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Discussion Membership
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Applying Simple Wisdoms
Table of Contents: Simple Wisdoms Overview Moral Principles. Freedom
Freedom is the main moral principle espoused by the conservative right. It is a good goal, but it promotes too much self-interest. It becomes self-centeredness. It is described by Karl Marx's concept of a craftsman's job. He saw people more as craftsmen than as laborers. Such an idea may eventually work out because of the labor robots will undertake. We have not yet made the best use of technology. Rightists have a bad attitude about social cooperation and a good attitude about freedom. Leftists have a good attitude about social cooperation and a bad attitude about freedom.1
If you use all non-coercive pressure and a person still will not comply, you can restrict him from violating your rights or you can restrict him from gaining the benefits of society.2
Capitalism. Distinction between market economy.
A distinction should be made between a market economy and those things that artificially perturb that economy. Marx does not make that distinction.3
I am better vaccinated against the main hazards of capitalism than most. When someone tells me something, I can reflect and say "Bullshit! I am not going to do that. Go take your money. I am not going to work in your sweatshop." Or, if I happen to be a capitalist -- which I am, I will understand that, yes, profits are important to business survival, but hoarding my money is not. And neither is wringing the business dry.
Progress can come only out of men's surplus, that is: from the work of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to venture out in pursuit of the new. Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.4
Capitalism in the hands of gentlemen. Should you be more interested in economics or producing gentlemen? What needs to be done is to inoculate people against the bad parts of capitalism. And not just capitalism, but by perturbations of Marxism as well. The ultimate answer is that people must defend themselves from being duped. And they must get useful information.
There is room for individual incentive which is not justified in socialism. Because they want to help themselves and other people? I don't put complete faith in altruism. If they are going to be helping themselves at the same time, why isn't the socialism really capitalism?
We are going to have to come to terms with the idea that it is okay for someone to have the incentive to do something better and to make it worth his while to do so. But we take incentive to mean profit -- money. Isn't better incentive that you are contributing to society? Re-education in that direction has not worked. And money does have value.5
You would have me improve my own position. What position are you going to improve? What things improve my life? (More fulfilling experiences in life.) What are some of those? (Using your intellect. Helping others.) How about going to Hawaii. Is that fulfilling? (Yes.) How do I get to go? (Do people not make money in socialist countries?) I think you are asking for a change in human nature. (No. A recognition of what is there.) That should be my line. Do you mean is or ought to be?6
Dealing with a totalitarian state
Enumerate the principles specified here. Convey to the totalitarian state the conviction, unity, and tenacity with which we hold the ideals.
There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one party rule -- executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses -- the nationalization or expropriation of private property -- and censorship.7
A free nation -- a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens -- has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. . . . But this right [of sovereignty] cannot be claimed by dictatorships, by savage tribes or by any form of absolutist tyranny. A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever.8
Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent 'rights' of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.9
There is no word or phrase not subject to abuse: consumer, organic, natural, people's, truth. Who can reason on such propositions. It is against our interest to let word abuse go unrecognized. Talk is not so important as reducing those principles to practice.
Foreign Aid
Successful foreign aid is helping people learn to think independently and well.
Governments
In . . . the Golden Age, government, so Posidonius maintains, was in the hands of the wise. They kept the peace, protected the weaker from the stronger, urged and dissuaded, pointed out what was advantageous and what was not. . . . To govern was to serve, not to rule. . . .and a king could issue no greater threat to disobedient subjects than that of his own abdication.10
The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men's rights: the police, to protect men from criminals -- the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders -- the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.11
Democracy, on the other hand, like its obverse side, Puritanism, had its source in envy, and to pump envy out of it would be to take away its very lifeblood. `There is only one sound argument for democracy.' he went on a bit later in the same piece. `and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.' The most essential thing about it was that it was `a device for strengthening and heartening the have-nots in their eternal war upon the haves.' 12
The Collective:
The distinguishing characteristic of such tribal mentality is: the axiomatic, the almost `instinctive' view of human life as fodder, fuel or means for any public project.
The examples of such projects are innumerable: `Isn't it desirable to clean up the slums?' (dropping the context of what happens to those in the next income bracket) -- . . . `Isn't it desirable to have an educated public? (dropping the context of who will do the educating, what will be taught, and what will happen to dissenters) -- `Isn't it desirable to liberate the artists, the writers, the composers from the burden of financial problems and leave them free to create?' (dropping the context of such questions as: which artists, writers and composers? -- chosen by whom? -- at whose expense? -- at the expense of the artists, writers, and composers who have no political pull and whose miserably precarious incomes will be taxed to `liberate' that privileged elite? `Isn't science desirable? Isn't it desirable for man to conquer space?'
And here we come to the essence of the unreality -- the savage, blind, ghastly, bloody unreality -- that motivates a collectivized soul.
"The unanswered and unanswerable question in all of their `desirable' goals is: To whom? . . .not to any of those people whose taxes pay for the support of our subsidized science and public research projects.13
Money. Value.
Money provides leisure to teach and learn. It provides an opportunity to do useful things. The profit motive lends itself to thoughtfulness. It and encourages economy.
Paraphernalia Laws
Those who would outlaw drug paraphernalia are trying to pick up mercury. It's virtually impossible. Their concern is admirable while their misunderstanding is distressing.
Legislators have created a new, tax-free, underground enterprise. It forced your children to become thinkers, since they were required to resolve the distinction between their criminality and the criminality of the robber or mugger. They have further rid us of perpetrators of junk and kitsch. Most of the paraphernalia was a rip-off. They have encouraged handicrafts. People will produce their own utensils. They have encouraged mail-order and magazine sales. And they have forced lawyers to wend their way through a sea of ludicrous legislation and court interpretation in a futile attempt to discern when an alligator clip is an electronic apparatus and when it is a roach clip.
They have deflected people from studying the real questions: Is any individual allowed to chemically alter his thinking? If so, when? And, if so, how can it be safely done.
Recreational drugs are not the problem. The problem is the way people think. Everyone is for reason but no one recognizes when they, themselves, abuse it.
The Draft
The question of whether or not to have the military draft is a badly formulated one. Consider this as an alternative: Ask one who understands the distinction between useful lessons and those otherwise look at what is offered in basic training. Ask him to sift out the "Yes, sir. No, sir. March. March. March." in favor of those lessons any good soldier should know if he were called up for the defense of his country. Then announce that Basic Training is no more. Military service will no longer be required.
Then, also announce that, to anyone who understands one's obligation to be prepared to defend their country, offer to teach them what they will need to know. In such a circumstance, we need not address the separate question of conscientious objectors. They just needn't volunteer. Take people of any age. Guarantee their jobs back after their six-week stint. Pay reasonably. Considerations and benefits are flexible.
This approach makes no attempt to appeal to the sense of patriotism, which too often is illogically used. It appeals to an understanding of the practicality and potential benefit to the trainee and everyone else.
I'm a pacifist in principle. A pacifist is one who understands how violent he could be. Yet I would consider taking a basic training of this sort. Consider the nasty things that might happen. Prepare as much as reasonably can be expected without being paranoid.
This approach is one way to avoid a large standing army while maintaining some readiness.
Jobs
There is no such thing as `a right to a job' -- there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man's right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no `right to a home,' only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no `rights to a "fair" wage or a "fair" price' if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no 'rights to consumers' to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no `rights' of special groups, there are no `rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.' There are only the Rights of Man -- rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.14
A union's function is not to preserve jobs. It's proper function is to get the best working conditions for those people who do have jobs. Looking closely at it, it is almost un-American to preserve jobs. It lowers productivity and becomes an invisible dole. It becomes an institutionalized invisible welfare that does not improve the position of any single individual, including those who are in the union.
I have no objection to people being laid off. I do object that there is no easy way to get them back into production again. The union's function should not be preserving jobs but bettering conditions and transitions to new jobs.
People's Bureaus
Libya's leader, Col. Moammer Kaddhafi has said "You speak of government. We have no government here. We have no diplomatics; just people's bureaus." ($.50. Tyler. 1201 Conn. Ave, NE(NY), Wash. D.C., 20036)
The "people", he says. There is no responsibility for an action. No accountability. Who is the interpreter of the people's will? Kaddhafi will not be put into a position where he must make a clear statement.
Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of 'the public interest' with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable its use rests only on any given gang's ability to proclaim that 'The public, c'est moi' -- and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.15
Reality vs. the Myth. Olympics
Americans criticize Olympic athletic sponsorship by the government. Yet in America there is a private jobs program which allows athletes to train with pay and time off from work. It is thrilling to watch any superb athlete perform. However, the vicarious feeling of participation or national identity with the athlete's accomplishment ludicrous.
Auto-indexing
We have traded impolitic recession and layoffs in favor of inflation.
Short-term versus Long-term
Politicians are encouraged to look for re-election rather than to take statesmanlike, long-term action. Neither can we elect by platform since we don't hold candidates to them.
I want my candidate to do what _he_ thinks best for the long term. If I find him pulling some politically expedient step, I would try to bounce him from office.
Food
If we produce too much food, why doesn't the price drop?
Productivity
Credit
Government Spending
Unnecessary government
Unnecessary government cannot be dismantled until people are thoughtful enough to replace it. Then they will be thoughtful enough to insist on it.
`As we once suffered from crimes, so now we are suffering from laws';[Tacitus, Annals,III,XXV.] and yet we have left so much for judges to consider and decide, that there has never been such complete and uncontrolled freedom. . . . There is little relation between our actions, which are perpetually changing, and fixed immutable laws. The most desirable laws are those that are fewest, simplest, and most general; and I even think that it would be better to be without them altogether than to have them in such numbers as we have at present.16
It is too easy to inculcate liberality in one who has unlimited means of practicing it at others' expense.17
Rights
A `right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life. . . .
The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. . . .
Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it.18
A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.19
What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that 'Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality -- so the notion that 'Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,' is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality to social issues.20
Racism
-------------------- Table of Contents: Simple Wisdoms Overview
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