[extropy-chat] Socialism versus Transhumanism

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Technotranscendence <neptune at superlink.net> wrote:
> On Friday, November 21, 2003 10:33 PM Jose Cordeiro
> jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com wrote:
> > I totally agree with Max's point below. We should
> > oppose this misuse of the name democracy
> > meaning socialism as proposed by leftists. For
> > a long time, I have been making the same critique
> > about James Hughes's paper, which should be
> > called "socialist" transhumanism as opposed to
> > "democratic" transhumanism.
> 
> The problem is that democracy is not antithetical to statism,
> especially
> not government intervention in the economy.  All extant democratic
> polities are welfare states, some bordering on socialism.  You might
> say
> this tendency is contingent and in a different setting democracy
> would
> not lead to welfare statism or socialism.  However, people like
> Hans-Hermann Hoppe argue on purely political economic grounds that
> democracies will always tend in that direction. 

The current status of many extant democracies is not an indictment of
democracy as inherently socialist. In fact, socialist tendencies are,
according to historical commentators, a key indicator that a democracy
is headed down a slippery slope to tyranny, when the majority discovers
it can vote itself largess from the public treasury, taxed to the tab
of the minority. 

Republican features are intended to prevent, halt, or otherwise
mitigate this slide, as Max has said. They are really needed only so
far as the degree to which a democratic government is empowered to
regulate the lives of individuals, and how successful statists are over
time at redefining such powers to encompass greater and greater amounts
and areas of human endeavor.

For example, here in the US, Congress seems to have few powers,
according to the Constitution, yet the greatest power that congress has
is the power to regulate interstate commerce. The Constitution does not
have a glossary to define what 'interstate commerce', or even
'regulate', means. As a result, where it was once accepted to mean the
overseeing of purely commercial traffic between states via channels of
commerce, as and where it occurs at borders, interstate commerce was
reinterpreted during the FDR administration to cover any sort of human
activity that has any sort of impact on commercial activity which might
potentially involve, or in the future involve, goods and services in
traffic between the states. The SCOTUS decision which was responsible
for this reinterpretation was, of course, the result of Roosevelt
threatening to pack the court, but it was still responsible for 98% of
the domestic statist expansion in the US in the 20th century.

This trend was something I described in my 2001 essay, "It's About The
Trust, Stupid!", published in The Libertarian Enterprise. As Jose
Cordeiro commented the other day, redefining the terms of discourse is
the most heinous way by which statists expand their influence.
Politically, they steal labels like 'liberal' and 'progressive' to
stealthily legitimize their subversion. They become involved in the
legal system and help to rewrite the legal dictionaries with expanded
definitions of terms to fit their needs for statist expansion of power.
They engage in promoting their new definitions via the press and literature.

=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                       - Gen. John Stark
"Fascists are objectively pro-pacifist..."
                                       - Mike Lorrey
Do not label me, I am an ism of one...
Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com

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