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#321
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![]() "R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Tribes of people in the wilderness before high population densities numbering 50 to 200 couldn't be anything else, they wouldn't be able to agree to do anything except voluntarily, and that means informal democracy. If they ****ed off their members they'd leave, they had nothing keeping them there unless their primary ethic was to get along, and that points to even better than mere democracy, but to freedom and consensus!! You're ignoring the fact that living on one's own was both lonelier and more dangerous than living with the tribe. Thus, the power to banish people from the tribe, or to impose punishments that members of the tribe would have to banish themselves to avoid, offered the potential for a great deal of leverage. That would certainly have undermined freedom and the need for consensus. Further, it would not be especially hard for a tribal government to take the form of a "big-tough-hunter-ocracy" where a group of the biggest, strongest men impose their will on the rest of the tribe because the others don't dare to challenge them - and aren't willing to take a chance on whether they could survive if they killed off their best hunters in the night, even if they would be willing to kill them and even if they were not too afraid to try. There is no particular reason to think that everyone would be given an equal voice and vote. I'm not saying that an essentially democratic tribal government would be impossible. I'm just saying that it cannot be taken for granted. Can you provide some practical, real-world examples? ----------------------------------- We use collective greed constantly, in wanting things from government we exert collective greed, in wanting peace and law and order and rights and infrastructure and social guarantees. Most of the things you probably imagine to be private greed are actually expressions of collective greed that motivates us to good ends! You see, greed itself is not the problem, but only whether it brings us together or pushes us apart. I will certainly agree that collective greed works well in pursuing collective goals - goals that are shared and that can be reached more efficiently working together than working alone. But many goals are individual, not collective, and your own stance against vouchers shows how miserably collective greed can work when different people have different goals. "I want a Viper." "Sorry, but our collective greed says you have to get a Porsche instead." "I want a house with yellow bricks." "Sorry, but our collective greed says that houses have to have red bricks." A system centered around collective greed can fail miserably when individuals need or want things that the collective does not care about, or when the collective takes advantage of differences in what individuals want as an excuse to provide them with less. Over the long term, an economy that is growing will inevitably eventually become bigger than one that is not. The process might take years, or even centuries, but it will happen. -------------------------------------- Duh, I think that's what "growing" means. But what growth means to Capitalists is actually the migration of wealth to the wealthy, not actual growth in our productive capacity due to organization and technology. These are actually opposites. You're being absurd. Suppose I spend $5,000 on a machine that lets me produce widgets in half the time it takes other people to produce them. That provides economic growth because I can produce twice as many widgets in the same amount of time. If widgets normally cost $50, it might look at first glance like I can keep selling my widgets for $50 and pocket the difference for myself. But if I would try such a thing, other people would notice and start thinking, "Hey, he's getting rich off those widgets. I'll buy my own widget-making machine and make some of that money for myself." Once widget-making machines become more common, we have to reduce our prices in order to compete with each other, so most of the benefit from the widget-making machines ends up going to people who buy widgets instead of to us. If I'm the first one to get a widget-making machine, I might make a lot of money before that happens. But in the long term, it is the customers that can now buy widgets for maybe $30 each (since some of the money has to go to pay back the cost of the machinery) instead of $50 that get most of the benefit. That phenomenon, repeated over and over, is why America's economy has grown to a point where our poor would be considered rich by the standards of quite a few other nations. You can argue that you think your communistic approach would work better, but you would have to be blind, a liar, or a lunatic to claim that the rich are the only ones who benefit from a capitalistic system's growth. |
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Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Tribes of people in the wilderness before high population densities numbering 50 to 200 couldn't be anything else, they wouldn't be able to agree to do anything except voluntarily, and that means informal democracy. If they ****ed off their members they'd leave, they had nothing keeping them there unless their primary ethic was to get along, and that points to even better than mere democracy, but to freedom and consensus!! You're ignoring the fact that living on one's own was both lonelier and more dangerous than living with the tribe. ----------------------------- Not if the tribe splits. Example, if the old try to abuse the young, the young may leave. And yet they have the best reasons to want to get along in order to 1) succeed, and 2) be happy. Thus, the power to banish people from the tribe, or to impose punishments that members of the tribe would have to banish themselves to avoid, offered the potential for a great deal of leverage. That would certainly have undermined freedom and the need for consensus. -------------------------------- Nope, because they had to grant to each other whatever they wanted for themselves, and that breeds consensus. Also they were lovers, as tribes of pre-humans must have been because other apes are today. Further, it would not be especially hard for a tribal government to take the form of a "big-tough-hunter-ocracy" where a group of the biggest, strongest men impose their will on the rest of the tribe because the others don't dare to challenge them - and aren't willing to take a chance on whether they could survive if they killed off their best hunters in the night, even if they would be willing to kill them and even if they were not too afraid to try. There is no particular reason to think that everyone would be given an equal voice and vote. --------------------------- One, big mean hunters don't do well. Bulls in a china shop don't do well at subtle games of waiting and planning. The tribe's hunters are the careful thinkers who can walk a long way and keep records of where the game is, they are meticulous in making their weapons so each lance or dart or arrow flies the same. And big mean anythings don't do well in tribes, they aggravate people and they DO get killed in their sleep or discplined by a group assault. No big guy can succeed against even just three smaller people. The largest members of the tribes are teddy bear types who like children and are humble. Only in recent times, the last 5000 years or so, have there been a way for large psychopaths to survive as criminals in bandit gangs. This is because only in the last 5000 years have there been so many people that those who were exiled for their criminality might find one another and form bandit groups before they died of accident or predation or starvation and exposure. Prior to that time our tribes were simply too far apart. I'm not saying that an essentially democratic tribal government would be impossible. I'm just saying that it cannot be taken for granted. -------------------------------------- And in the cases it didn't happen lots of people died or were far less happy or successful. This is called the exception that proves the rule. Our nature is well-known now, we simply take it for granted and fail to see it, or we recall the invention of crime by the Feudalistic psychopaths and assume we were them, when we were not at all! Can you provide some practical, real-world examples? ----------------------------------- We use collective greed constantly, in wanting things from government we exert collective greed, in wanting peace and law and order and rights and infrastructure and social guarantees. Most of the things you probably imagine to be private greed are actually expressions of collective greed that motivates us to good ends! You see, greed itself is not the problem, but only whether it brings us together or pushes us apart. I will certainly agree that collective greed works well in pursuing collective goals - goals that are shared and that can be reached more efficiently working together than working alone. ----------------- Name JUST ONE that cannot be?? I can't think of one, honestly!!! There is no one who does not at least secretly wish for a large number of lovers who care about them and all get along together. There is no one who does not want a lot of friends they can do things with all the time, so they never have to be lonely again. Sure, there are things one pursues alone, but its sour and cold and seems pointless without others to show your hobbies to, or to share together. But many goals are individual, not collective, ----------------- But only distorted criminal goals that CAN only arise in the child-abused mind. No one who was not abused would want other than collective happiness. Not even Rodney King, finally. and your own stance against vouchers shows how miserably collective greed can work when different people have different goals. ------------------------------------- You have an aberrational belief system BECAUSE you are the victim of the slave-control religion of the last Feudalism, your family has remnant serfdom in their mentality and that brainwashing was only ended a few generations ago, if it has ended fully at all! "I want a Viper." "Sorry, but our collective greed says you have to get a Porsche instead." "I want a house with yellow bricks." "Sorry, but our collective greed says that houses have to have red bricks." ------------------------- If you want a Viper, you build/buy it. If you want yellow bricks, make them. A system centered around collective greed can fail miserably when individuals need or want things that the collective does not care about, or when the collective takes advantage of differences in what individuals want as an excuse to provide them with less. --------------------------------- Nope, not so. Everyone has little desires that aren't shared by everyone else, so we are senstive to what others might want even if we don't. But we are also sensitive to believing the person should acquire those themselves, and especially not expect the rest of us to pay for them if we don't collectively agree to fund promulgating them, like with religion. Now if you want something we don't disagree about, something merely aesthetic, or unimportant to us, then we might see that we all have some things like that, and help each other acquire them. But we collectively do NOT have to fund or take a collective stand on anything divisive that has been a sore point between us all!! You see, because of well-remembered abuses many people now HATE ANY kind of religion that parents try to impose on children, and because of that this society right now is right on the edge of making religious brainwashing of children illegal, and this is WHY you're not going to make headway on this one!! Now YOU may not believe it, but for myself after seeing 50 years of history this is a familiar pattern of change to me now, the same sort we saw when spousal abuse because illegal and highly focused in the public eye. The same sort of arguments happened, and now there aren't any anymore! The society has finished deciding, and started IMPRISONING!! Religious brainwashing of children is already illegal in two nations in Europe. Over the long term, an economy that is growing will inevitably eventually become bigger than one that is not. The process might take years, or even centuries, but it will happen. -------------------------------------- Duh, I think that's what "growing" means. But what growth means to Capitalists is actually the migration of wealth to the wealthy, not actual growth in our productive capacity due to organization and technology. These are actually opposites. You're being absurd. ----------------------- Not at all, the "market", rather than meaning just "trade", is often used to describe only the development of profit and enthusiasm for those in the stock market, who derive that wealth from others WHO WORK, but NOT by working THEMSELVES!! Suppose I spend $5,000 on a machine that lets me produce widgets in half the time it takes other people to produce them. That provides economic growth because I can produce twice as many widgets in the same amount of time. ------------------------ No, that's NOT "economic growth", that grows nothing. It only makes cheaper widgets so people can afford more of them if they want, or spend less time earning one. They work the same hours but get more widgets, or work less and spend less hours for one widget! You would have the right to pay for the cost of the machine out of the sales of your products to the State stores, as a part of your costs, and otherwise you'd receive the same wage per hour for your labor. Or you could sell the machine to the State for reimbursement if you wanted and keep using it. If widgets normally cost $50, it might look at first glance like I can keep selling my widgets for $50 and pocket the difference for myself. But if I would try such a thing, other people would notice and start thinking, "Hey, he's getting rich off those widgets. I'll buy my own widget-making machine and make some of that money for myself." Once widget-making machines become more common, we have to reduce our prices in order to compete with each other, so most of the benefit from the widget-making machines ends up going to people who buy widgets instead of to us. If I'm the first one to get a widget-making machine, I might make a lot of money before that happens. But in the long term, it is the customers that can now buy widgets for maybe $30 each (since some of the money has to go to pay back the cost of the machinery) instead of $50 that get most of the benefit. ------------------ You seem to have this fatuous immature delusion that after 54 years that I haven't any idea how Capitalism works. Why do you even bother?? It still isn't "growth" as commonly spoken of in the marketplace. The market speaks of growth only of profit. That phenomenon, repeated over and over, is why America's economy has grown to a point where our poor would be considered rich by the standards of quite a few other nations. You can argue that you think your communistic approach would work better, but you would have to be blind, a liar, or a lunatic to claim that the rich are the only ones who benefit from a capitalistic system's growth. -------------------------- Actual productive growth that makes more goods for the same or less labor is indeed technological and infrastructural growth. But in the case of Capitalism the growth differential is mostly handed to the rich, who do less or NO work for it, while the workers who did the labor are deprived of most of that benefit. So no, you are barely correct, they do barely benefit, if you call that benefitting. But despite your desperate hand-waving and meaningless filthy partisan anti-communist verbal gestures, YOU are the blind lunatic liar here!!: Communism does indeed do the very same thing, promoting these same industrial advances by publically financing them in the EXACT SAME manner as an investor in Capitalism, but COLLECTIVELY!! AND HOWEVER!: When the widgets are divided, they go equally to each laborer for each labor hour they spent making them, which is the essence of fairness. Steve |
#323
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Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Tribes of people in the wilderness before high population densities numbering 50 to 200 couldn't be anything else, they wouldn't be able to agree to do anything except voluntarily, and that means informal democracy. If they ****ed off their members they'd leave, they had nothing keeping them there unless their primary ethic was to get along, and that points to even better than mere democracy, but to freedom and consensus!! You're ignoring the fact that living on one's own was both lonelier and more dangerous than living with the tribe. ----------------------------- Not if the tribe splits. Example, if the old try to abuse the young, the young may leave. And yet they have the best reasons to want to get along in order to 1) succeed, and 2) be happy. Thus, the power to banish people from the tribe, or to impose punishments that members of the tribe would have to banish themselves to avoid, offered the potential for a great deal of leverage. That would certainly have undermined freedom and the need for consensus. -------------------------------- Nope, because they had to grant to each other whatever they wanted for themselves, and that breeds consensus. Also they were lovers, as tribes of pre-humans must have been because other apes are today. Further, it would not be especially hard for a tribal government to take the form of a "big-tough-hunter-ocracy" where a group of the biggest, strongest men impose their will on the rest of the tribe because the others don't dare to challenge them - and aren't willing to take a chance on whether they could survive if they killed off their best hunters in the night, even if they would be willing to kill them and even if they were not too afraid to try. There is no particular reason to think that everyone would be given an equal voice and vote. --------------------------- One, big mean hunters don't do well. Bulls in a china shop don't do well at subtle games of waiting and planning. The tribe's hunters are the careful thinkers who can walk a long way and keep records of where the game is, they are meticulous in making their weapons so each lance or dart or arrow flies the same. And big mean anythings don't do well in tribes, they aggravate people and they DO get killed in their sleep or discplined by a group assault. No big guy can succeed against even just three smaller people. The largest members of the tribes are teddy bear types who like children and are humble. Only in recent times, the last 5000 years or so, have there been a way for large psychopaths to survive as criminals in bandit gangs. This is because only in the last 5000 years have there been so many people that those who were exiled for their criminality might find one another and form bandit groups before they died of accident or predation or starvation and exposure. Prior to that time our tribes were simply too far apart. I'm not saying that an essentially democratic tribal government would be impossible. I'm just saying that it cannot be taken for granted. -------------------------------------- And in the cases it didn't happen lots of people died or were far less happy or successful. This is called the exception that proves the rule. Our nature is well-known now, we simply take it for granted and fail to see it, or we recall the invention of crime by the Feudalistic psychopaths and assume we were them, when we were not at all! Can you provide some practical, real-world examples? ----------------------------------- We use collective greed constantly, in wanting things from government we exert collective greed, in wanting peace and law and order and rights and infrastructure and social guarantees. Most of the things you probably imagine to be private greed are actually expressions of collective greed that motivates us to good ends! You see, greed itself is not the problem, but only whether it brings us together or pushes us apart. I will certainly agree that collective greed works well in pursuing collective goals - goals that are shared and that can be reached more efficiently working together than working alone. ----------------- Name JUST ONE that cannot be?? I can't think of one, honestly!!! There is no one who does not at least secretly wish for a large number of lovers who care about them and all get along together. There is no one who does not want a lot of friends they can do things with all the time, so they never have to be lonely again. Sure, there are things one pursues alone, but its sour and cold and seems pointless without others to show your hobbies to, or to share together. But many goals are individual, not collective, ----------------- But only distorted criminal goals that CAN only arise in the child-abused mind. No one who was not abused would want other than collective happiness. Not even Rodney King, finally. and your own stance against vouchers shows how miserably collective greed can work when different people have different goals. ------------------------------------- You have an aberrational belief system BECAUSE you are the victim of the slave-control religion of the last Feudalism, your family has remnant serfdom in their mentality and that brainwashing was only ended a few generations ago, if it has ended fully at all! "I want a Viper." "Sorry, but our collective greed says you have to get a Porsche instead." "I want a house with yellow bricks." "Sorry, but our collective greed says that houses have to have red bricks." ------------------------- If you want a Viper, you build/buy it. If you want yellow bricks, make them. A system centered around collective greed can fail miserably when individuals need or want things that the collective does not care about, or when the collective takes advantage of differences in what individuals want as an excuse to provide them with less. --------------------------------- Nope, not so. Everyone has little desires that aren't shared by everyone else, so we are senstive to what others might want even if we don't. But we are also sensitive to believing the person should acquire those themselves, and especially not expect the rest of us to pay for them if we don't collectively agree to fund promulgating them, like with religion. Now if you want something we don't disagree about, something merely aesthetic, or unimportant to us, then we might see that we all have some things like that, and help each other acquire them. But we collectively do NOT have to fund or take a collective stand on anything divisive that has been a sore point between us all!! You see, because of well-remembered abuses many people now HATE ANY kind of religion that parents try to impose on children, and because of that this society right now is right on the edge of making religious brainwashing of children illegal, and this is WHY you're not going to make headway on this one!! Now YOU may not believe it, but for myself after seeing 50 years of history this is a familiar pattern of change to me now, the same sort we saw when spousal abuse because illegal and highly focused in the public eye. The same sort of arguments happened, and now there aren't any anymore! The society has finished deciding, and started IMPRISONING!! Religious brainwashing of children is already illegal in two nations in Europe. Over the long term, an economy that is growing will inevitably eventually become bigger than one that is not. The process might take years, or even centuries, but it will happen. -------------------------------------- Duh, I think that's what "growing" means. But what growth means to Capitalists is actually the migration of wealth to the wealthy, not actual growth in our productive capacity due to organization and technology. These are actually opposites. You're being absurd. ----------------------- Not at all, the "market", rather than meaning just "trade", is often used to describe only the development of profit and enthusiasm for those in the stock market, who derive that wealth from others WHO WORK, but NOT by working THEMSELVES!! Suppose I spend $5,000 on a machine that lets me produce widgets in half the time it takes other people to produce them. That provides economic growth because I can produce twice as many widgets in the same amount of time. ------------------------ No, that's NOT "economic growth", that grows nothing. It only makes cheaper widgets so people can afford more of them if they want, or spend less time earning one. They work the same hours but get more widgets, or work less and spend less hours for one widget! You would have the right to pay for the cost of the machine out of the sales of your products to the State stores, as a part of your costs, and otherwise you'd receive the same wage per hour for your labor. Or you could sell the machine to the State for reimbursement if you wanted and keep using it. If widgets normally cost $50, it might look at first glance like I can keep selling my widgets for $50 and pocket the difference for myself. But if I would try such a thing, other people would notice and start thinking, "Hey, he's getting rich off those widgets. I'll buy my own widget-making machine and make some of that money for myself." Once widget-making machines become more common, we have to reduce our prices in order to compete with each other, so most of the benefit from the widget-making machines ends up going to people who buy widgets instead of to us. If I'm the first one to get a widget-making machine, I might make a lot of money before that happens. But in the long term, it is the customers that can now buy widgets for maybe $30 each (since some of the money has to go to pay back the cost of the machinery) instead of $50 that get most of the benefit. ------------------ You seem to have this fatuous immature delusion that after 54 years that I haven't any idea how Capitalism works. Why do you even bother?? It still isn't "growth" as commonly spoken of in the marketplace. The market speaks of growth only of profit. That phenomenon, repeated over and over, is why America's economy has grown to a point where our poor would be considered rich by the standards of quite a few other nations. You can argue that you think your communistic approach would work better, but you would have to be blind, a liar, or a lunatic to claim that the rich are the only ones who benefit from a capitalistic system's growth. -------------------------- Actual productive growth that makes more goods for the same or less labor is indeed technological and infrastructural growth. But in the case of Capitalism the growth differential is mostly handed to the rich, who do less or NO work for it, while the workers who did the labor are deprived of most of that benefit. So no, you are barely correct, they do barely benefit, if you call that benefitting. But despite your desperate hand-waving and meaningless filthy partisan anti-communist verbal gestures, YOU are the blind lunatic liar here!!: Communism does indeed do the very same thing, promoting these same industrial advances by publically financing them in the EXACT SAME manner as an investor in Capitalism, but COLLECTIVELY!! AND HOWEVER!: When the widgets are divided, they go equally to each laborer for each labor hour they spent making them, which is the essence of fairness. Steve |
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