From: Dick.Gray@bull.com
Date: Mon Dec 14 1998 - 15:09:17 MST
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:50:00 MST