Meeting Challenges With Logical Institution of Adaptive Change ... or ... Continually Accelerating End Runs Around Institutional Momentum

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection*, except of course for the problem of too many indirections." David Wheeler

More usefully ...

ALL PROBLEMS IN DEMOCRACY CAN BE SOLVED BY ORGANIZING ENOUGH TO LEVERAGE RATHER THAN MERELY SUFFER MORE LEVELS OF INDIRECTION.

These and other statements about indirection are actually concise summaries of the theory of adaptive evolution. Sure we have plenty of old & new challenges, every year, if not every day.  How do we meet and survive them?

Name your problem.

Fiat currency budgets? White Collar Crime and banking? Tax rates? College loans? Unemployment? Military Industrial Congressional Complex? Police Brutality? Blue Collar Crime? Trade Policy? Excessive Regulations? Slow Moving Bureaucracy? Pollution?

All of these can be easily solved, by teamwork and organized teams. Most will acknowledge that organized teams can do amazing things, and have been doing so for ~4.5 Billion years on planet Earth.

What's to stop us now?

If that's the case, how do we actually take arms against a sea of self-generated problems, and by organized opposition, overcome them? Here is an observable framework, which we've already been doing, for millions of years.

Key concepts:

Successive, Transient Contexts.
Toolkits.
Recombination.
"Social" organization

Over-adaptation as Institutional Momentum.

Coordination & coordination rate.
Cost of Coordination.
Return on Coordination.
Communication & communication rate.

Selecting signal from noise or "parsing."

Reducing frictions.
Autocatalysis.
Outcomes vs methods vs perceptions.
Tuning & tuning rate, for components & the whole.
Adaptive Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision-Making = Adaptive Rate
Aggregate Interactions & Interaction Rates.
Aggregate Context Awareness.
Perceiving the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions]
Survival = Optimizing the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions].
Sustainability.


1) Successive, Transient Contexts.  People learn, as they grow, that the life of a person, a family, a tribe, a corporation or a nation state involves not just one, but multiple challenges occurring as a succession of transient contexts.

2) Toolkits.  In the long history of planet Earth, we continue to unravel astoundingly diverse examples of how physical aggregates, biological species and whole ecosystems survive succeeding contexts through slow accumulation of increasingly diverse toolkits. The more complex a system is, the more ways it can adjust to changing context (not that it always does). There is a fundamental difference between how most people define efficiency and resilience. Efficiency commonly refers to performance in a given context, while resiliency refers to outcomes across multiple contexts.

3) Recombination. Recombination is the outcome of pursuing another level of indirection. When the sticks used by ancient hominids weren't long enough to make a lean too adequate for their growing band, they started recombining them together in novel forms, to make better, faster, cheaper nests or homes. Once you look, recombination is everywhere, including physiological, chemical, biological, sexual recombination of genes, tools & toolkits (even snowmobiles!), behavioral (dance? music? art? sports?) and on to the cultural recombination we call changing business systems and legal systems. We're now facing demand for supra-cultural recombination among multiple nation states. Don't expect the United Nations to go away. It's what comes next that you should be pondering.

4) Social Organization. It's fundamentally useful to remind all citizens that social species rule because of their ability to scavenge all their diversity, and keep it in their toolkit for recombination and re-purposing ... as succeeding contexts demand. Social species outdo all others, and dominate the Earth, because those characteristics, which confer overwhelming increases in resiliency.


Implications.


5) Over-adaptation as Institutional Momentum. History certainly implies that it is usually death to over-adapt to a transient context. Today's "winner" is always today's Dinosaur and tomorrow's history ... UNLESS ... that entity can unwind and recombine the very institutional momentum that allowed it to be the MOST efficient today. Going too far has implications for your survival statistics, once the direction of the adaptive race changes.

6) Coordination & coordination rate.  If over-adaptation to any one of a series of fleeting contexts is dangerous, what's the fall-back strategy? It's quite obvious, actually. Just like the runners in a multi-lap footrace may or may not be rewarded by "winning" a particular lap, they all share the goal of staying in the race and positioning to lead WHEN NECESSARY. They typically do that by hanging around the leaders, and "staying within striking distance." And what if the race never ends? What if our adaptive race through history keeps changing direction, by changing context? In that case, our survival strategy is to survive and stay in the race. Hence, the ultimate tool in our already complex cultural toolkit is skill at coordination and cooperation.

  Is it better to be biggest? Strongest? Fastest? Not for our purpose. Rather, it's safer and "better" to assume and discard any and all attributes and skills, when & as needed. Grow fur? Humans don & shed clothing instead. Muscle mass? Humans use levers & machines instead. Fangs? Humans use knives instead. Physical speed? Humans use tools, domestic animals, bicycles, cars, boats & planes instead. In short, humans survive via recombination, adaptation and evolution. We're constantly shedding whatever holds us back, and domesticating ourselves to be resilient over time, rather than over-adapted to any particular, transient context.

7) Cost of Coordination.  Yes, there is a cost to coordinating. Just look at the practice & training time any organized team has to put in ... to learn and express aggregate coordination.

  Walter Shewhart famously remarked an obvious truth, that "In all complex systems the biggest [ongoing] cost, by far, is the cost of coordination." Coordination requires an effort, in order to broadcast, receive, sample, analyze and respond to constantly increasing amounts of information from a growing number of teammates doing increasingly diverse things. Can you imagine the challenge for basketball players and coaches if basketball teams went from 5 players to 6 on successive days, then 7, 8, 9, and 10? And what if the rules, court and equipment also all changed? That's life! It's also why sports can be initially useful, but quickly becomes an exercise in form over adaptive function. Ditto for music, choreography and theatre. They don't change as fast as our world does, and hence have become useful to fewer and fewer of our expanding populous.

8) Return on Coordination.  The most immediate corollary is so obvious that Shewhart left it unstated. In all complex systems, the highest return, by far, is the return-on-coordination. In fact, the return on coordination is the only return that exceeds the cost of coordination. If evolution occurs among others who are coordinating, then we have only one choice, to die out, or keep coordinating on a bigger/faster scale, so that our team outcompetes and absorbs, all other teams. What then? What if there is one day a United States of Earth? Long before that, our own complacency and un-directed personal habits and Institutional Momentum will become our greatest competitor. How do we compete with ourselves, and thereby maintain our adaptive rate? Obviously, just by staying alive. Our current challenge is to change everything and adapt fast enough to survive ourselves. A hundred years after Wallace & Darwin, even some literature majors eventually recognized that. "Everything needs to change, so everything can [appear to] stay the same."


More Implications.


9) Communication & communication rate.  How do social, coordinating species invest in coordination, so that the return always exceeds the cost? Despite what a sitting US President foolishly claimed, evolving species do "Nuance."
Those social species (and nations, and democracies) that survive:
  Exchange more information, faster and more widely.
  Practice more, and perceive more.
  Parse more context from the expanding sea of data they generate.
  Recognize and explore more aggregate options ... faster.


10) Selecting signal from noise or "parsing."  What does an adaptive signal look like, for an aggregate constantly re-orienting to a context that is changing yet again? Basically, one that allows a 2-stage optimization task.
S = Sum[A+B], and not Sum[A] + Sum[B].

  That's how a whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It's also how the USA wrote a Constitution and set out to "form a more perfect union."

  Both "A" and "B" have many parts, but they're used here to mean "keep the components alive AND adequately provisioned" (A) plus "grow the system" (B). Neither citizen component nor nation can sacrifice too much, nor gain excessively, if the whole is to exceed the sum of its parts. Yet between those tolerance limits we have tremendous freedom to operate and express distributed plus collective ingenuity.

11) Reducing frictions. This is both trivial and sublime. Any mechanic or race car tuner knows that reducing friction between moving parts is key to enhancing performance of a system. That's why we have oil, grease, ball bearings and precision carving or machining. Yet how many realize that the same thing applies to all the human moving parts in a social system? Much of successful military science and Officer Training comes down to systematically finding ways to reduce frictions among teammates, and making it hard for people to work at cross purposes. That's how social species allow themselves to leverage their increasingly diverse talents.

12) Autocatalysis.  How do social species actually do all these things? How do they simultaneously increase diversity, increase options and decrease frictions, so that they can explore their emerging options, and do so faster than others? The whole package is called autocatalysis, when each component catalyzes all other components to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That's the same way the combination of an egg cell and sperm cell catalyze the rapid growth resulting in a new, unique human, in a self-driving cascade of reinforcing triggers.
  First, everything has to be connected to everything, so everyone can see - or be frequently reminded - of dangling tasks. Then all data streams have to interact or discuss, so that analysis preserves the 2-stage optimization mentioned above. Finally, a bias to ADAPTIVE action must be present, which both triggers activity AND tempers it per the preserved connectivity. "Do no harm" gets to be a longer and longer list, as your number of co-citizens grows.

  The result is a massively-parallel calculation that is always impossible for participants to predict, in part because so many of the terms keep changing before the calculation can be completed. As an aggregate, we have zero predictive power, yet unlimited adaptive power, so far. It's up to us to figure out how to adapt, through continuous indirection.


Keys to adaptive autocatalysis.


13) Outcomes vs methods vs perceptions.  How do we keep our eyes on the prize, when the context never stops changing and the "prize" is continuously redefined? Answer, by trial and error discovery of unpredictably subtle adjustments. We redefine the "prize" as ability to survive and thrive, and we keep our eyes on that drifting outcome, whatever it takes. That means maintaining a determination to break any abandon or modify any tradition or break any taboo, as necessary, aka, practice Cultural Recombination.

14) Tuning & tuning rate, for components & the whole.  Our proverbial mechanics and racing enthusiasts understand the concept of tuning. If they're involved in automotive decathlons or fleet management, they also understand the concept of tuning for resiliency rather than breaking down before completing a multiple-race circuit. However, it's a comical commentary on narrow thinking that there are so many teams of expert "tuners" who stubbornly fight for years on end, and insist on tuning everything except their own interactions. Biology is chock full of examples of molecular, cellular, endocrine, muscular and behavioral functions that are systematically tuned to create a marvelously flexible whole, with the tuning based upon long lists of subtle, "if-then" variations on a basic theme. Just think of how many ways you can tap your finger, or move your tongue, just to start with trivial examples, before moving on to more complex examples such as speech, multiple languages and teamwork. Our survival depends on how fast we can readjust countless processes, and re-adapt them in novel ways, for novel purposes when and as needed. That means adding nuance, not avoiding it.

15) Adaptive Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision-Making = Adaptive Rate.   The reality of social tuning is that aggregate success follows the quality (including tempo) of distributed decision making. The tempo of trial & error learning is what biologists call Adaptive Rate. Those aggregates that can make adjustments faster, will outlast those that can't. Further, not that those who perceive possible outcomes earlier, and identify emerging options, can start making changes and reducing frictions sooner.

16) Aggregate Interactions & Interaction Rates.  In practice, this all feeds together in a constant, self-catalyzing or autocatalytic social loop.

Interactions drive awareness (personal + aggregate).
 Awareness exposes options.
  Options demand coordinated actions.
   Coordinated actions drive further interactions (restarting the autocatalysis).

Note that this reinforcing cycle occurs only IF:

Interactions remain diverse, and
 Feedback remains diverse, sent and received.
  Tempo remains high-energy.

17) Aggregate Context Awareness.  Note that an alert, aware and responsive aggregate occurs only if new components (kids & grandchildren) are quickly aware of the latest challenges motivating their nation, not just the old ones.

18) Perceiving & Exploring Aggregate (& local) Options.  All of the above only KEEPS happening if kids and grandkids remain aware that yet another context WILL inevitably appear, requiring yet a a bigger perspective to master. That way they will fully expect that challenge to appear, & will go looking for it. In the process, they will also keep building bigger perspectives on where they are and what new options are appearing, & will consider HOW to generate utilize ever more diversity (a bigger toolkit). All this will, quite coincidentally, lead them to practice coordinated use of their social+technical toolkit on an even greater scale. This is, incidentally, what humans have always done. We've just grown so quickly that we've temporarily forgotten the most fundamental lessons that our ancestors knew. Quite literally, we can't see our context for our details, precisely because there are so many of us and we're not staying as connected as we could and should be.

19) Survival is the Sum of [Aggregate Actions + Diverse Component Actions].  We can now reiterate an old truism. Making a whole greater than the sum of its parts involves a cascade of cooperative adjustments in order to achieve a shared, Desired Outcome. That's what coordination means.

20) Sustainability.  What has kept the universe, Earth, biology and humanity going all this time? It is common to say that adjustments occur only after challenges. Yet it is also true that those that survive challenges are those that had already started or continued preparing to make even more adjustments. If we are going to survive by continuously expanding our adaptive rate, then we need to make accumulation of coordination skills become our primary Desired Outcome. Ultimately, that's the best way to ensure that we'll be able to go anywhere and become anything .... regardless of the challenge.

  How do we achieve sustainability? Don't stop doing #'s 1-20, above. Add #21. 

If America only knew what Americans know ... we wouldn't have to worry about our sustainability, or the prospects for the 7th generation yet unborn.

   ###############

* Indirection, an alternate route to the same place; i.e., if the front door is locked, crawl in through a basement window in the back of the house. There are multiple paths for bypassing every obstacle.

Steering Aggregate Adjustments To Distributed Change: Developing A Faster/Leaner/Better Aggregate OODA Loop

For aggregates to persist, every distributed component process must change?

That is always obvious once said, so why does so much distributed friction persist, over the seemingly obvious?

In his most recent review of the historical negotiations leading up to launch of the European common currency, Bill Mitchell has dredged up a statement which, in hindsight, reveals amazing levels of mal-adaptive reasoning.

The avowed purpose of the euro currency was to "reduce the level of unemployment by fighting inflation."

It is truly amazing to see how that perspective has turned out, in our existing context. The implication, then and now, is that a slight majority of Central European Policymakers were and are STILL fixated on the mythical benefits of a gold-like, static currency standard. The entire monetary policy for the common currency has been one grand effort to peg their currency value to a contentiously derived figure which they presume is static, but which must in reality, dynamically float.

As a truly deranged consequence, Europe has embarked on a mad effort to stabilize an incidental metric, inflation, which is at heart, an indicator of the dynamic flow of adaptive value between the necessarily diverse forms of capital.

Think for a moment about the lunacy of Europe's grand strategy.

Do we bother stabilizing the net flow of water between oceans, rivers, lakes and tidal basins? Or do we simply navigate on all of them, as and when needed?

Do nations regulate, across their aggregate population, how many bodily resources flow between specific sub-classes of muscles, fat deposits, organs or other body tissue types?

And does the biological cell regulate the intrinsic "value" of a given ATP-molecule? Or does every cell only the adaptive impact of ATP, when used "wherever & whenever needed" in the cell?

Answer to all 3 questions: Surviving aggregates do NOT pursue maladaptive strategies for long.

They certainly do NOT do so during those spurts when we actually adapt and evolve. As an adaptive, aggregate response to aggregate context, we let the relative ratio of all instances of net resources "float." Independently, we then regulate, through our collective, distributed efforts, ONLY those net resources which can be commandeered and leveraged by citizens within each nation state.

In short, we act and survive as an aggregate of inter-dependent members, not as isolated individuals. The entire ideology of capitalism for the sake of capital is merely a method searching for a purpose.

By their own admission, the European founders embarked on their common currency to improve the AGGREGATE or general welfare of all citizens in all member countries. Yet their operations have been functionally orthogonal to their stated mission.  As a result, they have clearly degraded rather than improved general welfare, for tens of millions of their own citizens.

Are they only slow on the uptake, or is this a guaranteed consequence of the still divergent views of rentiers and coordinators?

It has been perennially argued and so far proven - since the first fiat currency unleashed quantum jumps in fiat policy space and policy agility - that there is no obligatory relation between unemployment and inflation.

The entire argument depends on the very definitions of both inflation and unemployment, which are rarely precisely defined in given arguments as context-dependent terms.

The presumed link between unemployment and inflation is only a straw man smokescreen raised by rentiers opposed to the very policy maneuverability that generates the higher return-on-coordination in the 1st place!

We can't see "our" aggregate causality for our distributed views!

Europeans, as well as we here in the USA are left with a simpler, stark proposition. We have no need for active "monetary policy" whatsoever?

Rather, we need an agile, automatic-stabilizer monetary policy, backed by agile fiscal policy?

Curiously, the latter view has been consistently espoused in evolving forms, from early colonialists, to Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and on to Abraham Lincoln's Greenback and eventually to our current fiat currency regime, crafted largely under the guidance of Marriner Eccles and FDR.

Why is anyone surprised? That has always been the way in which all "social" aggregates have maneuvered to survive and thrive, throughout the entire history of all aggregates, not just biological ones.

The logic of social species simply expresses the timeless logic of aggregates. What we call social aggregates are merely those which display seemingly greater LOCAL degrees of freedom (at least on planet Earth, where we're still confined).

The constant, aggregate logic is to guarantee that the aggregate survives in a Natural Selection Market, by allowing all of the aggregate's component members to seek aggregate benefit .... by freely trading SOME local degrees of freedom, in return for net-adaptive access to SOME aggregate degrees of freedom.

Aggregate success obviously tracks the QUALITY of distributed decision-making.

In evolutionary terms, it is quite easy to maintain net profitability in that pool of trades - but only when people actually use ALL of their heads, not just some, and not just their weapons.

Our dominant social friction seems to be over fair - i.e., adaptive - distribution of (or access to) our aggregate benefits. Every time we generate more new resources than anyone previously imagined ... we stop and fight over dividing up the spoils.

Instead of absorbing the biggest lesson. That we generate more than we can imagine ... again ... if we'd only not pause to fight over past successes!

In practice, we're in a constant fight over whether to actively waste new assets by uselessly hoarding them, or to adaptively leverage any and all assets, while exploring our newly emerging aggregate options. It's a question of stopping in the middle of an evolutionary path, or never stopping, and to instead always keep going.

Managing that friction is where the demand for real thinking comes in. In practice, our kids always go on, as we slowly stop. The real question is whether we're going to try to limit the options our offspring have access to.

This is actually astounding. It tells us a lot about our actual context, and our own impact on our own outcomes. Humans have come this far, and yet we cannot mediate juvenile frictions that arise among our own citizens, who are members of our own country? Ancient tribal customs worked these methods out perfectly, tens of thousands of years ago. Are we only confused, distracted and self-conquered by our own, growing numbers? So that we're not even leveraging what we've ALWAYS known?

Yes. Emphatically yes. As always, we have met the enemy, and they is us.

The only question is what we're going to do about it. 

What new methods will we invent to redirect emerging resources away from the next emerging battle with ourselves?

Our current primary social friction seems to be largely between just two of our arbitrarily defined, sociological "personality-types" - rentiers and laborers - which are analogous to biological cell types. To further our embarrassment, rentiers and laborers are clearly mutual symbionts, neither able to exist without the other. They are only virtually defined as different, yet act too stupidly to intelligently leverage their own return-on-coordination. Go figure!

With only cursory examination, the perennially under-regulated rentier outlook is exposed for what it is. A intellectually lazy, parasitic approach that mindlessly seeks to HAVE it's culture, and EAT MOST OF IT too (or at least hoard it).

Rent seeking is simply a non-adaptive approach not yet adequately regulated by the diverse co-owners within the same aggregate. The best & most common defense for the rentier fraud is "Why didn't you stop me?"

Meanwhile, with similarly cursory examination, the perennially under-organized laborer outlook is simultaneously exposed for what it is as well - the same intellectual laziness, expressed only slightly differently. A overly passive approach that works harder at avoiding rather than fulfilling the responsibilities of co-owning it's own aggregate.

By both methods, an intellectually lazy aggregate and it's options remain parted!

You could NOT make this up, or anticipate such an outcome for such a large culture of the supposedly most intelligent species ever to walk this planet. Certainly not after 10,000 years of rapidly evolving, human cultural history.

Our reality is that laborers are always trying to give away their aggregate ownership responsibilities, and rentiers are always trying to minimize the intellectual work they must perform in order to accept all those aggregate benefits, and keep them coming. As John Boyd famously said, their default goal of the rentiers is to just "don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it."

Is it any surprise that many people conclude that democracy won't work, even though it obviously can, has, and will again, in fits and spurts? Democracy is just another word for an agile aggregate, capable of maneuver context management. Democracy, when it does work, depends on an adequate quality of distributed decision-making, rather than the fallbac, of lazily TRYING to rely upon the transient crutch of Central Planning. No matter what the form, Central Planning always fails, since it can never scale planning as fast as aggregate options expand. It's only a matter of when, not if.

You also couldn't make up this escalation of useless parlour talk about whether democracy works, but you can predict it's inevitability, unless we better educate and better train our own personnel. Aggregates ARE what aggregates practice, no matter how smart their members are before they initiate "team" or aggregate practice.

Evolving methods drive evolving results. Until our evolving education and training methods more closely chase our evolving demand for faster/leaner/better coordination, we won't maintain an evolving democracy. We won't be able to explore, or controllably manage, our continually expanding options.

What part of Duh! are we NOT teaching our children? All of the details, and NONE of the context?

There is a better way. If we focus on coordination skills first, we'll ALWAYS be able to muster whatever adaptive rate, form and direction we need, when the hour strikes.

Things won't improve until labor, in aggregate, calmly and purposefully acts more like an aggregate owner, and until rentiers simultaneously, in aggregate, calmly and gracefully accept the overwhelming return-on-coordination among all co-owners. Until then, our Aggregate Adaptive Rate will continue to lag and our Output Gap will only increase. This is an aggregate organizational task, not a conflict to be won. To make things easier on everyone, we need "a more perfect union" - NOT disorganized squabbling.

One example conclusion follows from this expose.

The concept of keeping a "land-use-tax" obligation in balance with a "labor-tax" is only a crude beginning to a more general social-organization method. The range of so-called "Intellectual Properties" has now extended far beyond mere land itself, and the divisive rentier-vs-laborer competition now rages over every new niche that citizens invade via coordination.

To balance labor-taxes, a more general "Intellectual-Property-Use Tax" is clearly called for, to provide measured incentives for both random invention AND aggregate leverage (redistribution) of aggregate skills AND actual production. It always boils down to aggregate agility in regulating adaptive tolerance limits on all new methods employed of, for and by the host aggregate. Call it social responsibility or whatever you want, just get on with it quickly, so that our culture can move on, just as quickly. Aggregate tempo and maneuverability always matters, more than anything else.

Many other adaptive conclusions will soon be obvious to rentier/laborer enclaves, once they start working together, not just negotiating periodically.

Our next, adequate, and distributed solution this week ...... is always better than a supposedly perfect, Centrally Planned one, in some fanciful future.

Clearly, to guarantee that an organized citizenry can always QUICKLY consume all new resources and leverage every new option that it collectively produces, there has to be fiat or on-demand equivalency between labor and all other forms of capital. The ultimate logic of any social species is to provide rapid translation between all local forms of intrinsic capital, so that all capital translations are SPEEDILY valued and denominated per a FLOATING, aggregate-adaptive-rate scale.

The immediate benefit for us is to NOT impair the quality of our distributed decision-making, by judging decisions according to any subjugate, distracting and overly narrow metric which is too divorced from aggregate context.

In other words, just avoid any and all instances of Central Planning, where decisions for many are attempted BY too few, wielding a fraction of the aggregate feedback and knowledge which is too small.

Our constantly emerging aggregate benefit?

Just adjust more aggregate decisions, sooner. That's how all aggregates stay closer to their unpredictable, aggregate adaptive paths.

How do aggregates do that? By ever more frequent and continuous substitution of inexpensive prevention for the overwhelming cost of expensive repairs.

In practice, that means constantly inventing new social instrumentation methods, so that quicker, distributed decision-making benefit from earlier feedback from MORE of our aggregate. The alternative is slow, less distributed decision-making, more divorced from early & full aggregate feedback.

In this way, the aggregate adaptive value of all "markets" is entirely tied to them being equally open to real-time feedback from all citizens. If not fully open to all, in real-time, then market operations instantly veer towards more random purposes which are, by statistical definition, less adaptive for the aggregate. Again, it is only a question of when, not if.

May be state this in even more general, and therefore even more adaptive terms?

In our present tax system, EVERY form of capital transfer should be regulated by the entire range of aggregate feedback, through one, constant "Capital-Use-Tax" rate. That one tax rate should hold for all definable forms of capital leased from the aggregate.

How could this help? First, we could get rid of our currently arbitrary hodge-podge of labor-use taxes and/or land-use taxes and/or other IP-use taxes. Second, unless every voice is heard and valued, the aggregate impact of unpredictably emerging inter-dependencies cannot be detected and managed through cheap, early prevention. Instead, management is less successfully attempted through late and more costly repair alone.

Finally, any transient deviance from a uniform, "Capital-Use" tax rate would also be more clearly seen by all as an interim expression of flexible, not permanent, policy.

Now we're back to a simple, parlour-talk issue. Why is democracy always superior in the long run? 

Simply because all the rights and responsibilities implied by citizenship act as highly agile, distributed checks and balances. That's how we KEEP the cardinal rule of social species, that all national assets are in reality leased from the aggregate, and not owned independent from it, in opposition to aggregate Adaptive Rate.
One immediate consequence is the need to regulate inter-aggregate trade. Clearly, the currently promoted definition of "free" trade is a myth and oxymoron. Today's perversion of "free trade" only means that non-labor forms of capital movement are NOT taxed, while labor-capital is selectively taxed. The illogical reason for that aggregate policy is self-evident, as well as self-defeating for for both labor and rentiers alike.

Every form of trade, foreign or domestic, can be allowed ONLY after it's current and emerging adaptive value is evaluated by the full range of democratic feedback. For aggregate agility, however, no single, isolated action should be instantaneously prohibited in practice. Rather, to guarantee aggregate survival, the growth or expansion of all volume trades and/or trade agreements must soon be vetted and constantly reviewed through aggregate feedback.

Without constant deference to democratic feedback as our most reliable assessment method, we cannot claim to be pursuing aggregate adaptive rate as our Adaptive Path.

And if we as a people are not going to continuously pursue our best estimated adaptive path for the USA, why bother with any other charade whatsoever?

If we're going to pursue democracy for the return-on-coordination, surely we should pursue rapid coordination everywhere, or not bother doing so anywhere at all?

To continue co-organizing our own aggregate growth and distributed capabilities, we need that principle of Adaptive Fairness as our constant, orienting reference, while using it as the Desired Outcome which we are always chasing.

Lacking such a reference, we're left without a map, wondering which way our growing aggregate should go.