How about “these people can’t help themselves, someone needs to help them - get the government the hell out of the way”?
I buy that. Leftists don’t. They don’t understand implicit aid.
I actually just wanted to make sure you were ok with it. However, I’d urge you to consider that there are many groups that are labelled “the left” and not everything you say applies to all of them. There are lots of libertarians out there in the media with whom I very much disagree, and I imagine there are leftists who are tired of the “official” leftist position, too. Many old-leftists, Chomsky, Zinn, Gravel, Nader, and so on, are much more interested in ending corporate welfare than in welfare. Indeed, you can find plenty of places where these folks will refer to welfare programs and similar policies as the attempt of those in power to buy off those disadvantaged by their systems, and to avoid radical change. Chomsky in particular is an eye-opener on labels; he has some very interesting writings where, for instance, he’ll complain bitterly about Reagan, pointing out that he’s offended by the Reagan platform not as a leftist, but as a free-market supporter - he’s outraged that statist policies designed to transfer wealth between classes are called “free-market” or that you can train soldiers working for foreign powers to commit acts of terror abroad, or arm aggressive groups in other countries, and call it “defense.”
In my opinion, leftists are much better than rightists at seeing legitimate issues. They see very clearly the imbalance of power, the inequities, the absurdity of an economy that produces goods too expensive for the consumers to buy (how anyone can believe this to be a market outcome is beyond me). What they do not see so clearly is the solution.
Imagine that the government, under party A, conducted a large transfer of wealth from one class to another. Party B opposed this action, but lost - party B being the voice of free markets at the time. Having lost, B did what they considered the best available thing - they maintained that the recipients of all this wealth should in some way compensate those from whom it was taken, so they extracted some money from them on a yearly basis, to reimburse those who lost. For its part, though, party A continues to insist that these correctives are wrong - calling itself the party of private property and free markets (disingenuously, of course - they’re the party who favored theft initially) they maintain that it is wrong to extract wealth from the wealthy, and declare that B really just hates productivity, and the like. Now, over time, B loses track of its position, and somehow comes to believe that really, the ideal society is one with lots of wealth transfer - forgetting that the reason they favored these transfers initially was simply to reimburse the losers, and that originally, they believed that the ideal was laissez-faire - the means becomes its own end.
Which of these parties is better? Historically, B is. In terms of actual policies, neither is. The correct position is to favor neither. A has never been right, and B hasn’t been right for decades.
They are just not very intelligent. The first thing I’d do is put the animals on feed lots so they’re not shitting at everybody’s front door which brings disease-spreading flies. Then I’d look at the human facilities, which I’m betting are similarly way too close to living quarters. Then I’d start thinking about things like crop rotation, potable water, trade between villages, etc. But people in that IQ range don’t think much beyond the immediate day.
Which is why free markets/anarcho capitalism can only emerge in civilized societies. Other humans lived in similar conditions and were able to trade, realize the benefits of the division of labor, realize the benefit of capital accumulation, and pull themselves out off poverty. Of course, they didn’t know those terms and the theory, but they could tell that having a shovel beats not having a shovel.
LOL, pretty ambitious stuff. How do you build a feed lot with no money? What crops? Do you think these people are so stupid that they wouldn’t try that stuff out if they could, they would rather just live in abject poverty until their premature death?
This guy was probably just a dumbass too, huh?
Define “civilized”.
So you cant debate suicide until youve commited suicide yourself?
So you can’t be for or against killing cause you’ve never killed anyone?
And you can’t be for or against abortion cause you were never pregnant?
And you cant be pro or anti immigration policies cause yiu are not an immigrant?
And they can’t demand taxes on the rich cause they were never rich
Where will it end?
you cant study geometry until you are a triangle
City-forming, which enables people to subdivide labor and accumulate capital. Civilization is a process of accretion, starting from mud huts and proceeding to cathedrals. It requires a critical mass of individuals with sufficient intelligence and low time-preference.
And a state.
Environment can be difficult to overcome, but I know many successful people who started poor and many people who’ve had every head start in life who ended bankrupt or prematurely dead. That is the distinction between smart and stupid. The Ethiopian villagers are not ‘stupid’ in that sense; they simply don’t have the capacity for business plans. The ones that do figure out early on that they need to get the fuck out of the village.
Of course, you assume they have the means to leave, or the means to find somewhere better to go.
Civilization as I defined it does not require a State. In many ways, the State is a de-civilizing force, particularly with its egalitarian schemes frustrating the division of labor.
Could I have an example of a stateless civilized society?
I think you are strictly defining the state as an institution interested in egalitarianism, which it doesn’t have to be.
Renaissance Italy.
No, but the modern democratic State, which–let’s be practical here–is what we all generally have in mind, is militantly egalitarian.
So Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” in a stateless society?
Hey man, don’t put words in my mouth here. I was thinking about the types of states that existed at the dawn of civilization.
For all practical purposes, yes. The cities and their appurtenant lands were owned by noble families, who were constrained by hard currency and competition for human and financial capital. They bore little resemblance to the modern State.
Is your premise that civilization requires the State? Do you think in anarchy everybody will be content with subsistence farming?
I don’t see how that makes them stateless.
No, it’s that without the state, civilization would not have gotten off the ground, and vice versa. I’m not saying that now that civilization has gotten started, we could shed the state, but in the beginning, you couldn’t have one without the other.
It is an accurate model for the proposition. Unlike the modern State, the nobility had an ownership interest in their domain, and found their actions constrained accordingly. The result was an unleashing of human creativity that we may never see again.
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The State, being wholly parasitic, must rely on civilization as its sine qua non. The reverse is not true.