Bai might argue with you about the importance of having an overall narrative, and I think this may dovetail with the idea of framing to a certain extent.

Practically speaking, if we get 60 votes in the Senate and a Democrat elected President, a lot of good ideas will be implemented. If we don't get 60 in the Senate, however, we won't be able to implement many big ideas, so things will only improve a smaller amount.

With a Dem prez, foreign policy, the quality of the federal bureaucracy, and judicial nominations improve overnight, but we still won't pass important legislation without some Senate GOP support. Olympia Snowe becomes the new center of gravity.

In a better world, if we Democrats have a 60 vote majority in the senate we can pass some really great reform laws. But, we don't live in such a world. The only laws we can pass, no matter what our majority is, are laws that are seen as benign by big business, are seen as favoring Israel's interests, and that don't restrict the profits of the armaments industry. That greatly restricts what can be done, no matter what majority we get.

Before anything will change we need to engage a super majority of our voters to get informed, interested, and to vote. (Not possible in my remaining lifetime). We need to reverse the attitude that taxes are an unreasonable burden on citizens. (Not possible in my remaining lifetime.) We need to convince the majority in all states that we are all equal citizens, all equally human, and all needing to be treated with respect. (Probably not possible in this century.)

I support our efforts 100%, but I have no illusions about what can be accomplished.

Hoppy in Sacramento

It is true that our system of government seems built to make all sorts of legislation difficult. However, the Senate and the President would not block progressive legislation if the Senate and the Presidency were progressive institutions. But they are not progressive institutions. They are conservative institutions. And they are conservative institutions because they are the servants of the corporate class on whom they depend for the elevation to their positions.

Corporate lobbyists write legislation all the time. And their legislation frequently sails through, the Senate and Presidency notwithstanding.

Why do people treat the Bais of the world other than with dismissal is beyond me. I haven't read the book and don't intend to. Bai's book sounds to me, from the multitude of comments about it, as close to gossip as one can get without writing about divorces and affairs.

There is way too much noise around us, let the Bais try to reduce the amount of noise by keeping quiet.

Re: Europe doesn't have a better welfare state because the French had better intellectuals on the left; they built a stronger welfare state because, unlike in the US, the corporate class in Europe was devastated by World War II, so democratic votes were not thrawted and the labor movement was stronger.

I disagree with this. The European welfare state was a work in progress well before WWII. And your explanation does not account for its progress in countries like Sweden which suffered no damage at all in WWII.

Re: We don't get more progressive legislators because only the rich and those in thrall to them can afford to run for office.

I don't know that that is the problenm. It's pretty much true everywhere that you have to have a substantial financial cushion to afford to run for major office. Certainly no one who lives paycheck to paycheck (most people, both here and abroad) could do so. And there have been wealthy liberals: think of FDR and JFK. Moroever some of the most reactionary people in the country are found in the lower and lower middle class.

It would be interesting to see some stats on the relative wealth of legislators in various countries compared with the median for the same place.

In the mean time you can look up the GINI coefficient. The US is the most unequal of all industrial countries in terms of wealth distribution. I claim this gives the wealthy too much influence and is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Several countries in the EU have been drifting in the same way, notably the UK and Italy and the average person has been doing poorly in these places as well.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

You just wrote one of the best and most insightful comments I've seen on this very good board.

You wrote that in the 18th century, the power of government was understood while the power of corporations was not.

A funny aside, Adam Smith did understand the power of corporations and what they could become. And he warned against them, wanting them to die when the people who founded them did, lest they become more powerful than people.

We didn't listen. To the guy who most people call laissez faire but, were he alive today, would regulate the heck out of what's going on.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

The Democrats won a majority to get out of Iraq. They will use their majority to freely fund anothet $190B to be totally wasted in Iraq. Yet, they whine that they can't pass SCHIP because the big, bad Republicans will fillibuster a much smaller amount of money to be spent on our own children right here at home.

The American people are going to be stuck with two candidates who just can't wait to go to war with Iran and and who will not end the war in Iraq even by 2013. That's the "super majority" -- two candidates for more war is a super majority for war.

There will be no money for anything else.

Corvid

Maybe we should begin to develop the narrative (which would have the advantage of truth) that capitalism is antithetical, even hostile, to democracy. What's compatible with capitalism is law and order, not giving voice to people through a genuine democratic setup. Look at China. Or the United States.

The Republican party's corporate backers and leaders see, and relate to, the rank and file as a market to sell to, more than as a constituency to represent. And they use all the sales, marketing, public relations methods they use to sell their products to consumers to sell their political interest to voters. The party's ideas come from the top, and are intended to serve those at the top, and then are sold to those down the line.

The Democrats have a harder job. Because they really are bottom up and have much broader constituencies to represent. Those constituencies must first convince the party leadership to support their interests before they can have any chance to convince the broader field of voters that they share and support their interests too.

Europe doesn't have a better welfare state because the French had better intellectuals on the left; they built a stronger welfare state because, unlike in the US, the corporate class in Europe was devastated by World War II, so democratic votes were not thrawted and the labor movement was stronger.

Europe also has a bigger (I wouldn't say "better") welfare state because it is far more racially homogenous than the U.S.  The fact that welfare of all sorts would go disproportionately to racial minorities is a big reason why it hasn't the same popularity in the U.S. as in Europe.  People don't mind supporting their own, but white people have a much more difficult time supporting welfare when they see it as a program for taking stuff from whites and giving it to blacks.

"You say I'm a dreamer.  We're two of a kind.  Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"

John,

Exactly what are you accusing him of here? Is his "influence" somehow nefariously obtained?

I can't speak for others, but my reason is that I don't believe in treating ANYONE with dismissal, except perhaps in very rare cases. Instead, we are called upon to respond to the arguments and evidence presented rather than trying to deflect to the question of who's saying it.

These kind of statements are just an attempt to shut down discussions and arguments that the person making such a statement doesn't like.

The unions in the U.S. have been destroyed partly because they eschewed creating a political party they way unions in Europe did. The result was that big Businesses and banks here were able to dominate labor in the political arena by co-opting too many Democratic politicians.

When unions focus only on wages and benefits, they lose everything to those who focus on political power. That's because both big business and unions are a creation of those who use power to gain wealth. Most importantly, government determines the balance of power between labor and management.

It is difficult for banks and corporations in Germany to practice union-busting when they have several representatives of Labor sitting on their Boards of Directors. That is required by German Law. The result is better distribution of the profits of the business between capital and labor, with more recognition that health-care, housing, transportation and education for workers in is the interest of the economy as well as national society.

CommonDreamer: "Exactly what are you accusing him of here? Is his "influence" somehow nefariously obtained?" Not at all. Well, I could argue that he has disproportionate influence because he plays into the politics of the Sunday magazine or because it reflects a kind of Peter Principle in which good reporters get elevated to become bad pundits. But I didn't mean even that.

Someone had simply asked why we paid attention to him, given what we found to be poorly thought out ideas. I was just explaining it's worth replying when he has such disproportionate influence. And I think the replies really did get substantive. I realize my own got more shrill (not that one, but others). But frankly I just lost patience. I wanted to like him, since I'm not a fan myself of the "Democrats are traitors" theme of the blogosphere. But he simply convinced me he's got a lot of lousy ideas and straw men.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

The discipline economics is the study of sales transactions using money as a measure.

No it's not. The Economics 101 class I had in college defined it as the study of how a society distributes goods and resources. Trade with money is one way. Direct trade of goods or services is another and some economists do spend their time examining barter systems.

The discipline of Economics limits itself to the study of power from that source and assumes that a business itself is simply another individual with full knowledge of the decisions he makes.

Economics doesn't study the "power that results .. from transactions" at all. It's not concerned with power except in how it might affect the distribution of goods and services. It is true that wealth and ownership can be and often are sources of power for the individuals who hold them and can be sources of power when people combine their wealth, but this is a byproduct of an economic system, not its chief focus.

Since Libertarianism assumes that everything in society is controlled by economic transactions, the set of Libertarian 'ideas' is worthless to overall society.

Libertarianism doesn't believe in control at all generally speaking. And Marxists are just as enamoured of economic determinism as they are.

The key point to remember is that top managers in big business are power managers just like top managers in government. The difference is that government, being older, went through the theory of the divine right of kings and then moved slowly - with the kings kicking and screaming - towards democracy. [Magna Carta - Glorious Revolution (1688) - American Revolution - French Revolution - etc.]

Top managers in big businesses have been able to isolate themselves from most outside influences and are currently operating in the absolute monarch manner, except when government forces them not to. Then they, like earlier kings, kick and scream and in the case here in America, co-opt government to the extent they can with their wealth. Why not? Like the kings of yore, they control their own paychecks.

This is pretty over the top. Corporations respond to public pressure all the time.

I agree that we need government regulation, but at the same time, the interests of corporations and businesspeople SHOULD be represented in our government because what's in their interest is often in the interest of the economy, their workers, and technological advancement. As you state, corporations and businesses provide jobs, services and income, but the mass of people -- and especially and disappointingly it seems Democrats -- are so woefully ignorant of what it takes to do that, that I fear they would run the country's economy right into the ground if corporate interests had no power in the process at all.

Our goal should simply be to make sure that those businesses that choose to do the right thing like taking measures to protect the environment, or workers, or whatever at least have a fighting chance in the marketplace against those who take shortcuts.

But this kind of demonization of corporate America is really not helpful.

Economics purports to study the distribution of goods and services, but look at the data they use to do it. Goods and services are distributed to the highest value use. How is value determined?

In economics the value of a good or service is the dollar equivalent of that good or service as determined by an arms-length transaction between a buyer and a seller. (As you say, economics 101. It is clearer to accountants, however, and they provide the basic economic data being used. Still, check the money & banking course in economics or finance for more details.) You may also remember from that economics course that money (among other things) is a unit of value. That economic transaction converts the values of all types of goods and services into a single unit of value that can be compared to the value of totally unrelated goods and services. It only becomes such a unit of comparable value in an economic transaction.

How else could a guy compare the value of twenty dollars of copper or pvc pipe with the value of a twenty-dollar lap dance? Yet sale of each adds twenty dollars to the GDP through the magic of an economic transaction. [How do you determine which is the higher value good or service? How bad did you really want that lap dance? Which did you buy?]

Markets then take this value as determined in uncountable economic transactions and accumulated those transactions in financial reports, to determine the economic value of entire companies. That's the kind of data that financial markets run on.

Barter systems are negligible in the numbers used by the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor statistics, the Commerce Department or the Treasury Department - or any of the financial markets.

Economics doesn't study the "power that results .. from transactions" at all. It's not concerned with power except in how it might affect the distribution of goods and services.

The result is that we get a lot of outstanding equations that describe economic transactions at a macro level, but nothing comparable to compare power transactions. The result is that there are massive amounts of quantitative data describing economic transactions, while power transactions are essentially ignored. Management theorists who have studied management decision-making have proven that decision-makers give a lot more weight to quantitative data than to qualitative data in making decisions, and I think it is fair to extrapolate that the general public similarly gives greater weight to quantitative data over qualitative data. To day that another way, what an economist says counts more than what a political scientist or historian says because the Economist can provide better charts.

Libertarianism doesn't believe in control at all generally speaking.

No organization exists without control. Society in general requires control to maintain stability. Control is required in families, especially with children, and the apparent lack of control in towns and cities is the main reasons why members of agricultural societies tend to detest "townies." The existence of different classes (Aristocrats and Plebeians) in towns is a form of social control. Urban areas can't exist without it, and agricultural people can't stand it.

Libertarianism ignores social control and attempts to replace it with totally personal goal-oriented behavior. Yet there will always be a small number of individuals who do not consider the social reactions to the actions they take and thus have to be controlled. One in 500 individuals who do not live by the rules can destroy a society if not controlled. The result is that no one can be trusted to live without social controls, which require power. So the application of Libertarianism demands lead in the paint on children's toys from China.

Gotta have control - that is, power - to make society work. On that fact Libertarianism totally fails. Sorry. No one needs to control ME. Why am I controlled? Because the uncontrolled one moves around or does his antisocial behavior in secrecy. The other side, though is that the methods of control must themselves be controlled or they become methods of oppression on the other 499 individual. Again, you can't ignore power. It has to be applied and it has to be restricted in its application.

So how does economic determinism apply? Marxist-Hegelian determinism is interesting, but not very significant to anything here.

Corporations respond to public pressure all the time.

Corporations cannot be trusted to act in a socially responsible manner, especially when you have an extremely long production/sales chain like that of toys from China. What was it one Astronaut said? He was sitting on the launching pad realizing that his life depended on the reliability of 500,000 parts, each made my the lowest bidder? The final product depends on an awful lot of things being done satisfactorily, and failure is not an option. Control is an absolute requirement.

In private business they act to avoid transparency unless they are forced to expose their internal processes. There is an entire branch of economics based on how the buyer and seller act when one has more information about the product than the other does.

Granted that public pressure does cause businesses to react, but how often does it require then to act responsibly? Go look at how Enron operated. Or SunBeam. Or WorldCom. Those are the most well-known. The Auditing literature shows an awful lot more. Each and everyone avoided transparency and when it was demanded, they lied. A local food supplier sold a large batch of chile to a restaurant, who returned it because it smelled bad. The manager of the food supplier then refroze and resold it to a supermarket. Over a dozen people were hospitalized. The food supplier was saving money by not checking out the returned item before reselling it. The supermarket went out of business.

Quality control directly impacts the bottom line and does so immediately. A change in management, an incompetent manager, or a crooked manager can kill people. The food supplier wanted the final settlement sealed, but the judge was better than that. The cost of such behavior needs to be publicized so that others will spend the money on quality control. Was that demonizing business? I don't think so. Failures have to be publicized so that the cost of avoiding them can be justified to the bean counters.

I don't say that the needs of business should be ignored by Government, but the idea that Democrats don't understand the needs of business is a bunch of crap. I'm a Democrat, and I have a pretty good idea what the needs of business are, and sometimes the top managers of some businesses aren't going to agree with me. [But like the Enron Managers, they don't like Auditors either.]

To suggest that the needs of business might not be represented in government is applying the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. I'll focus on the crooks and watch the rest for crookedness, but I'll also support those businesses that are doing a great job.

Consider what Reed Hundt wrote recently about cellular phones. South Korea and Japan have much better technology that America does. Why? Inadequate American government regulation. Every phone sold needs to be able to use every network in the business. That would eliminate restrictive multi-year contracts and phones which are technologically crippled so that they can't work with other networks.

My kid tells me that Apple just applied a software patch that prevents the use of their iPod with other networks, because of the patch a hacker kid developed that opened it up. The fact that the Apple patch also disabled some iPods that did not have the hacker kid's patch was a surprise to Apple.

The real problem is that Apple is crippling its iPod in the first place rather than innovating in phone services. This is a failure of proper government regulation. The market needs to be designed to encourage better equipment rather than tying phones up under legal contracts and crippled software. No one uses a contract to talk or communicate. Innovation in contracts is not useful innovation. Yet this is a failure that Libertarianism and the free market philosophy causes. [Show me an innovative civil or tax lawyer and I will bet I am looking at a total economic parasite. Odds are on my side.]

I fail to see how demanding that businesses tell us whether they use lead paint on children's toys or cripple their cell phones is "demonizing corporate America." You are defending the indefensible. [Want to buy some Enron stock?]

Re: Do New York state and Florida have these 2/3rds laws or practices also?

I don't know about New York, but as far as I know Florida (where I live) has no such laws. The Florida state legislature however is one of the most incompetent legislatures in the country-- the Larry, Moe and Curly of legislatures. It is dominated by the GOP, but the Florida GOP is badly fractured between the Far Right and the Not So Far Right and the two sides fight more bitterly than either fights with the Democrats. We now have a governor who is astonishingly moderate for a Republican and he is trying to corral the legislature into accomplishing worthwhile things, though this seems mainly to be through endless (and expensive) "special sessions" since the legislature cannot seem to pass anything during the normal session and so must wait until their inaction breeds a crisis and they are forced to act (and then in their haste they are likely to make mistakes, or sneak through truly bad legislation they wouldn't dare advance except in a crisis). Case in point: at the behest of the insurance industry several Far Righters (including then-Gov Jeb Bush) held up any action for the last two years on our No Fault auto insurance law, which is due to expire Oct 1. As a result the state may not have any enforceable insurance law, and will be unable to require people to carry auto insurance at all. There's rumors of a compromise in the works, to be enacted at, yes, a special session, this coming week. But stay tuned: they may very well pass something that lets the insurers triple their rates too.

Thanks, and to answer your question, I think it's because people become so emotionally attached to a viewpoint -- or even more potent, they have an actual personal interest in a viewpoint -- that they simply cannot hear that viewpoint contradicted without feeling pained by it.

Sometimes I feel this way too. It's taken me a long time to learn to seek out opposing opinions, but over time I've come to see that it is those who I disagree with that teach me the most.

.> Bull. I have this computer I'm typing on
> because of the corporation Dell.

Personally, I would say you have your Dell due to (1) the efforts of a number of university electrical engineers in the 1930s, when doing university research was the equivalent of working for charity today (2) the needs of World War II, which drove NCR, IBM, Sperry, and their equivalents in England to become providers of high-speed computing devices (3) the needs of the hydrogen bomb race; see 2 (4) the needs of the space race, which again drove the development of solid state computers in the 1960s. Lots of power there - not too much market.

sPh

I was going to point out that value and price are not the same thing, but sphealy beat me to it. I think economists stopped talking about "value" and started to use the term "utility" because no one can precisely define value, and utility does not have a lot of competing common definitions that confuse the issue.

Price is not the same thing as value. It is a proxy measure of social value at a specific moment in time and in a specific place, and is established in an economic exchange measured in some unit of exchange.

For it to become useful to society, there has to be a market where everyone making a similar exchange knows the monetary price of the prior exchanges. The first monetary exchange sets a starting price, and then the following exchanges rather rapidly converge on a socially recognized price.

This price is merely a proxy measure of value or utility. The 5,000 year-old corpse found frozen in the Alps a few years ago was a man who had a bow, arrows, clothes, and even (I think) some decorative items, all of which surely had value to him. But they had no price, since money did not exist then. Without a price, society had no way of measuring what the value those items had for others, just as today there is no proxy measure for power relations between people.

All the economics theories you got in Eco 101 are based on price, not value.

As for power, I forget that many people consider it a negative term. Actually, power is the ability to get someone else to do something different from what they otherwise would do had someone not exerted power. I rather like the French and Raven descriptions of the sources of power. Those are listed at the link right above.

If you work for a company, and the boss tells you to do something specific, you do it because he has power to tell you to do it, not because he is paying you to do that specific thing. If you work on an assembly line, you are given the parts needed and you follow instructions regarding how to assemble them. You don't exchange anything for those parts. Someone with legitimate power based on his position told someone else to get those parts to you.

A productive organization is built around a Value Chain. That value chain consists of the whole series of actions designed to add value to raw materials and end in a finished product. There are usually some market transactions along the chain, particularly at the end when the product is sold, that set market values for the goods and services, but most of the activities between the various market transactions are allocations of resources and behavior directed by individuals using their power to give such instructions.

If you look at the various bases of power you will notice that two of them, reward power and coercive power, can result from promising or withholding wealth. Both of those and the other types of power have both positive and negative applications, but the power itself is neutral. It depends on how it is used.

I've recently been studying the neurological functions that are unique to human beings, and apparently "exchange" is one of them. Power is older. The leader of a troop of apes gets what he wants through the power he has earned when he defeated the other contenders for the position, and ceases to get what he wants from other troop members when he loses that position.

The price mechanism is a cultural development which works on the already natural human function of exchange. "Price" requires an economic exchange, measured in units of exchange, and is not socially of much value until the markets the exchanges occur in are large enough to become somewhat efficient. As a result, the price function operates only in money economies, something that most of the world outside Europe and North America did not have until after the spread of the Industrial Revolution.

A subsistence farm is, by definition, outside the money economy. Power is a lot more important than market exchanges, both outside the money economy and within economic and government organizations even in the money economy. The problem is, there is no convenient proxy measure for power that resembles the proxy measure, money, in economic matters.

[I always wondered how Hari Seldon quantified power in his equations in Asimov's Foundation Series. He had to if his equations were to have any predictive power regarding the future of the Empire.]

I always wondered how Hari Seldon quantified power in his equations in Asimov's Foundation Series. He had to if his equations were to have any predictive power regarding the future of the Empire.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Re: Only armies, the governments that fielded the armies and religions moved further than that on land.

But religious pilgrimages were very popular in the Middle Ages and while I don't know if a majority of people made a pilgrimmage, certainly if was a big enough business so that towns sometimes faked miracles and even invented fictitious saints to draw pilgrims and the equivalent of today's tourist dollars. Remember too that a major reason for the Crusades was the disruption of pilgrimmages in the Middle East by the Turks. Rome and Jeruslaem (and Constantinople for the Orthodox) were the major pilgrimmage sites. But there were lots of lesser ones, inclduing Canterbury in England and Compostela in Spain. So I think some skepticism about the lack of travel in the Middle Ages is in order. Also, languages were hardly as fragmented as your post suggests. Yes, dialects were stronger then than they are now, and the Plattedeutsch and Hochdeutsch or the Langue d'Oeil and Langue d'Oc speakers would have found each other's tongues incomprehensible. (They would today aswell if they did not have a written and media-imposed standard tongue in common) But merchant activity, monasteries and the practice of exoagmy (marrying into surrounding communities rather than one's own) kept things from getting so fragmented that there might be a language barrier in any given locality except where completely different languages abutted against one another. By the way. I've seen it claimed that if today you traveled on foot from Lisbon north to Galicia, then east through Castile to Catalonia, then northward across France and back south over the Alps to Italy, you would never find a place where the spoken dialects would be incomprehenisble between adjoining localities so smoothly do the Romance languages blend into one another (and there are similar claims for German and Dutch; the Scandivanian languages, and some of the Slavic languages).

Some random comments that I hope apply to power. Walter Goelitz wrote The History of the German General Staff, 1345-1945, but for much of that time, it wasn't a general staff by modern (to be defined shortly) standards. What it did do was institutionalize military history, so officers could learn from the past.

While I forget the original source, it was said that Napoleon was the last of the pure generals, who would have been beaten by an army with a "true" general staff. Napoleon did have staff officers who carried his messages to and fro, brought back reports, and arranged for food, campgrounds, etc. What Napoleon did not delegate was the actual planning of military operations, especially having contingency plans in place for enemy moves. Under Sir Francis Walsingham, Britain had a recognizable intelligence agency in the early 16th century, but it dealt with diplomatic rather than military matters.

The idea of contingency planning, combined with continual intelligence collection, the latter not necessarily superspies but maps, came together with a third component of modern power, electrical communications, in the mid to late 19th century. Much of what we think of today as a communications enabled society started with the electrical telegraph circa 1845, although there had been fixed semaphore stations around the turn of the 18th century.

As you suggest, bureaucracy is also a means of division of labor and development of specialization, and military planning staffs are one example. Secret police organizations certainly existed into antiquity, but, as population grew, you couldn't "round up the usual suspects" without knowing who they were. Biographical intelligence -- political opposition research -- probably was a British development in the late 19th or early 20th century.

While there were other factors, I suspect one reason that the Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, had with the Bolsheviks is that there were too many subversives, with even more code names, to track without better methods. Ironically, quite a few Okhrana agents were taken into Lenin's Cheka. A major Cheka mission was identifying deserters, then enemies of the state, and, given the scale of the Soviet security organs, they required a bureaucracy.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Interesting. Actually I have a working thesis going at the moment that the development of the modern world - at least in Europe - is the development in size, complexity and reliability of permanent organizations. [I think that there are also some unique human neurological functions that are developing to support this. Functions like the instinct to recognize patterns, to build verbal narratives, and to mentally imagine alternative future states, recognize cause and event chains that lead to them and choose the preferred future. Human evolution appears to have originally been driven by rapid climate changes, but then when society was created mental evolution became also driven by social and sexual pressures. Nicholas Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, has written a fascinating book called "Before the Dawn" which traces much of purely human evolution as determined recently by studies of DNA.]

The Thirty Years War demonstrated that a full time professionally trained army would regularly defeat mercenaries. The next lesson was that the larger army would beat the smaller one. The big problem was how to pay for such full-time professional armies.

That led the Kings to tax the merchants so as to support the central army. The Baronial levy's were less professional and invariably smaller, and too often the Barons themselves were revolting against the King. So armies were centralized and nations got bigger because bigger nations could field bigger armies.

Bigger nations needed bigger governments, especially the tax collection part, and since the merchants supported the king over the local Barons, that government had to also support the merchants. National security, you see.

Interestingly, this appeared to be the process in landlocked nations. Northwestern Europe and the British Isles were seafaring (Littoral) nations and depended on navies rather than armies, so the centralization of government did not occur as much. But they still had to centralize somewhat to beat off the larger French and Spanish governments.

After an army gets just so big, it has to institutionalize its management functions, which is what you describe in the development of General Staffs. Clauswitz fought with the Prussians, who Napoleon defeated rather handily. Clauswitz spent the rest of his life running military schools and improving the German military institutions, and Prussian society was built around that military model that resulted.

Bismark used that military and the Prussian militarized society to unify what became the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm, and then around the turn of the century the great German sociologist Max Weber first described the governmental bureaucracy that had developed to institutionalize those much larger organizations.

It appears to me that the formalized General Staff was designed as a reaction to Napoleon's conquest of Europe, so it should be no surprise that he probably would have been defeated if he had ever faced an army with such a General Staff.

Napoleon certainly was not the last General to fight that way, though. I recall from a fascinating biography of British General Charles George Gordon (also known as Chinese Gordon and Gordon of Khartoum.) who commanded the Chinese government forces against rebels in 1862. He did all the military planning himself and wrote orders as well as instructions to issue weapons and ammunition on scraps of paper to be carried by couriers to the recipients.

Then there was a friend of mine who had personally commanded a two-battalion air assault in Vietnam who would later (repeatedly) remark as we were writing multi-page five-paragraph orders that he had commanded that attack with nothing more than a pocket notebook and two ball-point pens. Of course, he was a helicopter pilot and could view the entire battle from the air. Who needed a staff?

If you work for a company, and the boss tells you to do something specific, you do it because he has power to tell you to do it, not because he is paying you to do that specific thing.

No. You have it backwards. I respect my boss' wishes, I listen to what he says, because he's paying me, and I do not for one moment accept that he has some intrinsic power over me merely based on his position. I provide a service to him as an equal for which he pays me. The moment he isn't paying me, he has no power over me.

But even to the extent he has power over me, that's not my primary motivator. Mostly I want to do a good job because I take pride in my work. My boss has never had to threaten me with firing -- he's never had to exert power -- because he's never asked me to do anything that I didn't want to do or was at least quite willing to do.

Your definition of power is getting someone to do something they wouldn't do if power was not exerted. That assumes that the two individuals in question -- the one exerting power and the one exerted upon -- are in conflict over how the exerted upon is going to use his time and energy. But that is simply not the case in most group endeavors where people are working together toward a common goal. In fact, show me an organization that depends on the constant exertion of any kind of power to run and I'll show you a disfunctional, inefficient organization.

I'll agree that power may be involved in determining the goal, but that's not the same as it running things, and I would argue that people actually do often determine goals and make decisions without the involvement of power, even in groups.

Your original statement in your first post was that society runs on power. Given your definition, that statement depends on the notion that people won't do anything to further society or I suppose even themselves unless they are told to. That is demonstratably false.

Ben Franklin did experiments that led to the discovery of electricity. Did he do that because he was told to? No. He didn't even do it for the money. He did it because he was interested in it. He wanted to.

People every year give millions to charity. No one tells them to. People even give millions to political campaigns and causes for which they get no tax break.

Every time there's a disaster, all kinds of people step forward to help. No one tells them to. They just do it.

Civic organizations like Kiwanis or the Rotary Club have existed in the United States for generations. They didn't come about because someone exerted power. They came about because of the natural tendency of human beings to come together in communities. And since they are volunteer based, the don't run on the exertion of power.

Everyone who runs campaigns know they run on volunteers -- people the campaigns have no power over to make do anything they don't want to do. Granted, the campaign provides DIRECTION, but that's not the same as an exertion of power because the people volunteering have CHOSEN to be directed.

By your definition, a society that is run on power is one in which those wielding power constantly make decisions about what all the rest will do in contravention to what those people would otherwise do. To believe that is a good system, one has to believe that those in power can make better decisions about what individuals do with their time, energy and resources then they themselves can make. I think that's a hard case to make.

The basic libertarian argument -- indeed the basic American argument for individual freedom -- is that the things that people would do on their own, the choices that individuals would make are as good or better than the choices that would be made for them by those in power.

Even in your ape society, I would guess there's a lot of activities -- every day activities -- such as gathering food that constitute the really important work that makes the ape society run and which occur without any assertion of authority or power by the lead ape.

There are and have been societies run on the basis of power. Such societies establish a noble class that has power and rules the lower class. Or there's a priest class that runs people using what I would guess you would call information power by keeping people afraid of some superstition.

The American Revolution overthrew all that. The essense of America is that it doesn't run on power. It runs primarily on the free choices of individuals. If you don't understand that, then IMO you understand nothing about this country or its culture.