From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 09:06:33 MDT
Olga Bourlin wrote:
>
> From: "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
>
> > Yes. I like to challenge liberals with this problem: suppose
> > that you were a multi-billionaire and wanted to use exactly
> > one of your billions of dollars to benefit the people of some
> > poor third-world country. How would you go about it?
>
> I have trouble relating to the "liberals v. conservatives" contest. I don't
> think either communism or capitalism is particularly democratic. We can do
> a lot better than we have done in the past - not by molding humans to fit
> the economy's needs, but by reshaping economic and social policies to fit
> human needs.
This sounds so wonderfully polemic and sagely, but what does it mean?
You know, if you invent a system that works better than the free market,
you could win a nobel prize. Get hopping, oh sage one.
I see this sort of sentiment among many of the dissillusioned liberals
of the 60's. Their fantasies about the 'workers paradise' of the Soviet
Union have dissolved in the dismaying light of truth like the Venona
File, yet they seem to still be trapped, emotionally, by socialist
propaganda about the free market which they in practice generally
understand little about. They desperately desire for there to be a
'third way', at least a third way that is unlike the slave labor
mercantilist oligopoly of the present day China. They are to distrusting
of individual humans, no matter how much they preach about 'loving one
another' (how can you love without trust?), to admit that leaving it to
individuals to solve individual problems may be the proper way to go
about it: libertarianism.
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