[ExI] Cephalization, proles--Where is government going?

Will Steinberg steinberg.will at gmail.com
Fri May 13 21:27:08 UTC 2011


2011/5/13 Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com>

>  False. They counter balance one another.  Without initiation of force no
> group can simply do what it wants without becoming uncompetitive relative to
> other groups that wish to act in that realm.
>

Unless one group has the upper hand.  There are many fine families living
just South of me, who are surely a group who wishes to act in the realm of
"owning a habitable house," but I will bet you any amount of money you wish
that they are not 'competetive.'  You see, the only competition which the
exploited have to wax on the exploitees is the choice to unparticipate.
 This worked in the bus boycott.  People don't need buses.  People need
houses.  The common men which you seem to think could unleash their true
power if only Mr. Govt. got his hands off: they cannot do anything!  They
are stuck under the foot of wealthy landowners, pushed back by social
tensions--anyone who has enough money MOVES OUT of that place, which is all
libertarian and good for the "people who have enough money" but of course
not so good for the people who literally cannot get a job near them, who
cannot buy fresh food near them--whose very ability to wax their freedom of
occupation has vanished.  It is a bit like the parish laws, except the
government actually isn't the one enforcing the stagnancy--it's the
marketeers!  Your idea of a benevolent free market is naive.  The free
market rewards those who are willing to cast aside others for profit.

I was going to write more, but every time I try and think of a counter
argument I am in disbelief.  I am left with two considerations to the
libertarian's stance, from a scale of Glenn Beck to Rand Paul:

(1) You see the problems of the world, especially when people are left to
fend for themselves in hostile environments, and say "Hell, it's a dog eat
dog world."

(2) You *don't* see the problems of the world, and really think everything
will work out in what would be the one of the largest, least predictable
social experiments in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, believing (1) means you are avaricious and cruel, while
believing (2) means you have a limited scope of the world.

A free world might be good.  Unfortunately there are still people people who
would want to kill everyone.  A good government's job is to eliminate this
social pathogen, and so a good government's job before the 'freedom
singularity' is to remove all traces of evil from the system so when we let
it proceed unchecked those bits won't turn cancerous.

There are bad people in the world.  They want to hurt people, to exploit
them for personal gain.  How do you rationalize this?  Maybe in a
theoretically perfect system of freedom, it would be easy to offset the
power of a company because so many other choices could be made as
alternatives.  Sadly, though, today's society does not provide these
exploited with alternatives, and so (even though they really want to, even
though there could be no *civil laws* against it) they would be forced to
live in a substandard situation.
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