[extropy-chat] Bush wants another $75 billion for wars

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Sean Diggins  <sean at valuationpartners.com.au> wrote:
> -----------------------------------------
> 
> No No NO! I do not advocate communism. But speaking of "the barrel of
> a gun", I fear such things as the NRA...

Aside from its tendency to support Republicans, it is more of a civil
rights organization than the ACLU.

It is not just communist, Sean. ANY government program that takes your
money as 'taxes' to redistribute it to someone else is theft at the
barrel of a gun.

> 
> As an aside, I recently listened to a monk who one considered
> explored communism/socialism. He attended one of those meetings
> decades ago in England during Vanessa Redgrave's prime activist
> period. After she spoke, he stood up and said "presumably, to
> achieve your goals, you must change the mindset of everyone who
> does not agree with you. But you cannot ever do this. Therefore,
> the only other answer is to kill them. And who is going to do
> that? You, Vanessa? Everyone here in this building?" - silence.....
> 
> As another aside, Bush says "you are either with us, or against us" 
> - seems to me that was about bringing the entire world to heel.

It depends on what Bush is 'with'.

I see this from Democrats here in NH who are opposed to the Free State
Project, where they say asinine things like "Nobody is going to come
here and shove freedom down my throat!" Sounds like something one would
expect from a 'house slave'. You can't "shove freedom down someone's
throat", the best you can do is get the government monkey off their
back.

When a force for liberation says 'you are with us or against us', that
means you either believe in freedom or tyranny. "For evil to succeed
only requires that good men do nothing", as they say. Complacency,
disinterest, apathy, are just as conducive to tyranny as outright
assistance to it.

> 
> I think you really were triggered by my use of marxist terminologies
> to describe the huge and widening gap between the mega rich and
> everyone else.

Whether a gap is widening is irrelevant. What is important is whether
the least well off are getting ahead in objective terms, not relative
terms. When people below the threshold for 'poverty' commonly own items
that were considered luxury items not even a decade ago, the definition
of that word is seriously cock-eyed.

Extropians look forward to the day when a homeless person can afford
their own intelligence augmentation and life extension. Delivered by
the free market.

> 
> The compassion I speak of is not individual, either. I'm talking
> about collective compassion built into the philosophical/political 
> /economic construct.

Not possible. Philosophical/political/economic constructs are not
persons.

> Currently, this doesn't exist in any meaningful way as far as I can
> tell, in ANY system except some of the remaining tribal communities,
> as all have been usurped in one way or another.  
> When I speak of compassion, I see it as a "verb" in the sense that
> true compassion requires an activity reflecting the empathy/sympathy.

How does a Philosophical/political/economic construct have empathy when
it isn't even a person?
 
> 
> But yes, I am guilty in this respect of one thing - when corporations
> and/or
> individuals amass HUGE fortunes, there are always sources for those
> fortunes. Winners, losers. It is not an endless, infinite bucket of
> money/resources. I ask "how much is enough?" Should there be
> requirements to return such wealth beyond a certain point? 

Return wealth to who? Upon what basis is a claim made?

You seem to suffer from a false belief in the idea that the world is a
zero sum game.

> Should the current checks and balances be restructured from the top
> down, philosophically, economically, politically?



> Will emerging technologies make it easier to implement such
> restructuring, particularly with respect to renewal of resources?

Of course. Nanotech will eliminate resource scarcity almost entirely.
The only remaining scarce resources will be IP and energy.

> 
> One of the reasons I posted the Naomi Klein article was that it
> described the carve up of another country's resources "at the
> barrel of a gun" by corporate entities who seem to be very good
> examples of my terminology "rampant, unchecked capitalism" of
> which war profiteering is surely the ugliest example.

"Profiteering" is one of those fake words that statists like to use.
Profit is an expression of the disparity between supply and demand.
Saying 'excessive profit' has any meaning is like saying that people
can be 'excessively free', 'too pregnant', among other oxymoronically
adjectivized phrases.

> 
> -----------------------------------------------
> 
> >I want to help those less well off in this world, but I want it done
> ethically, without coersion, and in the way that I deem proper.
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> I like that sentence a lot, but I'm not sure about the last bit....

If you don't have control over how you help they world, then you aren't
really the one helping the world, you are just someone else's agent.

Statists of all sorts have real trouble understanding this concept:
that an act is only virtuous if it is committed freely by the person
committing the act. If your money is being taken to help someone else,
against your will, then you gain no karma from the act. Crime done to
help others creates no net positive benefit to society.

The concept of the "Robin Hood" is possibly the most corrosive idea in
western history.
 
> 
> "The idea that one can have freedom and self-ownership without having
> the right to own and reinvest the fruits of one's labor, and the
> profits from that investment, is laughable, erroneous, and truly
> irrational."
> 
> -------------------------------------
> 
> I agree. But I am not an "absolutist". At what cost? What is the
> responsibility towards the inevitable losers? Should economic and
> political power be attached to wealth?

You have no responsibility to losers, they are responsible for
themselves. Nor does there necessarily have to be a loser for you to
win, as that is the mindset of a zero-sum-game player. Most wealth is
created, not stolen.

> Should unfeeling, cynical exploitation of the ignorant or weak be
> fair game?

If you steal from someone but feel bad about doing it, or feel that it
was 'only fair', does that make it okay? 

> Should exploitation of limited resources be fair game? Is war "fair
> game"? 

War against tyrants and other opressors anywhere, anytime, is always
justified. The libertarian prohibition against initiating force against
other individuals does not have a limited jurisdiction (some
libertarians think otherwise, but I don't think they are 'complete'
libertarians.) If a libertarian believes that national boundaries are
fictitious creations of unjust governments, then they have no restraint
upon a libertarian.

What makes you think that resources are limited? There are very few
such resources. Beyond limited species of wildlife, inanimate material
resources become unlimited for practical purposes if technology is
allowed free reign to develop more efficient resource utilization.

Life is not a zero sum game.

> 
> "The definition of a Libertarian is a person who believes that it is
> wrong to initiate force against another individual for any reason.
> That is all."

> Presumably, that is _your_ definition, as there are many others. 

No, there are not.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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