In a message dated 12/31/2003 4:44:34 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and wealthy individuals like himself
Government favoritism? It sounds like you don't believe a raising tide lifts
all ships. Tim is entitled to keep the wealth he has earned, when it's taken
its called stealing.
I prefer NOT to use language like "a raising tide lifts all ships," as it essentially endorses the pragmatist view supporting capitalism.
Rather, I favor the fundamentalist view that if Alice and Bob make a transaction, be it a trade of goods or labor or whatever, it is not right/wise/proper/constitutional to take some fraction of the alleged profit to give to someone else. It is "redistribution" that I am mostly arguing against, for multiple reasons. (Including the corrosive effects of teaching a growing fraction of the population that they are "entitled" to things.)
I don't claim this is a "right" implicit in the fabric of space-time, or handed down by Moloch or YHWH or some other supernatural myth-figure. Rather, societies which have taken money from workers to give to others to sit at home and breed or eat Doritos while watching Oprah have failed.
Jamestown was a recent example, with the initial settlers adopting the usual "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" arrangement. It failed miserably, as various settlers found good reasons--exhaustion, the hot sun, to much to drink the night before, sex, or just laziness--to not show up for work parties. This meant those working had to work even harder. A vicious circle, much like the one now facing American industry, where more and more workers are claiming bogus "disability" and where the insurance costs are driving companies out of the country. And where some ethnic communities treat those who work and study as "suckas," as "Oreos."
Jamestown's solution was a harsh one: "no work, no eat."
This sounds harsh ("what about cripples?"), but it's basically the only stable attractor, in a Schelling point sense, that exists, along with the other attractor, where a growing percentage are not working, on disability, on unemployment, etc. and the remaining workers are carrying a heavier and heavier burden.
This Schelling point analysis applies to a lot of our so-called "rights," as with religious expression (where the non-coercion principle is that neighbors will come to a "territorial boundary" arrangement not to interfere with the religious views of each other, as dogs might reach a territorial boundary arrangment with other dogs.
So the issue is not "a rising tide lifts all ships" as the defense of capitalism, the issue is one of stable attractors.
That this lifts all ships is because, as Jamestown learned, having nearly all able-bodied people working to grow crops and make things and trade is, for nearly all involved, better than having 30% of the workforce slaving away in the hot sun so that 70% can find excuses not to be working.
That is not a stable attractor. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are using the tired old cliches about how it is "society that paid for business" and hence "society" has some right to take a cut of each transaction between Alice and Bob.
The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays for their perks.
What commie nonsense.
A lot of collectivists here on the Cypherpunks list.
Chortle. For them to think that strong crypto means more freebies and entitlements for "the poor" is hilarious to see.
--Tim May
