Ignorance is a Sin

Premise A- That, any course of action can be justified, if unknown information is ignored.
IE- Imagine that a foreign nation has been handling the interrogation of prisoners, and because they are effective, you don't ask any questions about how they go about accomplishing the intelligence gathering. Are you different from a country that openly condones the use of torture?

Imagine that you, as president, want a war, so you go to the FBI and ask for one. One month later, a major landmark within your country is destroyed in a terrorist attack. The war begins, and the FBI agents who were tasked with starting it are all awarded promotions. Are you superior to a president who directly orders an attack on a major landmark within your country?


It's easy to imagine scenarios where I can accomplish practically any deed without knowing the cost I paid to accomplish it. Willful avoidance of knowledge can easily dodge any moral question. The issue becomes a little less blatant when knowledge is not as readily acquired, but the principle remains the same.

IE- Should a job be done by the person best capable of accomplishing the job at the highest quality and the lowest cost?
The answer, should be by definition yes. If the answer given was not yes, then the job is being carried out for some purpose other than the completion of the objective of the work. In other words, the stated objective of the work is simply a cover for the true objective of the work, or at the least, there a exists another objective for the work that is not the stated objective.
The stated objective of work should always be the actual and complete objective of the work. This is because concepts can seem correct, until they become preposterous upon being stated. This doesn't mean that the stated objective of work must be public knowledge, only that those who decide to create work must have an understanding of what they are doing and why.

That said, the question posed of who should receive a job has some very interesting implications. First off, there is nothing that gives merit to someone's work outside of his ability to accomplish the work. In other words, the definition of work, is the payment of a price to receive a benefit. A high benefit at a low cost is always the measurement of a job well done. Putting the right people in the right job is thus superior to putting the wrong person in the same position. Any decision of job placement, is a question with the same moral implications as condoning attacks on your own territory, or torturing prisoners. Of course, who is placed in what job isn't an issue faced merely by management or recruiters. Decisions about employment are caused by factors such as direct political pressure, economic legal structure, cultural pressure, generally accepted theories, etc. For the same reasons that torturing someone is not okay based on a lack of knowledge that your actions led to the torture, firing a competent employee is not okay based on a lack of knowledge that you were doing so.

This means that no-one acts in a purely moral manner, because everyone is ignorant of the full implications of his actions. However, some of us are more ignorant than others. This ignorance is thence translated directly into evil action.

People who use the tools available to them to acquire what knowledge they can are superior to those who don't. Information gathering is therefore one of the most central requirements of moral society. In other words, a moral society requires that, as possible, all decisions be made using all available information related to the decision. A society that is better able to accomplish this goal is superior to society that cannot achieve this goal.

This presents two major issues- A method to categorize giant amounts of information such that the person who needs the information, knows that he needs it, and a method of gathering all of the information in the first place. In general, the best system we have come up with, for the purpose of controlling the flow of goods and services, is the price system. Anything that hampers the price system's effectiveness reduces the flow of information pertaining to those fields and is thus evil. It must not be forgotten that information gathering is not society's sole objective, that other objectives can sometimes take precedent. The core objectives of any society is of course, the achievement of desire. All other objectives are fractions of the whole, broken down so as to allow the viewing of issues pertaining to them. With that said, achieving any objective at the cost of another objective at an equal level, will not allow you to move forward. You will only achieve a string of pyrrhic victories.

The price system, as such, must not be distorted. Any action taken to modify the state of the environment must be taken in such a way that information is not lost.

Humans have a habit, of deciding that a certain amount of information is good enough. With this, they assume that any belief that is close enough to correct is equal to any other belief within the same circle. Once people stop considering how a decision should be made, the only relevant issue is that a decision be made. Hence, we place people in authority and treat their decisions as the best and most reasonable regardless of what decisions they make, or how they come to them. As structures of authority grow, the decisions become more distant from its effects, which in turn discards information pertaining to the decision.

The universe exists within the eye of the beholder. As a corollary, the specific nature of a given action can be known only to the actor himself. Forcing someone to take action, therefore discards this information. It cannot be known how much suffering was paid compared to the benefits received from an action unless the actor decides to take action to achieve a benefit. If the actor takes action to avoid another cost, the only known information is that the cost that wasn't paid is higher than the one that was. IE- that X>Y. Given the cost X was artificially created to force the actor into motion, and the benefit was Z there is no way to know whether the decision to pay Y in order to receive Z was the correct decision. In reverse, forcing someone not to receive a benefit also discards information.


This leads once again to the principle of distortion. A government, wherein everyone acts exactly as if the government did not exist, would by definition be an anarchy. By definition, an anarchy has no cost. IE- something that does not exist cannot cost anything. A government that caused no changes besides the creation of opportunity, IE a government that managed somehow, for everyone to do exactly what they would have done, except that the people had access to an infinite amount of electrical power would also be non-distorting. (note: I am not describing a government that subsidizes electricity. The government conjures it out of thin air.) This is because the government is not discarding any form of information.

The price of government is thus, distortion, or information discard. The design of every form of governmental action should thus be, the minimization of distortion and the maximization of results. To achieve this function, a well made law code requires as few forced actions as possible to achieve the same result. At this point it becomes important to focus on what results should be achieved. Specific results tend to be petty and stupid. For instance-
Having a child attend a series of classes and do particular homework.
Such a result has created a value system that determines that good is measured against whether the child goes to class and does homework. This value system is pathetic compared to one that measures whether the child is happy now and in the future.

School, as a concept, must be measured against the results of the schooling. To do so, it requires that the taker of the measurements have some idea of the cost of the schooling and the benefits. It therefore becomes important that the people who are taught must decide that they wish to participate in the classes. Ignoring this, will discard all of the involved information. You cannot assume that a nation is morally sound while discarding all information on the damage done to around a fourth of the nation's population. As a corollary you can assume that nation is immoral, simply because it lacks the ability to make moral decisions. The same can be said of any society in which each of its citizens is expected to partake in a series of premeditated actions before being treated as a source of information. Every separate entity has information unique to itself, by definition, and if that information is ignored it is lost.

Any system that achieves the same results without losing that information is superior. Every decision must be made based on the results of those decisions, and the results must be inferred from basic values. The decision must come at as low a cost as possible with as high a benefit as possible. Costs cannot be ignored, and results cannot be inferred to exist just because we want them. Everything about a moral society must be decided based on careful and complete measurement of the applicable variables.

Culture and Morality

Scenario A- You have sure knowledge of a bio weapon system that is going to be deployed on your home town a day from now. The weapon system shows no signs of its existence from the day it is deployed (tomorrow) until 10 days have passed. After the 10 days are up, anyone who has been within 30 miles of the site at which the bio weapon was used during the period of 10 days, regardless of the length of time, will die. You have no usable evidence to support your claims, and attempts warn the public are futile at best. However, there is a female who you are fond of and you would like to ensure her survival. Knowing her, convincing her to leave the city is futile. As such, the only way to save her is to abduct her, and keep her prisoner for 10 days.

Condoning the course of action described requires an admittance that rights exist to protect ideals, and that beliefs are morally neutral. In other words, a harmonious course of action is selected not based on what two individuals agree to, but is selected by choosing the optimal path within the set activities that would be condoned by both parties from the vantage point of knowledgeable observers looking back on the course of events.

Scenario B- The Earth is currently populated by a transcendent race of humanity. Unfortunately, humanity is still haunted by its past, which includes the mass scale use of super weapons, and is going to go extinct. Every day the amount of usable land remaining on earth shrinks as ecophage populations rise, and at this point civilization is no longer in a state wherein a solution can be reached before the entire Earth is converted into radioactive wastes, unapproachable even by super humans. However, as all hope seems to be lost, a meteor formed of exotic elements falls upon the Earth- elements that enable the creation of a spaceship and terraforming platform. However, the people who own the land upon which the meteor fell are early generation transcendentals, who were designed on a different basis than the later generations. These people believe that the only meaningful activities are things such as farming, or scientific research for the sake of improved tools. They look down on activities such as watching movies or playing games. Because of their culture, reproductive rates are incredible and whenever any one's earnings rise high enough that he can support another person he multiplies. It can be stated that if events are allowed to unfold without interference, the people who escape the Earth will slowly devolve themselves into machines, and will eventually consume the entire universe without any feeling left within them. In order to reach a future wherein people can go to the stars and seek more ephemeral realities, wherein people take action so as to laugh and cry rather than merely to exist, in order for life to continue being alive for more than a few generations- it is necessary to eliminate the first users of the meteor and claim it for the purposes of your superior group. Let's even add that your group has been pushed by the ecophages so hard that the only way for your group to reach the stars, is to wait for the group that originally got the meteor to build a spaceship for their own use, and then kill them in a surprise attack at the last possible moment.

Condoning the course of action described requires an admittance that morality is based on creating value, that a course of action is decided upon based on what the results of the actions are.

Scenario C- If your neighbor were to die, you would obtain his property by contractual agreement. You have learned of a ritual, that, if performed would enrage your neighbor to the point that he would come charging into your house with an ax and would then try to kill you. There is no conceivable reason why you would perform the ritual except so as to enrage your neighbor, nor is your neighbor different from other people in any other way except for his irrational hatred of this particular ritual. If you were to perform the ritual, you could easily shoot your neighbor when he broke in your door, and everybody would consider it self defense, and you would in turn obtain his property.

Rejecting this course of action requires an admittance that a course of actions can be viewed in terms of the results of the initiation of action, or, that a plan is judged from the difference in the universe between when the plan is initiated and completed. In other words, taking specific action in order to make someone try to kill you, and then killing him, is equivalent to using a perfect scheme in which you kill someone and then make it look like it was self defense. You start with an above average person who doesn't drive drunk or vote for communist governors, and who's slight flaws are obscure enough to make him less dangerous than anyone who has driven a car while not being sober- and you convert this person into a corpse, thus causing the world to have a higher proportion of below average people compared to those above the average, and instilling a certain amount of fear in the world. It's just theft and murder, and the initiation of violence was done by the same party in either version.

As such, violence cannot be constrained to such a simple heading as the redistribution of resources without consent, nor is it possible to build a working moral framework simply by maintaining the ownership of property. The moral use of resources must achieve a series of objectives, including-
A- The resources must, as best as is possible, be used to create idealized worlds.
B- There exists ideals that are superior to the ideals of others. The idealized world that must be created should be in accordance with what is truly valuable.
C- The framework of resource distribution must judge people by the purpose of their actions and by the correlation between the actor's beliefs, and reality.

Given this, the definition of violence which holds violence as a set of activities that in the eye of an observer, moves the world toward a less ideal state functions. A definition wherein violence is limited to actions that redistribute resources from their owner, as decided by first user or by consent of transfer, fails, at such a time as an action that requires a reaction, is the origin of the reaction. Since people are obligated to take actions that can include use of lethal force in order to protect their ideals, taking any hostile action against someone's ideal is equivalent to creating the required reaction yourself.

The fact that the creation of violence is evil is valid. More specifically, the more effort that is spent trying to destroy other humans, the weaker humanity becomes overall. A perfect human race would act in a completely harmonious manner. By not acting in such a manner, it is proven that humanity is not perfect. By definition, an imperfect existence does not act in a completely moral manner. It is because of our imperfection, that we must act in a violent manner, even though we would prefer to exist in a world wherein there was no violence. Or, put another way, in a world wherein nobody believed that anybody was actively reducing the value of the world, it is highly probable that the value of the world is not being reduced. In reverse, in a world wherein people believe that the people around them are reducing the value of the world, there is a high probability that the value of the world is being reduced.

Nonetheless, violence is itself merely a symptom of problems existing at yet lower levels. When a patient is burning from fever the doctor does not throw him in a lake- he tries to reduce the temperature by addressing the underlying problems. A philosopher who simply states that a disease would not exist if the symptoms were not present is being both cowardly and lazy. It is impossible to eliminate violence by opposing violence, just as it is impossible to eliminate a waterfall by placing obstacles in the path of the falling water.

In order to create the idealized world, what we need are not groundless rituals and rules, nor strings of connotation that allow us to skirt subjects we find unsavory. Morality in itself does not imply any rules, nor does it answer what we should or should not do. Morality exists in order to judge value- in order to state that X is better than Y and that Y is inferior to X. Assuming that a grasp of morality would allow you to construct a moral society is like assuming that a grasp of physics would allow you to describe the properties of meitnerium as if you knew it as well as you did iron. It's just arrogance. Morality exists to give us measurements. Physics cannot tell us the ideal alloy with which to build a bridge. It can, however, give us measurements that prove that some new alloy is better than the one we're currently using. The organization of society should be treated similarly, with multiple experiments running at all times, and with a recollection of what models have been attempted, and what they did. As such this insinuates a methodology through which societies branch off into multiple diverse groups which are then measured against each-other, with the most valuable societies being used as a basis for the creation of the next generation of societies.

Fortunately, nature has, so far, been favorable. Morally well designed societies have, throughout history, fostered superior understanding of technology. Dissenters within these societies have periodically used these technologies to populate new frontiers before the dissenters within inferior societies were able to reach them. However, this process, being natural and not artificial is fragile, in that is based only upon the particulars of the environment. IE- there exists no reason to ensure that the process described will function on an indefinite basis. Since it has worked so far, and there exists no pressing reason to alter it, it becomes reasonable to ensure the process continues to function through artificial means. This means using methods that nullify the most visible threats.

These scenarios would cause a breakdown of the natural process-
If frontiers could be populated by inferior societies.
If existing societies could expand into frontiers at a rate equal to the speed at which the frontiers were opened up.

The technological prowess needed to enter new frontiers will for the foreseeable future be exclusive to valuable societies. However, the use of these technologies may, over time, become available to inferior societies, allowing dissenters to populate their newly claimed territories using the residents of less moral societies, which would inevitably start using the newly claimed land for their own ends as the land was terraformed into forms that require less technological prowess for minimal use. This scenario has been seen in the past, with societies importing large quantities of slaves into frontier land, but has not generated catastrophic results so far due to logistical issues. However, if a single American colony on Mars could support many times its numbers in Chinese, we could eventually reach a universe wherein the majority of humans lived under tyranny for the convenience of a few groups that were similar to a morally sound society, but supported the continued existence of the tyrannies by providing the necessary body of scientific data and economic calculations to maintain civilization.

America had to fight a war with Britain in order to populate its frontiers. In theory, as technology improves, transportation becomes easier and geographic barriers both to force and to communication break down. It may be that the moon will have to fight a war for its independence. Or worse, that such a war could not be won, and as such, it would be impossible to continue to use frontiers as locations upon which radical and unpopular beliefs could be implemented. The reason the Protestants were able to participate in activities that the rest of Europe saw as unsavory and wrong was distance. However, what used to be a powerful barrier requiring months to overcome can now be crossed in a matter of hours. If future frontiers are opened not by a difficult journey, but by the removal of the barriers to that journey, then the people who are supportive of the majority views of society no longer have any incentive to not colonize. This in turn cuts down on mutation rates, and thus stops evolution.

As such, neither a peaceful tolerance of evil, nor an acceptance of empire is acceptable. It is not possible to conquer all those you hold as evil without creating an empire. As such, the alternative is simple- to obtain resources for superior societies and deny them to inferior societies. Trade is rational, in that at the end of any trade, both parties are superior to how they used to be, but when an inferior society lays first claim to a resource, the inferior society grows to encompass that resource, which in turns reduces the average quality of societies. This is why it is necessary to build nations- and why it is necessary for those nations to have borders.

Distinct nations allow for the existence of distinct societies, which in turn allows us to have measurements on the results produced by the societies. Fundamental alteration of currently active nations is not necessary. In fact, since the fundamental alteration of a nation by its nature, requires the replacement of one existing framework by another existing framework, it almost always consists of the conversion of one nation into another nation, in other words, expansion of nations through unscientific means. The goals of political activity then, is just to allow the fundamental precepts of a culture to express themselves. This does not exclude the possibility of reconstruction of governments, or other such possibilities- after all modern cultures are written in polymorphic code, and the top levels must adapt to match the lower levels. What it does mean is that a government should be consistent with the culture underneath it, and the actions on top should be taken with regards to the foundation underneath.

Law and Violence

An economist is to an economy what a physicist is to a Large Hadron Collider. The economy is a tool, a set of devices used to measure a set of objects. Now, in one sense the economy is an illusion- a non-existent structure layered above the world but not part of it, similar to math. However, it must be noted, that all things that exist are, by definition, real- and thus have some sort of reality that exists within this world. Although the vast majority of economic activity doesn't actually exist (or to put it in another sense, exists only when measured, and is in fact data about the world above that is retrieved by measuring the parts of the economy that do exist and extrapolating from there.) it is implied within the frame of what does exist.

Most of the physical basis for the economy is built using spontaneous donations of brain based cpu cycles. This is how the economy can perform extremely complicated calculations, and come up with advanced information without breaking the second law of thermodynamics. However, spontaneous events don't normally just happen in succession in a particular direction, by definition. In order to create spontaneous direction, there are two requirements- the first is Brownian motion, easily satisfied using the human brain, an extremely complicated object that essentially functions as a giant magnifying glass that picks up on low level chaotic activity and aligns large scale structured activity with the generated random seed data. The second requirement is a way to insure that travel in one direction is possible, while travel in the other direction is not. For nano particles, a moving magnetic field can achieve this task. For humans, we use law.

So, the physical basis of humans and their brains is easily identified. Since all known methods of intelligence are chaos based, economics should work fine with most alien species as well. However, law is, in general, yet another virtual construct, so must also be broken down into a physical basis.

Law is not government- it can exist in anarchy. Government is a tool designed to organize violence. Imagine an anarchist society wherein it is illegal for women to wear clothes more revealing than burqas. (IE, women seen outside without burqas will be spontaneously stoned.) One day someone decides that the burqa law is stupid- ideally he will simply stop enforcing it, but it may be that his peers will think badly of him if he doesn't participate in the stonings. Due to its lack of free speech, and inability to accept political activism, the majority of this anarchy's people could oppose the law, and yet the law could still stand unquestioned. With a government, it would be possible to support your positions without taking personal risk, through having intermediaries take the risk onto themselves. In a sense, this is the main purpose of government, to act as a figure head, that officially does everything, so that humans can go about their lives without directly taking hostile action against their neighbors. The important facts following from this, are thus- that law is a consequence of human action and/or inaction, and that government is simply a result of underlying forces. Law is not generated through such a simplistic mechanism as the edicts of one person. Rather, a policeman is able to arrest a thief because people have already classified the policeman and the thief into two different groups. If people did not recognize the authenticity of the police force, the entire organization would collapse within a day. In other words, the physical basis of government is the recognition granted it by its people.

Although all governments are, in essence, the same, the particulars vary widely. The main difference from one government to the next, is the level of recognition supplied to the government. If no recognition is given to the government, then law enforcement, and creation, is totally distributed. As such, law avoidance, and elimination, is also totally distributed. Therefore, violence is totally distributed. The distribution of violence has some major ramifications. For instance, the target of violence is known ahead of time if violence is not distributed. If we have a police force, we know that most shoot outs with law enforcement will involve that force. This doesn't give us much advantage in terms of defeating the criminals- however, it means that the criminals will have to use either a focused power surge that overwhelms deploy-able forces (thus avoiding direct combat due to the results of combat being obvious.) or to sufficiently obscure their actions so as to not be detectable, once more avoiding direct combat. If we have a military, a revolution can end when that military is defeated, so entire cities don't actually have to fight it out in bloodbaths in the streets in order to determine a winner. The military is about as hard to defeat as all the people who support it, (after all, it's just a conglomeration of donations from its supporters.) but destroying it doesn't even kill everyone inside of it. Another important angle is that the government supplies people with a tool with which to do violence. Say some super genius hates nuclear power plants- in an anarchy, he would have to go on a rampage in order to leverage his vast fortunes into usable political power. However, in a democracy he can just become a special interests lobby and ban nuclear power plants in a manner that causes no collateral damage. Violence is much more limited if it is only used to accomplish the goals which the source set out to accomplish, so it is best to keep all violent activity organized. Government is designed to accomplish this feat, by creating targets for militaries to attack, political power accessible to the unscrupulous, and incentives to keep criminals focused on their core objective and avoid causing extraneous damage when they partake in crime.

The other end of the governmental spectrum is a fully recognized government, or one in which all activity is government approved. Now, since we already know that all government is violence, and that all benefits of government emerge from the replacement of certain violent activities with other violent activities, we can instantly see that a fully recognized government can only exist in a fully violent society, and the blatant absurdity of this system stands out. Of course, such a society could exist, and even be profitable as part of a larger world that included less recognized governments (imagine an army-state that acted as mercenaries and was paid by the major powers to prevent military invasions of foreign territory. It could be that such a state could act in lieu of the major states' militaries, and by acting as a deterrent, cause the more ruthless nation states to avoid starting an arms race, causing one standing military to exist, rather than requiring the maintenance of several.) However, as a basis for civilization as a whole, violence is not viable.

So how much recognition should we give our governments? The answer is, this scales to how violent we wish to be. And so, it becomes important to actually explore just what violence is- Violence is the set of all activities that decrease the total value of the universe, from the perspective of any existing viewer. Looking at it this way it at first seems impossible to partake in non-violent activities. Technically, it IS impossible to partake in non-violent activity, but we can change degrees of violence- ie we can reduce the overlay between existing activity and violent activity. This can be accomplished in two manners. The first is obvious- achieve desired ends using methods that involve less violence. If it is equally difficult for a person to get his food by raising it himself or by stealing it, society can easily convince him to raise it himself, which causes overall civilization to flourish. The second method is to aggregate activities. For instance, imagine a person who wants bread, and has an infinite supply of fish. He is a master of misdirection and disguise, so from his perspective stealing bread is free. If he is completely selfish we can expect him to steal bread- but if we look at the situation closely we realize that having an infinite supply of fish, he can still act in a completely selfish manner while leaving fish to replace all the bread he steals. Now, he can achieve the same goals, but does so in a much less violent manner.

Most people would quickly claim that they would support a completely non-violent society. Since we already know that this is absurd, the second level we can jump to is a minimally violent society. This makes a lot more sense but introduces an extremely complicated word into the mix- "minimally" doesn't actually mean anything on its own. The best answer is that we want to be violent enough that our values succeed and flourish. We are not willing to allow others to stand in a position of violence to our core principles, and must be violent to the extent necessary to eliminate such groups. Since the world is composed entirely of accidents, inevitabilities, and the things people do, the course of history is fatalistic. As such, it is a natural objective to create a framework through which people can take action, and then discover the results of their actions. In other words, a framework wherein depending on the nature of undiscovered accidents or misunderstood inevitabilities, the probability of victory or defeat will not be hampered, but, regardless of who wins or loses, at the point at which that data becomes accessible, to a maximum extent, all the things that people do should result in support for the winner. Thus the ideal violent activity is the collection of power. As large a percent of violence as possible should be used to become more powerful.

In turn, this means that we need to avoid people committing violence to become more secure, given that the difficulty of the objectives are equivalent. (note that if someone profits from a method of violence in a manner that lacks a nearly equal opportunity cost, it is by nature impossible for society to stop him from using that method. Society is not godlike, it is only capable of creating a minor weight formed from sanction that can be added where chosen. The extreme impact of society emerges based on the fact that the majority of objectives can be approached by a near infinite amount of angles, a multitude of which will be nearly equal in cost.) Security, by its nature, forces results into the present. IE, security causes the accidents and inevitabilities of the future to occur all at once. This means the loser cannot be phased out- he will necessarily have to be blotted out in a bloody war. Therefore, in an ideal society, the members will peaceably coexist regardless of how opposite their viewpoints, and engage each-other on a battlefield composed of geometric effects such as arguments and reproduction, while building up a wealth of capital that can be exploited both by the current generation and by those deep in the future.

However, we are not in an ideal society, and our government must not just account for how violent we wish to be, but also for how violent idiots who can't understand what we're telling them want to be. Although our instincts may make us want to just smash such groups, the fact of the matter is that that would be trying to advance our agenda through becoming more secure. Of course, if they insist on acting in such a manner that we cannot ignore them (for instance, by trying to secure their values by shutting down research into fields that scare them, but that we find necessary.) we must take direct action- but failing that, we need to integrate them into some sort of system. Fortunately, after we step back a bit, we realize that people are, on the whole, very congenial towards focusing on power, and can normally be discouraged from the opposite with relative ease.

This is because of law. The physical basis for law is a set of mental routines within the brain's source code. Namely, the brain includes two important functions- Save and load. The brain saves data about its circumstances and environment, keeping track of its current state and its past state. When the current state falls below any given past state, the brain automatically activates its load routines. The load routines are a set of calculations that describe the inevitabilities required reach the previous state, which are then used so as to take the actions required if those inevitabilities exist. These routines serve as the magnetic field that sits eternally just behind civilization, transferring heat into information. Through such a simple program, as long as sufficient energy in inserted, indefinite amounts of information can be created from the energy. As such, law is a compilation of information that exists due to a incredibly vast sea of calculations using Brownian logic gates, that cannot dissipate, because every time it weakens, we load to a state wherein it was stronger. So why is it that law is always good? The answer is simple- by definition. Law is the sum total of the calculations we performed moving from lower states to higher states.
Due to the benefits conferred in a society wherein people build up large sums of wealth in order to accomplish their purposes, our calculations repeatedly advance such a society, and thus, said society is naturally accepted over time.

In sum, government should expand until it has achieved a maximum amount of conflict resolution and no further. So, that said, what are some practical implications thereof? First off, if there is no conflict, then there is no need for government intervention. This immediately debases all attempts to improve the overall economy through governmental economic activity. It also debases all hostile activity deployed against foreign nations that does not address hostilities existing within those nations. Furthermore, given equal opportunity costs, and giving preference to power, we also know that it is better to become stronger than to prevent foreigners from becoming stronger. This becomes an even easier decision when we realize that hostilities between any two factions gives a relative advantage to all third parties, so if there are any enemies not targeted by your hostilities, you may well be putting yourself in a worse position than you started in, even after a complete and easy victory. It's also unnecessary to ensure that people properly seek their own self interest. This is because people will advance their values naturally, so the very idea of internal conflict is silly. Understand that advancing one's values isn't just about succeeding in life, or becoming rich, or any other such nonsense. All it requires is that your inherent nature align with morality. As an extension, any activity that includes only members that support the activity need not be meddled with. In general, the negative implications of the nature of government, are that governments should not expand violence into fields that would otherwise have been non-violent.

So what are some violent activities that government should be in control of? The most obvious examples are things like regulating the activities of thieves, lobbyists, rapists, lawyers, politicians, and murderers. However, the secret, and most important field of regulation is known as homesteading, which is the act of seizing resources that are not currently owned and causing them to be owned. IE, of turning unclaimed resources into claimed resources. This is very much an inherently violent act. Where once there was oil in the ground that anyone could partake of freely, now there are guns that will shoot you if you seek to make use of the oil. Method A (avoiding violent activities) is not a viable solution to this act of violence (for the obvious reason that simply leaving the oil in the ground is blatantly idiotic.) As such, Method B (combining the violence with an opposite activity that causes the overall action to be non-violent) is the best approach. One important method of achieving Method B is simple- taxes. However, another method is to limit the group of people eligible for the benefits of the homesteading to a set of people who will have the lowest overall levels of violence. In other words, to have a group of people who have expanded rights and entitlements which distributes the country's natural wealth to them- and perhaps a special title to go with these privileges. (This special title being citizen.) However, since the special privileged class is now strictly superior to their unprivileged rivals, it becomes reasonable to ensure that your country is composed with as large a percentage of special privileged class as possible (current experiments indicate a percentage of 100% is the maximum, not including tourists and temporary occupants located for non-resource base related purposes (such as studying in a more centralized college)) In other words, all immigrants seek to undermine our ability to generate power, in order to expand their own power. Since we are better aligned with our values than foreigners, we would prefer that we have a greater portion of this world's available wealth. It is a natural and reasonable violent activity to homestead as much as possible, and to prefer power for ourselves over power held by neighbors. After all, we ARE in a violent conflict over the end nature of life, the universe, and everything- the war may be engaged using economics and literature, but the conflict is very real and the stakes are huge. Securing ourselves against others claiming resources is a malinvestment, but becoming more powerful individually, even if the total power level of humanity is hampered as an opportunity cost, (note that, in reality, security IS good. It's just not how law is promoted, not how economics functions and not what government should focus on. As such increasing our relative power (even if we don't increase our absolute power) is actually a good thing, in so far as other humans are the greatest threats to our values.) is perfectly reasonable.

Another important role of government is this, that at times, a natural end loser of history will become inevitable given that the loser does not take action to prevent this. In general this action will consist of immediate hostilities against another group (note that such hostilities don't have to be riots, or warfare. Much more likely, it will consist of villainization, lobbying and other "acceptable" but no less dangerous, attacks.), generally a group that will, even if it "wins" the conflict, also become an inevitable loser at the end of the conflict, due to the competitive advantage attained by third parties. Thus it is up to government to insure that nature doesn't take its course, and to insure that nobody loses without having a fair capacity to make his arguments and collect resources. In other words, government must insure that all major factions capable of enacting violence on those that the government services are as best as possible, discouraged from doing so. Redistributing resources from the group that will be attacked, to the group that would implement the attack, is not just doing a favor to the faction that the wealth is given to. It also serves the faction that the wealth is taken away from. To understand, imagine a game of Risk. One of the players has conquered all of Asia, and, if ignored he will obviously win. Ordinarily the players on his borders would all instantly attack him, suffering major losses to themselves, but obliterating the Asian player. In turn the player not involved (South America) would have a huge advantage and probably turn out as the winner of the game. As the position stands, the Asian player will definitely lose, and everyone but the South American player is at a major disadvantage. However, if the Asian player is trustworthy and is allowed to talk, he might be able to salvage his position, say by agreeing to engage in unreasonable battles every turn, chosen in such a manner that his strength doesn't grow faster than anyone else and no-one profits or is hurt from his actions in a relative sense. Now the board is rebalanced such that everyone has an about equal shot at winning again. Besides South America, everyone is better off. (Note that the reason we, in a utilitarian sense, desire to stall the final battle, is that wealth naturally expands itself. By their nature, apocalypses are expensive, so when armageddon occurs, we lose all the future capital we would have gotten by investing the wealth that ends up consumed in fire and ice. Needless to say, with higher technology and a more advanced civilization, it will be easier to clean up the seas that have turned to blood, and to replace any moons that end up being devoured.)
An easy way to accomplish this is to make enough resources available that victory is still possible even under most worst case scenarios. That way, no matter how badly off a group is, it has food, knowledge and communications, so it can still build better arguments for its positions, which may in turn allow it to win in the far future, when present environments have shifted, and the keys to wealth production have changed hands.

Finally, I should address some common counter arguments, that actually counter the wrong premises and thus aren't actually related to the argument-

A- The free market is by definition a set of calculations done using unviolent methods. The vast majority (if not all) of big businesses are connected to the government. Microsoft makes its vast fortunes by exploiting copyright laws. (Yes, creating something that only has value because it is standardized, then using the standardization in order to level a tax on all computers used for standard activities is MOST DEFINITELY an exploit. A standard was inevitable from the start, Microsoft only produces wealth in so far as it gives us a high quality standard in an early timeframe. That's not saying that Microsoft doesn't give us anything (Windows 7 is actually a very good product) but that by siphoning too much of the economy to Microsoft, we have malinvested too heavily into creating good operating systems, paying an invisible opportunity cost distributed across all other fields.) The free market has already tried to kill GM several times. Practically all banks receive regular doses of free government cash... the list goes on, but in short, the road to being a big business is almost always through leveraging government support.

B- America's government meddles in medicine MORE than most of the rest of the 1st world. Our spending is slighty above average, our regulations on who can be a doctor, who can run a hospital, etc. is highly above average, and our regulations involving what you can and cannot sell is WAY above average (the FDA is famously one of THE hardest governmental regulatory agencies to get drugs and operational methods through. European countries often have had life saving drugs with no drawbacks for ten years before those drugs are legal in America. In turn, this forces American hospitals to give patients either riskier or more expensive treatment.) The entire debate over whether we should provide socialist or capitalist medical treatment is bogus, much like the rest of the Republican party.

Anarchy

What defines an anarchy? It could be called an environment in which all rights are granted. When people think of such a list of rights, they normally notice immediately such rights as the right to murder or steal, however, these are not actually threats to anarchy and are balanced by the right to self defense and the right to vengeance. The one right that particularly threatens anarchy on a fundamental basis, is the right to form a government, and thus, the right to restrict rights. As such, an environment in which all people have all rights, is, by its nature a low entropy state.

So, how else can one define an anarchy? The other definition that comes up is simpler: any populace lacking a government. It is theoretically possible, that such a populace could be raised with principles designed to protect themselves and their anarchy. Thieves could be dealt with more easily without trials and courts to protect them, and murderers would be kept in line by the heavily armed population. Giant armies would emerge from out of the population to strike down threatening governments whether foreign or domestic. Such a society could generate law without government, and maintain all the trappings of civilization. However, looking at such a society one must realize that it's just a system, albeit a weird one. In such an anarchy, it is possible that anyone who doesn't conform to societal norms will be killed on the spot, or that giant witch hunts will be undertaken by a paranoid populace. IE, an anarchy CAN BE a tyranny. Most governments, (or any other system of organization of a populace.) try to justify themselves with some form of divine righteousness. Once you realize that an anarchy can be tailored to build any societal model, it becomes a system like any other, acceptable only upon the merits of its abilities.

So, given that you make an anarchy, what is different from another government, the same in respects separate from systematical factors? First off, in an anarchy, activities must be popular- basically, passing a "bill" in an anarchy, is equivalent to passing a constitutional amendment in a democracy. Such changes to "law" would have no official ceremony- the nation would just evolve over time. What's most important here is- war. An anarchy would be capable of starting a war, only after a rather extreme event managed to raise extreme support. The nature of this event, is, dynamic, in that it depends on what the populace thinks of as an act of war. In this way, anarchy resembles democracy, but requires generally bigger events than an equivalent democracy. However, just starting a war isn't enough in anarchy. After all, in an anarchy, the army can, literally, just pack up and leave at any time. As such, for an anarchy to engage in war, the war must be popular throughout. This leads to a fork in how an anarchy operates-
In a military anarchy, an army would always exist, and invading and conquering foreign nations would be seen as the norm. Alternatively the anarchy could form a army only when invaded, defending itself from foreigners but rarely fighting frivolously. In-between systems are too complicated, and thus, difficult to manage in an anarchy.

One should not make the mistake that an anarchy would not have leaders. In any system, certain people stand out, and are listened to. While anarchist leaders would not dare judge criminals directly, or issue ultimatums (for fear of a anti-government crowd labeling them a start up government, and executing them on the spot.) national policy would be very dependent on these people. Given that there is no system of turnover, it is likely that these people would be very established, and would wield their power for life (though many would fade in and out of the spotlight in the flow of time.)

To maintain an anarchy, certain factors are necessary, chief amongst them- homogeneity. Amongst multiple cultures, a clash is inevitable, as well as a power struggle. This power struggle is almost certain to include a government. Therefore, either the anarchists must ethnic cleanse the opposition, or the nation ceases to be an anarchy. What is most interesting, is that an anarchy must thence have strict border control, especially assuming its neighbors are all living under, and supporters of, governments. Even anarchist neighbors could be living under a vastly different anarchy, and would therefore, start enforcing vastly different laws. Given that in an anarchy just living in the country makes you a full citizen capable of taking the laws into your own hand, it is imperative that immigration be controlled, lest your country dissipate.

Evolution and Desire

What does a rock desire? What is it thinking? A standard answer to this would be to say "nothing". That it is simply a physical manifestation of the laws governing our environment. However, a rock is, in fact, the end result of incredibly complicated interactions, the very ability to sit still becomes incredible when one looks at quark physics. And yet it is so- that small underlying probabilities on a low level lead to stable realities on upper levels. In this manner rocks are identical to humans- that it is a manifestation of an underlying yearning, that SOMETHING WANTED SOMETHING. To declare anything else requires an arbitrary line, wherein at one point something is alive and thinking but at an arbitrarily similar point it isn't. Like trying to draw lines with RNA on one side and viruses on the other. The very definitions of thought and life only work as properties, similar to heat or velocity. An absolute zero life reality would have to have zero information content.

That said, humans are obviously more alive than rocks are. So are algae and spaghetti. The question then arises as to what delineates higher levels of life from lower levels of life. A standard snap reply would be "intellect". A somewhat more advanced reply would be "morality". Since we are currently just playing games with the English language (which, like math, is not actually the basis of the universe around us, no matter how much we wish it were.) both answers are correct, as is any other answer. However, amongst those correct answers there is one that I would point out as a very interesting angle from which to view the world- "desire". While quarks have hardly any desires and just run around as they please, electrons insist on finding protons. DNA wishes to reproduce, which is far beyond simple magnetism, whilst fungi wish to grow. The definition is fully scalable and works for any interaction. What makes a human more alive than a cow? The fact that the human wants to build houses, share experiences and make inventions, while the cow just wants eat grass and lay down facing power lines. If the cattle just had the desire to improve their environment they could be human. This works for IQ as well- in that a stupid thug merely wants his next fix, whereas if he wanted to carefully annotate the exact actions of a slowly titrated chemical he would in fact BE a brilliant scientist. Note China, who had gunpowder, all the IQ they could ask for, but just didn't WANT to shoot anybody. It was lack of lifeforce, not calculation capacity that held them back. While it might be argued that the Chinese really DID want to shoot people but just didn't think of it, this argument doesn't work, once we realize that monkeys and mocking birds want to imitate the actions of those around them, but do not have any higher desires. The desire to replicate the actions of others is not equivalent to a desire to take independent action.

IE- to be a higher life form, all that is necessary is to desire the correct things. However, by applying previous knowledge of the definitions leading here, desires are not customizable (IE a thug really can't just want to goto college and memorize the periodic table.) and have a physical basis. The more interesting implications don't revolve around how to reach a level of life but in what a higher level of life IS. We note already the line of desire from a quark to a human, but it is important to note the trends inherent in these goals- That a quark, desiring to be in its correct triplet has an infinitely easier objective than any human objective- IE a more obtainable objective. Whilst our objectives are complicated and hard to achieve, a quark can just teleport to its objective. Rocks have a far higher chance of sitting still than DNA does of replicating, and a cow is more likely to eat the grass in front of it than the chance that a human will put a house on that grass. IE, the goals of higher lifeforms are perpetually less realistic than those of lower lifeforms. In fact, they are not only more difficult, but due to growing pattern overlaps, the goals of higher lifeforms steadily become mutually exclusive. Whilst the rocks can live in perfect harmony, humans must always be in conflict, whether through war, or through various advertisements drawing customers away from one product and to another.

If we move on to yet higher lifeforms, we find angels and demons, beings aspiring to ultimate power. (Demons through force-ably integrating all reality with their objective, and angels through convincing all reality to integrate. Either way the end result is the same.) So what happens if one such being achieves its objective and becomes omnipotent? It must then become a god. For that is the driving force of evolution, that once a lifeform has achieved its desire in fullness, the next frame MUST include a higher lifeform. This is because, the universe is information. It is a slide-show OF information. In order to change slides, the information contained MUST change. The next slide IS the difference in information. There are of course two other possibilities, ones that always exist- A- the projector is turned off, and the slide-show ends and B- a new slidereel is loaded, and the show is fundamentally changed.

However, our show is evolution, and our next slide will always contain a higher lifeform. So then, what does a god desire? What does the demon who has slain all opposition now want? What does the angel who has rallied all desire to one point want? The answer relates to the same thing that every form of life has always attempted- to replicate. A god however, being omnipotent, cannot simply create another god. Why? Because, being omnipotent, everything within the universe is simply an extension of himself. Creating an exact copy of himself would merely cause him to become more massive. To create a new god, it becomes necessary to reproduce not only the form, but the core nature that IS a god, IE the quality of understanding that the god has obtained- but this understanding must be formed entirely independently of the god's original experience, lest reproduction falter, and the infant be rendered simply an additional limb. It is therefore a god's duty, nay, nature, to create a new universe. Any lesser desire, and the supposed god is instead just a extremely powerful demon. What lies beyond godhood then? Is evolution an indefinite progression?

Logic and Facts

To establish the truth, there are 3 essential steps. First- is the argument logically valid? This can be broken down into the questions of- Are the premises required contradictory?
(note that a contradictory statement is not invalid- it is meaningless. If (contradiction) then Y is ALWAYS true. It is, as such, incapable of providing input. IE, a test that always comes up positive is no better than simply declaring the statement true without any measurement. IE in any designation of C->Y is equivalent to 0=0. This principle ignores scale- it's like multiplying a final product by 0, all information is lost if any link is invalid. It should be noted, that autorepair routines are a valuable asset, in that YOU can yourself, fix a target argument such that it becomes a valid argument. Even the best scientists often make mistakes especially in long and convoluted math. Sometimes these mistakes are easily fixed, and the argument does not need to be sent back to its source for maintenance.)

Are all statement transformations done such that they lead to equivalent results?
(IE, take the statements of X->Y and ~X (not X)->~Y. These are NOT equivalent. IE, assume X is true if the tested variable is a hawk, and Y is true if the variable is a bird. In all cases wherein X is true, so is Y. However, a dove is not a hawk, but it is a bird. Any argument wherein we start with the premise of X->Y and derive a statement such as ~X->~Y is logically invalid. This is, once again, due to the fact that given any derivative from which the original truth table is changed, I can obtain any result from any premise. As such, the truth of the premises has no relation to the truth of the final statement.)

Once these routines are complete the second step is- Is the statement mathematically valid?
This is when outside information is first factored into the issue. Each premise is measured against additional known information. The validity of the premises is based on how much outside information would have to be rendered false for the the premise to be declared true, vs how much outside information would have to be rendered false for the premise to be declared false. A strength level is assigned to each premise. Note the difference between a premise and a variable. IE "If cattle exist the so does the sun god." is a premise. The existence of cattle and the existence of the sun god are both variables. The RELATION is the premise. Since there are many scenarios that include cattle but not a sun god, I can call this premise into question. It should be noted, that it is impossible to render such a premise impossible (any such design would already be logically invalid.) but it is possible to assign probabilities to each premise. As some premises drop below a certain threshold I can furthermore declare the effort involved with further exploration to be not worth the benefits derived thereof, thus setting a virtual 0 to the premises strength.

Finally, the issue turns to the variables themselves. It should be noted that in many arguments, rendering one or more variables false will not destroy the argument. For instance- X or Y->Z. Even if Y is false Z (the variable I care most about) is still true, given that X is true. That said, it becomes necessary to, with a similar approach as before, judge the strength of each variable. It can be stated that the probability that Z is proven (be careful not to dismiss Z just because a false proof is given. IE "given that oil continues to be used to generate electricity, then we will be nuked. Oil will continue to be used to generate electricity, so we must prepare for a nuclear attack with a nuclear defense shield." Note that the starting premise is weak (that using oil will necessarily lead to getting nuked) but the conclusion is not necessarily a bad idea. At least, many better arguments could be given for that same conclusion.) , given a statement such as X or Y->Z is equal to- The probability of the premises being accurate multiplied by the probability that any set of variables that leads to Z is accurate.

So, this leads to the issue, of what tools to use to asses the probability of the premises and variables. The first, and most obvious is direct input. For instance, one does not need expert advice to know that the sky often displays a blue color. Any variable that requires the sky to lack its color in order to function requires the complete dismissal of all input throughout your entire life, and thus becomes abstractly improbable. This method is, however, limited. Especially when dealing with variables. Oftentimes, events can avoid contradicting personal experience even if you know a good deal about a subject. IE, say there was a statistic that said 2% of females aged 16-28 in town X get raped every year. As a resident female who lived her entire life in town X and hasn't been raped, you must realize that according to the statistic provided, this scenario has a nearly 77% chance to occur. As such, the personal experience of living in town X and not getting raped is nearly worthless in terms of judging the issue.
This is when you turn to aggregate data. So long as the collection method is valid and the source is trustworthy, statistics are the best and only way to answer questions upon which you lack data. Any amount of individual data points can be averted by declaring them a coincidence. However, by aggregating them, they become much stronger- facts are like sticks. Breaking one is always easy, but breaking them all at once is astronomically harder.

Sometimes, though, you will inevitably run across issues which fall into one of two categories- the statistics behind the premises are so astronomically convoluted that you can't understand what they mean or the data is so lacking that it's impossible to use a amalgamated mass. This is when the opinions of outside analysts become important. IE, a biologist can declare that his data indicates a coming epidemic, that requires immediate action to avert. The reasons for his declaration can easily be absurdly arcane, but if the other biologists around him agree that his data means what he thinks it means, and if he is a person who has successfully predicted 3 similar events, his data is probably valid. Alternatively, say a murder occurred and the murderer is confirmed to have destroyed all video evidence and left no dna evidence. However, he didn't know that his target's child was hiding in the closet and saw the entire thing, leaving a good enough testimony to identify him from amongst all the people who could physically have achieved the act. One must judge if the source would want to mislead you, or have some sort of vendetta against the presumed murderer, or if it is more like that the child is simply telling the truth. Oftentimes, these questions are actually very easy to make, but sometimes a very confusing situation arises- one in which 2 valid sources come to opposite conclusions. Since this method is a step within the process of judging argument validity, presuming that any given argument has not already been judged true or false, it WILL inevitably be reached. (assuming data exists. Even so, when faced with a unsolvable problem, people tend to pull in their friends, coworkers, etc. to help them come to a conclusion.) As such all problems are supported by one group and opposed by another, and the constituent strength of the groups supporting and opposing the argument must also be factored in. Note that group size is of minimal importance compared to other factors. IE, 10 doctors telling me that my symptoms are caused by disease X is more meaningful than 10000 non-doctors saying the same thing. Although popular opinion can be used as an indicator, it is often caused by such things as "going with the flow" or by the conclusion simply being the most obvious, even though anyone who really knows what he's talking about knows 10 proofs that make the conclusion false. (Often, 1 way hash arguments, wherein the true argument is thoroughly proven, but the proof is so long/difficult, that the average person cannot follow it, either due to willpower+available time or simple intellect failure. Note that lack of will to follow an argument is not necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact a mathematical necessity. By definition, listening to one argument requires that you are not listening to another. If you just start listening to every available argument, you will soon find that there are STILL far more that you haven't listened to.)

If, Then, Else

So, we've decided that an ailing economy is solved by producing jobs, and demand. This is achieved via government spending. So, given that this procedure works, what else must be true?

Firstly, that people in their latent state are not productive. IE, that rich people will not use their wealth in a progressive manner, and that poor people will become more productive once given a job. (The issue of poor people facing starvation or simple deprivation could easily be solved by immigration control and charity. It is assumed that we cannot afford charity for the entire world, so there must be limits to who can get this charity.) The jobs given to the poor are NOT currently productive. Producing a single job is far more expensive than giving a single person enough money to sustain a middle class living. IE, any job given to the poor must be judged as an investment, not a product.

So, this splits current economics into two questions- is 'idle' spending more effective than forced spending and does a person, after working for a certain period become an effective member of the economy? Current assumptions say that upon such a time as a person runs out of obvious beneficial activities to achieve he will enter into an idle state and cease partaking in useful activities. The answer to this syndrome is thence to force economic advantage gain for less useful activities visible to the government but not the economy. In theory these activities can be intuitively seen easily, but due to the lack of financing for those who would benefit, they are invisible to the economy. So, we must look then at the nature of the economy's vision- IE what makes an activity visible to the economy vs what hides such an activity. Simply, an economy repeatedly distributes money back to those who produce the greatest amounts of wealth. A miner gathers ore. The ore is sent to a refinery and eventually becomes steel. The steel is sent to a car factory. The Car worker trades his money for a house, that was built from wood gathered by a lumberjack supporting all the people up the line. Presumably the workers demand as much as they can get and thus each receives the maximum amount that a company can pay them and still make a profit (IE the wealth they produce is directly returned to the worker. Note that this doesn't really happen, because some people are better at fraud than others, so some workers make way more than they're worth through clever trickery, most of it legal. Of course the reverse is also true, and plenty of workers are screwed by clever companies. Such activity should however, be viewed merely as corruption, and should be stomped out where plausible.) Some people are not in the direct line of work, for instance, venture capitalists. However, they are in the same positions as the workers, in that the only way to start a car factory is for someone to judge that a car factory needs to be opened even though there is no proof, and for him to provide the capital. This is a very difficult job that only a few people can do, and those who do it well are provided large amounts of wealth due to their importance to the economy. From an economic perspective there is little difference between company/customer and employee/company. When A provides a service B responds by returning wealth.

So, what's curious is this- what happens when the worker at the car factory is replaced by a computer, and where thousands of factory workers used to be paid, instead a couple hundred engineers handle everything. The factory worker can no longer produce a surplus of wealth, and thus becomes invisible to the economy-(note also a equivalent scenario: that a lot of people move to cities creating a large demand for houses. For a period, any uneducated bum can be a valuable economic resource due to the necessity of houses and lack of alternatives. However, as the demand decreases the incentive to employ the bums disperses until such a time as it is no longer profitable.) IE the natural response of the economy is to kill him off. (remember that our objective is to improve the economy. Such issues as starving unemployed persons can be handled by charity instead of by handing out jobs.) It can be argued that the worker will simply learn a new skill and do something useful elsewhere, but this merely delays the issue. IE Given that the variables necessary for production change, the persona of the worker base must also change. Given that said variables shrink to a smaller field (for instance, those with a higher IQ, or greater amount of experience) people who were previously productive members of the economy will be dismissed from the economy.

By current economic standards, this method of dismissal is a disastrous inevitability of any unplanned market. This process creates depressions. What must be asked then, is what is a depression? As part of a natural business cycle, it is formed when people finish getting what they want. Once people can drive around for free, and everyone has a house the workers get fired and the companies go out of business. IE a depression does not involve the disappearance of wealth. Indeed, wealth is freed up during a depression. (note that yes investors will be screwed by a depression, but that's because they're not doing their job right. Investors are paid to tell us if a economic activity will be useful in the future, and if their predictions are wrong they will be fired.) So where does the money go?

Here is where the very rich come in. The money ceases to be in an active state and enters an idle state. Note that money, if not spent translates into deflated prices. IE no matter how rich you are, to be noted by the economy you must partake in economic activities. IE idle money is not money that is not spent. It is money that is translated into activities that produce no direct economic benefits. This can be classified into two fields- investments and luxuries. Investments are to be defined as anything that may, in the future give a profitable return. Luxuries are activities that in all probability will not return a profit. As such, the entirety of modern Keynesian economics henges on whether the money will be placed in investments superior to employing workers or if the money will be wasted on luxuries during a depression.

Or, another way of putting it is this- do the very rich become richer or poorer at the end of a business cycle? IE after the economy recovers, do the very rich also recover? If the very rich are reduced in wealth every cycle then it can be assumed that they spent their assets on luxuries or poor investments during the depression. If however, the rich become richer, then it can be assumed that they merely turned to more far sighted programs.

However, the business cycle has, throughout history, been increasing the economy. The nobility was in the 1500s-1700s extremely productive. They set up the industrial revolution. Simply put, business cycles are too frequent for a upper class to remain on top indefinitely without responding profitably too them. Upper class individuals with way more wealth than they need do not tend to fritter it away in parties. They either hold onto it (thus not getting in the way of the rest of the economy) or take extremely far sighted actions to increase their wealth. This is why they are so rich. IE, the problem addressed by current economics (a loss of demand, and thus no way to find useful ways to spend money.) is incorrect. What needs to be addressed is this- that the economy will not always find everyone in it useful, not even everyone who has been useful in the past. Rather than giving these people jobs, which provide the people only a small amount of money compared to how much is spent to produce the jobs, they should be given their wages without the work involved. Then the saved money can be turned to farsighted goals. (such as scientific research, or power plants that can produce cheaper electricity (note that demand for electricity can be fully met, but if the electricity can be produced cheaper, then people who could not previously afford any electricity will start buying whilst those who could afford what they really wanted can buy even more, even if all they do with it is leave the lights on while they're out. IE demand will scale to supply.)

One should ask, what makes these far sighted goals so bright that they outshine nearsighted goals? The answer is simply that they are more economically viable. There's no reason to continue turning trees into houses when no one will trade any resources for the house. However lesser demands, such as my demand for a quantum computer can still be addressed. It's not that these people stop providing products- it's that they start providing products that can't be immediately delivered. These include everything from free food and electricity to spaceflights. A depression starts when my demand for a quantum computer outstrips your demand for a bigger house. It's that simple. Competition for limited resources.

So we ask, do I have a right to a quantum computer when you still want a house? The answer there is this- that we are only different than other species because of our scientific progress. We are the only species that demands things that we can't get. A wolf never demands a gun, and thus is still stuck hunting with fangs. Sure, if a wolf pack hunkered down and started producing more advanced weapons, many wolves would suffer or even starve while the pack worked out its more effective weapon. However, do we really wish we had acted like the wolves way back when, or do we thank the sacrifices of our ancestors? That said, are we really so selfish, that we wish to stop here, reap the rewards and fuck the rest? Given, we shouldn't have to give everything to those in the future (if everyone did that, no-one would EVER actually get to enjoy their wealth.) but a few depressions here and there aren't so bad if it helps those who come later.