[ExI] To Arms!

[Lee Corbin]

Dagon writes

> So you come to the conclusion that the US is overrun by "criminal 
> gangs".

In certain areas, yes.

> You then go and attribute a cause - "free will" and
> "incompetent politicians".

No, I attribute it to liberals (what we call over here
people like you). I attribute it to the mindset that
can no longer distinguish between a lawfully run society
based upon freedom and liberty, and a society whose
infrastructure is poor and whose people are ruthless.

Challenge: give me any historical or current example
of a better behaved society than that of, say, Iowa
or Minnesota, (which are for the better part free of
the contamination that afflicts places like New Jersey
and New York, and which are no more corrupt than
Sweden or Iceland).

Of course, to you, it is an absolute tragedy if someone
freely chooses to not work or contribute in any way,
and so starves to death, a tragedy that is not at all
the individual's fault, but merely the fault of society.
You really should read Pinker's "The Blank Slate" to
find out the latest research concerning the delusion
of Rousseau (and everyone since, like Marx) that we
all start off as blank slates and that all evils are
attributable to the environment. It's just not true,
Dagon.

> You seem to conclude that ineptitude of will 
> is the cause for a collapse of infrastructure
 > and the formation of gangs.

Well, that may be literally true, but it does no good.
No, the problems stems from people who are unwilling
to acknowledge that people are not blank slates, and
in many cases come into this world with bad dispositions.

Even more importantly, it comes from a failure of
institutions based upon liberty, the free market,
and capitalism. This is true anywhere you look in
the world. Africa is the way it is because the world
suffers from an inequality of capitalism. (This is
the *main*, but not the only reason that the countries
of Africa differ from those of East Asia.)

> You then go and assert that "the people", and you 
> suggest you can make a clear and precise, almost
> Berlusconi-esque incission separation the meek
 > from the gangbanger, and are sure that if this
> "noble citizenry" (you can recognize the good ones -
> they were white robes...

What you say here has a lot of truth. It is *extremely*
dangerous for concerned citizens to take the law into
their own hands for precisely the reasons you state.
Look, in fact, what happened in the French Revolution.
It's easy for the power-mad to take over in many, many
cases. But not all. You don't want to read about the
history of the San Francisco vigilantes, do you? Nor
do you want to read Pinker's "The Blank Slate", because
actual knowledge of these elements would weaken your
ideological conviction.


> This week the EU president said : America is on the road to Hell 
> <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2214443/posts>.

The EU president is entirely correct. The policies favored
by the Democrats and Obama (which are exactly the same
policies that would have been followed by McCain and the
republicans) ignore the principles of government non-intervention
and the unconstrained operation of the free market. If companies
fail, then they fail, the idea of being "too big to fail" being
simply a failure to admit that short term severe pain leading
back to health is better than protracted (but less severe)
pain leading to total government regulation of everything.

> In the above example - the situation is unsalvagable. Once you let a 
> society rot, allow the formation of an underclass that has
> absolutely no meaningful association with society, cannot care for 
> itself, yet is completely dependent on the resources of
> society to survive - then you have created the basic requirements for 
> banditry.

I totally agree with you! Conditions in the big cities
should *never* have been allowed to get out of hand.
The corruption should never have been tolerated, (e.g.
Chicago 1850-present). As soon as recognizable underclasses
begin to form, they ought to have been either massively
deported, or subjected to resettlement on reservations,
where they'd be compelled to go back to agriculture or
any kind of honest toil in order to survive.

Lee