Tell him to share his one eye right there right now for the common good. Marxism is a waste of time. Stay away from him- do something productive. Nothing can be more capitalistic than valuing your time.
I would agree with you but for the fact that I’m pretty sure he has to go and watch this guy and has no choice so he might as well engage him in any way he can, it’s good practice for dealing with all those on the radical left he might someday meet, and he can make sure this guy doesn’t convert anyone or at least as few as possible… Hell some might find it interesting and begin to get into things like Mises
Well, let’s hear what the man himself has to say… [:)]
Tell him, don’t ask him, that the alternatives to “One skin, one driver” – ie, the slavery based alternatives, such as “One skin, other drivers”, are unappealing forms of tyranny.
“One skin, one driver” is neither “my skin uber alles” – crime, nor “most skins uber alles” – totalitarianism, statism. Tell him, as a fellow naked sweaty ape, that you have no interest in handing over your life to some other naked sweaty ape without a fight.
Tell him that the proper form of the existential question is “Why am I here, and what am I supposed to be doing now as a result of that?”, and that the answer to those questions is our individual lives, plural; your life is your answer, my life is my answer, lather, rinse, repeat, we all get just the one skin to run, with its finite mote of heat and light and time here in this existence. Tell him that the beginning of tyrrany is posing those questions as “Why are we here, and what are we supposed to be doing now as a result of that?”, as if there was a singular Universal answer to those questions. The religious belief that there is a singular answer to those questions, imposable onto all of us by some religious zealout tyrant wannabees, is proper only in rampant theocracies, including, theocracies based on the religion Social Scientology.
Tell him that forcing the ‘we’ form of those existential questions is at the foundation of every pile of million human corpses rotting under the sun.
Tell him that in a free nation based on voluntary, not forced associations, paternalistic megalomania needs treatment, not a political movement. Kindly tell him to seek treatment for his obvious paternalistic megalomania.
Or, surrender the argument to his nonsense circular ‘sociological’ terms of art, such as what he rolls his eyes into the back of his head and divines is best for an unseen yet all seeing "S"ociety, God, “the” Economy, or whatever other old as time carny huckster leg-lifting ploy he wants to pull over on you.
So how did it work out in the end?
Ask him how would communism here be any different than communism in the USSR, China, and North Korea. That should jolt people back to reality.
Just going to throw this out there… i’m pretty sure they have some good responses to this. I mean its not like you’re the first person to bring it up and they’ve had a lot of time to think about their answer…
They have no good responses. Economics, history, and political theory (public choice) show it cannot be any other way. As Brutzkus wrote, in 1920, the best communism will ever provide is a ‘well equipped barracks.’
Communists will just respond, “It’s socially acceptable.”
If you try math, or talk about economic calculation, they will open their mouths… silence. Then, “well, listen, humans are not coldly calculating meanies/fascists/cheesecakes/zionists/[other libel terms and strange insults I’ve heard]…blah blah blah.”
It’s pointless arguing with some of these people. Like my math tutor a while back (professor of physics) said about them, “There are no miracles. If a person acts as an idiot, then he’s an idiot.”
Skip the event in the future, and take a nap. If you ever become in a real position to withhold powerful appointments to these people, do that; you’ll get more done for society.
Good advice. We can’t cure idiocy.
I bet they have a lot of apologist historians.
That’s an understatement. If you actually want to understand communism, don’t read second hand dealers of ideas [ namely today’s Marxist / Social Democratic historians ]. Read the actual theorists, the primary sources.
But these people are not historians, in the sense that they study history and have evidence.They have no evidence; they make it up.
In a couple of his books, David Landes showed as theme how historians use aggregates to make false claims, for instance.
As price decreases, quantity increases, but revenue is only, of course, reasonably greater. Furthermore, the changes in quality of goods (Ford Model T versus modern Toyota; tin versus stainless steel) are not reflected well in aggregates.
In other words, if we were to trust aggregate data, the First Industrial Revolution did not occur, because national income (according to very questionable ways of computing it, also) only grew at ~1.5 annually in Britain at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
Of course, massive changes in social organization had occurred, but aggregate data cannot show them well, and if we didn’t know anything except aggregate data, we would assume nothing had happened. Nevertheless, fully aware of this, many historians use aggregate data.
And this, the occurrence or non-occurrence of the Industrial Revolution, is nowhere as ‘controversial’ a question as capitalism vs communism, on which every person who doesn’t read books has an ‘original’ opinion.
There are historians who deny there is even specialization: everyone should do a little bit of everything and get rid of bosses said one of them. Is this really a apologetic historian, or is this just a person who is making things up?
We can never counter these arguments, because they are not arguments: in the end, the appeal is not to ‘specialization doesn’t work’; its the appeal ad hominem ‘hate people with more property, so get rid of them and take their property.’
It is dialectic. If I were to insult a person, and he leaves the room, and I had prior this the last say on a topic: I ‘win the debate.’ Dialectic is not logic.
Schopenhauer said, quoting Aristotle, never engage in debate with people who you don’t know are interested in truth and at your level of knowledge.