From: Alexander Sheppard (alexandersheppard@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 12:48:49 MST
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 20:25:03 -0800
From: spike66 <spike66@attbi.com>
Subject: Re: Inherent coercion in capitalism
Alexander Sheppard wrote:
> Now, in "classical" socialism (or communism) of the form I've seen
> in Russia, the "goal" seems to be to give everyone an equal share
> of the pie. That doesn't work. The really talented people will
> become lazy and the less talented people will develop schemes to
> milk the "system".
Sounds backwards to me. The really talented will milk
the system, quite successfully, and the less talented
will be lazy, and wonder why the system does such a poor
job of satisfying their needs.
Only the self-motivated will be those who will really
contribute voluntarily to the system. As soon as we
learn to modify the human genome and memenome(?) to
make people self motivated, then socialism should work
just fine. Until then, not. spike
(Reply) Well, this assumes that "talent" is the ability to "milk the
system", that is, bring resources under your control, and not do anything
productive. However, as far as I can see, this is actually not talent at
all, in any sense. In fact, if we take talent as being the ability to
produce things, then the most talented people in our society have not worked
because they wanted to "milk to system" at all, which is only natural,
considering the above. Einstien did not want to get rich off physics. That's
ridiculous. So, as far as I can see, all the people who have made real
scientific contributions to our society on any large scale have done it
because they thought it was worth doing for some other reason.
I find your second paragraph to be most interesting. You've basically summed
up why capitalism is involuntary, in that first sentence. I'd be very
interested to hear other's people comments on this, actually. That's what I
mean by a voluntary system, essentially--that's what I mean by anarchism.
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