'Anonymous' Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault

[polaris93]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/25/anonymous-stratfor-hack-hackers-hacking_n_1169268.html

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen a raft of e-mails and credit card data from U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor,

Comments

[galadrion]

If everyone had the same amount of money, money would lose its value, and we'd have to use something else to get goods and services transferred from seller to buyer.

Not really, because while money is a facilitator of value exchange, it isn't (and cannot be) the sole repository of value. As the Coase Theorem (which won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics) states, if there's nothing to stop people from trading then people will continue trading until they've exhausted all possible gains from trade.

Allow me to phrase it this way: assuming that hypothetically, everyone in the world has, by fiat, an equal share in all the money in the world. Everyone in the world has approximately $5,000 US. (Very approximately. No one is exactly sure how much money there really is in the world. As it turns out, without very strict definitions, and a great deal of verbal weaseling, no one can know.) So, because everyone has the same amount of money, do they stop wanting other things?

Quick and simple answer from any basic, honest entry-level economics course: NO! Human beings can (and do) generate just one thing in unlimited quantity and unrestricted quality: wants. No realistic supply of resources can supply the sum of all human wants - this is why the science of economics exists. So people are still going to want some things more than they want others - and which things are wanted more are going to vary from person to person. (Basic axiom of economics: no two people have precisely the same wants.) So trade is going to happen, until no one can see any way for trade to improve their situation. (The practical function of the Coase Theorem.) Money does not cause this behavior; it merely gives the participants a near-universal medium of exchange, making it easier to come to agreements in exchanges.

To reiterate: money is a facilitator of trade, not the cause of it.

Now, all that being said, you do have a valid point regarding these wealth redistributionists and their effect on wealth itself: if someone is going to "redistribute" the wealth you generated (political doublespeak for "take it from you and give it to someone who didn't create it), then you don't have the motivation to generate as much wealth, do you? After all, they've just demonstrated that you're not necessarily going to be allowed to keep it, or even use it the way you'd choose to. So you (and any other rationally self-interested individuals subject to this sort of behavior) have less reason to produce, which gives the redistributionists a smaller resource base to draw upon, which means they have to confiscate a greater proportion thereof, which means the producers have even less motivation to produce, which means...

Welcome to the vicious circle so ably portrayed in Atlas Shrugged.

My apologies for the rant, but you managed to touch something a bit... sensitive...

[polaris93]

Yep. Mainly I was presenting the idea that a human or any other economy is a system in which energy (services) and matter (goods) are transferred from entities to entities (a living creature or creatures of some kind, or a non-living object or process, such as a river, a lake, a stone, etc.). Those are real transfers of real things between real entities, and they can only occur if there's a steep enough gradient between the organisms/entities (including, e.g., hives, nests, colonies, packs, bands, corporations, etc.). The gradients are established because of desire by an entity or set of entities to gain goods and/or services from another entity, whether or not the other entity is alive or not, willing or not.

What is always present is the will of the first entity to gain something the second entity has or is; it must be alive, and must desire what the second entity possesses/is. Take away that will and desire and the gradient that is necessary to an economic transaction disappears. As you point out, incentives power the system; take those away and the system grinds to a halt. And the way you do that is to even out the economic highs and lows of the system -- make everyone start from the same position, none having any more or less than anyone else. When you do that, entropy of the system is maximized, and nobody cares to participate in the game of economic transactions. Goods and services are acquired by brute force or luck or accident, or not at all.

We saw that happening in the Soviet Union, and it will happen here if Obama gets his way, and whenever it does, it destroys civilization, which depends on orderly systems of transactions governed by incentives and enabled by means of monetary tokens (money) or barter. (Forgive me, I'm not in good shape right now, and it shows in my thinking and writing).

[galadrion]

And the way you do that is to even out the economic highs and lows of the system -- make everyone start from the same position, none having any more or less than anyone else.

Fortunately, this aim has never been achieved and probably cannot be achieved by any human-derived agency. It is - theoretically - possible for all people to be allocated the same physical resources (if you're willing to grant a totalitarian authority sufficient remit), but people themselves are not equal: the utility each will be able to extract from his or her own resources will be different. (No two people have identical capabilities; for an instructive parable, see Harrison Bergeron.) As a result, no possible human agency will be able to eliminate trade and the benefits thereof without completely eliminating humanity - and from the outcome of recent current events, such a human agency can apparently look forward to being eliminated by the oppressed: see Qaddafi, Hussein, and others. (I doubt Obama will suffer the same fate, but then, he didn't take the dance to the same level the others did.)

We shall see what develops. Personally, I tend to be optimistic through cynicism - people in power will always do their utmost to ruin things, but fortunately they're too incompetent to do the job properly. Just because they fail to screw up completely, though, does not mean they should be excused...

[polaris93]

I agree with you. Here, I was exploring something that I suddenly realized was fascinating: the basic likeness of an economy to an ideal gas, electricity, or crowd behavior. Along with astronomy, my first love as a kid was mathematics, which is the language of the physical sciences. So I got very excited about this, and wrote about it. But the conclusion, that Socialism is a civilization-wrecker, not only is not fun, it's also confirmed by what we've seen happen in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. And not just when it comes to money and what it can buy. There are other things than money that people value -- a man or woman's children are worth any amount of money to them, which is why it's hard to keep them from giving in to kidnapper's demands and giving them the money they demand within minutes of the demand being made. Both China and Russia have lost a great deal of their cultural strength, thanks to Socialism. China has money and economic strength now (some), but culturally and socially she is shot full of wholes, and so is Russia.

[polaris93]

Okay, that last comment was tres confused. I'll stand on the conclusion, but the analysis needs clarification.

An economy is a system of the movement of movement of resources among organisms/groups of organisms and the inorganic portions of their environment. The resources may be material (goods) or energy (services), and the organisms may be of any species. As long as the net movement of resources among the entities making up the system is greater than zero, then the system lives and may even thrive. Otherwise it dies, and the organisms must find another system/community/civilization to become part of or they, too, will perish. If the organisms think they have nothing to gain by attempting to acquire resources, then the net movement of resources ceases, and the system dies. In human communities and civilizations, money is a second-order facilitator of transactions, and has a value all its own; if it loses that value, and nothing replaces it, then goods/services can only be acquired by theft, looting, or personal labor, and the delicate system of interactions among people that makes a civilization what it is ceases to exist, and with it that civilization.

Thus "redistribution of wealth" is simply a means for destroying civilizations.

[galadrion]

...if it [money] loses that value, and nothing replaces it, then goods/services can only be acquired by theft, looting, or personal labor...

You overlook barter; trade will go on, for as long as participants see any benefit in it, no matter what obstruction authority may place in its way.

And if any authority places too many obstructions, well, the United States was born out of such adversity...

[polaris93]

That's true.

BTW, I forgot to add that in general, transactions between creatures and other creatures and their environment can take many forms. Services: think of a male spider or bird proffering gifts of food or decorative trinkets to a beloved, hoping that she will accept the gift and provide sex. Goods: beavers making a dam which, just incidentally, makes a better environment for fish (upstream, anyway); trees swap oxygen for the CO2 breathed out by animals. Conscious calculations probably don't go into such transactions -- the Little Head vs. the Big Head problem -- but they are transactions, and can be analyzed as such.