Re: Property [was Re: The Education Function]

Dick.Gray@bull.com
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 15:09:17 -0700

Samael writes:
>[...] I believe that capitalism is as silly as any other method of
>organising a system (yes, I know, capitalism is in some ways not a way of
>organising a system).

So, every method of organizing is silly? Then we're doomed, aren't we?

>I care about people and I believe that in certain situations that people
>ought to be helped.

If you really cared about people you wouldn't advocate forcing them, at gunpoint, to comply with your idea of "help".

>But looking around I can see hundreds
>of thousands of people starving to death when we have the technology to
feed
>the world and educate them all to university standard for a tiny fraction
of
>the amount we spend on arms each year.

Those hundreds of thousands are starving due to governmental strangulation of markets under the guise of crackbrained socialist and interventionist theories.

>So yes, in a perfect world where Capitalism worked instnataneously to
>equalise differences[1], I'd be happy to leave it to it's own devices, but
>otherwise I think that I'd prefer the singularity to arrive 10 years later
>with a load more happy well fed people than arrive ten years earlier with
>hundreds of thousands of people dying of easily prevented diseases.

You're betraying your ignorance of economics again.

>[1] A company moves into a very poor country and employs it's people
doing
>horrible jobs for a pittance.

A "horrible" job paying a "pittance" sure beats the hell out of no job and starvation.

>Eventually more companies move in, they have
>to compete for labour, wages rise, quality of life rises, education rises
>and the companies have to find someone else to make trainers. Great - in
>the long run. In the short run I'd rather that we were sponsoring
education
>in these countries and making people happy now. Even if it did mean you
had
>to pay an extra $5 for your trainers and they were made in Ohio.

So - you're advocating sacrificing everyone's long run wellbeing for short run (and ultimately illusory) "happiness". This is an extropian outlook, is it?

Dick