iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 19h

“I suspect she left some time ago…” Really @mrjamesob.bsky.social?! Come on. You’re better than that.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 21h

@mrjamesob.bsky.social Do you think we should dispense entirely with the phrase ‘hard-working’? I do.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

That doesn’t answer the question. I don’t think they’re silly, no. Why do you?

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

@mrjamesob.bsky.social How can a pension be both ‘worthless’ and ‘unsustainable’. How do our peer countries sustain their much higher and earlier pensions? BTW, pensions are not paid out of taxes. Pls stop repeating this. Taxes do not fund services.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Absurd? You think the other names are absurd? Why?

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

So citing this as ‘proof’ that independence would fail is circular, it's using a figure that only exists because Scotland lacks fiscal sovereignty to argue against Scotland gaining fiscal sovereignty.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Scotland's deficit within the UK isn't Scotland's deficit in any meaningful sense right now anyway, because Scotland doesn't issue currency or set its own fiscal policy. It's a devolved accounting construct within a currency union it doesn't control.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

@mrjamesob.bsky.social Pls stop repeating the ‘household budget’ myth re Scotland. The only constraint on a sovereign currency issuer isn't "does spending exceed revenue," it's whether real resources, labour, materials, productive capacity exist to absorb that spending without generating inflation

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That would rule out an awful lot of the classics though.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That’s a bit of a stretch for me. Certainly capitalism was created to socialise risk and privatise gains. The rules were always controlled by those with most. Without a public sector there can be no private sector.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yup. This was two years ago. bsky.app/profile/waso...

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

@stephenkb.bsky.social Hi. Would love to hear your take on this. bsky.app/profile/waso...

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

To credit capitalism with modern wealth is like crediting a landlord with the harvest. The soil was prepared, the crop was planted, the rain fell… and yes he owned the field but that's just property law. It doesn't address who built the combine harvester… or sowed the seed.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Capitalism gets to take the credit because it was the dominant social arrangement when the curve went vertical. But correlation isn't mechanism. The machine was already running. Capitalism emerged from wealth created by altruism and curiosity.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Once you have deep specialisation and compounding scientific knowledge, wealth growth is close to inevitable. The productivity gains follow from the knowledge gains. You don't need capitalism to explain it. You need literacy, surplus, social stability and time. Not greed.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The steam engine didn't emerge only from a profit motive. It was a creative act. It emerged from natural philosophers, instrument makers, mining engineers and metallurgists whose specialisations had been deepening for generations.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution… is what happens when enough specialists exist in enough proximity, with enough surplus, to dream rather than just survive. Social cooperation made that possible. Capitalism just inherited it.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Specialisation doesn't just make individuals more productive. It makes new disciplines possible. And disciplines, talking to each other across permeable boundaries, produce science. Not capitalism. Creativity thrives when hands and minds are freed from subsistence living.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Here's what actually explains the explosion in human wealth: specialisation deepens over time. Specialists talk to other specialists. Knowledge compounds. A clockmaker's precision feeds a physicist's instrument. A physician's anatomy feeds a surgeon's technique…

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

So to credit capitalism with modern wealth is to mistake the state-enforced rules of a specific market structure for the universal human capacity and desire to cooperate and produce.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

But that just relocates the argument to which baseline rules are justified. Which is precisely the conversation "they both agreed" was trying to avoid having!

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The obvious reply: if background rules always shape bargaining, "coercion" stops meaning anything; every system assigns control of resources somehow, including a socialist one. Fair enough.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

"They both agreed" only sounds neutral if you don't ask what each side's alternative to agreeing actually was.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

G.A. Cohen covers the other angle. Any individual worker can point to a theoretical exit. But the working class as a whole can't all take those exits, because subsistence outside wage labour was closed off when the land got enclosed in the first place.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Akerlof's work on information asymmetry (the Nobel-winning one) shows the same gap on the knowledge side: the better-informed party doesn't average out with the worse-informed one. It extracts from them.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

By that standard, "nice business, shame if anything happened to it" is just another voluntary trade. The only test on offer is whether a fist was used, not whether one party has leverage the other can't match.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Push "no force = voluntary" to its conclusion and you get Walter Block's absurd Defending the Undefendable (foreword by Rothbard, commentary from Hayek) defending blackmail as a free exchange of information for money!

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

But now routed through legal entitlement instead of a knife. "Voluntary" only describes the transaction if you accept the laws and existing distribution of property as a neutral starting point, rather than the product of a choice made by whoever already had the property.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Robert Hale dismantled this in 1923. Property and contract law are themselves coercive, backed by the state's willingness to use force to protect ownership. A worker choosing between a wage and having nothing is faced with the same kind of choice a mugger's victim.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The standard comeback: exchange under capitalism is voluntary. Both parties agreed, so it must be mutually beneficial. But that only works if you assume something almost never true: equal status, equal information, equal need, no implied threat dressed as a neutral offer.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Then it declared the result a free market. But the market was not free. No market is. None can be. It was constructed by the same people who then claimed they were simply letting nature take its course.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The 1834 Poor Law reforms finished the job, stripping away parish relief that had let workers refuse the worst wages. Guild restrictions that had kept extraction on a short leash were dismantled too. Greed didn't flow into a pre-existing space. It built the space first.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

After enclosure they had nothing left but their labour, which they now had to sell at whatever price was offered. The "free" labour market was only free in the sense that no law directly compelled you. Every practical alternative had already been removed by law.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

England's enclosure acts converted common land, grazed and farmed collectively for centuries, into private property. Around five million acres. Before enclosure a family without money could still survive. The commons gave them grazing, fuel, food. They had some independence.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Karl Polanyi makes this case in The Great Transformation: a self-regulating market society doesn't occur naturally. It had to be built. And the building was itself an act of greed: landlords using state power to grab what wasn't theirs.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Capitalism's actual innovation is to take that pernicious edge case and put it centre stage. Here's the part people get backwards. Capitalism didn't invent that instinct. Negative reciprocity shows up at the margins of every society anthropologists studied. What changed is the scope it operates in.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

David Graeber's version: most human economic life ran on baseline communism, contributing according to ability, drawing according to need, among people who trusted each other. Impersonal extraction was confined to the edges, to people you didn't expect to see again.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Sahlins reserved that last category for strangers and enemies because nothing else explained why anyone would treat exchange as a contest to win rather than a relationship to maintain.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Generalised reciprocity: open-ended giving among kin, no ledger kept Balanced reciprocity: even swaps among neighbours Negative reciprocity: extract maximum gain, no obligation to give anything back

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Once you define it properly, you can see what kind of trade it actually is. Anthropology has a clean term for "all for me, none for thee, so long as I can get away with it." Marshall Sahlins called it negative reciprocity — the far end of a spectrum:

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Ellen Meiksins Wood made this case in The Origin of Capitalism. It isn't trade with a new coat of paint. It's a specific, late, historically unusual social relation. Conflating it with markets in general is how the "capitalism saved us" virus gets into the social bloodstream.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Capitalism means: private ownership of the means of production, producers dependent on the market for survival rather than land or custom, and a compulsion to keep accumulating because the firm that doesn't gets undercut and replaced.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Trade and markets are nearly universal. The Hanseatic League, the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean spice trade… ran extensive commerce for centuries. Capitalism is something narrower.

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Wasonceloved @wasonceloved.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

By that sleight of hand it becomes an unfalsifiable tautology: capitalism is better because it alone improves our lives, therefore anything that improves our lives must be capitalism. The circularity is the point. So the definition needs pinning down.

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