic interests, to the confirmation of whatever torture monkey the Busheviks threw up to be Attorney General. Few were more assiduous at that than the new puppetoon President - whose definition of change, you should be realizing now, means "more of the same, only bigger and harder."

It's possible the Republicans in Congress will make a show of voting against the transfer of wealth to their masters - in full knowledge it'll pass pretty much no matter what they do.

Certainly the Krugmans and DeLongs and all the rest of their choir are fascists - the polite term being Keynesians. The question is, are they idiotic enough to believe what they're saying? One almost hopes they're simply bought.

And that they had the sense to demand to be paid in the traditional silver.

Ethics-free hacks, indeed.

Once upon a time otherwise intelligent (and educated, which isn't the same thing) people apparently believed that statement, uttered decades ago by John Maynard Keynes, among others, in reference to the national debt.

But what does it even mean? On the face of it, isn't it transparent nonsense?  Let's see you borrow $100 from yourself.  Does that mean you suddenly have $200?

Ah, but let me explain how it really works.

I take from you $100.  That shouldn't bother you, because "we" - necessarily including you and I - owe it to "ourselves." Yes?

Now, to pay back that debt, I take from you $100.  Because you and I are still part of "we." And we owed that $100 to ourselves, yes?

So now we're square. The debt has been repaid. Only a greedy bastard could possibly complain. Gitmo for you, Gordon Gekko!

Isn't that simple?

Not convinced?  I give you the "bailout" - the largest single wealth transfer from the proletariat to the wealthy in known human history. In this case, the transaction above works out as $100 (plus a whole lot more) borrowed from you, and repaid to J.P. Morgan.

Which cosmic larceny, of course, is heartily supported by both presidential candidates.