From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 14:43:28 MST
"Alexander Sheppard" <alexandersheppard@hotmail.com>
>The rich have no risk of starving or losing their homes
True but irrelevant. Somebody is going to have to pay 3 billion dollars the
next time INTEL needs a new semiconductor foundry, where is the money
going to come from? The poor?
>the poor do, in a capitalist society.
A poor person on welfare in a capitalist country if far, far, far, more
likely to be morbidly obese than to be starving.
>they believe in the sanctity of a system rather the sanctity of
>the human condition and actual human freedom.
It's odd, there is nothing really wrong with the word but it's a fact that
I've never seen the phrase "The sanctity of X" used in support in anything I
agreed with. Not once. The same is true of "level the playing field" and
"you can't cry fire in a crowded theater".
> In other words, socialism and capitalism, anarchism and
> authoritarianism, are only useful insofar as they are humanistic
I agree, but the most important word is "useful". Do you really think
socialism is a friend of the poor? India and Japan were about equally poor
50 years ago but India embraced socialism and Japan went capitalist. Today
India is still poor but Japan is not, even though it has far less natural
recourses than India. One system fought poverty, the other did not.
An even better example, a textbook experiment that you seldom see in the
real world is in the two Koreas. In this experiment you have the same people
the same geography the same language the same culture and the same economic
starting point 50 years age, zero, but half embraced capitalism while the
control did not. Today one is a world economic powerhouse, the control is
still stuck at zero.
>any system which favors real human liberty is basically desirable,
> I think
Again I agree, but remember, liberty and equality are mutually exclusive,
the more you have of the one the less you have of the other. Personally I
think equality is a second rate virtue, you can't have too much truth or
freedom or justice or happiness, but you can have too much equality.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
PS: I changed the title of this thread, extropians-digest V7 #302 did not
seem particularly catchy to me.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:57:57 MST