Senor Barborito wrote:


First of all, 'morals' and 'morality' are the realm of the religious, and we have little enough to discuss if you're going to sidetrack us with the mumblings of witchdoctors intent on continuing to hold undeserved sway over their communities.

You say you believe that this money was Gates' to do with as he wished, not for politicians - which leads me to believe you do not believe in taxation of any kind. Without taxation there can be no government, so the question then becomes - are you an anarchist? Cavemen with clubs is about as far from a utopian society as it is possible to get without organized destruction of rational thought (fascism).

Of course, you're not. Furthermore - the Soviet Union was not at all a true socialist system in the utopian sense, but rather a protectionist oligarchy, much like what America is currently demonstrably sliding into due to corporate influence of politicians via their unlimited reserves of money. In short your system is dragging itself down into the very state it wishes to avoid, but with entirely worse facets at work, as corporations have no interest but the bottom line of gathering yet more 'resource' in whatever fashion they can. Eventually rational thought will stand in the path of resource acquisition, and it too will be terminated. Would you then have us live a system containing both the worst aspects of the Soviet Union and fascism? I didn't think so.

I understand this in a way that many socialists have not and do not - which is why I propose limitations within reason instead of true normalization. It is still possible to earn 266% of your neighbor's income in the system I propose - the question here for everyone is whether their insecurity so great that it requires a greater differential between their status and that of those whom they consider themselves superior to? Are the lives of households in America earning $80,000 a year so cruel as to be unbearable in any way? Having come from a household that went from the start to the end of that range over the course of ten years - we were slightly poorer than was comfortable at the start, and slightly wealthier than was comfortable at the end. Having lived off of $5,000 in grants a year as a student, and lived as the de facto child of a person with tens of millions of dollars in their possession for three months, neither situation was in any way tolerable. The near starvation at one end and despicable excesses of the other ought to have both been criminal.

I realize that he invests it in stocks, but I also realize that the vast majority of it sits holding Microsoft stocks so that he can maintain his majority ownership status - this is not at all healthy for either the economy or those in the lower echelon of it.

I'm not suggesting we force anyone into mediocrity at all, but rather insisting that everyone who works ought to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, health care and information services for their families. Those who work harder, require more knowledge for their jobs, and (minor modifier) take on more responsibility ought to have nice food, a nice abode, nicer clothing, slightly better health care and the same information services for their families. That, and that alone is the objective here. Furthermore, those on the upper end of the scale will more frequently be able to participate in the 'investment similar to petition' system I mentioned, and thus the more educated will dictate whether or not malls, monorails, and the like are built or not. I share your doubts about government, but that is an entirely seperate system from socio-economic design, requiring an entirely different discussion. I would venture to say that my single highest priority in any proposal, however, would be democracy by the people and for the people - not by and for artificial conglomerations of people known as 'corporations.'

Uniforms and single beds, the kinds of things most fundamentalist socialists insist upon, reveal exactly the reason their 'pure' systems never work - they provide no incentive for one person to gain more education than his fellow man. No incentive for him to try harder if it all goes to the government. The system must provide incentive, but not so much incentive that one or even a hundred men can easily subvert the government and thwart the will of the governed. This leads to another point about the found philosophy and aims of each system that I'll get to in a moment.

Why should any individual desire to excel as Mr. Gates has? Shouldn't the desire be to cause one's species to excel as a whole? Isn't it time we left childhood behind? As above, I'll return to this shortly.

Many USENET groups do actionally function as one might hope - I've often gotten an enjoyable amount of information out of comp.compression, as well as comp.programming. Your problem is that you've only seen the alt.* side of things, and those are an unmitigated mess that ought to be abandoned, I agree.

It has application to many other systems as well - weblogs for instance, are a movement sitting on the brink of something quite probably extremely profound - perhaps nothing so earth-shattering as the World Wide Web, but something great and terribly useful and impossible to live without afterwards. I suggest you check out some of Clay Shirky's articles at www.shirky.com, it's illuminating reading at the very least.

My disgust would be based upon living with the extremely rich - that post-million crowd, for three months and sitting on their gold toilets, watching them get fat and bore the hell out of each other with their droll conversations while their Corvette's baked out on the driveways of their million-dollar houses. Then switching not long after to a college life where I could barely afford to eat while working far harder than 99% of those I had just been lounging with ever had in their worthless lives. Nearly all of them had inherited their money, you see.

Also take into account that many of these people had an incredible amount of political influence both locally and nationally despite being profoundly simple-minded creatures and you begin to understand my concerns about our current economic system.

To have the intelligentsia guide the nation would be to have the brain guide it, to have the rich guide it would be to have the stomach (resource acquisition) guide it, and to have the unspecific nationality immigrants guide it would be to have the penis guide it. I don't find this a terribly hard choice, despite my agreement that, yes, the intelligent are very susceptible to demogoguery of a different type. Only one of these three will try to keep the whole body unharmed and in forward motion.

A 'moral' government requires believe in absolute 'good' and 'evil'. Please define each and provide an ontological basis for this definition. Furthermore, the rich in America are richer because the lower classes in America work considerably harder than the lower classes in most other nations, and because the intelligentsia provided them with the technology to create more wealth more quickly. Many poor, on the other hand, work themselves nearly to death for a bowl of Ramen noodles at the end of the day, and quite a few are no less intelligent than those who rule over them - why then are they not the ones making the decisions?

This reminds me of a common complaint against the Japanese in the early 80s, now thanks to Sony and others' incredible R&D efforts rendered mostly mute.

This was the point I wanted to hold off on above: ultimately a socio-economic system will reflect the economic philosophy of its founders. The question is, what philosophy does capitalism reflect? That of someone interested in creating an enlightened, progressive and forward-moving society or that of a selfish person blindly pursuing resource acquition without reason or worry? Which of these two personalities should be in charge of designing the societal system?

Absolutely not - my belief is in pushing everyone forward into the position of decision maker. The problem is, the more I see of the general public's mindset, the more frightened I am by lack of ability to decide wisely as the public consistently demonstrates through its self-contradiction and adherence to voodoo mysticism. I do not believe that what I say should be taken for gospel, but I do believe that my general thrust - socialism with incentive or capitalism within reasonable boundaries - is dead on. I also believe that society should be designed by people of a selfless nature, who only wish to see the species as a whole pushed forward - not anyone who wishes for personal gain or has a vendetta. I certainly wouldn't let myself be included in any committee responsible - I'm far too focused on death avoidance.

Both of these involved selfish individuals bent on the death of rational thought (especially the latter) designing the society. They had to fail.

I do agree that demagogues are problematic - but just as Noam Chomsky has pointed out a few interesting things to me in his lunatic ravings, so has Ann Coultier in her neo-racisct screeching and Rush Limbaugh in his bellicose pomposity. It's important to have icons who will bring the diamonds to the fore along with the rough. Again, the problem here is S/N ratio and filtration, which was your homework assignment - I find it odd for you to refuse my assignment and then list it as the problem you have. I agree it would be better to filter without these personalities involved outside of their local university or underground secret militia group. Finally - it has been my experience that the more intelligent an individual is, the more he is able to seperate himself from causes or crusades. I myself fail my own test in my desire to escape death at all costs - but I believe that the people I have met more intelligent myself ought to have a chance to design a society based on the rough major outline points I've established here for the good of the species, and not any speciifc individual.

Nothing can restore natural selection save anarchy - civilization destroys it plain and simple, with the possible exception that in another decade or two average American obesity rates might well result in the death of quite a few people unable and unwilling to control themselves.

This is why I scrapped my prior idea of a 'credit' system, where each individual was given government issued clothing/shelter/food/health/info service and could purchase upgrades depending on how far along the bell curve they were in terms of job performance and went back to suggesting a more traditional system that is more easily adopted by capitalist societies in any case.

Yes, it is. I don't believe that the well being of my own self should be my highest priority. Rather I believe, foolishly, that preventing my own death should be my highest goal, and that pushing my species forward should be my next highest. Figuring out what would be model society in the first place - an end goal if you will - is necessary before making any other progress in that second goal, which is why I bounce this set of ideas off of people rather a lot.

--SB