The Ron Paul Geek Factor

Ron Paul. To most people, he's quite the enigma. Many in traditional media circles are having trouble understanding both his appeal and his platform. A good name for this is Fifth Avenue disease.

Our culture is built on taking reality, dusting it off, slapping a coat of paint on it and pretending it's something else. Geek culture is built on long arguments about what reality actually is. If you don't believe me, go spend some time on Kuro5hin or Slashdot. As a result, most geeks are very suspicious of most of what they read and hear.

The traditional media has been uninterested in geekery for some time, preferring to continue as if the jocks ruled the world. However, the geeks have built a parallel community for themselves, largely assuming, somewhat correctly, that the rest of society was uninterested in the things geeks were interested in. The internet has grown, in a large part, due to geek socializing.

Well, it turns out there are a lot of geeks, and many of those have been relieved to discover others like them. As a matter of fact, there seem to be more geeks than non-geeks.

So, a social movement has been growing under the radar and out of the loop. The social movement has not so much been ignored as the previous order simply cannot fathom its existence at all. The idea that those who are to be led by the 'elite' might take offense to being treated so is unfathomable. The idea that people would prefer being left alone to dealing with tons of social programs is, to them, inexplicable.

What I'm trying to say is that the average person of the old social order simply cannot comprehend the geek culture. The average geek, of course, cannot comprehend the old society, and views it as 'evil', a word whose meaning has changed in geek culture to mean anything that causes annoyance, trouble or more work than it is worth. There is a certain mean-spiritedness, of course, because none of these geeks were popular in school.

Ron Paul is quite a geek. He is not a computer geek. He's a medical geek. He's an economics geek. In the classical sense, a geek is anyone who obsesses to the point of social ostracisation. Ron Paul pretty much has demonstrated he really doesn't care what anyone thinks of him. He's also demonstrated the other mark of geekery: a single-minded dedication to the right thing. Sure, geeks may not agree what the right thing is, but most geeks are definitely dedicated to what they think the right thing is.

Ron Paul's 'right thing' is a well-managed government, a government that considers the cost before it does a thing, and a government that takes its citizens seriously. Being taken seriously is a new thing to geeks, despite their traditional position of being considered more intelligent than most. Being taken seriously is a new thing for Ron Paul.

Actually, there is plenty of surprise on both sides. I don't think there's been a serious effort to reduce Paul's performance, although there's been plenty of dirty tricks from other candidates and much of the establishment, but nothing more than they'd give, say, a strong Clinton bid.

Sure, those with a vested interest in Washington as usual are fighting, but most of society simply does not understand what Dr. Paul stands for, nor can they. As Mayer said, 'we're just waiting for the world to change'. The insurgence of Dr. Paul's campaign is due, simply, to the number of people who had all but checked out, been rebuffed, annoyed, angry, ostracised, whatever, who have been waiting for the world to change. Well, the chance is here and they are changing the world.

Fundamental Factors

Economists refer to value used in production as a factor of production. In any modern economy, factors are generally too complex, both in terms of numbers and in terms of interrelationship, for conventional analysis. There are, however, root factors, that will, in my humble opinion, yield to analysis.

By root factors, I mean things that are fundamental to the survival of labor. Essentially, without labor nothing gets done because the labor itself demands things and must work to acquire them. Hence, the things the labor wants are the things it trades its labor for. Most of the things labor trades for in a modern economy are not fundamental to survival. Generally recognized survival requirements include food, water and shelter.

Water is largely a government thing these days, although drinking water is increasingly produced by private entities because (no surprise) they produce a so much higher quality product that people are willing to pay a premium over the essentially free the government charges for water.

Shelter refers, of course, to housing. A significant sign of decay in an economy is a reduction in the availability of high quality afordable housing. We don't have that problem right now, thanks to the housing market implosion.

Food, however, is a problem. The old saying goes 'Communism can work until the food runs out.' Food is one of the most basic of basic factors. It is also one of the most commonly ignored ones. Margins are razor thin and prices have been historically low as a percentage of the general economy for so long people simply don't worry about it.

Now, food prices are rising. Some of this is due to monstrously stupid responses the government put in place after the food production bubble that coincided with the general production bubble the US suffered that ultimately led to the great depression. These subsidies, taxes and price controls have ensured a fairly inefficient food market ever since.

At the heart of most of this meddling is price fixing. Price fixing is, of course, any attempt to make a given thing worth something other than what labor wants to pay for it. In this case, it was an attempt to make food worth more than what anyone would give for it on the theory that over production was not the farmer's fault. This had the effect of increasing the margin the farmers received, thus increasing their share of production. As long as production continued to rise, this situation didn't annoy the rest of the economy.

With the advent of far more scientific production, ie, agribusiness, the farmer as a tradition began to lose out. Agribusiness began using marginal land effectively, thus bypassing local laws that would have constricted it. As more and more farmers became insolvent, produciton declined. Now, as demand is increasing, production has met it on the way down.

Fortunately for us, agribusiness still has the ability to respond and increase production. In a more directed society, this is often not so.

For instance, in a communist society, where the farm producers receive exactly the same compensation as any other producer, the continuous reduction in quality and quantity of goods reduces the marginal benefit to farmers from floating their excess goods into the market, causing them to both reduce production and reduce the quality of the goods they release into the market. In the case of a free market, however, since food is a factor that has a minimum floor, production must increase to meet need, and price will increase in the short term to cover the increased need, which will lead to producers increasing production, leading to a new equilibrium.