From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 26 1999 - 17:15:56 MDT
> From: J. R. Molloy <jr@shasta.com>
> >Yes, someone once pointed out to me that no one invented capitalism. It
> >arises spontaneously from the natural order of life. Knowing that changes
> >forever the way one looks at socialist ideology.
Socialism also arose spontaneously from the natural order of life. In a
small band, where meat is scarce - say, one high-value hit per person
per week - while anyone can gather vegetables with effort, a capitalist
economy will develop for vegetables and a socialist economy will develop
for meat. I'm totally oversimplifying here, but the point is that we
have built-in functions for property rights *and* sharing. It's just
that only the property-rights mindset can scale up to a national
economy, while the socialist mindset only works within small tribes and families.
For that matter, even aristocracy arose spontaneously from the natural
order of life. Most forms of government do. The "natural order of
life" is a pretty diverse and flexible thing, with lots of
special-purpose code.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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