Both of Gee's posts have been 'commented' upon. Mr. Red has been posted, without comment. Do I perceive a bias? (And if this is "name-calling", I'm afraid you'll have to come up with the 'name' yourself)Onward.
Our systems apparently are meant to be designed in a way that maximizes the right kind of manipulation. I believe Gee is an advocate of systems that allow people to 'manipulate' themselves, based on market forces, but let us examine this affair. From a more liberal viewpoint:
1:Justice.
Apparently it is more 'just' to support an educated bureaucratic elite, whether Plato's 'geometers' or the modern Party apparatus. Failing that, we shall have a common ownership, unregulated by a state, which has a fully conscious populous who simply know what is correct and good, via osmosis. In return for losing the industrial state, I am offered ... the primitive village. In place of a law of property and ownership, I must accept ... what? Rule by charisma? Popular opinion? Demagogues? Have we learned nothing from populism? Has Makhno been completely forgotten?
2:Freedom.
To be free, I must lose the right to own. To do as I desire, I must forgo the objects of desire. Who will 'own' what I must use? Why, everyone, of course! And what will I be free to do? Why, whatever everyone else thinks I should do, of course!
If I must give, according to my ability, with nothing to show for my labors other that a collective permission to live, I am hardly free.
3:Equality in even the most abstract sense.
Here is where socialist ideas shine. What could be more equal, but for everyone to have an equal share in everything? Strange, that this never seems to be true in practice. Those that man the military force of the soviets, or those involved in distribution, or in some other part of the bureaucracy necessary to manage all that communal property, always seem to do better than the rest. Perhaps it is true that capitalism must be destroyed, before the socialist system will work. Only when this system of "consumer goods for achievement" is destroyed, only when the masses are brought down to an equally miserable condition, without hope of release, will there finally be a chance of making this sort of arrangement stable. Might this be the appeal of the primitive village?
Perhaps a nuclear war would help? Maybe all this anti-nuclear activism has been secretly reactionary ...
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McSpotlight: I commented on Gee's posts not because of what he said, but because of what he didn't say; one post was a one-liner, the other was inflammatory. I'd have said the same to Lark or RD or SDF or Joel or you.
