The problem of Capitalism

Meanwhile, children in Africa are starving to death in the dirt.

 

Yes it bloody well is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For someone who thinks more lofty thoughts than a million of us plebs, you seem to have missed the giant elephant in the room.

The insanely trivial niceties you are demanding come at immense cost. In order for them to even arise as a question, life must be outrageously safe and secure .. and retain not even vestigial struggle for survival. In order for THAT life to happen, requires massive exploitation of both humanity and the planet. And you want MORE?

Just by way of the mechanics - in case you still don't get it: when we are dealing with survival on a daily basis, our priorities remain focused on the practicalities above all else. Try telling a starving African that the Truth! Liberty! Justice! of underemployed fat Americans is more important than his survival.

 

No it bloody well isn't, as I've already proved to you. In 100 CE, Rome was a better place to live than pretty much anywhere. Does that mean they shouldn't have tried to do without slavery?

Whenever someone says something like that to me, I know they are about to make a fool of themselves.

A quarter to a half or even more of GDP being taken unjustly from those who have earned it is not a trivial nicety, sorry. Landowner privilege is the greatest evil that has ever existed, and it KILLS millions of innocent people EVERY YEAR.

Only to the tiny minority who are net beneficiaries of evil. The greedy, privileged evil are willing to make everyone else $100 poorer to make themselves $1 richer.

Not at all. These issues were raised in the 18th century, when life was anything but safe and secure.

Landowner privilege is the major REASON people have to struggle for survival.

No, it does not. That is very much the point. Exploitation of people is actually wasteful, and aggravates scarcity. GDP is 100%. In order to get 20% more of it for themselves, the privileged reduce the whole by 50% or more.

Everyone wants more. The greedy, privileged evil want more without earning it by any commensurate contribution.

You are boring me with such garbage.

I see. So, when slaves are being starved, we can only think about feeding them, never emancipating them? How convenient....

Truth, liberty and justice for Americans, including the underemployed and fat ones, would very much enhance his chances of survival. That's what YOU don't get.

 

Hehe. "When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor had no food, they called me a communist." -- Dom Helder Camara

You need to stop typing and start thinking.

 

Look, my Dude .. First Worlders a bunch of greedy spoiled fat lazy babies ALREADY. We are responsible for the most destruction of this little dying planet. Every single time we do anything but tone down our personal demands for more, we increase that destruction. And who do you think is paying most dearly for that greed? The starving, the war torn, the Third World subsistence farmer, etc etc.

It's incredible to me that those who most loudly claim to care, are the most greedy of all. Demanding ever more boons from their already grotesquely overblown and over resourced societies. Demanding more more more .. always more. Don't need to worry about food any more? Start demanding protection of feelings. Or Truth! Justice! Liberty!

As long as we keeping demanding the life we have, we'll keep getting the life we have. Astonishingly obvious, but seems to be missing from so many worldviews.

 

No, I need to do less thinking and more acting. We all do.

 

Nonsense. For most of us, life is quite stressful. Suicide kills twice as many people as homicide.

The planet is not dying, not even close, and power can be used for good as well as ill. We just have an institutional framework that encourages destruction.

Nonsense.

Nope. They have benefited enormously,

There's a difference between demanding more without earning more, as the greedy do, and demanding what one has earned, as the just do.

When did I do that?

Why do you feel threatened by them?

I'm not demanding the life we have, but a better one.

 

No, most people do far too little thinking, including you.

 

1) O.M.G ... you just proved my point by bleating about the 'stress' of First World existence. If this incredibly rich and safe life is so awful that you feel suicidal, you are spoiled beyond redemption. this is EXACTLY the stuff I'm talking about. damn .. how did you get that so wrong?

2) the planet cannot carry on with the abuse we inflict upon it. WE, greedy little spoiled First Worlders. The people gobbling up 90% of the resources of the planet, and still crying for more more more.

3) they are starving NOW because we keep wanting more more more. and just stuff isn't good enough .. we must have all those extra luxuries like delicate and self-focused care of our poor suffering psyches.

4) I'm completely unthreatened by Liberty! Justice! Freedom!. In fact I was so determined to see them come to fruition that I made my own. I worked hard to liberate myself from enslavement to conventional work, I insist on a just community (of peers - ie, family and friends), and decades of sacrifice mean I now reap the freedom of independence from the grid.

5) No you're not. You're sitting at home bleating into the wind.

 

Great. Why don't you ask the vast majority (ie, everyone outside of the First World) to forget about their immediate pressing need to work for survival, to spend more time writing poetry and sitting in armchairs thinking lofty thoughts? Tell them they're stupid for not already doing so, just as you do - in your Ultra Safe and Ultra Well Fed Rich Western Nation.

 

You don't have a right to property owned by other people.

 

No, I DISproved your point.

I didn't say I felt suicidal. You made that $#!+ up, just as you make most of your other $#!+ up.

I identified the FACT that suicide is a bigger problem in 1st World countries because of the stress people feel, especially the pressure to do well, which gets harder in more complex societies.

<yawn> OK, so how do YOU explain the fact that so many people kill themselves in 1st World countries? Are they just stupid, spoiled, insane, or what? How do you explain the fact that suicide rates dropped dramatically in the belligerent countries of WW II, but then went right back up again once the war was over? Your scorn for those who feel so hopeless or ashamed or whatever that they kill themselves is not an argument, sorry.

Absurd. You are talking utter rot. The planet is in no danger whatever from our "abuse." We can change a few things, but that's all it is: change. Nonsense about our abuse destroying the planet is as silly as nonsense about how high-rise apartment buildings "destroy" neighborhoods. They don't destroy neighborhoods. They only change them, just as we will only change the planet.

Henry George refuted Malthus with a single sentence: "The man and the jayhawk both eat chickens; but where there are more jayhawks there are fewer chickens, while where there are more men, there are more chickens."

You need to take a couple of months off work to think about what that means.

Garbage. Almost everyone who is starving now is starving because landowners have removed their liberty to feed themselves.

You are intensely threatened by justice.

You have no idea what a just community looks like, having neither lived in one nor thought seriously about what it would be like.

You just have a different idea of freedom.

<yawn> All human progress has come from those who were not satisfied with what was, and said so. That is what I am doing, in the way that I believe will be most effective. Any one of my posts on this topic is of more benefit to humanity than anything you could ever hope to do, and I will thank you to remember it.

 

I most definitely have a right to property owned by other people when that "property" consists of MY FRICKIN' RIGHTS. By your "logic," slaves had no right to leave their owners. We know that is false, so your claim is already known to be false, with no further argumentation needed on my part.

 

I didn't mention poetry. You made that up. But a few lofty thoughts might lead them to an understanding of WHY they have an immediate pressing need to work for survival when their work produces an order of magnitude more than that. Oh, no, wait a minute, that's right: you wouldn't want them to start thinking about THAT, now would you?

:LOL: Are you really so benighted that you think trying to make people feel guilty for being civilized is an argument?? REEEALLLYYY???

 

No, I'm 'trying to make people feel guilty' about demanding ever more luxury while those who pay for it keep dying in the dirt. BUT, only those who protest that they care about Justice! etc. Those who embrace their own acquisitive capitalism get a pass .. because they're honest.

And no, with the number of humans on this limited planet, there is no magic formula which will somehow allow you to keep living the lush life you live .. while extending same to the billions scrabbling in the dirt. That you think there is is frankly astounding. Don't get me wrong, I also believe that there could be far more Justice! and equity ... but I am under no illusion that it would mean a life anything like the one we have. For Justice! to happen, First Worlders need to meet the Third World in the middle. Are you prepared to do that? I'll wager you're not .. and your (convenient) excuse will be "my job is to focus on the philosophical"

 

The people dying in the dirt aren't dying because people in advanced countries want more meaningless luxuries. They are dying because rich, greedy, privileged parasites in THEIR OWN COUNTRIES have forcibly removed their rights to liberty and inflicted systematic, institutionalized injustice on them, which they have done for POWER, not meaningless luxuries.

I see. So, in what you are no doubt pleased to call your "mind," those who seek legal entitlements to steal from the poor are "honest," but those who want to stop legalized stealing are supposed to feel guilty about their normal human desire to improve their situations???

Through the looking glass...

<yawn> Google "Simon Ehrlich wager" and try to become at least minimally informed on the subject.

OK, you're a Malthusian, and you don't care how many times Malthus has been proved wrong, or how many millions have been killed by those who implemented Malthusian "remedies" for "overpopulation." I get it.

You just oppose it. I get it.

It would be far better because rent seeking behavior is so wasteful.

Not bombing them any more would be a start...

The 3rd World doesn't need the 1st world's help, just not to be robbed, oppressed and killed by it. What has the 1st World done to Libya, a former 3rd World success story? What has it done to Iran, to Iraq, to Syria, to Afghanistan, to half the countries in Central America? Read, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins, and try to become at least minimally informed. If you are up for something more technical, you can try "Superimperialism" by Prof. Michael Hudson.

 

We could - TOMORROW - give up 90% of what we each have and wipe out abject poverty worldwide. But the only way it could happen is at the point of a gun ... and there goes your Justice! Liberty! Freedom! There is no way you're every going to reconcile that inherent flaw in your proposition. You're litereally trying to replace one 'forcibly removed right' with another forcibly removed right.

 

You're going in circles. Your rights end at another person's property. You are not the king of the world. Other people have a right to their property.

 

Can you please tell me how my logic would support slavery?

 

It wouldn't take anything like that amount of money. See Jeffrey Sachs's proposal:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-extreme-poverty-be-el/

Or rich, greedy, privileged parasites putting away their guns.

Wrong. It is guns in the service of privilege that cause the poverty in the first place.

There is no flaw in my proposition. You are just makin' $#!+ up again and falsely attributing it to me.

No. My proposal is to restore, secure, and reconcile the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. I don't propose to take anything from anyone, but only to require those who ARE doing the taking to pay for what they are taking from everyone else

 

You say no one has a right to anyone else's property. Slaves were property of people other than themselves. They therefore (according to you) had no right to resist or leave their owners. I'm not sure which part of that you are having so much trouble understanding.

 

No, you are, because your "argument" for property in land consists of pointing out that land is property. Same argument slave owners used against the abolitionists. Classic question begging fallacy.

No. Their property ends at my rights.

GET IT????

But landowners are.....?

They do NOT have any right to "property" that consists of MY RIGHTS.

 

Um, except that I've stated numerous times that no person has the right to violate the person or property of his fellow man. Obviously slavery is inconsistent with this. So you can't be serious if you think that I endorse slavery.

 

You don't have the right to violate the property of your fellow man. Sorry.

 

You are LITERALLY spelling out the use of force to obtain that which does not belong to you.

Exactly as I said in my earlier post. You are simply replacing one 'forced theft' with another. How is that you are unable to see this? You're the one bleating Liberty!Justice!Freedom! .. and you're the one wanting to force compliance to your masterplan. Unbelievable.

PS: I'm the one in favour of voluntary collectivism .. a far more Liberty!Justice!Freedom! based proposition.