I’m saying there never really has been - there has always been limiting factors on the market, often for very good reasons and with very good consequences. Now, of course today’s corporate monopolies are almost all assisted and sponsored by the government, and to my mind it is this relationship in particular that constitutes the state. I’m saying that if you take the government out of the equation that still leaves the corporations, and they have become masters of market manipulation.
Agreed.
I’m not proposing any such thing, except whereby people enter into communism of their own accord. I’m proposing more a healthy respect for what is nourishing about the natural world, and the resisting of the privatisation and market-isation of its bounty. I would however distinguish when someone makes a farm, I recognise that private property gives people an incentive but I also recognise that it is a reality that someone who is ultimately going to die within a matter of decades causes damage to the earth in a way that outlasts them, and that this affects other people and therefore is of justifiably ‘social’ concern. The idea that owning something gives you the right to destroy it, in particular, I ardently oppose.
I broadly agree.
No apology required, this is exactly why I started this thread. I can’t register on BTL and this was the next easiest place.
I would distinguish here between the moral value judgment and the law, but otherwise I agree entirely and think you’ve broken it down very well. I don’t think there should be a legal obligation on people to help others, even if I believe in a moral obligation. I think the nature of duty-altruism is violated by having it be an obligation backed up by the threat of force, rather than an attempt to persuade and extol the virtue of. The sad truth is that in any society you’re going to get people dying who could have been kept alive, so outlawing that would be meaningless anyway.
This is a difficult one, because healthcare is, at times, an absolute necessity for survival and yet it is relatively highly skilled, rare, work which is therefore deserving of considerable reward. It bridges the natural hierarchy of needs-wants and the respective economies you’ve suggested. So I don’t know, I’d like to think something like welfare healthcare would still be possible, but without all the massive subsidising of drug companies and so on. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be dependent on the drunkard in Deadwood, would you? Nor would I. I think we can do better than that.
Yes, you are absolutely right, but our task is also to appreciate that which is valuable beyond the logic and the laws.
So, to the question that is perhaps most difficult to answer in practical terms - what about security? Almost everything the state does, it does in the name of security (it says it means our security when of course it means its own). Avoiding economic armageddon, pig flu, bad weather and terrorists gives the state mosts of its perceived legitimacy. Now, demonstrating the absolute corruptness of the state in this regard is not difficult, but the politics of security goes to the heart of what makes humans humans - our ability to imagine different possibilities, including nightmares. Most creatures simply don’t suffer from nightmares. So, even when people recognise that the state is corrupt they don’t make the jump to anarchy because ‘better the devil you know’. They can envision a worse scenario than anything you can tell them is real, and hence the feeling of protection offered by the state remains with them.
Here is one instance where I think the free marketeers haven’t thought it through, because offering up security as a commodity to an open market, in an age where people perceive all kinds of fictitious threats, is the mafia-media complex’s wet dream. Combating that would require intelligence analysis and media production of a quality much higher than the web based media is capable of, because alerting people to real threats and steering them away from bullshit, and doing so on a daily basis, is not an easy task. I got involved with all that with the intention of trying to raise the standards, what I found was that most people didn’t give a fuck. Hence my desire for a different approach, and our discussions.