[ExI] To Arms!

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/3/27 Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>:

> 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.

How are the liberals responsible for that?

> 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).

So what's the essential difference between the well-behaved and badly
behaved states?

> 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.

I must admit that prior to joining this list I didn't think that
anyone seriously questioned the idea that one of the main purposes of
civilised society was to provide for the basic needs of its citizens.
I knew there was debate about exactly which services should be
provided, how they would be funded, and so on, but not that it might
be wrong to have any public services at all. So I suppose this is just
one of those matters where we will reach an impasse due to having have
different basic principles.

> 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.

If personality is more inherited than environmental, then that means
the evils of the world can't be mainly due to personality. Otherwise
what genetic catastrophe would explain the behaviour of the German
people under the Nazis, for example?

>> 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.)

There are plenty of examples of third world countries where the
government does everything it can to suppress any activity that might
be construed as impeding business, for example by eliminating trade
unionists or other liberal/lefty types, not to mention refraining from
spending any money on public services, and these countries are a total
mess.

>> 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.

You seem to be saying that such government intervention would be -
what? a lesser constraint on liberty? - than regulating banks.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou