In reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, I have come to realize how the subject of economic efficiency should be discussed.

The Republicans’ sell their idea on how to run an economy on the idea of economic efficiency.  Who could possibly be against economic efficiency and in favor of “waste and fat” in an enterprise or in the government?

Well there is a reason to be hesitant about anything that is ultra-efficient.  Something that is ultra-efficient produces the most output from the least amount of resources as long as everything is running according to its design.  The problem is that such a system is extremely fragile.  The more efficient the system, the less it takes to knock it off kilter.  When the fragile system does get knocked off kilter, the disaster is much larger than anything that would have happened in a robust system.

Vulture capitalists, like Mitt Romney, come along and see an enterprise that they consider to be “inefficient and full of waste”.  They buy the enterprise so that they can siphon off all the “waste and fat” into their own pockets.  As soon as the event comes along that pulverizes the now fragile system, they abandon it to the public and walk away with all the wealth they siphoned off.

The next time a demagogue comes along to sell you on increased efficiency that will occur if we privatize a robust government function, remember to ask, “But will it make the function so fragile that it is bound to fail?”

Remember, economics (real life) is not binary – it’s not “all this or all that”.  We must deal in a spectrum of real numbers rather than 1’s and 0’s.  We don’t want to over engineer a system to make it so robust, that the added safety margins are truly unnecessary.  However, we  don’t want to cut away the safety margin so much that the system is too fragile.

If you rigidly apply a single dogmatic position (called Conservative or Liberal), you will either get ultra-efficient but fragile systems or you will get systems that are so robust that they are throwing away the chance to use some resources for other useful purposes.  We need to work more wisely, not more dogmatically.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Dilemma of the Cooperative Gene by J. D. Alt.

The first reality, then, which the cooperative gene must acknowledge is that it is never going to persuade the competitive gene to cooperate towards the equitable creation of collective goods. The only strategy available, it seems, is for the cooperative gene to persuade itself that money is neither a commodity, nor is it scarce—that the narrative hammered out by the competitive gene is, at its very roots, a false and self-serving belief system that puts collective society itself at risk.

If you don’t think the word “gene” is the most appropriate phrase to use, just substitute “a more appropriate phrase” every time you see the word “gene”.

The article may be completely logical and the best way to sell the idea, but I am coming to think that for the sake of reducing fragility, the problem is really that the government has given too much of the fiat currency to the wealthy who are squirreling it away rather than putting it to work in the economy.  It might be easier to kiss this money good-bye and just create more money to be put to better use.  However, the idle money cannot be ignored.  As long as it exists, there is the chance that it will be taken out from under the mattress and put to use just at the most inopportune time in the economic cycle.  This will cause inflation.

Better to cut the downside risk of inflation, something the Republicans claim to be worried about, by taxing back the idle “money” and putting it to the use it should have been put to in the first place.

The web site Popular Resistance has the article and video Video: The Anti-TPP Take Over Of The US Trade Representative Building.

Below is a video of activists working in the coalition FlushTheTPP.org dropping multiple banners from the US Trade Representatives Building in Washington, DC to protest the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The groups sought to expose the secret negotiations that have been ongoing throughout the five years of the Obama administration and mobilize people concerned about workers, the environment, banking, food, water, Internet freedom and other issues to take action to oppose the TPP. The TPP will give large transnational corporations absolute power over our lives and make them more powerful than governments.

The web site itself is trying to let people know that the Occupy movement is not as dead as the media would like you to believe.