From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Sun Jan 04 2004 - 17:40:14 MST
Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> writes:
> Right, but if no one ever considers their own needs,
> others have to guess at what those needs are, and
> they will often guess wrong.
Luckily, of course, parasitism takes over and very rapidly the
altruists die, sucked to death by the others.
However, it would be amusing to see two true altruists sitting in a
desert together with only enough food to keep one of them alive. Both
will starve, but unlike the donkey starving to death between two bales
of hay because of metastability, the result is not just predictable
but necessary. (Solutions like drawing straws will not work, btw --
the true altruist will refuse any solution that gives him a chance of
surviving when others might do so instead.)
Rand satirizes this sort of stupidity very effectively, but it is
amazing how people who don't grok the economic way of thinking
continue proposing it through the ages even though the problems with
it are so utterly manifest.
Anyway, Communism has been tried. It doesn't work.
-- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
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