tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62676381557989407682023-11-16T03:09:23.466-08:00@darjeelingzenDarjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.comBlogger754125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-58422893670574515142014-04-17T19:45:00.001-07:002014-04-17T20:01:26.246-07:00Self-possession vs. 'self-ownership'<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">If 'I own myself', this entails I am both a slave and a master/ruler. If I reject both rulership and slavery, it is not then possible that I own myself and accept that I am free of domination. It is not necessary for myself to assert my 'self-ownership' to defend myself or pursue my own interests; the fact of my bodily possession and my interests as an organism is more than sufficient for self-defense, as any animal will readily react with fight or flight if necessary. Any theoretical additions to establish a justification of self-defense and pursuit of self-interest would appear to be redundant/superfluous to what is already sufficient for any organism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> ~ Darjeelingzen </span></div>
Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-6147074145755524072014-03-23T22:57:00.002-07:002014-03-23T22:57:54.591-07:00The king and the Capitalist twice removed<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"One upon a time there was a river. A small village of people lived by this river for as long a time as anyone remembered. The villagers would catch fish by the river. The villagers built a down going down to the river. Some built boats to fish from the river. Others made nets for fisherman. Some of the boat owners worked together to build a dock. The villagers made improvements to the river; by sinking debris in the water they would create habitat for bait fish that would draw in a greater number of target fish that the villagers wanted. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Then one day, men on horses with swords and armor said that the river was the property of the king and the village must pay the kind for the privilege of using the king's river. Being afraid and intimidated by the men with horses, swords and armor, the villagers paid the demanded extortion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Over the years, the king would occasionally raise the fee. The villager became poorer and had to work more and harder to provide for theme selves under the burden of the taxation. The king gave the kings's second cousin twice removed, a grant for funds to build his own boat, a larger boat. The kings's second cousin twice removed used the funds to have a boat built and remaining funds to hire workers to man the boat and catch fish from the river. The king granted an exemption to the kings's second cousin twice remove for a much lower rate of taxation. The kings's second cousin twice removed, found that his boat operated at very narrow margins and sometimes at below cost because of the high-overhead of having to pay workers and having to maintain the boat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"The kings's second cousin twice removed asked the kind to require a license to fish from the king's river; this way the kings's second cousin twice removed will have less competition because the kings's second cousin twice removed will be one of the few to receive such a license, and with less villagers catching less fish, the supply of fish will go down and the kings's second cousin twice removed, would have greater profit. The king agrees. The king declares that only licensed fishermen may fish from the king's river but the village much still pay the yearly taxes because the village subsists from the land which is the kings's property.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The kings's second cousin twice removed now can run a profitable business from his large boat. The business is so good, the kings's second cousin twice removed has four new large boats built and he hires nearby villagers to work on his boat. Having their land expropriated, having their many years of investments and improvements to the land and to the river taken from them and under a heavy tax-burden, the villagers have little other option but to accept employ with the kings's second cousin twice removed. Now the villagers work the king and the capitalist twice removed."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">~ Darjeelingzen</span></div>
Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-32920827753762831452014-03-21T17:39:00.001-07:002014-03-21T17:39:30.109-07:00Property is Theft: Explained<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Imagine, if you will, that a people were dominated by conquest and plundered for centuries, where the stolen possessions of the subjugated peoples was used to establish a great system of production that is often called, 'capitalism', and a great network of 'private property' held by the inheritors of those that have conquered and plundered the subjugated peoples, such that the dominators had come to control a super-majority of land and capital-goods, whereby the subjugated have only their labor left to trade. When what is called 'property' is the inheritance of domination, and where 'capitalism' is the exercise of that plunder by both those that perpetuate the institutions of domination and by the collaborators with those institutions of domination, then in that world, 'property' is rightly equated with theft."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">~ Darjeelingzen</span></div>
Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-67547927780366947362013-07-10T12:28:00.001-07:002013-07-10T12:28:07.686-07:00Discussion on health-care, economics and choice<div class="p1">
I've been enjoying a lively discussion with an acquaintance on Facebook of the subject of economics and health-care:</div>
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Selim : I probably shouldn't bother with this but I don't understand why you believe that a completely free market is always the ideal solution. There are areas where it works (it's great that I can get 31 flavored of ice cream) but there are areas where it creates additional expense and actually works to cut people out of the system, like healthcare. Most countries that have the government function as the single payer have the lowest expenses and the citizens are happiest with the system.</div>
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Todd : Selim, it ultimately comes down to morality, and the idea that the ends do not justify the means. There are plenty of benefits to slavery, but that doesn't make it right. Further you certainly can't justify the practice simply because you're not sure who will pick the cotton without it.</div>
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Jacob : Could you explain how you think that a "free market" would "cut people out of the system"? One of the features that I find preferable in a free-market, would be the increase of access and the reduction of cost; those seeking health-care services could choose from a plethora of market choices, unrestricted by regulatory-capture, and/or rent-seeking within the medical establishment.</div>
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When you point to the "happiness" of places with a "single payer" system, how do we know they would not be even more pleased with a system in which they would have more choice and less cost? I'm concerned that single-payer systems, in their efforts to control costs, artificially reduce (compared to market demand) options for care, while regulating compensation for medical services, necessarily creates a situation of an economic price-ceiling (the single payer limits what it will pay for, even if the individuals seeking treatment would be paying more in a free-market), which leads to a shortage of supply (delays to treatment, treatment options unavailable); as well as the possibility of creating price-floors where the single-payer has higher compensation rates that individuals seeking care would have been willing to pay under free-market conditions.</div>
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Since the single-payer cannot know the subjective-values of each individual in terms of what they would be willing to pay in a free-market condition, therefore the single-payer is going to be less efficient at allocating the goods/services to those persons seeking care, than they themselves.</div>
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I'm concerned that the price of health-care in largely inflated due to distortion s of the health-care market... and my understanding of economics has led me to a conclusion that individuals seeking their own happiness are better at effecting their own happiness, than would be any third-party attempting to make them happy at the expense of removing autonomy/choice.</div>
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Todd : Two old women are waiting in line for government supplied bread in Soviet Russia. The first woman complains to her friend that the lines are a lot longer than the used to be. The second woman smirks and tells the first woman that she shouldn't complain - they could be living in America, where the government doesn't even supply bread.</div>
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Selim : Couple of things - Todd - the Canadians aren't enslaved just because they have single payer healthcare.</div>
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Jacob - individuals may be good at figuring out what brand of beer makes them happiest, but healthcare is much more complicated and the reality is that most people don't have the scientific and medical expertise necessary to make the best healthcare decisions.</div>
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And the reality is that healthcare costs are vastly inflated in the United States, where administrative costs for all of our vaunted healthcare choices take up close to 27% of our healthcare money, compared to places like Canada where administrative costs for single payer is less than 10% of the revenue - and again - ask your average Canadian and your average American who is happier with their healthcare and Canadians will be ten times more likely to say they are happy.</div>
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Jacob I might not have sufficient expertise in a lot of goods/services that I would like, in order to make all of the decisions for them. For instance, I might not have sufficient expertise to build a modern house, therefore I might contract with a business-firm with a good reputation to build the house for me. I might not have sufficient expertise to fix my vehicle, so I might contract/make-agreement with a trusted mechanic to do the work I have insufficient expertise to do myself. I might have insufficient expertise on how a computer should be built, but I can contract/make-agreement to buy a computer from a manufacturer of computer after doing some product research, as to which product might best meet my needs. I might not have sufficient expertise to grow my own food, but I have sufficient expertise to figure out what food I might want to purchase from vendors willing to sell.</div>
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I'm sure medicine is very complicated; structural and mechanical engineering is complicated, computer-manufacturing is complicated, soil-science is complicated, yet in all of these complicated fields, I could have sufficient expertise to select an expert in the appropriate field. The advantage of me making the selection rather than someone else, is that since the outcome affects me, my having responsibility for that decision is the more direct connection between what I want and what I might be able to receive. If someone else decides for me, what medical options are available for me, and what they are willing to pay for those options to the medical supplier, then there is a disconnect between my needs and my available choices to meet my needs.</div>
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(And such systems create weird distortions of price, such as in the hospital I work at, there is this thing called a "towel clamp" that we pay over a dollar each for, they are all plastic and I'm sure they are something that you could likely find a pack of 24 for a dollar somewhere. But because they are a "medical device" the hospital pays an exorbitant price, which it passes on to the patient and/or the patient's payer; just one example of an artificial market distortion.)</div>
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I do not see how a single-payer system can avoid the economic problems created by price-ceilings and price-floors, [http://www.college-cram.com/study/economics/government-intervention/price-ceiling/ ] where a set-price by a "single payer" for a particular good/service, is necessarily either going to be higher or lower than the natural market equilibrium, causing either a shortage in supply or an over-supply and consequent effects in the quality of the goods/services.</div>
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The single payer system, seems to be intractably marred by the economic calculation problem: http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf</div>
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Appeals to "happiness" of selected sets of persons by sociological scales fail to be relevant in two ways: The first, is that such a system must be measured by who the system fails (those who might have made other choices in a less controlled/dominated system); if a "single-payer" emerged for the payment of food-services, and that "single-payer" decided what foods, at what prices it would pay for, then the system must be measured, not by the majority of persons for whom get what they wanted out of such a system but those who are deprived of choice/autonomy to make their own food-decisions (to include those potential providers of food-services that were excluded by the "single-payer"). Just because I get all the health-food I would have purchased anyway in the single-payer system, does not mean that the system is a success for someone else who no longer can have KFC, and all persons who are stake-holders in KFC are also not-satisfied. Secondly, appeals to "happiness" metrics seem also to be irrelevant, because the metric points to the "seen" while ignoring the immeasurable "unseen" of foregone opportunities ( http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html ); the question is not which disparate groups while trying to control for potentially significant factors (always vulnerable to the unknown-unknowns, and factors that cloud analysis or are otherwise left out) has the highest happiness metric, the question is rather, would this same group of persons, be able to better satisfy their needs/wants/preferences, in an alternate economic arrangement/marketplace?</div>
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I look at the hypothetical simple economic arrangement in which two people work cooperatively together in some kind of exchange and I see two parties who are mutually benefitted; whereas in an alternate economic arrangement, where one party consents and another party does not consent to the exchange, I do not see the same cooperation but rather one-party benefits, while another party has a loss. I have concerns that a "single-payer" system, is going to have many systematic "losses" because it is not a system that relies entirely on voluntary consent, it uses force of law to impose a "single-payer", which has the necessary implication of reducing choices (necessarily because if it were to be willing to pay an unlimited amount {an automatic billion dollars per person for any ailment}, it would soon self-destruct), and therefore, necessarily creates some artificially imposed harm/loss on some individuals, and in the total network of market relationships (that seen versus the unseen principle) harm to one person, causes a ripple effect of a reduction in opportunities for all.</div>
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There is an "opportunity cost" to every action, "single-payer healthcare" included, and my question, is if everyone were fully informed of the opportunity cost, would they still do so? If the answer is "no", then the system seems unnecessarily oppressive and burdensome. If the answer is "yes", then there is no reason to have a law to force people to do, what they would freely consent to do anyway.</div>
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Price Ceiling | Economics: Government Intervention | College-Cram.com</div>
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www.college-cram.com</div>
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This Cramlet explains the concept of the price ceiling and the impact it can have on pricing, consumer demand, and production.</div>
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Heidi : also to consider and it is maybe not the same in Canada....what thing that our government operates works well? nothing.</div>
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Todd : Canadians aren't slaves? I assume you say that because they are allowed to keep some of their earnings, right? Well, that definition of freedom just isn't good enough for me.</div>
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Selim : Todd - how are you defining Canadians as slaves? Because they have to pay into a healthcare system for all of their citizens? There are lots of countries that have some form of single payer system that aren't slaves.</div>
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Matter of fact can we get away from this hyperbole all together? Any argument that degrades into slavery and/or the nazis seem to feel ludicrous.</div>
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Selim : Heidi - I'm fairly content with our system of roads run and managed by the department of transportation. Medicare has done an excellent job of taking care of our elderly for the most part. Government does lots of things well. There are things that can be done better but the alternative doesn't mean everything is done poorly.</div>
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Selim : Jacob - we don't have a single payer system now and those price distortions are present - that is the result of price distortions that have resulted from the differences in how much a hospital can charge each insurance company. If a hospital can bill Aetna 4000 for a colonoscopy because of a deal they have but can only charge Medicare 2000 for the same procedure then there will be price distortions because of these various deals, which creates an environment for hospitals to create funny charges.</div>
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If you don't want to talk about happiness because its too vague that's fine - we can talk numbers. The average American family pays about 5-7000 dollars more in annual medical fees than every developed country but in just about every meaningful medical outcome we have some of the worst health outcomes. A big part of that comes from the huge gap between those who have had insurance and those who haven't. </div>
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The system that you feel is better - where people can choose how much or how little medical insurance they have has been a huge disaster and results in massive expenses in the form of unnecessary medical care in the emergency room, where care is 4-5x more expensive.</div>
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Your philosophy that we should be directly in control of our decisions make sense for commodities. For medical care the evidence is incredibly clear - by every single metric, a "laissez faire" approach leads to worse outcomes and significantly greater expenses.</div>
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Show me one country that has a system like the one you envision - we are the only one and we are doing a terrible job of taking care of a huge section of our population. It's improving fortunately but your ideas would bring us back to 40-50 million people without insurance.</div>
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Selim : And the idea that you alone could make a deal directly with all the medical care professionals you need is laughable - your healthcare is not like your automobile care - the reason we have group insurance is to make a risk profile that allows all of us to get healthcare. Are you going to make a deal with every MRI technician, nurse, doctor, orderly, janitor, etc? Going to a hospital for a simple procedure requires some kind of interaction with over 100 people - are you going to get friendly and directly negotiate when your child needs an emergency appendectomy?</div>
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Jacob: http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html</div>
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How Government Solved</div>
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www.freenation.org</div>
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Jacob : If navigating health-care would be so complex, why couldn't I contract with a medical expert who I trust to guide me through it? Why couldn't my PCP serve that role?</div>
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I am in agreement with you that the current system of health-care is flawed; though the current system bears no resemblance to "lasses faire" in my eyes. Every regulation concerning health-care will create market-distortions that will inevitably be higher or lower than the freed-market equilibrium price/quality; if those distortions are present now, more regulation, which is the application of force through institutions of power, will create still more distortions, higher-prices and lower-quality.</div>
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If a group of persons sets the price of health-care services, then all services which would have costed more than the artificial set price will not be produced because a business firm cannot long produce a good/service at a loss; they must lower quality to come in under the price ceiling or they must produce something else. All of the services that are not produced because of an artificially set market price, are the unseen/immeasurable opportunity costs which are lost and for which people are not likely to be aware that they lost. </div>
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If Americans are actually paying more for health-care with a lower quality of service, then we must look to the multifarious market-distortions that interrupt voluntary markets: what are regulations concerning health-insurance? What are the procedures of tort in medical matters? What are the regulations of medical devices? What are the regulations of pharmaceuticals? What are the regulations concerning the provision of health-care services? What are the barriers to market entry? What are the barriers of licensure? What are the "intellectual property" regulations? What are the barriers to trade import/export? Each of these creates market distortions and before any relevant comparison of cost or quality of care could be rationally analyzed, we would need to control for all market-distortions created by those laws/regulations. Until then the metrics being used have intractable variables which are not being controlled for.</div>
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Selim : Europe has a higher barrier to entry for medical programs than the United States as a whole - most EU countries start tracking students who aspire to go to med school at a much earlier age. .</div>
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Doctors tend to make much less money for services because they are salaried in Europe - here most doctors, except doctors at places like the mayo clinic, work on a fee for service scale - the market distortions ere are much greater because there are literally multiple fees for the same program. The NYTIMES did a great article last month talking about colonoscopies and the various charges based upon insurance in the United States. European doctors are flabbergasted by that because there is only one set fee for the procedure in each country. Everyone in Switzerland is charged the same amount for the procedure.</div>
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It is a fact that our health outcomes are way worse. You saying that it may be other issues instead of our healthcare system makes no sense to me - nobody in Europe is without healthcare, therefore they have better healthcare - that is pretty straightforward. </div>
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And the idea that a health lodge, an idea from 1905, which worked when "doctor" and "surgeon" were the only two medical specialities could work today is ludicrous. Back then there was no such thing as a "pediatric oncologist" or an "ear, nose and throat" doctor. Our level of specialty makes that system untenable - how much should you pay a "musculoskeletal radiologist" for his/her services?</div>
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Our group collective bargaining is called insurance - and in order to provide service for everyone it requires young and healthy people to be inured to balance out the risk for companies - if you want choice and not single payer then we are talking companies - they can't cover every diabetic if healthy 22 year Ike's try to opt out because they don't need much healthcare right now.</div>
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I'm not arguing against your life philosophy , I am just saying that the evidence doesn't support total freedom of choice for healthcare - not if we value and believe that everyone should be able to go to a doctor without rushing to the emergency room. </div>
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If you believe that it's not your job to subsidize others while you're healthy that's a different issue - but the numbers clearly show that collective healthcare is not possible or economical without the government as the main collective bargainer. No country on earth has succeeded in providing healthcare to everyone when we just leave it to the market place - none.</div>
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Jacob : I am concerned that the evidence that is being selected as purported demonstrative, does not take into account of various and numerous variables of market-distortion; thus making comparisons between different sets using those metrics, fails to acknowledge those intractable variables. The facts you have asserted, do not appear to be simple observations but rather complex analyses relying on assumptions and possible biases that are not accounted for. I'm concerned that there is little account for the "human" factor in these metrics; the individual subjective preferences of each individual in real-time, which would seem to be necessary for a net utility metric analysis. I'm also concerned for the apparent lack of recognition of "opportunity cost"; a feature of economic theory which by its nature is not-measurable and therefore reflected in no metrics, yet is a necessary feature of a theory of action or exchange.</div>
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I am willing to agree that the current system is full of unsatisfactory market-distortions. I am also willing to agree that I would like to see a market for health-care such that everyone would have access to qualified/competent care.</div>
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I am not confident that there is a strong case to be made that health-care services are some how economically distinct from all other goods/services and that market-processes absent institutions of power/hierarchy, would not be able to provide those health-care services on a voluntary/consensual/mutually-beneficial manner. I prefer to see cooperative and win-win social/economic interactions because this does seem to have a strong case for a maximal net utility analysis; while the use of the force of law to involuntarily compel certain behaviors seems to be a tragic loss of social autonomy.</div>
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Selim : I can present the evidence that our healthcare outcomes are much worse than at least a dozen industrialized nations and that we pay significantly more for the healthcare we receive than any of these countries that we can compare ourselves with.</div>
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As for my biases of observation, well every opinion has those and we can't remove them. Your biases in favor of some marketplace solution for everything is pretty obvious.</div>
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We are the only country that attempts a marketplace solution.</div>
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You're telling me you prefer a win-win solution - I'm not sure what's more win-win than doctors being paid for their work, patients being treated at a reasonable cost. I've shown you evidence of why our system doesn't work but you have yet to show me evidence of a system that can work the way you describe.</div>
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As for why healthcare is not like commodities - commodities for the most part are things that people can do without if you can't afford them - you don't need to buy brand name soda, go ahead and buy the generic stuff if that's what you can afford or don't buy any soda. Healthcare is not something you can do without and survive. The fact that you can't do without it makes it not like the rest d the marketplace. At some point or another every human being needs medical care of some sort - regardless of whether they can afford it or not...which means we as a community have to get together to ensure that healthcare is provided for others who can't afford it. That's why it can't be treated to normal marketplace solutions.</div>
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Selim : Opportunity cost can be measured fairly easily so I'm not sure what you're referring to - </div>
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We have a marketplace solution and it has left huge gaps in how service - no business would cover someone with preconditions if they didn't have to - they are a huge money loss - if a purely market driven system were in place then every HIV positive and cancer patient would have to pay 100k a year for their medication or lose their insurance. </div>
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The financial burden of the sick is too large for any individual to afford - we have group insurance to spread the cost and risk - if healthy patients didn't have to take insurance then the market itself won't work - </div>
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So we have two options - a market system where everyone gets insured and people pay a penalty for not getting insurance, or a single payer system where the government insures everyone. The single payer system is cheaper but at least now everyone is covered.</div>
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There is no marketplace solution that could group all the high risk patients into one pool and pay for their medical care. It literally wouldn't e possible.</div>
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Jacob Could you explain how you would measure an opportunity-cost?</div>
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When you refer to problems/deficiencies of current market conditions, I am very much inclined to agree that they are problematic/deficient. However, because I do not share agreement with you that the current system, operates under freed-market conditions, I identify much of the problems/deficiencies with market-distortions caused by institutions of power/hierarchy (power-over-others with predictable win-lose outcomes). </div>
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I would like to see institutions of cooperation working to meet everyone's needs in a power-with-others structure that would have predictable win-win outcomes guaranteed by individual voluntary consent. </div>
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If a system does not have a peaceful/cooperative/non-sacrificial "opt out" function for individuals to seek other options, then there would seem to be an unnecessary amount of coercion needed to maintain a system that ostensively is put into place to serve people. I prefer options that are peaceful/cooperative; I would prefer to let people make choices for themselves, rather than forcing them to do what you or I might think is "good"? If a system would benefit everyone, why is it necessary to force them to participate? </div>
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I wonder if the current-cost of health-care is a result of market-distortions based on compelling people to do things. I wonder if health-care would be less expensive if there were more-choices=more-market-competition rather than less-choices=controlled/regulated-market.</div>
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Jacob : Every regulation, would seem to "regulate"/control (literally means "limit") the expression of the market (into a deformed-market); every limitation of the market to meet needs, limits the market supply, which means an increase in price is necessary for the market to find the new deformed-equilibrium price; therefore every health-care regulation causes an increase in price/cost. Since I would like health-care to be affordable, I would like maximal choice, maximal market supply and therefore maximal human-needs-meeting.</div>
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Selim : You keep saying the same thing! </div>
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You keep telling me what you believe and what you would like to see but you don't say how you would address the problems our current market based solutions have - how would you pool the "high risk" patients, whose health related costs are somewhere in the 6 or 7 figures. How would you group those in a way that is "win-win" without low risk people, who pay 10k a year but only utilize 3k of health expenses?</div>
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The market is designed to make money not to take care of people. How do you reconcile the need to make money with the greater good of caring for our poor and ill who can't afford to pay their direct costs? Give me something concrete, not just some platitude about seeking a win-win solution without actually giving a way forward.</div>
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Jacob : The prediction of what strategies individuals might select to meet their needs, is a precarious exercise of prognostication. If institutions of power-over-others controlled and regulated the production of apples for several years, and someone were to ask me, "In a freed market, how would apples be produced?", to answer with any absoluteness of the actual strategies would be to presume that I had control-over the actions or knowledge of the future subjective-preferences of other individuals, neither of which is the case. </div>
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I suspect that health-care is expensive because of the limitations of supply caused by the distortions of regulations from institutions that exude power-over-others; that without those limitations of supply, a new market equilibrium would be established, such that it may be possible that most medical illness/disease could be treated so inexpensively that insurance would not even be necessary. But there are of course other possibilities; that the lower costs of health-care and the relief from the restriction of supply of insurance services, could create conditions were insurance for medical services could be very minor; then there is also the possibility for group-insurance policies from charitable organizations ("lodge-care" "friendly societies) or worker-cooperatives; there are also the possibilities of charitable medical services. By allowing for a natural market supply of medical services, there would be a vast increase in competition, thereby driving down the price (the equilibrium of supply and demand). </div>
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I imagine a scenario in which institutions of domination, control the production of vehicles; where the supply of vehicles is regulated in various manners, thereby limiting the supply and increasing price but to compensate for that increase in price, every person is given by the institution of domination a subsidy to buy a vehicle. I can understand how important the subsidy might seem given the artificially high-price of vehicular products, but if the price of vehicles is an artifice of political power, then the subsidy serves to artificially increase the demand of vehicles (because the subsidy creates a situation where each person has an inflation of disposable income in relation to the purchase of a vehicle) to compensate for the artificial limitation for the supply caused by regulation.</div>
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I do not share agreement with the technical meaning of, "The market is designed to make money not to take care of people"; the market is not designed, the market is a manifestation of spontaneous order organized by people finding mutually-beneficial opportunities for exchange, therefore the market qua market (without the institutionalization of domination) is a process which cares-for/benefits all parties involved.</div>
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I analyze the "single-payer" strategy as one that compensates for the exorbitant prices cause by institutional domination; it may be that such a strategy, does indeed decrease the cost of medical services overall, but I am concerned that the decrease in cost may come at the expense of a decrease in quality or further decreases in supply and/or access (waiting-periods). I do not see how one could measure the opportunity-cost of lost opportunities caused by the limitation of supply through regulation but I suspect it could be considerable.</div>
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If there are vulnerable populations of persons in need of medical-service that have desperate need for medical services, I suspect that they would be better served by more choices, greater supply, greater competition, less political control over the market, upon which they depend than the system that is currently in place. If there is real and legitimate social interest in protecting vulnerable populations of persons who have much medical-need, and I suspect there is, I reason that they would be better served by charitable organizations that are voluntarily organized because the members actually care about those populations, as opposed to a political bureaucracy. </div>
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If I continually return to my preference for win-win outcomes and cooperative strategies, it is to emphasize that preference in response to what I perceive as false-dilemmas constructed to advocate that some sort of social-domination is necessary to produce a good outcome. I do not share agreement that domination/power-over-others is necessary to produce good outcomes and I am worried that it actually necessarily produces less than satisfactory outcomes. I am worried that many of the political solutions offered, are put into place to benefit corporations (which I do not agree are freed-market manifestations) and other persons in (political) power.</div>
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Selim : At risk of putting words in your mouth you are saying that the marketplace has the potential to provide the optimal solution if there was no government or social interference, would that be correct?</div>
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If that's correct then this pure market has never existed in any place other than some kind of academic exercise.</div>
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Medicine is expensive fundamentally for several reasons; technological innovation and research is expensive - yes a big part of the expense is because of government regulations regarding safety and proving the safety...I am not sure I would want medicine to be made available without rigorous trials.</div>
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The other reason it is expensive is the fact that we don't engage in healthcare rationing. Your average elderly patient, in the last six months of life, will cost approximately 2 million dollars - this end of life care is by far the greatest expense in the medical system. This isn't counting elderly assisted living homes which can cost over 24 thousand a month and which Medicaid will pay for once a person runs out of money to pay for said assisted living. Unless we are willing to engage in some kind of healthcare rationing the absolutely largest costs will continue to increase as baby boomers retire and as medical innovations continue to develop new and expensive ways to keep people alive a little while longer.</div>
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The point I want to make with all of this is that the market, and most economists would agree, does a poor job of taking on risks associated with developing the kinds of innovation that will be required to solve our major problems especially ones that require large infusions of money for research or infrastructure development. In those cases government is the right tool for the job.</div>
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I think my main problem with your outlook is that it sounds like only "one tool" is right for every job. There are many times where the market is the right tool for the job but I refuse to believe that it is the only way or that it is "always" the best way to accomplish things. The market has failed the United States for decades to cover everyone in terms of health insurance and if the market needed to wait for perfect conditions of no government or social interference then it is not the right tool for the job. The market manages to do a good job in other areas despite regulations - if it could have met our needs I think 50+ years that we have been attempting to create a complete safety net would have been enough time.</div>
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Jacob : I do not share agreement with your portrayal of the perspective I wish to express; I see the "freed-market" as a abstract corporate manifestation of each individual, acting in the interest of that individual's preferences, values and needs, seeking to maximize that individuals's personal satisfaction, seeking strategies to accomplish that satisfaction in cooperation with other individuals. In any given system where domination/power-over-others is absent (for instance between the two of us conversing, sharing/contributing our ideas for our greater understanding, I perceive no significant effects of the institutionalization of power-over-others; but to include any micro-social/economic interaction/exchange where effects of domination are mitigated/remedied) we might call such interactions of exchange (even if it is merely social exchange) a 'freed market". Such as it is, the those various acts of cooperation/power-with-others that you and I might perceive every day are by no mean hypothetical or academic exercises; just because power/domination/hierarchy are historically pervasive, does not imply that peaceful cooperation a phantom of the imagination. </div>
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Yet if it were the case that such had never existed in the formulation/definition that you have offered, then how could something that does not exist, then how could it have "failed" later in your exposition?</div>
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Medicine is not the only field that requires research and technological innovation, yet it seems to be one of the few industries currently being recommended for such a payment system. I do not share agreement that medicine is economically distinct/different from the production->consumption processes of other goods/services; I would share agreement that cooperative/voluntary production processes are efficient in the satisfaction of all goods/services. I do acknowledge that scarcity is a feature of all production, and that there are limitations of the abilities of freed-markets to meet needs, but these limitations are going to be less restrictive that institutionalization of domination systems. The freed-market is not a "single tool", it is the manifestation of diverse distributions of strategies to meet human-need; the institutionalization of domination centralizes, it creates monopoly, it decreases autonomy and choice. Voluntary, consensual and cooperative processes are decentralized, resilient, diverse, distributed, individuated, customized; they increase autonomy and choice, they respect the preferences, values and needs of individuals who consist of the entirety of members of abstract sets like "society".</div>
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Selim : The market has failed to create this system you are talking about - frankly I can't even conceive of the structures you are talking about working on the large scale - mutually beneficial cooperatives work for the Amish building barns but when you are dealing in large scale, in terms of hundreds of millions of people I don't believe I have ever seen a system that has the completely mutually beneficial processes that you are describing. Your example in point - lodges from the 1900s could conceivably work in a simple system - a couple of hundred people make arrangements with a bunch of nearby doctors - but I don't see how Aetna, with over 37 million insured could possibly endow all of their patients with e level of autonomy you desire and still be remotely cost competitive.</div>
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It seems to me you are willing to let the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good" - I don't agree that your system is feasible, and even if it was, you present no proof that it would provide better care that would be less expensive. I can prove that we spend the highest percent for healthcare </div>
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthcare-spending-world-country</div>
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I can also prove that our healthcare outcomes are demonstrably worse despite paying much more</div>
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http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/health-outcomes-report-cards-by-country/</div>
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If you want to keep your belief in the realm of what is theoretically possible if our system was perfect that's fine, but it is demonstrably proven that single payer health care systems, while not perfect, are strongly correlated with lower expense and better health outcomes than countries that offer greater "choice" and more "market driven" solutions.</div>
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Healthcare spending around the world, country by country</div>
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www.guardian.co.uk</div>
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The US spends more than any other country in the world on healthcare - but how does it really compare?</div>
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Darrell : Wow, Jacob I wish I could have helped in adding to your logic, which to my own research seemed flawless. Do you mind if I copy this to repost somewhere? I am sure that Cody (who is not on Facebook) would love to read it, actually, as well as Tony Myers. As to the feelings and motivating factors involved, I think you addressed some of the concerns you had, I think Selim is concerned that with freedom of choice, people will unfortunately make the wrong choices, and many will suffer as a result. Please let me know if I misinterpreted this, Selim.</div>
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Selim : Darrell - that's part of the problem - if you're 22 years old and perfectly healthy there is a high probability you will choose to opt out of getting health insurance - it takes 7-12 thousand dollars out of your meager paycheck. </div>
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If enough healthy people opt out of insurance then insurance companies are stuck with a pool of high risk patients. They pay 12-20 thousand a year into their insurance (more because they may have families than out imagined 22 year old) but because they are sick they actually consume over 100 thousand a year in resources. This isn't hard to imagine when you realize that monthly pills for HIV come to anywhere between 2-5 thousand a month. </div>
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So sick people and high risk people cost much more than they put into the system. In a market system for insurance like we have this creates an unacceptable risk profile for companies - if they have more sick people than healthy people then they won't be able to make any money. A single payer system where the government is the main payer then you no longer have to worry about companies making a profit. By taking the profit motivation out of insurance you can insure everyone. Not only that you can do it cheaper. The reason you can do it cheaper is because if there is one payer then that payer has an extraordinary amount of leverage to negotiate prices - Medicare pays doctors a thousand dollars for a colonoscopy for a senior citizen. Aetna pays 5 thousand for that same procedure to doctors. </div>
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Having one Payer eliminates inefficiencies and inequalities. NYC public school teachers have zero copays for their health insurance - that's because the pool of NYC civil servants is huge and has been able to negotiate that. A freelancer or people who work for a small company will have much larger copays.</div>
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Rather than making things more "equitable", choice in the case of insurance reduces equality and exacerbates inequality. </div>
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The market doesn't always make things better, more fair or lower cost. The evidence doesn't support any of that.</div>
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Jacob : Thanks Darrell. I alerted you to the discussion because I thought that you might find it of some value. </div>
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Selim : I think that there is a significant distinction between what I call a "freed market" and what you call "the market"; "the market" (the macro structures that are currently observable) are what I might refer to as, "deformed markets" (markets that are significantly influenced-by and adapted-to the market-distortions of institutions of domination). Because I make this distinction, if you desire to find agreement with me, that the current market conditions are unsatisfactory, then I can certainly share agreement with you! But "the market" that is currently observable is not the "freed market" I attribute as having being most efficacious at meeting human-need. I would not agree that the "market has failed to create this system you are talking about" but rather, that institutions of domination have been reticent to abdicate power-over-others/domination.</div>
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While the references you provided look to be reliable indicators that the set of persons in the "United States" does spend more per person than other sets, I am not confident that this analysis has eliminated/controlled-for all possible incongruous variables affecting the data to include: market distortions created by, regulations concerning health-insurance, procedures of tort in medical matters, regulations of medical devices, regulations of pharmaceuticals, regulations concerning the provision of health-care services, all barriers to market entry/competition, "intellectual property" regulations, barriers to trade import/export? Until then the metrics being used have resolved all variables which could distort the analysis of the date, then the metrics may not actually measure what they are purported to measure and the resultant comparisons might be dubious.</div>
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For health-outcomes (as well as spending) I would expect to see data that has eliminated the variables of different risk-factors in the separate populations (which I don't see in the reference you provided but perhaps I missed it); additionally the data from the health-outcomes link, after a quick glance, seems incongruous with http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf </div>
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I appreciate that you would like to point to measurable-outcomes, but I am concerned that unless the data is carefully controlled for all of the variables mentioned, then the data is not seem particularly useful for meaningful analysis.</div>
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I am appreciative that it seems that your motivation is to ensure that most/all persons receive adequate medical-care, even though I do not share agreement with you that a "single-payer" is an efficacious system for accomplishing that goal. I would be willing to agree that it is *possible* that a "single-payer" system *could* be less expensive for consumers as compared to the current systems. However, much of that possibility would be highly contingent on whether the new "single-payer" system would eliminate many of the current market-distortions of political limitation of the supply of medical-services; for if that is not the case, then I would expect that the "single-payer" system would be less responsive to market-forces of supply-demand equilibriums (I would again refer you to: http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf ).</div>
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I am highly suspicious of any system which uses political/social-force to compel individuals to act against their conscientious choice. I do not agree that compulsion through political force can bring about a "greater good" when it brings about an immediate harm (if nothing else, the opportunity costs). I would not want to compel my neighbor to act against his will; I would prefer to negotiate more amicable terms in which we might cooperate together; I choose to apply this preference to macro-social analysis and I wonder if we would all be better off with more cooperation and peace, and less compulsion and domination. If peace and cooperation work so well on a micro-level of small sets of individuals and small communities, why would it not work on a global level? Why should force/violence be necessary on the large scale, when peace & cooperation can be shown/demonstrated to produce win-win outcomes on a small scale? Is not the scale of the global, reducible to each of the individual members?</div>
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Selim : So what you're saying is that unless you see data that resolves each and every one of those issues you will find it suspect and not agree with it? That sets quite a high bar for what you will accept, especially considering you've provided no evidence to support your position that a freed market would result in lower cost and greater access.</div>
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The freed market you're talking about has never existed in society. In essence you're saying that you believe this philosophical abstraction is preferable to what is proven to be better than what we currently have. </div>
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I find that hard to understand from any side - I will never let perfection get in the way of progress. Our current system has been terrible for a long time and we have seen superior results come from other countries. The system Obama has managed to put into place is not perfect but it is vastly improved over what came before. If I understand you correctly you won't see anything shy of your utopian ideal of a freed market, which has never existed, as being good enough,</div>
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And scale is not just a reduction of individuals - by that logic we are nothing more than a collection of atoms and what is true for atoms should be true for humans - by definition when you increase in scale and size you increase in connections and complexity. If you take a human body apart it doesn't work - the connections create complexity that is not contained in the sum of its parts - that is fundamentally wrong!</div>
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Jacob : I do not share agreement with your characterization/analysis of my position; my perspective is that for data to be relevant and valid in reference to the conclusion that is drawn from the data, the data must be controlled for all meaningful variables. If the data fails to control for meaningful variables, no valid conclusions can be drawn ( I believe this is known by statisticians as "intractable analysis"). I can sympathize that it might be tempting to rely on data when it seems to confirm our suspicions (which is not to say that our suspicions in such a case are necessarily incorrect, only that the data that we have does not necessarily imply the conclusion we would like to reach) but should not the data from which we attempt to draw conclusions have a "high bar"? (especially if we use them as justification for the application of political-force to compel some to obey others).</div>
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At the risk of repeating myself, I see the "freed market" as already existing in the diffuse micro-scape between particular individuals; where ever two persons participate in mutually-beneficial exchange, without resort to domination, without significant influence of the institutionalization of domination, there is a particular manifestation of a "freed-market" which I point to as effective for meeting human-need, diffuse though it may be in a macro-perspective. The lack of macro freed-markets does not imply to me to be a failure of cooperation but the pervasiveness of domination/power-over-others.</div>
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I believe that reason and rationality is the basis of my cognitive understandings; I have offered as "evidence" for my position, logical/deductive-arguments that have well established basis in economic theory that I believe rationally justify my conclusions. Those arguments have been offered for your consideration and you are welcome to question premises and/or determine if there have been errors/fallacies in my reasoning. Reason and evidence is the basis by which I attempt to construct the frameworks that I develop into my perspectives/lens which I use to understand the world and interpret data.</div>
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I have offered to you arguments of significant economists of how artificially opportunity costs, not only causes losses for the individual that experiences the loss but also for the larger economy, as well as significant argumentation that seemingly refutes the possibility for centralized economic structure to make accurate economic calculations, which would seemingly have significant implications for the results of disequilibrium of supply and demand and therefore significant losses in net human-satisfaction/human-needs-meeting.</div>
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I do not share agreement that the principle of cooperation/peace/non-violence is some unachievable, unrealistic or undesirable principle upon which to understand and apply to human-interactions. I do not share agreement that compulsion/domination can be considered "progress".</div>
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I might share some agreement with your illustration of "humans" and "atoms" (though I'm not entirely sure, because I'm not confident that we have a complete enough understanding of either "atoms" or "humans" sufficient to deny that there is not a significant implication), though my presentation of scale was not between the scale of two real objects (large-object-A: a human; small-object-B: an atom) but between the scale of an abstract-set ("society") where such an abstract set is defined in reference to all of the particular members of that set (all individuals consisting of the set "society") and I believe in such a case, a "set" is defined as composed of its individual members.</div>
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Selim : You can't control for all meaningful variables outside of the most rigorous clinical trials - by your standards then any economics paper would be highly suspect since it is impossible to control for all possible variables. Part of the reason we talk about correlations and degrees of confidence is because we can't control for every variable in any published study. That is why I'm saying you are setting too high of a bar for our discussion. And frankly I don't see how demonstrating that our health outcomes are poor in relation to other countries even requires us to look at all of the variables you mentioned. </div>
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if you want to simplify it to smaller variables we can do that - we measure something as simple as our infant mortality rate the United States has the highest level of infant mortality in the developed world - if we spend more money than any other country on health care why should we have the highest rate of infant mortality? </div>
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I suspect we will be going around in circles soon if we haven't already - but I don't understand where or when you see your vision ever actually coming to fruition since you can't tell me how this would actually happen. </div>
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My analogy still applies - science talks about predictability; physics, which deals with our smallest objects, are the most predictable. As we increase in scale by definition we lose predictability - genes are less predictable than individual compounds, which are less predictable than individual atoms. This applies at the macro scale too; an individual's behavior or choices are much simpler and can be predicted with much greater accuracy than a groups, or a states or a country's. as we deal with larger amounts of people we deal with much greater complexity than when we are dealing with smaller groups. </div>
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I realize I'm not going to change your mind on anything but I want to find some common ground where we can meet. So far I haven't found it. </div>
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And I don't understand why you are using the term "violence" when you talk about people doing things that they don't want to do - we do lots of things we don't want to do without it being violent or non peaceful. Education is compulsory in the United States when a child reaches age six - you can home school, send them to public school, religious or private but you have to send them. By your definition we are doing violence to parents by forcing them to educate their children even if, for some strange reason, they don't want to educate them.</div>
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US surpasses other industrialized countries in infant death rate - World Socialist Web Site</div>
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More than 11,000 American babies die on the day of birth, a number 50 percent higher than all other industrialized countries combined.</div>
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Selim : Also please read the article - 20% of women coming into hospitals are uninsured, which means they got no prenatal care...couple that with hospitals cutting costs and shutting down maternity wards are big factors in the appealing levels of infant mortality. Why aren't these things happening in Italy or France? It could be lots of variables but logically the fact that there is no such thing as an uninsured person in France is a big reason why they don't have those problems.</div>
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I'd like to see some kind of quantitative evidence to support your idea that a freed market would result in better healthcare outcomes - I haven't read your 50 page paper....I was slightly biased against economic papers written in 1920 when they couldn't possibly speak towards modern medicine and the challenges they are faced in 2013.</div>
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Jacob : I think we have established some common-ground. We both would like to see an outcome where more persons have access to health-care, rather than less persons. We both value strategies that we perceive are "workable", "feasible" or "realistic" (though we may not agree on what those strategies are). We both would like to see health-care costs be less (though we disagree on what strategies would effectively accomplish this). We both would like to see change/progress; neither of us is content with the current status-quo. </div>
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Jacob : (I perceive that a threat of force to compel or coerce someone to act involuntarily, as a violent act {it is an example to me of power-over-others/domination}; this would include compulsory education. I'm not supportive of punitive strategies and would much prefer outcomes which are win-win rather than win-lose.)</div>
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Jacob : In the effort to forge greater common ground, perhaps this submission would more directly speak to many of the concerns you have raised: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/health-care-and-radical-monopoly#axzz2YQ8LfgRB</div>
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Health Care and Radical Monopoly : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education</div>
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www.fee.org</div>
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ARTICLEHealth Care and Radical MonopolyFEBRUARY 23, 2010 by KEVIN A. CARSONIn a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argued that the versions of health care reform currently proposed by “progressives” all primarily involve financing health care and expanding coverage to the uninsured rather…</div>
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Selim : So at the risk of another argument you feel that compulsory education, despite the massive amounts of good it has done society, is bad? You would prefer it be optional? </div>
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This is a world view that makes little sense to me - humans don't always act in their best interests, why would you be against something like making sure kids get some kind of education?</div>
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Selim : Some of the stuff in the article made sense to me - I think doctors should not be earning on a fee for service model they should be salaried like they are at the mayo clinic. </div>
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I generally think intellectual property should be respected so hacking an MRI machine sounds like a terrible idea; funding R&D is incredibly expensive, that's why few companies do it. If it was easy and legal to just reverse engineer a new MRI machine what possible incentive would GE have to invest millions into its development? </div>
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Clinics currently exist where a person can go see a NP who can handle most simple cases. Say what you want about artificial scarcity due to licensing but if my kid had a medical emergency I would want a licensed surgeon who had 15 years experience minimum and had done the procedure thousands of times. And the simplest cases like the article mentioned don't cut into the biggest expenses, which are end of life care and high risk patients. </div>
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If our common ground is improving healthcare lets define what we are talking about when we say improve - are we talking about annual insurance costs for a family? Amount of tax money spent on healthcare? Are we talking about total access?</div>
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Jacob : I would not characterize compulsory education as "bad", as this might imply that there is no possible "good" that can result of it and I might be able to find some agreement with you that there might be some benefits to some individuals; after all, some students *want* to go to school, therefore I conclude for those students, school must be an environment/experience that they value. I would not however be able to characterize it as "for the greater good" either, as I would identify some serious short-comings to centralized education models (and especially compulsory ones). I wonder if children would be able to learn a wider breath and richer content, if they were able to explore topics freely.</div>
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You have likely seen the research on "inquiry-based" and "student-centered" education models; they are decentralized, they permit the student greater choice/autonomy, they are more fulfilling satisfactory for students and they appear to have greater outcomes. I look at things like this http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html and wonder what could be learned in a rich learning environment, that is completely open and responsive. I suspect you have also been exposed to the research regarding what happens when students do not feel that they are in a safe learning environment; I would suggest that any student that does not want to be in school, is not in a safe-learning environment, whatever their reasons, they have identified that space, as a place that does not meet their needs and likely threatens their capacities for needs-meeting. I'm also confient that you have been exposed to pedagogical researchers/theorists such as Dewey, Vygotsky and Holt; I'm very much persuaded by the scaffolding, learn-by-doing, inquiry-based models they provide.</div>
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I'm likely sounding repetitive by now, but I think there are possibilities for strategies for eduction that are voluntary and consensual and do not require a punitive domination model. Montessori is certainly a step in the right direction but there is still much room for improvement there.</div>
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Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com</div>
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www.ted.com</div>
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Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?</div>
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Jacob : (By the way, rather than reading Mises whole paper, something like this might suffice to provide the general picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem )</div>
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Economic calculation problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</div>
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en.wikipedia.org</div>
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The economic calculation problem is a criticism of using economic planning as a substitute for market-based allocation of the factors of production. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" and later expanded upon by Friedrich...</div>
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Jacob : {I thought you might have been interested in the story about the modern lodge practice, and how it was sued by the state to raise its rates)</div>
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Jacob : Would you object to an open-source MRI? http://opensourceecology.org/</div>
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Open Source Ecology</div>
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opensourceecology.org</div>
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The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.</div>
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Jacob : As I was reflecting upon this discussion, two wonderings began to rise to my mind. The first is the use of language in regard to what is, or what is not a "fact", when there is an understanding that there are "degrees of confidence"; it seems to me that the language of declaring what is and what is not "fact" is inconsistent with an understanding of "degrees of confidence" and statistical analysis. Perhaps preferable language would be, "Such-and-such a conclusion, seems have a strong supporting evidence, given such-and-such assumptions and such-and-such selected analysis". The language which declares what is and what is not "fact" seems to over-state one's case when one relies on interpretations of data which must necessarily be open to new/alternate interpretations/analyses. My understanding of science is that is is not dogmatic but based upon rational principles toward a particular experimental methodology. If something is claimed to never-have-existed, it would seem that therefore, no data would be available for that which never-has-existed, which would indicate that there is no inductive conclusion that could be drawn when there is a lack of relevant data. I wonder what leads to the over-stating of one's case in terms of absolutes framed in such a way to imply that they are not controvertible, rather than exploring a subject with a fair amount of curiosity.</div>
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Another concern I had as I reflected upon this discussion, was language in regard to "principle"/"perfection"/"utopian"; I hear this langage used often and I am inclined to wonder, what do people who object to "principle"/"perfection"/"utopian" think of other people who have advocated for peace, such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.. Some how I would not suspect that the same criticisms of "principle"/"perfection"/"utopian" are leveled at these figures who advocate for a more peaceful/cooperative world and I wonder where that disconnection arises. I wonder why what is expedient or what is traditional, or what is conservative of traditional modes of doing things, somehow is automatically judged to be of greater value than what is principled/reasoned. I do not understand how reasoned argument of how things could possibly be much improved is necessarily inferior to what currently is, especially when there is dissatisfaction for what currently is.</div>
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These observations are not specifically in regard to this discussion alone but a far more general curiosity/wondering of discussions that I have had in the past that this discussion has brought up for me.</div>
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Selim : If I get what you're saying - you're saying that is that we can't define something as a fact if it is potentially open to interpretation or if there are unanswered variables. </div>
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You're also saying that if something doesn't have any data supporting it, like your idea of a "freed market" then you can't make any conclusion about whether it is possible. </div>
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If Thats what you're saying then I think it makes it difficult for me to provide evidence for my point of view and easier to demonstrate your point of view. I believe that economic data will never be able to control for all variables as you can only observe the economy and can't control it in a clinical or laboratory setting. There will always be unanswered questions and it will always have uncontrolled variables - that's why we talk about correlation and causation. Correlation provides valid data to create reasonably confident conclusions.</div>
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You saying that If there is no data to prove it can't exist then we can't make any conclusion about it seems wrong to me. Science can't disprove that astrology is BS - but we say that it's not falsifiable - the fact that we can't disprove it's existence or possibility is a conclusion in and of itself a problem. We can explore the possibility and discuss it but I don't see how your conclusion can go past the realm of the mind as opposed to any kind of reality.</div>
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As far as "utopian" goes - Ghandi, MLK and such had a template - they had a vision that was at least based on something that existed before. MLK could look to the story of Moses and say "a people can be freed". I don't see any precedence for the idea that more choices in healthcare will lead to improved outcomes - I see the opposite - we in the United States have more choices than any other developed country and we have worse outcomes and higher costs than other developed countries. No country has a "freed market" but England has a capitalist market just like us, just with more of a safety net. </div>
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I am a big fan of talking about improvement - improvement is something I can measure - I can predict that if we had a single payer healthcare our costs for healthcare would drop by 25-30% - in line with the costs in other European countries.</div>
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You are telling me a freed market would result in lower costs and improved outcomes but you can't make a prediction of how much it would lower costs. Science talks about falsifiability and the value of making some predictions. </div>
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You're telling me that there will be a huge improvement but no prediction or idea of how much improvement - If I have to choose between a known improvement and some potential improvement in some unspecified amount I prefer the known quantity.</div>
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Jacob : Thank you for that response. I found myself sharing a surprising amount of agreement with you just now. </div>
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I agree that "economic data will never be able to control for all variables"; I agree that there are (nearly) always uncontrolled variables (and we both seem to agree, that this is especially the case of the social sciences); I agree that the "template" of Ghandi and MLK was a powerful part of their vision; I share agreement with your disposition for improvement; I agree with you that I do not claim to be able to make accurate/reliable predictions as to actual supply and demand conditions and the resultant price equilibrium in hypothetical futures (and I would be suspect of any one who claimed to do so). I'm pleased that we have these common understandings.</div>
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I would also like to offer some clarifications: in my reflection upon assertions of "fact", what I intend is an understanding of "fact" which is observable, verifiable and not open to alternate interpretations. If something is open to other conceivable interpretations, then either more experimenting is required for a more complete inductive conclusions, or both parties are engaged in a theoretical discussion of alternate possible unverifiable premises. Data does not interpret its self, conclusions are drawn from data using particular analytical methodologies which are based on theoretical assumptions. Discussions of theory, or discussions questioning the assumptions of theory, usually take the form of which theory is the most consistent model for human understanding/reason and human empirical observation. If I am questioning the assumptions upon which data is being analyzed due to errant/fallacious theoretical assumptions, or their implications for their analytical methodology, then to provide further data based on the same conclusions fails to satisfy the objections. I certainly appreciate your desire for what is "measurable" but I question/object to many of the theoretical assumptions of the metrics so often used; they seem to me to substitute the measurements of price, but attempt to conclude something about human choice and human satisfaction with those choices (a utility calculus) when there are significant deformations/limitations on human-choice for the purposes of human-satisfaction that are built into political-violence/force. I can understand that it might be tempting, since a utility calculus is so empirically difficult (how do you calculate and individual's "utile"?) that price data might be used in its stead, but such data would only be a relevant measure of preferable individual choices, when those choice are completely voluntary and consensual; if not then the data is necessarily tainted by the coercion of violence, prices do not necessarily reflect voluntary and consensual choice and if we try to base conclusions about what will make the most people, the most happy (I'm assuming here, that neither of us would desire a net decrease in human-satisfaction) then we can not use such corrupted/deformed data and any applied analysis of correlation may be implication similarly tainted/corrupted. I'm saying that very often the metrics do not measure, what they are purported to measure; the analysis relies on dubious theoretical assumptions; which is why I base my arguments so often on what seems to you to be more theoretical; I wish for a what is most rationally consistent theory, because I like to have the theoretical assumptions that provide me the greatest consistency and clarity.</div>
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I'm concerned that use of the language of "fact" can be for some people, expressing that certain assumptions are unquestionable/incontrovertible, as are the analytical methods implied by the underlying theoretical assumptions; I'm concerned that such language shuts-down meaningful dialog by implying that there are no other possible theoretical assumptions to interpret empirical observations. I wish to have open discussion of important ideas and I do not desire to unnecessarily restrict the possibilities for understanding.</div>
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I very much like the template of "a people can be freed"; I believe that is the position I support. I want each individual to be free to make choices for themselves; I want social and economic interactions to be free from violence, force, coercion, punishment; I support that for all peoples. I'm concerned that using political-force to compel people to do certain things, makes them less free, it gives them less choices, it restricts their actions, it may restrict their production, it may increase prices, and reduce net human satisfaction and this is highly undesirable to me. The individual is the ultimate social/economic decentralization, while control over an entire market sounds like a monopoly and I do not think that monopolies can be efficient market forces at meeting human need.</div>
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If cooperation results in a win-win and domination/violence results in a win-lose, then I predict, by deductive reasoning and confirmed by inductive observation, that the more win-lose, the less human-satisfaction and the more win-win, the more human-satisfaction. I think that's at the core of what I want to share here. I'm open to any improvements that you might like to suggest, that would give people greater choice and not require harm (=violence/coercion/expropriation) to implement.</div>
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What did you think of an open-source MRI?</div>
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Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-87403562700436735012013-05-26T21:44:00.001-07:002013-05-26T21:44:24.749-07:00Stolen Concept Fallacy<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Stolen concept fallacy </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I'm beginning to notice, that every time I encounter reference to the "fallacy of the stolen concept", I find in the justification of the supposed fallacy, a certain amount of the fallacious use of circular-reasoning/begging-the-question at play and I wonder if anyone else as identified this phenomenon.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The "stolen concept fallacy" usually requires a particular definition to be asserted by the one supposedly identifying a "stolen concept" argument (fallacious appeal to a false dilemma?) and then uses the particular definition as proof of the meaningfulness of the definition; creating a situation in which a proposition is non-falsifiable by definition(?) .</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I'm listening to Pekoff? lecture where he says (paraphrase), "it is not necessary to refute the [deniers of objectivism] for to deny objectivism, one must concede that they are making an objective statement about reality." </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If someone were to agree that "A is A" is a logically valid form, does not necessarily (non-sequitur) follow that any term substituted for "A" is meaningful and/or coherent; for instance, "Brtpwtop is Brtpwtop" or "Jabberwocky is Jabberwocky" may be logically valid but are not necessarily sound in that the terms lack sufficient definitional coherence to be meaningful (meaningless) but if the definition provided claims to take the form of, "The definition of 'A' is 'A'" then how is this avoid critique of begging the question?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Just because a person denies a particular theory of language, does not necessitate that they have "stolen the concept of language"; just because a particular formulation of logic/reality is denied, does this necessitate that all possible theories are denied? To claim this, one would have to argue that their concept/theory is the only possible concept/theory (false dilemma), but if the proof consists of a proof by definition, then why is this definition the only possible definition that can be used?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I think that the "property is theft" is a good example of how the "stolen concept" identification possibly uses some fallacies of it's own, especially because this is one of the classic/quintessential examples of the supposed "stolen concept"...</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I believe that the statement, "property is theft" originates with Proudhon, who is arguing for an alternate theory/definition of "property" in which he uses an alternate term "possession" to describe legitimate-use (what you or I might ordinary describe as "property". Proudhon is essentially criticizing the property theory of Locke, essentially arguing that the "mixing of labor" with "unowned" objects/material "in a state of nature" does not confer absolute control over every aspect of the materials surrounding the transformation but only to the use/transformation itself. In Proudhon's view, Lockean "property" is arbitrarily expansive, conferring an assignment of "property" in excess of what is justified by reason (the use/transformation only) and thereby creates claims of the legitimacy of the use of violence to "defend" beyond the actual use/transformation, in effect, to arbitrarily/unnecessarily exclude persons of use of objects that are not directly in-use/transformed. Perhaps we could translate Proudhon's "Property is theft" to mean, "Lockean property theory permits/legitimizes persons to make arbitrary claims to the ownership of materials that they have not put into use nor transformed; Lockean property theory advocates the arbitrary-exclusion/'theft' of objects/material from potential 'homesteads'/'transformers'".</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I might disagree with Proudhon, but i would not agree that he has not "stolen" the concept of "property"; Proudhon has not contradicted himself, because he has contradicted my theory/definition; he has rather offered an alternate theory (it may be an inferior theory but that's another argument entirely). In order to say that that Proudhon has "stolen the concept", I must first assume that my definition of "property" is the only definition possible, thereby every denial of my definition, must by my definition, use my definition in order to refute my definition (begging-the-question/circular-reasoning and false dilemma). This is perhaps why "stolen concept" is an alleged fallacy that has been introduced by the objectivists but that it has not gained traction outside of that community as an identified fallacy.</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I invite your thoughts.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">http://www.anthonyflood.com/randretortion.htm</span><br /><br /><span style="line-height: 18px;">http://maverickphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004/05/is-ayn-rand-good-philosopher.html?m=1</span></span></span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-88670557809774534962013-05-17T21:05:00.001-07:002013-05-18T15:32:53.195-07:00Making the old system obsolete<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0976563); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Noteworthy; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px;">(In response to Cantwell's recent video title, before I got to watch the video)<br><br>Making the old system obsolete</span><br>
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I would like to recognize, that the current system/paradigm meets certain needs for most people; needs for security (kinda; for most people, the metaphorical electric fence is protective, rather than restrictive), needs for predictability/order/consistency (easier economic calculation & lots of past personal investment in the current system), needs for a sense of belonging/community (though it is something of a tribal "us" vs. "them" belonging/community).</div>
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The needs met by the current system/paradigm, are met (tragically) at the expense of meeting other needs, like autonomy (liberty), integrity (honesty) and peace (non-violence).</div>
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In order to make the current system obsolete, it may be necessary to *demonstrate* (not necessarily, "persuade") a superior model/paradigm; superior in that it demonstrably meets needs in a better/greater way.</div>
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Therefore, I reason the concentration of my energies are best directed at the actionable strategies that are consistent (implied) by the principles/ideas/theory/philosophy {this is where people like Molynuex provide a valuable service; they serve as lens focusing the ideas/theory towards greater development; Molyneux's greatest contribution, may be as a light drawing liberty-moths to his online community}.</div>
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Why we might be so often frustrated, what we lack, is the answers to the question, "ok, so what do we do now that we understand the logical-elegance of this new paradigm?" (greater meaning-needs met)</div>
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Peaceful/non-violent parenting is a wonderful actionable strategy for furthering autonomy/empathy/symbiosis as a paradigm.</div>
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Extending the potential of the peacefulness of parenting, to all social interactions maybe the next step of applying autonomy/empathy/symbiosis principles/theory/values. "Non-violent Communication" (NVC) offers potent strategies/tools for connecting empathically with all the individuals with which we might interact.</div>
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Then there are more solid applications... The more I can reduce my autonomy-leakage, the greater I can meet my need for full-pressure autonomy; I can stop the leaks where I am taxed the most, I can find ways to live on less income, I can use crypto-currencies, I can discover ways to construct inexpensive and energy efficient housing, I can avoid interactions with the banking/financial system do to their emeshment with institutions of domination (govt & central banking). The results of these action-items, these actionable-liberties, is that I work less, with more free time to enjoy my life, with less debt, and a higher standard of living than perhaps many people having double my income. </div><div style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0976563); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Noteworthy; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0976563); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Noteworthy; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px;">When liberty-theory/autonomy-values are *applied* in *demonstration* of their superiority, then people may abandon the current system for something they can clearly *see* is better for their own life (and the younger they are, the less invested in the current system, the more likely that a change of paradigm will be appealing).</div>
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<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0976563); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Noteworthy; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px;">When I attempt to persuade without demonstration, I can be perceived/received as threatening current needs meeting without proof of future needs-meeting; when we demonstrate, the people that emulate our actions do not even need to understand the theory/value behind/justifying the action; they only need understand that they will be happier/greater-needs-meeting-potential by abandoning the old system and embracing a new model/paradigm.</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-59671883578754036742013-04-06T16:23:00.001-07:002013-04-06T16:23:58.175-07:00Rudolf Rocker"Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.<br />
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It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity."<br />
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~ Rudolf RockerDarjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-37758919925721170192013-02-25T12:30:00.001-08:002013-02-25T12:30:53.250-08:00Persuasion & Choice
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I would like to offer some of my own thoughts to you, with the hope that you may find them of value for your own life; my hope is that you will ultimately act, so as to meet your own needs/values/preferences.</div>
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I have been wondering if the strategy of persuasion is consistent with the value of liberty/autonomy.</div>
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I would like to provide clarity, as to what I mean by the verb-forms of "persuade":</div>
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<span class="s1">[ <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/persuade?show=0&t=1361635367"><span class="s2">http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/persuade?show=0&t=1361635367</span></a> ]</span></div>
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per·suade transitive verb \pər-ˈswād\</div>
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per·suad·edper·suad·ing</div>
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Definition of PERSUADE</div>
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1</div>
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: to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action</div>
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2</div>
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: to plead with : urge</div>
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— per·suad·er noun</div>
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Examples of PERSUADE</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• He persuaded his friend to go back to school.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• She couldn't be persuaded to go.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• He would not let himself be persuaded into buying the more expensive stereo.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• I am not easily persuaded.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• They persuaded us that we were wrong.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>• He persuaded himself that he had made the right choice.</div>
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Origin of PERSUADE</div>
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Latin persuadēre, from per- thoroughly + suadēre to advise, urge — more at sweet</div>
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First Known Use: 15th century</div>
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From this definition, I am seeing two separable meanings: the first is "persuade" as a request or special-pleading, the second is "persuade" as a kind of shared reasoning by which the persuading party attempts to demonstrate a superior logical-position/argument, to the party to be persuaded.</div>
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I wonder if both meanings are perhaps, in a very peripheral way, not conducive to an expression/demonstration for the values of liberty/autonomy.</div>
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I can understand how attractive the strategy of persuasion can be; when we have an idea of how to fix the problems of the world and all that is required to implement that idea, is to use persuasion/pleading/argumentation to establish an agreement about those ideas. </div>
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"If I could only arrive at a place of agreement with others, regarding values of liberty/autonomy, then the world/society/community would have much more peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions!"</div>
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But I wonder if the attempt to persuade is effective and I wonder if it adds value to the persuader and the potential-persuaded. If in the attempt to persuade others of my view, I am frustrated by the lack of agreement, then what value is this strategy adding to my life? If in the attempt to persuade others of my view, they are defensive/disconnected/irritated, then is my strategy adding to the life of the potential-persuaded? If I wanted to give someone a gift and they told me they were not interested in that gift, would I try to force or compel that person to accept it? If I wished to contribute my thoughts on a subject/issue and became clear that my contribution was not accepted cheerfully, would it be consistent/respectful to my values of liberty/choice/autonomy/freedom to compel or pressure the acceptance of my contribution?</div>
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I would like to provide clarity, that I do not intend to imply, that it is not needful to share and contribute thoughts on important matters of interest; or perhaps said another way, I often find it of value to me to share my thoughts and ideas with others; obviously that is what I am doing as I composing these words. I would like to suggest that the difference between persuasion and contribute/sharing, is in the goals/intentions; persuasion may be a strategy that assumes that the other person needs changing and inasmuch as persons maybe resistant to overt external thought-pattern manipulation, persuasion may not be an effective *communication* strategy; persuasion may not be a technical *communication* but a telling/imperative. Persuasion may carry with it, a subtle authoritarian demand, and insofar as this is the case, this may not be consistent with the values of liberty/autonomy/choice/freedom.</div>
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*Communication* may require a "process of togetherness" (to commune) and that togetherness may imply a goal/intention to participate in mutual-sharing of ideas, a willingness to receive, as well as to give/share/contribute.</div>
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I wonder if rhetorical devices/modes that employ an assessment/evaluation/judgement of another person, are consistent-with/conform-to the values of liberty/autonomy/freedom choice. I wonder if rhetorical modes which claim, "If you disagree with me, then you are irrational" or "If you disagree with the principle of the Non-Aggression Principle, then you are unethical/immoral" are consistent with values of choice/autonomy/liberty.</div>
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I would prefer not to use "logic" as one might use a intellectual-weapon; but I would prefer to use logic, reason and evidence to assist my understanding, and if others are willing to receive my contribution of that current-understanding, then all-to-the-good! If they are not willing to receive my understanding, then I would prefer to respect their choice/autonomy and seek alternate means to meet my desire to contribute my understanding.</div>
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Thank you for receiving what I wished to share. I would like to now be open to your thoughts & contributions. :-)</div>
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Be well.</div>
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Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-76739610102298640722013-01-03T12:33:00.003-08:002013-01-03T12:33:34.330-08:00a little more something else[Scott S. asked: "How do we help morality-loving freedom freaks to see they can instead base their principles on something more solid and productive than morality? And that alternative, what would you call it? Empathy? Strong Internal Compass? Belief In Innate Human Awesomeness?" and my response was as follows:]<br /><br /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I have been thinking about the same line-of-questioning that Scott has raised... what is a "should"? What is "morality"? What is "ethics"? Where do "should"s come from? How are "should"s derived?</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">From an NVC perspective, we might translate the "should"s as requests... "You should be nicer to your sister" might be translated, "I am uncomfortable/unhappy when I observe conflict among the two of you, who are siblings to one-another; I would prefer if each of you had less conflicts and more cooperation and I wonder if siblings might have more potential for sharing/cooperation than many other kinds of relationships and, I would like to request an exploration of strategies in which greater cooperation/sharing with your sister could take place.".</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Similarly, "It is universally/always morally/ethically wrong for one person to initiate agression/aggressive-action unto another person." could be translated, "I have needs for trust and safety that I would like to get met, and to meet those needs, I would like for us to come to agreement, that we will both try to generate/design strategies in which we will cooperate with each other which will result in win-win outcomes and we will agree not to interact with each other using strategies that lead to win-lose outcomes."</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I have contemplated a "boiling-down" or "distillation" of the philosophical "should" expression of "objective morality"... I have come to think that it implies a logical argument which is cohesive but requires two "premises" or "axioms"; the first is that, the (rationally?)conscious-entity asserting the premise, is different from non-conscious-entities; and the second premises is the acceptance of other entities that exhibit the behaviors indicative of conscious-entities are in the same class-set as the entity asserting the second premise. Put more simply, my expression of consciousness, sets me peculiarly apart from rocks and plants, and that I may use these non-conscious entities as means to serve my ends and that other entities exhibiting the same kind of (rational?)consciousness as I find myself exhibiting, are to be treated with the same respect I would like to be treated with. Perhaps more simply still, I am a person, and I wish to be treated as a person and in kind, I will agree to treat other persons as persons; that I am neither beast nor god and that I accept that other persons are neither beasts, nor gods.</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If there is agreement upon these two premises, then I think that the "should" becomes meaningful.... but these are possibly very abstract arguments for most situations and are unlikely to draw two people into closer connection/harmony unless they already find themselves to have had prior agreements as to the essential nature of the argument (which I presume is true in this case). If these two premises, are agreed upon, then there is a </span><b style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">sense</b><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> in which the "ethics" would be "objective"; </span><b style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">except</b><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I do not think it it possible to </span><b style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">objectively</b><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> verify the premises themselves, so that this "objectivism" rests upon a less-than-objective framework... but I wonder if that is not an inherent philosophical limitation of "objectivism"... that it requires "axioms" which are not objectively verifiable... they potentially are only "verified" by/for the entity which accepts/asserts the axioms....</span><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #555555; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Therefore, I approach the matter this way, it is not necessary for me, that anyone else agrees not to use the "should" or the "should-not" but only that I recognize the "should" as a request for trust/agreement/cooperation. I can then translate the "should"s and if in that process of understanding, a place of sufficient trust and cooperation is reached, then perhaps that is a place where the "should"s become an unnecessary expression for that other person and I....</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-69275854574133472542013-01-03T12:31:00.003-08:002013-01-03T12:31:38.501-08:00connecting with others, when there are opposing views<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">[Someone asked, "how does one bear the arrogance and stupidity of the liberals one knows?????"; and my response was the following:]</span><br />
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<span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[0]" style="background-color: #f1f2f6; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[0].[0]">I try to connect with the basic/universal things that "liberals" are concerned about... they are concerned about "the poor" and I try to reflect back to them, that I am also concerned about people who may not be meeting their basic physical needs for h</span></span><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3]" style="background-color: #f1f2f6; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0"><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[0]">uman-thriving and that I share their wishes that every person be able to provide for their needs and for a certain-optimal-level of physical comforts/luxuries with a certain-minimal-level of exertion/work to accomplish/meet those needs; where I might diverge in opinion is not the basic concern of that the "liberal" is expressing, but the *means* or strategy that the "liberal" would suggest that those *ends* be accomplished.</span><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[1]" /><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[2]" /><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[3]">I find that in this way, there is a recognition of a basic agreement that we both can connect with and from then on, the conversation can be cooperative exploration of alternative *means*/strategies than than an antagonistic argument.</span><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[4]" /><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[5]" /><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[6]">I am wondering if argumentation of "facts" is as persuasive as we would expect it to be... I wonder if a good definition of "facts", might be "uninterpreted data/observations"... and with that definition, I don't think "facts" are often in dispute as much as the *interpretations*/conclusions that are drawn from those "facts"... then I wonder about the situation in which two people are unhappily "arguing" with each-other... it seems like they "argue" because they both want the other party to "hear" their perspective/interpretation... they both want to communicate something that is important to them... if this were not the case then I would expect that one or both persons would just stop communicating... but the conditions under which they both continue to communicate, no matter how their unhappy feelings about the conversation is building, indicates to me that they each want to share something with each other but they are having trouble speaking/giving and/or hearing/receiving what is trying to be shared.</span><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[7]" /><br id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[8]" /><span id=".reactRoot[155].[1][2][1]{comment312824575501947_312900622161009}.0.[1].0.[1].0.[0].[0][2].0.[3].0.[9]">Rather than this kind of antagonism, I have found more satisfaction in discussions that begin with an exploration of shared values and then after the trust of shared values is established, then the discussion can go forward as a cooperative effort of the optimal means to accomplish those shared values. </span></span></span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-83120414035158964052012-12-29T22:04:00.002-08:002013-01-01T08:05:45.200-08:00gun script<br />
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<span class="userContent"><a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf</a> examines the firearms-restrictions of various countries and the incidence of violence per-capita, and concludes that there is a negative correlation between firearms-restrictions and the incidence of violence (which is to say, where there are firearms-restrictions, there is a statistical increase in the rate of violent-crime per capita)... but it wasn't an extrodinarily strong negative correlation; suggesting that firearms-restrictions have some effect to increase violence, but that the incidence of violence per capita is related much more strongly to unexamined factors (political/economic/cultural/social) than to firearms-restrictions/firearms-ownership.<br /><br />Also, John Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime" is also an interesting analysis demonstrating a similar negative correlation between firearms-restrictions and incidence of violence per capita but I would have preferred to see alternative statistical-techniques in Lott's work.<br /><br />Here are some other perspectives to consider:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/323766?uid=3739256&sid=21101586769147" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/323766?uid=3739256&sid=21101586769147</a><br /><a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/323311" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/323311</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/323313" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/323313</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.journals.uchicago.edu%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1086%2F338345&h=wAQGTRXVl&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/338345</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.terry.uga.edu%2F%7Emustard%2Fpolice.pdf&h=zAQE-h0QF&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/police.pdf</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org%2Fdiscover%2F10.1086%2F323314%3FsearchUrl%3D%252Faction%252FdoBasicSearch%253Ffilter%253Djid%25253A10.2307%25252Fj100232%2526Query%253Djuvenile%2526Search.x%253D4%2526Search.y%253D16%2526wc%253Don%26Search%3Dyes%26uid%3D3739256%26sid%3D56050142283&h=NAQFPBtxq&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/323314?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj100232%26Query%3Djuvenile%26Search.x%3D4%26Search.y%3D16%26wc%3Don&Search=yes&uid=3739256&sid=56050142283</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Feconpapers.repec.org%2Farticle%2Foupecinqu%2Fv_3A36_3Ay_3A1998_3Ai_3A2_3Ap_3A258-65.htm&h=ZAQGKY15h&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://econpapers.repec.org/article/oupecinqu/v_3A36_3Ay_3A1998_3Ai_3A2_3Ap_3A258-65.htm</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnrlott.tripod.com%2FPlassmann_Whitley.pdf&h=_AQHKczmW&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://johnrlott.tripod.com/Plassmann_Whitley.pdf</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bepress.com%2Fbejeap%2Fadvances%2Fvol4%2Fiss1%2Fart1%2F&h=xAQFVPYS0&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol4/iss1/art1/</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Feconjwatch.org%2Farticles%2Fthe-debate-on-shall-issue-laws%EF%BB%BF&h=5AQFbapLy&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://econjwatch.org/articles/the-debate-on-shall-issue-laws</a><br /><br />I'm concerned about how disparities of power, would have a tendency to increase the profit-potential of those who have the greater power. I observe that there are numerous news stories about illegal-drugs found in prisons, which indicates to me, that legal-prohibitions do not in fact, eliminate the prohibited item. If there is a prohibition on a kind of firearm, the firearm will not be eliminated, but will have a grey/black-market providing that firearm at increased costs. But those who wish to obey the legal-prohibition (probably out of fear to avoid punishment) are possibly thereby less able to defend themselves, creating a disparity of power, between those who wish to obey the prohibition and those who ignore the prohibition, which could potentially increase the incidence of violence. Because my objective would be to decrease the incidence of violence, I could not rationally support a restriction/prohibition that could create a power-disparity between different sets of persons; prohibition/restriction is not effective for "illegal drugs"<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Ferikkain%2F2011%2F07%2F05%2Ften-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal%2F&h=pAQEepDdh&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/</a> &<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fhostednews%2Fafp%2Farticle%2FALeqM5g9C6x99EnFVdFuXw_B8pvDRzLqcA%3FdocId%3DCNG.e740b6d0077ba8c28f6d1dd931c6f679.5e1&h=5AQFbapLy&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank">http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g9C6x99EnFVdFuXw_B8pvDRzLqcA?docId=CNG.e740b6d0077ba8c28f6d1dd931c6f679.5e1</a>and similiarly, I would not expect it to decrease the rate of violence if the prohibition/restriction were to be extended to particular forms of tools/implements of "firearms".<br /><br />Using violence/coercion/bullying of government to reduce violence/coercion/bullying does not appear to me to be a rational or effective strategy.</span></div>
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Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-71839699083824660972012-12-22T15:19:00.002-08:002012-12-22T15:19:26.492-08:00Gun-Control<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If politicians believed that "gun-control" reduced violence, why wouldn't they disarm the military & police? Would the reason be because disarmament may only have the desired outcomes of peace, if all persons/"nations" agreed? But if those parties already agreed on peace, then why was the disarmament component a necessary step?</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> If disarmament is the goal, why is armament required to enforce the disarmament? How does using force/violence of a minority group of armed-persons, to disarm the majority of persons, help to reduce the violence? Would not "gun-control" as it is typically advocated, potentially increase power-disparities, between those minorities of persons who either enforce the disarmament or those who ignore the disarmament-rules, and the majority of persons who are forcibly disarmed? Would not that power-disparity, increase the potential profit of the armed groups to victimize/abuse/oppress the unarmed groups, and thus increase the potential for violence?</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">How many people have been killed by "private" murderers in the last century?</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">How many people were killed by dictators such as Pol Pot, or Stalin or agents of other political leaders in the last century?</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If the purpose of "gun-control" is to reduce violence, and if political-states have killed more people than "private" murderers, then why wouldn't the object/goal of violence-reduction be to disarm governments/nations/political-agents?</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-24578259486270151812012-12-09T12:55:00.000-08:002012-12-09T12:55:12.656-08:00Shaw: justify your existence<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">“ I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say , ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.’ </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">~George Bernard Shaw</span><span style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><br /><br />[Fabian Socialist; Cecil Rhodes; Malthusian catastrophe->Darwinism->Eugenics=>Social Engineering]</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-55335979191657265302012-12-02T16:22:00.000-08:002012-12-02T16:22:11.402-08:00Quigley: Tragedy and Hope A History of the World in Our Time [Excerpt] <br />
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<a href="http://darjeelingzen.blogspot.com/2012/07/quigley-tragedy-and-hope-history-of.html" style="color: #888888; text-decoration: initial;">Quigley: Tragedy and Hope A History of the World in Our Time</a></h3>
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Tragedy and Hope A History of the World in Our Time By Carroll Quigley (1966)<br /><br />"...[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. this system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations...."<br />"It must not be felt that these heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called 'international' or 'merchant' bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. this dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their influence over the flow of current funds though bank loans, the discount rate, and the re-discounting of commercial debts; they could dominate governments by their own control over current government loans and the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power was exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful financial coupes, to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and to share their winning opportunities with their associates."</div>
Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-75000447092292399382012-12-02T16:20:00.002-08:002012-12-02T16:20:17.322-08:00Quigley: COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">TRAGEDY AND HOPE</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">by: Carroll Quigley</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Excerpted from pp. 950 - 955 - detailing the establishment of the "New York branch of the ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS". . . the:</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Group has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, of any other groups, and frequently does so. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> I have objected, but in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wished to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The Round Table Groups have already been mentioned in this book several times, notably in connection with the formation of the British Commonwealth in chapter 4 and in the discussion of appeasement in chapter 12 ("the Cliveden Set"). </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> At the risk of some repetition, the story will be summarized here, because the American branch of this oganization (sometimes called the "Eastern Establishment") has played a very significant role in the history of the United States in the last generation.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups organized by Lionel Curtis, Philip H. Kerr (Lord Lothian), and (Sir) William S. Marris in 1908-1911. This was done on behalf of Lord Milner, the dominant Trustee of the Rhodes Trust in the two decades 1905-1925.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The original purpose of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and William T. Stead, (1840-1912), and the money for the organizational work came originally from the Rhodes Trust. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> By 1915 Round Table groups existed in seven countries, including England, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and a rather loosely organized group in the United States (George Louis Beer, Walter Lippman, Frank Avdelotte, Whitney Shepardson, Thomas W. Lamont, Jerome D. Greene, Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, and others).</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The attitudes of the various groups were coordinated by frequent visits and discussions and by a well-informed and totally anonymous quarterly magazine, The Round Table, whose first issue, largely written by Philip Kerr, appeared in November 1910.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The leaders of this group were: Milner, until his death in 1915, followed by Curtis (1872-1955), Robert H. (Lord) Brand -- brother-in-law of Lady Astor -- until his death in 1963, and now Adam D. Marris, son of Sir William and Brand's successor as managing director of Lazard Brothers bank. The original intention had been to have collegial leadership, but Milner was too secretive and headstrong to share the role.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> He did so only in the period 1913-1919 when he held regular meetings with some of his closest friends to coordinate their activities as a pressure group in the struggle with Wilhelmine Germany. This they called their "Ginger Group". After Milner's death in 1925, the leadership was largely shared by the survivors of Milner's 'Kindergarten', that is, the group of young Oxford men whom he used as civil servants in his reconstruction of South Africa in 1901-1910.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Brand was the last survivor of the "Kindergarten", since his death, the greatly reduced activities of the organization have been exercised largely through the Editorial Committee of The Round Table magazine under Adam Marris.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Money for the widely ramified activities of this organization came originally from the associates and followers of Cecil Rhodes, chiefly from the Rhodes Trust itself, and from wealthy associates such as the Beit brothers, from Sir Abe Bailey, and (after 1915) from the Astor family. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and other organizations associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell, and Company.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The chief backbone of this organization grew up along the already existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan Bank in New York to a group of international financiers in London led by Lazard Brothers.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Milner himself in 1901 had refused a fabulous offer, worth up to 100,000 a year, to become one of the three partners of the Morgan Bank in London, in succession to the younger J.P. Morgan who moved from London to join his father in New York (eventually the vacancy went to E.C. Grenfell, so that the London affiliate of Morgan became known as Morgan, Grenfell, and Company).</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Instead, Milner became director of a number of public banks, chiefly the London Joint Stock Bank, corporate precursor of the Midland Bank. He became one of the greatest political and financial powers in England, with his disciples strategically placed throughout England in significant places, such as the editorship of The Times, the editorship ofThe Observer, the managing directorship of Lazard Brothers, various administrative posts, and even Cabinet positions.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Ramifications were established in politics, high finance, Oxford and London universities, periodicals, the civil service, and tax exempt foundations.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended. Once again the task was entrusted to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> This front organization, called the royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan "experts", including Lamont and Beer, who had gone to the Paris Peace Conference and there became close friends with the similar group of English "experts" which had been recruited by the Milner group.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In fact, the original plans for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations were drawn up at Paris. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The Council of the RIIA (which, by Curtis's energy came to be housed in Chatham House, across St. James's Square from the Astors, and was soon known by the name of the headquarters) and the board of the Council on Foreign Relations have carried ever since the marks of their origin.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Until 1960 the council at Chatham House was dominated by the dwindling group of Milner's associates, while the paid staff members were largely the agents of Lionel Curtis. The Round Table for years (until 1960) was edited from the back door of Chatham House grounds in Ormond Yard, and its telephone came through the Chatham House switchboard.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The New York branch was dominated by the associates of the Morgan Bank. For example, in 1928 the Council on Foreign relations had John W. Davis as president, Paul Cravath as vice-president, and a council of thirteen others, which included Owen D. Young, russell C. Leffingwell, Norman Davis, Allen Dulles, George W. Wickersham, Frank L. Polk, Whitney Shepardson, Isaiah Bowman, Stephen P. Duggan, and Otto Kahn.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Throughout its history, the council has been associated with the American Round Tablers, such as Beer, Lippmann, Shepardson, and Jerome Greene.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The academic figures have been those linked to Morgan, such as James T. Shotwell, Charles Seymour, Joseph P. Chamberlain, Philip Jessup, Isaiah Bowman and, more recently, Philip Moseley, Grayson L. Kirk, and Henry W. Wriston.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The Wall Street contracts with these were created originally from Morgan's influence in handling large academic endowments. In the case of the largest of these endowments, that at Harvard, the influence was usually exercised indirectly through "State Street", Boston, which, for much of the twentieth century, came through the Boston banker Thomas Nelson Perkins.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Closely allied with this Morgan influence were a small group of Wall Street law firms, whose chief figures were Elihu Root, John W. Davis, Paul D. Cravath, Russell Leffingwell, the Dulles brothers and, more recently, Arthur H. Dean, Philip D. Reed, and John J. McCloy. Other nonlegal agents of Morgan included men like Owen D. Young and Norman H. Davis.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In England the center was the Round Table Group, while in the United States it was J.P. Morgan and Company or its local branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Some rather incidental examples of the operations of this structure are very revealing, just because they are incidental. For example, it set up in Princeton a reasonable copy of the Round Table Group's chief Oxford headquarters, All Souls College. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> This copy, called the Institute for Advanced Study, and best known, perhaps, as the refuge of Einstein, Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, and George F. Kennan, was organized by Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller's General Education Board after he had experienced the delights of All Souls while serving as Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at Oxford. The plans were largely drawn by Tom Jones, one of the Round Table's most active intriguers and foundation administrators.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The American branch of this "English Establishment" exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune,Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the lamented Boston Evening Transcript )</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In fact, the editor of the Christian Science Monitor was the chief American correspondent (anonymously) of The Round Table, and Lord Lothian, the original editor of The Round Table and later secretary of the Rhodes Trust (1925-1939) and ambassador to Washington, was a frequent writer in the Monitor.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> It might be mentioned that the existence of this Wall Street Anglo-American axis is quite obvious once it is pointed out.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> It is reflected in the fact that such Wall Street luminaries as John W. Davis, Lewis Douglas, Jock Whitney, and Douglas Dillon were appointed to be American ambassadors in London.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> This double international network in which the Round Table groups formed the semi-secret or secret nuclei of the Institutes of International Affairs was extended into a third network in 1935, organized by the same people for the same motives.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as nuclei for the new network. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> However, this new organization for Pacific affairs was extended to ten countries, while the Round Table Groups existed only in seven. The new additions, ultimately China, Japan, France, the Netherlands, and Soviet Russia, had Pacific councils set up from scratch.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In Canada, australia, and New Zealand, Pacific councils, interlocked and dominated by the Institutes of International Affairs, were set up.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In England, Chatham House served as the English center for both nets, while in the United States the two were parallel creations (not subordinate) of the Wall Street allies of the Morgan Bank. The financing came from the same international banking groups and their subsidiary commercial and industrial firms.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> In England, Chatham House was financed for both networks by the contributions of Sir Abe Bailey, the Astor family, and additional funds largely acquired by the persuasive powers of Lionel Curtis. The financial difficulties of the IPR Councils in the British Dominions in the depression of 1929-1935 resulted in a very revealing effort to save money, when the local Institute of International Affairs absorbed the local Pacific Council, both of which were, in a way, expensive and needless fronts for the local Round Table groups.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The chief aims of this elaborate, semi-secret organization were largely commendable: to coordinate the international activities and outlooks of all the English-speaking world into one (which would largely, it is true, be that of the London group); to work to maintain the peace; to help backward, colonial, and underdeveloped areas to advance toward stability, law and order, and prosperity along lines somewhat similar to those taught at Oxford and the University of London (especially the School of Economics and the Schools of African and Oriental Studies).</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> These organizations and their financial backers were in no sense reactionary or Fascistic persons, as Communist propaganda would like to depict them. Quite the contrary. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> They were gracious and cultured gentlemen of somewhat limited social experience who were much concerned with the freedom of expression of minorities and the rule of law for all, who constantly thought in terms of Anglo-American solidarity, of political partition and federation, and who were convinced that they could gracefully civilize the Boers of South Africa, the Irish, the Arabs, and the Hindus, and who are largely responsible for the partitions of Ireland, Palestine, and India, as well as the federations of South Africa, Central Africa, and the West Indies.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Their desire to win over the opposition by cooperation worked with Smuts but failed with Hertzog, worked with Gandhi but failed with Menon, worked with Stresemann but failed with Hitler, and has shown little chance of working with any Soviet leader. If their failures now loom larger than their successes, this should not be allowed to conceal the high motives with which they attempted both.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the frame-work of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930's.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> It must be recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie, and, once the anger and suspicions of the American people were aroused, as they were by 1950, it was a fairly simple matter to get rid of the Red sympathizers.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> Before this could be done, however, a congressional committee, following backward to their source the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker Chamber, through Alger Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking tax-exempt foundations.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> The Eighty-third Congress in July 1953 set up a Special Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations with Representative B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, as chairman. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the "most respected" newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worth while, in terms of votes or campaign contributions. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of the interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years later, the Reece committee's general counsel, Rene A. Wormser wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called Foundations: Their Power and Influence. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> One of the most interesting members of this Anglo-American power structure was Jerome D. Greene (1874-1959). Born in Japan of missionary parents, Greene graduated from Harvard's college and law school by 1899 and became secretary to Harvard's president and corporation in 1901-1910. This gave him contacts with Wall Street which made him general manager of the Rockefeller Institute (1910-1012), assistant to John d. Rockefeller in philanthropic work for two years, then trustee to the Rockefeller Institute, to the Rockefeller foundation, and to the Rockefeller General Education Board until 1939.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> For fifteen years (1917-1932) he was with the Boston investment banking firm of Lee, Higginson, and Company, most of the period as its chief officer, as well as with its London branch. As executive secretary of the American section of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, stationed in London in 1918, he lived in Toynbee Hall, the world's first settlement house, which has been founded by Alfred Milner and his friends in 1984.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> This brought him in contact with the Round Table Group in England, a contact which was strengthened in 1919 when he was secretary to the Reparations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference. Accordingly, on his return to the United States he was one of the early figures in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations, which served as the New York branch of Lionel Curtis's Institute of International Affairs.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> As an investment banker, Greene is chiefly remembered for his sales of millions of dollars of the fraudulent securities of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger. That Greene offered these to the American investing public in good faith is evident from the fact that he put a substantial part of his own fortune in the same investments. As a consequence, Kreuger's suicide in Paris in April 1932 left Greene with little money and no job. He wrote to Lionel Curtis, asking for help, and was given, for two years, a professorship of international relations at Aberystwyth, Wales.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">- End Excerpt -</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-18295539002149376822012-11-30T19:58:00.001-08:002012-11-30T19:58:00.338-08:00Russell, Bertrand: Ruling-Class Mass mind-control<br />
"Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.''<br />
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Russell continued, ``The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship....The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.''<br />
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Russell concluded with a warning: ``Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.''<br />
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~Bertrand Russell<br />
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http://www.schillerinstitute.org/new_viol/cybmindcontrol_js0400..htmlDarjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-16481998911260271322012-11-30T12:35:00.001-08:002012-11-30T12:35:40.441-08:00Sowell: The difference between making love and being raped"Liberals love to say things like, 'We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share.'. But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay."<br />
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~Thomas SowellDarjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-9536076656467663572012-11-30T11:46:00.001-08:002012-11-30T11:46:31.391-08:00Propaganda by Edward BernaysFrom: "Propaganda"<br />
by Edward Bernays<br />
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(Ig publishing, 2005, paper,originally published in 1928, p37)<br />
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The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.<br />
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We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.<br />
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Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.<br />
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They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.<br />
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It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.<br />
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In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.<br />
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In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.<br />
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It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-38667542256651206432012-11-17T08:10:00.001-08:002012-11-17T08:10:13.448-08:00Kilt-wearing: A Personal JourneyKilt-wearing: A Personal Journey<br />
<br />
The Upsides to Kilt-wearing<br />
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1. A kilt is more comfortable than pants or shorts<br />
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2. A kilt helps me feel cooler on hot summer days.<br />
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3. Woolen knee high socks keep my lower legs warmer than jeans.<br />
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4. It is comfortable to run/jog in a kilt<br />
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5. It is more efficient (slightly less tiring) to walk. (The clothing isn't wrapped around legs providing slight resistance at thigh lift and knee bend).<br />
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6. Crouching is comfortable. (Though kneeling and knee-walking is a bit more complicated/challenging)<br />
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7. That refreshing breeze I feel on a windy day. :-)<br />
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8. No chaffing on endurance walks or hikes.<br />
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9. It couldn't be easier for a gentleman to take a leak (for that matter, other woodland necessities are made simpler by a kilt, rather than pants around my ankles)<br />
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10. No more need to worry about forgetting to zip my fly. :-)<br />
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11. I can carry things in you pockets of my kilt much more comfortably (on the side pockets hanging off the kilt)<br />
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12. If my kilt gets wet, I don't have that wet fabric directly against me, except at the waist<br />
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13. I can take my kilt off, without taking off my shoes.<br />
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14. I can put my kilt on with my shoes on.<br />
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Down-sides of kilt-wearing:<br />
<br />
1. Riding a bicycle is a bit difficult... The back of my kilt is long enough to usually be touching the rear wheel but too short to really "sit-on" it to keep it from flowing in the wind... Also... You may scandalize the neighborhood while riding a recumbent bicycle...<br />
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2. Kilts are more expensive than pants.<br />
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3. Kneeling to do things such as scrubbing floors is awkward because if the front of the kilt gets under your knee, it can "trip" your leg...<br />
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4. I have had some trouble staying warm in a kilt... All of my kilts are made of cotton, and when I first started wearing kilts, it was for comfort in hot weather, for which cotton and linen are well suited; with woolen knee socks, my cotton kilts are warmer than jeans but I'm finding that when it gets into the twenties, I am gravitating towards woolen pants. I suspect that a woolen kilt may keep me similarly warm as woolen pants but it looks like a wool-kilt starts at $250 and I'm not ready to take that plunge yet... I had ordered acrylic kilt with perhaps 10% wool but that order fell through and was cancelled by the supplier due to lack of stock. I will keep experimenting with this and perhaps a thicker pair of woolen socks will have an additional warmth factor...<br />
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5. Children can be occasionally heard to be asking their parents, "Mom, why is that guy wearing a skirt?" <br />
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6. No knee protection. You might be more likely to scrape your knee if you fall down or kneel a lot.<br />
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7. Heavy. I would compare a kilt to the weight of a pair of jeans as that seems comparable but a kilt is certainly heavier than a pair of shorts. So if for some reason you are counting ounces, perhaps a nylon kilt may fit the bill.<br />
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8. Mosquitos. I haven't encountered this as a problem yet but I'm cautious about wearing a kilt in outdoor adventures where there might be a lot of mosquitos... The mosquitos might have additional access to tender parts... Also I have wondered about kilts and ticks... I also have some concerns about kilts in rattlesnake country but a pair of pants isn't going to stop a rattler either... I'm not about to give away my pants just yet...<br />
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Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-14058777536279403582012-10-30T21:49:00.001-07:002012-10-30T21:49:59.828-07:00Henry: Tyranny & Despotism<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">"The honorable gentleman who presides told us that, to prevent abuses in our government, we will assemble in convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. Oh, sir! we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors can not assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Patrick Henry 1788 House of Burgesses, Virginia.</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-59132750751435736362012-10-28T01:03:00.004-07:002012-10-28T01:03:37.246-07:00Rothbard: Leftist<table align="center" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; text-align: start;"><tbody>
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CONFISCATION AND THE HOMESTEAD PRINCIPLE</h2>
<h2 style="color: black; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 1em; position: relative; text-align: center; text-transform: uppercase;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">MURRAY ROTHBARD</span></h2>
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<span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> Karl Hess's brilliant and challenging article in this issueraises a problem of specifics that ranges further than the libertarian movement. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of "professional" anti-Communists in this country. Yet not one of these gentry, in the course of their fulminations, has come up with a specific plan for de-Communization. Suppose, for example, that Messers Brezhnevand Co. become converted to the principles of a free-society; they than [sic] ask our anti-Communists, all right, </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">how </i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">do we go about de-socializing? What could our anti-Communists offer them?</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> This question has been essentially answered by the exciting developments of Tito's Yugoslavia. Beginning in 1952, Yugoslavia has been de-socializing at a remarkable rate. The principle the Yugoslavs have used is the libertarian"homesteading" one: the state-owned factories to the workers that work in them! The nationalized plants in the "public" sector have all been transferred in virtual ownershipto the specific workers who work in the particular plants, thus making them producers' coops, and moving rapidly in the direction of individual shares of virtual ownership to the individual worker. What other practicable route toward destatization could there be? The principle in the Communist countries should be: land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, thereby getting the property out of the hands of the State and into private, homesteading hands.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> The homesteading principle means that the way that unowned property gets into private ownership is by the principle that this property justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor. This is clear in the case of the pioneer and virgin land. But what of the case of stolen property?</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> Suppose, for example, that A steals B's horse. Then C comes along and takes the horse from A. Can C be called a thief? Certainly not, for we cannot call a man a criminal for stealing goods from a thief. On the contrary, C is performinga </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">virtuous</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> act of confiscation, for he is depriving thief A of the fruits of his crime of aggression, and he is at least returning the horse to the innocent "private" sector and out of the "criminal" sector. C has done a noble act ands hould be applauded. Of course, it would be still better if he returned the horse to B, the original victim. But even if he does not, the horse is far more justly in C's hands than it is in the hands of A, the thief and criminal.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the Stateapparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called "taxation" and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Any</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrifictangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State's act of aggression. These people then become the "homesteaders" of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> Take, for example, the State universities. This is property built on funds stolen from the taxpayers. Since the State has not found or put into effect a way of returning ownership of this property to the taxpaying public, the proper owners of this university are the "homesteaders", those who have already been using and therefore "mixing their labor" with the facilities. The prime consideration is to deprive the thief, in this case the State, as quickly as possible of the ownership and control of its ill-gotten gains, to return the property to the innocent, private sector. </span><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> As between the two groups, the students have a prior claim, for the students have been paying at least some amount to support the university whereas the faculty suffer from the moral taint of living off State funds and thereby becoming to some extent a part of the State apparatus.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> The same principle applies to nominally "private" property which really comes from the State as a result of zealous lobbying on behalf of the recipient. Columbia University, for example, which receives nearly two-thirds of its income from government, is only a "private" college in the most ironic sense. It deserves a similar fate of virtuous homesteadingconfiscation.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">their</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> credentials to "private" property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">genuine</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their "private" property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murdered [sic] must be"respected".</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn overownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">might </i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">even if</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics—without compensation, of course—</span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">per se</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> and </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">not</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves—the government—would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">private </i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><br />
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<i>(Continued on </i><i>page 4)</i></div>
<br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6267638155798940768" name="4" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #888888; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; text-decoration: none;"></a><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><table style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; text-align: start;"><tbody>
<tr><td width="50%"><i>4</i></td><td style="text-align: right;"><i>The Libertarian Forum, June 15, 1969</i></td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6267638155798940768" name="4" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #888888; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; text-decoration: none;"></a><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><hr style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6267638155798940768" name="4" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #888888; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; text-decoration: none;"></a><big style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif;"><b>CONFISCATION</b></big><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> — </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">(Continued from </i><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">page 3)</i><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> And there is another consideration. Dow Chemical, for example, has been heavily criticized for making napalm for the U.S. military machine. The percentage of its sales coming from napalm is undoubtedly small, so that on a percentage basis the company may not seem very guilty; but napalm is and can only be an instrument of mass murder, and therefore Dow Chemical is heavily up to its neck in being an accessory and hence a co-partner in the mass murder in Vietnam. No percentage of sales, however small, can absolve its guilt.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> This brings us to Karl's [Hess] point about slaves. One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land—their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">should</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">reparations </i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to "reparations", reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist's call for "40 acres and a mule" to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> Alan Milchman, in the days when he was a brilliant young libertarian activist, first pointed out that libertarians had misled themselves by making their main dichotomy "government" vs. "private" with the former bad and the latter good. Government, he pointed out, is after all not a mysticalentity but a group of individuals, "private" individuals if you will, acting in the manner of an organized criminal gang. But this means that there may also be "private" criminals as well as people directly affiliated with the government. What we libertarians object to, then, is not </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">government </i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not "private" property </span><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">per se</i><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> but just, innocent, non-criminal private property. It is justice vs. injustice, innocence vs. criminality that must be our major libertarian focus.</span><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><br style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;" /><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">[Further reading if you are interested: http://mises.org/daily/2099]</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-40642832123397316682012-10-27T16:32:00.001-07:002012-10-27T16:32:26.895-07:00Foucault: History"...do not look for progress or meaning in history; do not see the history of a given activity, of any segment of culture, as the development of rationality or of freedom; do not use any philosophical vocabulary to characterize the essence of such activity or the goal it serves; do not assume that the way this activity is presently conducted gives any clue to the goals it served in the past." <br />
~ Michel FoucaultDarjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-9034623578987658222012-10-23T23:28:00.004-07:002012-10-23T23:28:46.739-07:00Rationality & Empathy<br />
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<span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354171238007122}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[0]" style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354171238007122}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[0].[0]">@Simon Portez I sense that your remarks indicate that you would like others of like-mind to emulate the actions you have taken; I receive the impression that you disapprove of, or perhaps possibly frustrated with those who seem to "talk" or "think" in</span></span><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354171238007122}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[3]" style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354171238007122}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[3]."><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354171238007122}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[3]..[0]"> similar ways as yourself, but do not act in a manner you have chosen for yourself. If this is so, I share some of that frustration/impatience; while theory/theorizing/philosophy is important (for how would one determine how to direct one's action without some theory/philosophy?), action is also clearly important and I would like to acknowledge this. I believe that, regardless of the speaker, the passage I referenced has remarkable insight; that while thinking/theorizing/philosophizing by itself, lacks a certain dynamism of action, the expression and sharing of ideas, is a kind of action of its kind. You may well wish others to do more than share ideas, but that sharing of ideas with rationality and empathy is the action that will draw others to the cause and this support is what is ultimately necessary to win the day. I am not convinced that if many were to replicate the actions you describe, that such action would sway many to support the cause of liberty, but perhaps may even alienate some to the cause of liberty? I support the use of self-defense against instituions of domination, just as I support the use of self-defense against a mugger; but I would not the condemn the woman who surrenders her purse to the mugger and similarly, I would not condemn the woman who might capitulate to the agents of an institution of domination in the attempt to ensure her own safety. It is my view that each person must decide for themselves, what actions that they would choose to take in order to meet their needs; I can certainly respect your dedication to the opposition to institutions of domination but I also respect those who are dedicated to sharing ideas of liberation with others; I suspect that it is the sharing of ideas with reason and empathy that will ultimately prove efficacious to secure our liberation.</span></span></span></div>
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<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]"><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[0]">The great mass of persons ultimately support institutions of domination, because those institutions of domination have expended much energy, over a great period of time, in the expression of rhetoric (though rhetoric lacking in its logic and grammar) to convince people that the institution of domination provides for their safety and protects them. Institutions of domination rely far more on rhetoric (persuasive words & ideas), than they have need to resort to violence. To unravel the institution of domination, a superior rhetoric supplied with superior logic (reasoning) and grammer (facts/evidence/definitions/fundamentals) will be required; it may not in the end be a bloodless revolution, but the revolution of ideas must occur before action can be efficacious in winning the day. </span><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[1]" /><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[2]" /><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[3]">But perhaps beyond the employment of the rational arts, institutions of domination use the *threat* of violence to induce fear, coercing compliance and expropriate possessions. Fear is an emotion that reaches beyond the scope of reason; it is the primal instinct to preserve one's self from danger. The rational arts are nearly impotent against these emotional factors, therefore another approach/strategy must be employed. To a certain extent, persons opposing the agents of institutions of domination and surviving, provides some encouragement to others so inclined, that it is possible to oppose an over-whelming source of power/violence.</span><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[4]" /><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[5]" /><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[6]">I am of the opinion that empathy is the approach to overcome these latter obstacles, if one values cooperation/power-with-others more than one gravitates to domination/power-over-others. A person will fear, so long as they cannot acknowledge their own fear, so long as they remain out of touch with their true/authentic-self but when another person is willing to acknowledge/empathize that fear, the person who fears can begin to process their emotional turmoil. </span><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[7]" /><br id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[8]" /><span id=".reactRoot[104].[1][2][1]{comment354163894674523_354183388005907}..[1]..[1]..[0].[0][2]..[9]">In empathic response to fear of the power of institutions of domination and with superior rhetoric informed by sound&valid logic and grammar, we may begin to unravel the harm caused by institutions of domination.</span></span></div>
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Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-54509742849191298662012-10-22T17:24:00.000-07:002012-10-22T17:24:07.007-07:00Anarcho-Capitalism: a Facebook Reply to detractors and supporters[A reply on Facebook to those who are critical of "anarcho-capitalism" and the supporters of "anarcho-capitalism"]<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I would like to contribute to the discussion here. I would like to start off, requesting some patience with my presentation and expression of my thoughts in the context of this discussion. I would like to request some temporary amnesty for using Rothbard as an avatar picture; Rothbard represents for me, an economist who I respect, though I may not find agreement with all of Rothbard's thoughts.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I am not overly fond of labels for my own self-identification, and though I hesitantly confess to at one-time identifying with "anarcho-capitalism", I have since distanced myself from such an identification as I recognize some of the strengths to the criticisms of "anarcho-capitalism". If pressed for a self-identification, I now self-identify as "radical liberal"</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I recognize that the traditional/historial owners of large capital accumulations have always done so under the arm of the State; therefore I recognize how it would seem like a hopeless endeavor to many to unravel such an insidious conflagration of the State and its "capitalists" and therefore I think I understand the appeal to toss the entire nest of vipers into the flames.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">But I would also like to recognize, that "anarcho-capitalists" do not use the term, "capitalism" in the same way as Marx would have used it; that "anarcho-capitalists" have an independent theory of economics, and within the context of that theory, "capitalism" does not *necessarily* imply the institution of domination/violence/coercion.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I feel that the "anarcho-capitalist" theory of "property" needs some revision, or rather, it has need to reinterpret its theory of "property" as a theory of possession or just-use; I would like to recognize that the "anarcho-capitalist" theory of "property" actually implies, not property as is employed by institutions of domination, but just-possession/just-use. I believe that the implications of a Lockean/Rothbardian "property" theory, do not actually imply "property" but rather imply a claim to the just-possession of the transformation by labor of material "stuff" and the just-possession of the exchange of the transformation of that material "stuff".</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdarjeelingzen.blogspot.com%2F2012%2F06%2Fquestion-posed-to-thepopularfront.html&h=MAQEq1KcFAQEDwK5AGyj0_VGM3c24Y9DaJ_BoMa1pg5eNMQ&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>darjeelingzen.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>2012/06/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>question-posed-to-thepopularfro<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>nt.html</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">"[E]very man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, an left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men." ~ John Locke</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">"Nowhere and at no time has the large-scale ownership of land come into being through the working of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political effort. Founded by violence, it has been upheld by violence and by that alone." Ludwig von Mises</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">“There are two types of ethically invalid land titles: 'feudalism,' in which there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to keep first-transformers out of that land. We may call both of these aggressions 'land monopoly'–not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-ownership of land except by actual transformers, their heirs, and their assigns.”</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">–Murray N. Rothbard</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdarjeelingzen.blogspot.com%2F2012%2F06%2Fproperty-or-posessions.html&h=wAQG7m1g-AQEQoVDB-EgdzrEscSSslV0noAT4f9A9QLvv6Q&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>darjeelingzen.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>2012/06/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>property-or-posessions.html</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">"Anarcho-capitalists" can sometimes be found to support arms of institutions of domination such as legal-entities known as "corporations". "Anarcho-capitalists" often do not recognize that their theory of "free-markets" actually implies that large-accumulations of capital are less likely under voluntary-market exchange systems; that rather than a few wealthy "capitalists" directing factors of production, if there was an absence of institutions of domination, then the barriers of market competition being removed, would imply that the forces of production would be in more hands, rather than fewer; that there would be a much greater distribution of wealth, not just because of an increase in production, but because each person would be an independent producer, as well as consumer of goods produced.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Yet, the definition of "capitalism" as "the ownership of the means of production" also has its limitations. What is the "means of production" other than those means by which goods are produced? Can any goods be produced without any labor inputs? Even a machine which automates some of the production processes, requires labor inputs to produce the machine, to maintain and repair the machine, as well as labor inputs to feed the machine raw-materials (those materials themselves requiring labor-inputs).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">If labor is a necessary condition for production to take place, which is to say, without labor, no production is possible, then labor is the primary means of production; it is the mode by which production is possible.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">For labor to take place, a mind or consciousness must direct the body to act in meaningful and purposeful ways; therefore without mind/consciousness, no labor is possible and therefore the mind/consciousness is likewise, the means of labor.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I reason that mind directs labor in purposeful action, in order to satisfy human-needs, either for one's self or for the needs of others in gift or exchange for the products of labor of others.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Therefore, each individual, possessing a mind and a body by implication of their mind directing their action in labor to satisfy needs, possesses in themselves the [primary] means of production. Through these means, they may fashion labor-saving devices in order to increase either their production or their recreation; these additional but secondary or tertiary means of production may become increasingly complex but they all fundamentally proceed from the individual's control or possession of their own body by their consciousness. Therefore, all persons by their minds' control of their bodies, possessed to the exclusion of others, the means of production.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">This reasoning would imply that the definition of "capitalism" as something separable from labor-forces themselves, is a misnomer, and an arbitrary definition/distinction.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">But, I for one, would prefer to live in any society, be it Proudhonian, Rothbardian or any other, that would be absent institutions of domination.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">I recognize that there is much disagreement of ideas, but I would like to see more cooperation in finding agreement on how we might defeat/bring-down institutions of domination and I am hopeful for a day when we may all be free-people and live our lives in peace and prosperity in common sisterhood/brotherhood of our common humanity.</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6267638155798940768.post-25786637972175452682012-10-22T14:29:00.001-07:002012-10-22T14:29:42.587-07:00Fusions of liberty<span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">[oringinally published at: </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Lucida Grande, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">http://forum.libertarianprepper.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5 ]</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">I'm interested in the fusion of ideas mentioned by LibertarianPrepper. I see the ideas of liberty as a matrix reaching out into varied application and integration into daily life. For instance, if a person grows a garden and learns simple preservation methods, such a person is remarkably less dependent on food-distribution systems and has achieved quite a lot of independence or freedom from reliance on those systems. The simple act of growing a garden, while innocuous in and of itself, decreases our reliance on systems that are ultimately controlled/regulated through coercive/dominative means and therefore can be unreliable and/or unstable.</span><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">Even if someone was to accept the principle of liberty as applied to ethics or politics, they may still retain some of those old-domination thought-patterns, because it is no simple thing to unravel the pain/trauma of a childhood/life-time of domination, just by the gossamer cognitive acceptance of a principle such as the "Non-Initiation of Aggression Principle". I'm interested in how persons who are interested in liberty, may learn to clear their minds of all traces of domination-thinking and domination-language and embrace a consciousness of empathy and connection with others. </span><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">Therefore it seems to me, that there are a lot of possible "fusions" or integrations possible within the liberty-movement that are as yet, still in their infancy of development/incorporation; among these might be self-reliance of some food-production (gardening, husbandry, aquaculture, fishing, hunting), polyculture systems (permaculture), wilderness survival skills (confidence one's ability to survive/provide-for-one's-self, decreases fear of losing the systems/institutions as we know them today), permaculture (agricultural design systems for permanence & sustainability), paleo/primitive diet (emphasis on fats for carrying calorie load, rather than energy-intensive production of grains for calorie-load; has benefit of being evolutionarily/genetically appropriate and decreases sugar/insulin spikes, reducing inflammation), home medical skills (herbal medicines & traditional medicine at home), self-defense skills (martial arts, firearms), peaceful/connected communication (Non-Violent Communication {NVC}), trivium guided autodidactism, and of course all of the "traditional" interests of liberty-minded persons such as economics, political theory, philosophy, history, etc.</span><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">I would like to point out, that the liberty-movement is still young and while there is lively academic debate in many areas, the core principles of liberty in their application (how does an individual create a space of greater freedom for themselves, in the present now) is a development in its infancy and I'm very interested in exploring these "fusions" of liberty.</span>Darjeelingzenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459001964917082591noreply@blogger.com0