We’re told that banks and mortgage companies made a bunch of stupid mistakes which resulted in an economic meltdown.  So to save us from the economic meltdown, we were told we have to give $700 billion to the same banks that put us into this mess to start with.

And now the banks tell us that they are not going to tell us what they did with our money which we gave them to save us from them.

So, seriously, just how stupid are we?

It always puzzles me that some of my (economically) middle- and lower-class friends, none of whom ever seem to do any reading on the subject, believe that Republicans have a better handle on things like lowering taxes, spurring job growth, and just generally protecting our standard of living.  I haven’t lived very long — just a half century so far — but even I have noticed that whenever we have a Republican President, things tank.  Whenever we get a Democrat in the White House, things improve. All the way around.

The current administration has, however, far surpassed past Republican administrations in damaging our country on just about every front imaginable.  Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, influential Republican adviser Grover Norquist once famously said one goal was,

to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.  (Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (2004) p. 6.)

And journalist Elizabeth Drew noted that,

It’s not just because taxes are irritating and unpopular and all that.  He [Norquist] has a long-term view, which is the lower the revenues that the government takes in, the less spending it will be able to do, the less money will go to the groups that he sees as the base of the Democratic party and its power—the teachers’ unions, welfare workers, municipal workers and so on.  This is the big, long-term war.  It’s total.  It’s Armageddon.  And I have to say that the people on the right, I think, have thought this through much more than their opponents on the other side who really don’t much know what they do and how the opposition thinks and are just waking up to it.  (Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America, quoted in Banana Republicans, p. 7.)

I can only hope that people will start to wake up to what’s happening.  I’m personally concerned that the United States cannot survive another Republican President, not even one from the great hockey-playing, moose-shooting state of Alaska.  (Yeah, truth is, Obama isn’t running against McCain; he’s running against Palin.  Because while I’m concerned about whether the United States can survive another Republican President, I’m convinced that his health and age make it unlikely McCain will.)

Maybe it’s time we recognize that there’s a reason George W. Bush continues smiling and appears to be unconcerned about the severity of the problems into which he’s gotten us.  The reason is at least as old as the recognition that Rome needed a more robust fire department. I doubt it’s a mistake that Grover Norquist was once called “Field Marshall” of the Bush economic plan. And people think the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing.  Bush continues to smile and nod and grin and bob his head because everything is going exactly according to plan.

So I’m not surprised at either the economic devastation that we’ve seen under Bush’s watch, nor at his apparent lack of concern.  I suspect there may well be private parties in the now anything-but-transparent White House where Bush gleefully fiddles away, impervious to the vagaries of the economy he and his friends are helping to destabilize.

What does surprise me is the lack of recognition on the part of everyone else that this mess is caused by eight years of unbridled Republican policies. What does surprise me is that middle- and lower-income voters can’t see in their own lives what economists have long recognized:

The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House.  (Larry Bartels, “Inequalities” (April 27, 2008) New York Times Magazine.)

Unfortunately, the thing that has created this mess is what will also make it virtually impossible for a true government bail-out.  For that, we need only look at the now-historic (and thus largely forgotten) Great Depression.  Only the oldest amongst us really remembers — and understands — the depth of that depression, the key cause of which was “an expansion of the money supply in the 1920s that led to an unsustainable credit-driven boom.”

The factors noted by the Austrian School economists, primarily Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Murray Rothbard (A History of Money and Banking in the United States), are present again today.  And the government is trying the same things it tried after the crash of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression.

But forget that for now.  If you’ve ever tried to balance a checkbook, or run a household, just think about this:  George W. Bush has spent years — almost eight of them — cutting taxes.  Forget also, for the moment, that those tax cuts have largely benefitted the rich, and not the rest of us — seriously, forget that part for now.  Just think of it this way: Bush has cut the “income” of the United States government.  At the same time, he started a war that costs billions per day to run.  Coupled with that, he and his friends have failed to regulate lenders, effectively removing the controls that kept the kids from dipping into the piggy bank whenever they ran low on cash.

How long would your household last before you lost everything, if you did the same things our government is doing?

Even now I can see Dick Cheney and Grover Norquist sitting in a bathtub, clinking glasses, toasting one another, while George Bush fiddles (read that however you want) in the background.

Suggested Reading

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)	A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II	Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

That doesn’t explain one significant failure pointed out to me this morning by James G. Brown in his comment on my January 2004 article about U.S. companies benefiting from the war in Iraq.

Mr. Brown points out that I’m an idiot because “[T]here’s only one company in the U.S. that can do what Halibrton [sic] can do.” Just one. The others are “French or Germany [sic] corporation[s].”

Silly me. We liberal Jews are so ignorant that we can’t even spell the names of other companies, let alone recognize that they can’t do what Halliburton can do.

Oh, wait. I forgot. This is the United States. That means there are likely other companies that compete with Halliburton and can do the same thing Halliburton does.

That must explain this quote:

The Bechtel Group, one of the world’s biggest engineering and construction companies, has dropped out of the running for a contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as other competitors have begun to conclude that the bidding process favors the one company already working in Iraq, Halliburton. — Neela Banerjee, Rivals say Halliburton Dominates Iraq Work (August 8, 2003) Truthout

And that doesn’t even count the other competitors listed on the Yahoo! Finance site.

Oy! “Bechtel” is a “Germany [sic]“ name! They must be Germans! Not.

Riley P. Bechtel, Chairman and CEO of Bechtel, was born in the United States and graduated from Stanford University in California before joining an American law firm (in San Francisco, I believe). Bechtel itself was founded by Warren A. Bechtel, who started out grading railroad beds with mule-drawn wagons in 1898 in Oklahoma. Bechtel has been involved in such non-German projects as San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system and the Hoover Dam Project. Unlike Halliburton, they can’t handle foreign engineering projects, though — unless you count the work they did on Hong Kong’s new airport and associated infrastructure. Oh, and the work they did in Iraq before realizing Halliburton was the favored son.

As Mr. Brown noted, some of these companies traded on American stock exchanges are not totally owned by Americans. That, as he explains, should make it clear to us why we award them contracts off the coast of Texas, but not in foreign places like Iraq.

So ignore the fact that the company Vice-President Dick Cheney once headed got no-bid Iraqi contracts worth billions. It’s not corruption. They’re Americans! And only some of their competitors are Americans!

More importantly, Mr. Brown seems to be ticked off because I wrote about corruption within the United States government whereas he was concerned that there are questions about whether Kofi Annan has a son who might have been involved in receiving illicit payments under the “Oil for Food” scandal. As with “Halibrton,” Mr. Brown cannot spell the name “Kofi Annan,” but he is already convinced Mr. Annan was involved in corruption that makes Halliburton “look like chump change.”

Nothing like that has ever happened in the United States! No politicians, or their sons, have ever been involved in similar scandals.

Well, unless you count the Savings & Loan scandal that cost some Americans their entire life savings and retirement plans and in which several members of the Bush family had key parts.

But perhaps we liberal Jews are just pissed off because the numerous scandals involving every generation of the Bush family reach all the way back to when the United States government ordered the seizure of Bush property because the company Prescott Bush was running was engaged in supporting Adolf Hitler.

And perhaps the only reason he left off the word “stinking” that most people use when they say “liberal Jew” was out of recognition that the blog article on which he was commenting was written in January of 2004 — long before any allegations I ignored against Kofi Annan’s family were made.

As of December 2004, these are still only recent allegations and no one yet knows what happened. That’s why the U.S. senate wants to see United Nations records relating to the “Oil for Food” program.

Funny how Mr. Brown doesn’t mention anything about the U.S. companies — ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil — that are also under investigation in two separate grand jury proceedings to determine their role in the scandal. Funny how he doesn’t comment upon the fact that we have, as yet, nothing more than allegations about any U.N. involvement.

And we can’t use, as support for the U.N., the belief of many folk that the allegations are manufactured by the Bush Administration to get even with the U.N. for its stand on the illegality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After all, they must be lying. They oppose the Bush Administration. I mean, only al-Jazeera types would argue that “there has yet to be found a single person with his hand in the U.N. cookie jar.” And the fact that Halliburton’s Swiss bank accounts were recently frozen while they’re investigated in an alleged bribery scandal should not lead us to think anything I ever wrote about them was justified.

So, clearly, I’m simply prejudiced because in January 2004 I was writing about Halliburton’s no-bid contracts and the scandal surrounding them instead of writing about Kofi Annan.

Of course, my blog article that stirred up Mr. Brown was written long after the verified and validated information regarding the Bush family’s involvement with Nazi Germany, Saudi Arabia (whence virtually all the World Trade Center terrorists came) and, of course, the business of selling weapons (is this perhaps why there are wars whenever we put Bushes in office?). As of today — I just checked to make sure — Fox “news” has two stories about Kofi Annan on their main page; CBS has none, ABC none, MSNBC none, CNN none. But a Google search this morning on “bush family nazi involvement” returns 97,700 documents. A similar Google search on the term “halliburton scandal” returns 120,000 documents.

Dang! Why doesn’t this friggin’ liberal Jew have any January 2004 blog articles about Kofi Annan’s scandal, which makes “Halibrton [sic] … look like chump change”?

I’m sorry that I don’t write the things on my blog that make people like Mr. Brown happy. I’m sorry that I think corruption occurring in my own country’s government which threatens the existence of my own country gets more “press” on my blog than these other important corruptions in which American companies like ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil are involved. I’m sorry I document my sources via hyperlinks so that people can see that the things I do write about are not made up. I’m sorry I didn’t do the research to prove that Halliburton’s competitors cannot do what Halliburton can do. I admit I assumed that because they are competitors of Halliburton, they could.

But maybe Mr. Brown was not referring to what they could do in Iraq. Maybe he was referring to the fact that none of Halliburton’s competitors can get no-bid contracts from the Bush Administration.

Hmmm…I never considered that as a defense to the charges! (I wonder if that’s because I’m a “liberal Jew”?) Brilliant!

Oh, and speaking of the long-forgotten Halliburton no-bid contracts, check out Malnurtured Snay’s blog article this morning about the soldier who asked Rumsfield why they don’t get armored vehicles to fight against the Iraqis — and the Bush Administration’s threat that unless Halliburton got another no-bid contract, the soldiers would get no additional armor.

Snay wants to know why this soldier doesn’t support the troops in Iraq. After all, he did question the Administration’s handling of the war.

Me? I’m busy researching to see if “Wilson” is a jewish surname.

This really should be a non-issue.

After all, the American people have proven that what the current administration does is actually irrelevant. I’m not saying this (seriously) to be sarcastic, but I’m not sure if the reason for this is because we so like having a Republican in office or if we just hate having a Democrat in office or if we like sending our children to die like heros in the dessert or if it’s because Bush claims to be a Christian or what. There’s something going on in the minds of most Americans that is simply unexplainable.

Over the last four years, I’ve seen prices going up for gasoline as if we were dumping gold into our gas tanks. Housing prices have risen dramatically (although this isn’t always bad, if you’re a seller). Civil Rights have become almost non-existent. Our government — and no one else — is responsible for this.

We accept these things because we refuse to believe our government — particularly one with a President who so frequently invokes the name of G-d — would not have our best interests at heart. And as to the restrictions on our freedoms, well, after all, most of us “have nothing to hide.”

Yet Americans don’t seem to understand that governments aren’t always benevolent. For more than 200 years, ours has been held in check by the law. For that reason, we’ve gotten used to the idea that (at least our) governments can’t really oppress — well, they can’t visibly oppress most white people, anyway. Essentially, we’ve been able to live free. The thing is that we’ve been able to live that way because our nation’s Founders placed limitations upon our government. Without these limitations, they believed, governments naturally turn despotic.

Under Parliamentary government, there is little or no restraint that is exercised by a Constitution upon the passions of the moment that may seize a nation. In what is perceived as an emergency, individual rights can be overridden. The entire government, therefore, is less stable over time and subject to being changed by something that might in retrospect seem whimsical.

The saving grace for the United States was that the Founders first wrote a Constitution to keep the power of government in check and then deliberately made it difficult to revise that Constitution. So opposed were the Founders to the concentration of power that a federal government would bring that the United States almost was not created at all!

Joseph Ellis points out in Founding Brothers: ?no one had ever established a republican government on the scale of the United States, and the overwhelming judgment of most respected authorities was that it could not be done.? The revolution had ?stigmatized all concentrated political power . . . and any energetic expression of governmental authority as an alien force that a responsible citizens ought to repudiate.? After all, Americans had just fought a long and difficult war to rid themselves of a ?despotic? king and ?tyrannical? parliament so they could be free to pursue life, liberty and happiness, unfettered by trade restrictions, taxes, and other burdens.

And so, for the majority of our history, our government has been limited in its powers. The major limitations have included requirements that prevent the government from conducting its business in secrecy. In addition to the Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act is one such limitation.

Freedom of information is a phrase bandied about almost daily by press and public alike. And with the perennial stress on both constitutional and inherent rights of American citizens, with the added assertion of government subservience to the individual, it was necessary that government information would be available to the public. Issues of counter-rights, such as sensitivity of government information or private interests, clash. It was, therefore, attempted in 1966 to enact a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which would effectively deal with requests for government records consistent with the idea that the people have the ?right to know? about them. Also, close in hand, the Privacy Act (PA) of 1974 covered government documents charting individuals.

Today, the Bush Administration has been hammering away at all such restrictions. They want the ability to operate in secret and they want the ability to maintain records on the majority of citizens.

That’s right, the majority of citizens, not just those the average American might agree “should be” watched.

This blog entry is not intended to be an in-depth examination of these issues. For more information on Total Information Awareness, “the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States,” you can check this web page. Technically, the Total Information Awareness program was killed by Congress amid concerns it would be used to spy on Americans. But the government views your privacy as anathema — which it is — to their ability to control. And Total Information Awareness lives on — but now with new names that help disguise its breadth.

Again, it isn’t (well, it wasn’t) my intent to go into much depth on these issues. One other thing to note, though, is that even where the law still forbids government from collecting extensive databases on citizens, it does not forbid them from using databases created by non-government entities, such as Cendant Corporation, which is (legally!) compiling huge databases on citizens. So far, these databases are “only” being used by other companies to “weed out” customers they don’t want. Insurance companies, for example, look at the buying habits of Americans (remember those discount cards you get from Von’s, Ralph’s and other grocery markets that track your name and purchases?) to eliminate those with “unhealthy” habits like “buying alcohol, cigarettes and red meat.” (And when Robert Rivera slipped and fell in a California grocery store and fractured his kneecap, he sued the store to pay the medical bills. In turn, the store threatened to use Mr. Rivera’s shopping history against him, specifically, that he made frequent purchases of alcohol and that he “was a lush with poor memory and coordination,” the Seattle Weekly reported.) These same databases are being used by government agencies like the IRS to track people who underreport income — looking at your purchases allows them to make judgments about whether you are reporting less than you earn.

Meanwhile, as the government increases its surveillance of ordinary citizens, our Vice-President fights valiantly to protect his right to keep us from finding out how much participation oil and energy companies had in the writing of the United States policy regarding energy.

The Bush administration has lost two rounds in federal court. If the Supreme Court makes it three, Cheney could have to reveal potentially embarrassing records just in time for the presidential election.

Although he’s lost repeatedly in the lower courts, the chances are that his run at the Supreme Court will be like, well, shooting ducks. Purely coincidentally, “The Times notes that pair [sic] arrived Jan. 5 on Gulfstream jets and were guests of Wallace Carline, the owner of Diamond Services Corp., an oil services company in Amelia, La.” (See “Scalia-Cheney Trip Raises Eyebrows,” CBSNews.com, January 17, 2003, emphasis mine. In fairness, of course, Scalia notes that “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.” That’s his opinion, anyway; and any other opinion isn’t reasonable.)

The White House’s fear is that in the unlikely event Cheney loses in the Supreme Court, it could be embarrassed by the records which would end up being released just in time for the election. But the damage this administration is doing to our country and our willingness to sit still — like so many ducks — is what’s really embarrassing.

The War in Iraq is not going as well as expected. More money is needed. More troops are needed. More of your children (I have none, which is why I sometimes think I’m an idiot for not being a “get what I can and damn the next generation” Republican) are going to have to die.

On the other hand, our population is aging. There is already a recognized problem in that as the baby boomers age, there aren’t enough young people to support the Social Security program. There’s been talk about raising the age limits for Social Security benefits. And, since the government spends more of our tax dollars on fighting the rest of the world, those tax dollars cannot be used to support programs benefiting Americans at home.

The recent death of Pat Tillman — which was somehow publicized in spite of a Bush Administration ban on this kind of news — shows the heartache of the war caused by the death of the sons and daughters of America. Heartache is the inevitable outcome of war, but the death of our young does not have to be.

Instead, the President should consider changing the rules when the draft is reinstated. Instead of sending our young productive workforce to fight and die in Iraq, he should send aging baby boomers. In fact, the benefits would be even greater if he sends those already collecting Social Security. After all, they’re already used to living on lower incomes and it’s not like we’ll ever send the rich to fight the war they so desperately crave to run our military-industrial complex upon which they’ve built their riches. (More than half of our discretionary spending is military spending.)

This solution is even more important in an era where corporations increasingly profit from wars like this while simultaneously carrying less of the tax burden than they did in previous decades (in 1940, for example, corporations essentially split the bill with private citizens, paying almost half the taxes; today, they pay just 13.7%). It is increasingly important as we fail to listen to the warnings of the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower — himself one of our greatest Army generals during World War II; he was Supreme Commander of the troops that invaded France to throw out the Nazis — when he said,

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The time to heed such warnings is past. As Eisenhower feared, the military-industrial complex has taken over our government and the problem now is to figure out how to keep America functioning in the face of what they’ve done. Since we cannot maintain the balance Eisenhower talked about between military programs and national social programs, the question now is how best to keep from killing our sons and daughters and continue to allow our aging population to receive subsistence.

By drafting only people between the ages of 50 and 70, we can accomplish both of these goals. First, our young people will not go off to war only to die for the rich. Secondly, our aging population will. This will alter the balance between young and old in our country and make it possible to sustain the Social Security program indefinitely. And since old people (arguably) cannot fight as well as young people, we will have to send twice as many; the balance will be achieved that much quicker.

Lastly, this could be combined with a plan to solve our prescription drug problem. If, during the draft, we make no exceptions for those older people on medications — in fact, we may even wish to target them — we could stop giving them their medications. Many of them are going to be shot anyway. Those that collapse on the field because of a lack of medications can be deemed “war casualties.” Bingo! No more Medicare problem!

This is a win-win-win-win-win situation for the President.

Win Number One: Most older people tend to be altruistic (they probably learned this caring for their young) and are more likely to join the Democratic party. Young people tend to be more selfish, making them ideal candidates for the Republican party. Thus, a plan that keeps the young alive while simultaneously reducing the numbers of older people benefits a Republican President and his party.

Win Number Two: By reducing the numbers of older people, less folk collect Social Security. The program is thus cheaper to maintain.

Win Number Three: By not killing young people, we have more workers to support the remaining Social Security program. In fact, this is actually two wins in one, because young people also tend to save less money, since retirement seems so far away. They spend more. This drives our consumer-based society.

Win Number Four: Old dead people don’t have prescription drug problems. They don’t have to be bussed to Canada for cheaper medications. This will also reduce the FDA budget as less of these buses will need to be stopped and searched.

Win Number Five: With less old people — and particularly if we target those on prescription drugs as noted above — overall Medicare costs go down.

Best of all for the President, there’s no downside! With so many elderly out of the way, and so few young people who actually vote (and fewer still who think before voting), there’s no one to vote him out of office!

See? I can think like a Republican!

Dick Meyer, author of the above-linked story, notes:

There have always been scandals and crooks in the history of American money, but our predator class is a distinct creation of the late 20th century. Meyer, The Predator Class (Nov. 19, 2003) CBSNews.com.

Perhaps.

Meyer also states,

Despite assurances from game-theorists and anthropologists that the criminal cadre in the species remains a constant percentage over time, I believe today’s mainstream, sanitized, and institutionally sanctioned financial crime rackets are being run by a new breed of crook. — Meyer, The Predator Class (Nov. 19, 2003) CBSNews.com.

Anyone who has read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, however, is not the least bit surprised. Axelrod’s book was written after experiments (conducted worldwide as a “contest”) among programmers who developed programs to compete within a virtual environment.

Axelrod himself says, “My original interest in game theory arose from a concern with international politics and especially the risk of nuclear war.”

I haven’t read the book in years, but my recollection is that one of Axelrod’s goals was to explain how the evolution of cooperation was possible in a Darwinian world. Social scientists have often pondered the apparent incongruity of a world in which the reigning paradigm involves the adaptation of species via mechanisms of intra- and interspecies competition for resources, stochastic drift, etc. somehow “naturally” giving rise to cooperative mechanisms. Axelrod used game theory and encouraged worldwide participation in a contest based on the non-zero-sum game known as The Prisoner’s Dilemma. His book was a discussion of the game, the particular rules of the contest and the results.

The thing that always intrigued me about this — and again recall that I’m going off memory here (a link appears at the end of this article for ordering this book) — was that Axelrod’s theory works well only for small populations where the Predators are controllable because, if they do manage to thrive, they will eventually eliminate Prey and be forced to turn upon one another. In a smaller population, Prey are more aware of the presence and methods of Predators and so have more control; where they fail, Predators control one another (more on that below). In other words, the survival of a “healthy” — to put a perverse twist on that term — Predator class would require very large populations because the Predator class would at the least be self-limiting otherwise.

No surprise, then, that my reaction was one of wryly amused interest when Meyer wrote,

I believe there is no way the counter-class made up of regulators, watchdogs and do-gooders and hack columnists can match wits with the predator class. Today’s piles of money are so huge, great fortunes can be amassed by swiping the tiniest of slices in the wiliest of ways long before picked pockets are discovered. — Meyer, The Predator Class (Nov. 19, 2003) CBSNews.com.

Meyer thinks the game-theorists are wrong and expresses pessimism that this situation will self-correct. On that count, he is both right and wrong; or, I suppose I should say, wrong and right. The game-theorists — at least on my reading of Axelrod — are right. And the situation will not self-correct.

The reason is that the current population of the world now numbers in the billions. The percentage of the overall population that then constitutes the Predator class is relatively small in comparison. The Predator class typically feeds off of the Prey, although it is not opposed to going after other members of its own class under the right conditions.

It might seem that it would make more sense for a Predator to go after another Predator. After all, taking down a Predator would theoretically bring a larger cache and (one would erroneously think) be easier than taking down many members of the Prey class.

An aside is necessary here: Contrary to popular opinion, not all the Rich would fall into the Predator class. However, it is highly unlikely that any true member of the Prey class would be Rich; in other words, a member of the Predator class would not likely be a member of the so-called “lower” classes — neither the not-entirely-appropriately-named “Middle Class” and especially not of the Poor, both of which constitute the Prey class. Intelligent Prey may rise to the level of Predator, but in doing so they will shed the economic skin they wore as Prey; in becoming a member of the Predator class, they will almost certainly become Rich. But there is nothing to stop any member of the species from either inheriting or building Riches while refusing to become a Predator. It may possibly require even more intelligence than Predators normally need to maintain a position as Rich, but it’s doable for one with enough Luck, Skill and/or Intelligence. It might even happen by somehow wheedling a position wherein one is needed by some group of Predators so that they ensure survival to the one in that position.

At any rate, as noted, Predators may have a larger stock of Riches. This might on the surface make it seem that a Predator would do better to go after another Predator. And sometimes a less-than-intelligent Predator does this.

But it is very unwise. Consider the lowly Tyrannosaurus rex. Now there was a Predator! But the same thing that made T. rex a great Predator — teeth, strength, experience in fighting Prey that did not want to die — also made it dangerous to other members of its own species. So although T. rex might have been larger than the Prey T. rexes might normally pursue, it was imminently more dangerous. (There is some argument about whether T. rex was actually a Predator. The outcome of that argument does not alter the point of mine.)

In addition, the Predator class itself is a small, somewhat self-contained population. And no doubt Predators transitioning from Prey to Predator have to be more careful than established Predators. Nevertheless, the Predator class still follows the pattern discussed in Axelrod’s book; as long as the population is small, cooperation — if only in the form of an uneasy truce — will exist even among Predators.

So how does it feel to be Prey?