From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 16:35:14 MDT
Charles,
As an intelligent and educated person you have probably heard of the
saying that if you hear the thunder of pounding hooves and it is North
America then you should expect horses not zebra.
Now if we are talking about the deaths of American Indians and we say
"you" killed them most folks know we are talking about people of European
descent not the Asians nor the Africans. As we are not trying to demand
reparations nor asking any one person to feel guilt a general term is all
that is demanded.
But I had a tactical reason for suggesting that we stay at lower
levels of abstraction. The socialists have been past masters at sounding
wonderful when taken at the highly abstract level -- it is the concrete level
where they get into trouble. On the other hand I believe that capitalism has
proven just the opposite.
At the abstract level they are humanitarians that love all mankind and
wish to create a "Heaven on Earth." At the concrete level they all too often
have difficulty conducting a two car funeral and ruin the lives of the people
that are trapped in the societies they run. In fact they have a tendency to
let a thug to get in charge and to stuff the Gulags with prisoners to the
point they have to conduct executions just to clear out space for the
newcomers.
I am well aware there are possibly hundreds of rabbit paths in this
briar patch of a discussion we are having but my chief concern is any
contention that socialism is a respectable political theory. Two hundred
years of history has shown over and over that socialism is not respectable.
Ron h.
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