[ExI] Socialism and Environmentalism are inevitable

[William Flynn Wallace]

Why can't it be both socialism and capitalism?  We have both now.  They are
not mutually exclusive.

This liberal doesn't hate business.  That's just crazy.  I do think some
restraint is in order and so most people.  bill w


On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 9:53 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

>
>
> On May 25, 2014, at 6:51 PM, Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > 4a.   (Externally) As we connect to ever larger social groups through
> social media, such as mail lists like this one, we are experiencing
> increasing rewards from this interaction. Also we are increasingly
> interdependent on international trade to meet our needs. By needs I'm not
> thinking about food/t-shirts/housing, which are all things we can provide
> ourselves if we have some land and the strength to work it. I'm thinking
> about our health needs, or other scientific, or technological needs. These
> have ONLY been achieved through the 'scientific community'.
>
> >
> >       My vision of socialism is based on an ever more inclusive social
> network which manages the environment. A private organisation is
> conceptually unable to do this as its motivations are not the same as the
> larger group's. The environment is something real and measurable, as
> opposed to money which has no value other than what we give it. The body of
> scientific knowledge is something testable, and a shared legacy of humanity.
> >
> >       Capitalism worries about solving the 'free rider problem'
> constantly while in fact capitalism itself is the ultimate selfish meme. By
> this I mean that capitalism takes, for example, a forest and transforms it
> into a smoking wasteland and exports the wood to another place so that it
> shortly ends up in a landfill where the biomass is polluted with toxic
> chemicals. This is described as efficient and profitable and many numbers
> are added to somebody's column. The fact of the matter, however, is that we
> have a degraded environment in the real world. Capitalism itself is the
> free rider, constantly taking real things and giving entries in account
> books in return.
>
> I agree with your premise, that the current need of our species it to
> adapt to larger social groups. And at one point, like you, I would have
> thought socialism was the obvious way to do this. Or some form of expanding
> our sense of family/tribe to a larger circle like species/planet.
>
> However, after being in the humanitarian field for a while, and becoming
> depressed by the constant failure of well-meaning people -- and the
> surprising success of indifferent or even hostile people -- to raising the
> poor from poverty to wealth, I reached the (reluctant at first) con
> conclusion that I was absolutely wrong. Capitalism, not socialism, is the
> secret to helping the poor, and also probably the secret to advancing as a
> species to a truly peaceful world society.
>
> There are many examples. India, for instance, has done more for the poor
> with ten years of capitalism than with fifty of socialism. Small bank loans
> to the poor housewives have done more to shift wealth than huge donations
> to the governments of Third World governments.
>
> After I studied the libertarian thinkers, I realized that no matter how
> compassionate you are, no matter if you love a stranger on the other side
> of the world as your own brother, you cannot know enough about his needs
> and desires and capacities to help him better than he can help himself.
> That is why those of us trying to help the poor failed. We thought were
> were better than he was; we thought we knew better than he did. That hubris
> is the downfall of ANY form of socialism, no matter how kind and pacifist.
>
> YOU DON'T KNOW BETTER THAN THE POOR HOW TO HELP THEM.
>
> Just stop thinking you do. Please.
>
> Money is not a selfish meme. It is a marker of communication that allows
> millions of brains to solve problems at a local level far better than your
> brain or my brain or any technocrat's brain could solve, even if we were
> the smartest people in the world. Or the smartest computers in the world.
>
> Money is also a form of QUMA.  QUANTIZED UNITS OF MUTUAL ALTRUISM. Money
> is a FANTASTIC evolutionary invention, unprecedented in the history of
> life. It allows individuals who don't know each other to engage in mutually
> beneficial trade, across borders, even across time. NO OTHER SPECIES CAN DO
> THAT. Bats and ravens and wolves can share share meals, but not with
> strangers, and not over time. Money is amazing. But we don't appreciate it
> for the same reason we fear snakes but not guns, even though guns kill more
> humans than snakes. It hasn't been around long enough.
>
> The main reason so many humans hate and misunderstand capitalism, and rail
> so much against it, is that our brains have not yet evolved to understand
> how beneficial it truly is to our species.
>
>
> Tara Maya
> Blog  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  Amazon  |  Goodreads
>
>
>
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