Hi Craig Weinberg Lord of the Flies is basically the conservative view put forth by Hobbes (and Paul). At root we are criminals.
Welfare is essentially the leftist view put forth by Rousseau. At root we are saints. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-05, 00:40:00 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:14:17 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:07 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:49:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 4:23 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: > What struck me is that the "the USERS of wealth in directing the life > of the country." > seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. > Richard OK, let us confiscate all capital and distribute it evenly to every one. Then what? then we have democracy? No, because people always congregate into groups, it is their nature. And from there it is "Lord of the Flies" all over. It has happened many times before. Why do we never learn? I think that's why Jefferson was keen on periodic revolutions. If inequality is inevitable though, it makes sense to mediate that tendency to some extent if we can, rather than giving carte blanche to the winning savages. It's like saying we should learn that there is always crime so why bother with police. Isn't civilization based upon the effort to tame our innate tendencies toward self interest? Or at least to agree to conspire against the barbarians outside of the walls. wouldn't even need to confiscate all capital, and I don't think that anyone is suggesting that. Just make hoarding wealth more expensive. Sure! A tax credit for investing. Oh way, that already exists! It is why the investment tax is so low as it is! Investing in guaranteed payouts is what makes hoarding of wealth possible. Why would we want to give tax breaks for the wealthy to find ways of taking more money out of the economy faster? At the plutocrat level, you should be rewarded only for investing in non-profit enterprises that lose money. Being able to invest huge amounts of money, especially unearned money from a dynastic fortune, is a privilege that should be taxed, not rewarded. Maybe follow the Scandinavian model on a trial basis for 20 years in a handful of cities. Scandinavia is a bad place to build a model because it has a homogeneous population. Such populations behave, on average, very different from highly diverse populations. Segregation into polarized groups happens much slower in homogenous populations. You might check out the meme flow in such conditions, its amazing. If by homogeneous you mean financially homogeneous, then a plan which tilts the economy in favor of the middle class should by definition make any place into a more homogeneous society - in which case the Scandinavian model would be expected to perform as it does for them now. If you are talking about anything else, then I suspect it's just a coded racism. This country was built in large part by slaves. We exploit poor migrant workers. There may not be a choice ultimately for us but to choose whether to become slaves and disposable workers ourselves (assuming we are not already) in a feudal plantation-prison society or to settle the score and go after those who continue to benefit the most from the system as it is. In any case, there is no reason to think that experimenting with a Scandinavian type system, or even Canadian, British, etc, when it comes to health care would not be better than what we have now. The biggest problem is that our political assumptions are unfalsifiable. No matter how far our standard of living plummets and how the far-too-rich get richer at everyone else's expense, it can always be suggested that it could be worse had we not done what we did. Only through experimentation in a scientific way will we ever learn anything. Craig Craig -- -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/TCkITfdw-KcJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.