Re: The PPACA Thread Part III - Let's have a healthy debate!
How do you propose we get people to participate? Mind control?
Enlightened self-interest, the same reason highly educated and/or wealthy and/or white and/or male people vote for policy outcomes which will cost them personally, at least in the short term, but benefit the society as a whole.
I am proposing that a large enough subset of the population has outgrown the monkey stage of human evolution so we don't need state-centered, coercive mechanisms to bring about the type of society we want to live in. Because obviously that percentage is still nowhere near an actual majority, we'll need to "economically secede," and of course we'll still keep participating in society as a whole and work for good policies in government.
But we may be big enough now to go it alone for many things. Obviously the huge, overarching things like defense we still need the state for. But we should at least look at taking libertarians up on their ideas, though with entirely different goals in mind. The libertarians dream of a war of all against all with the best rising to the top and everyone else reduced to slavery. In fact, that is the very outcome that is developing now in late stage capitalism, But can we use exactly the same non-coercive philosophy to create economic values that reward safety, diversity, and just generally Doing Good? Can we consciously make a compact to mutually support
private entities that follow those principles and shun those that do not?
The thing about the Free Market is: it works OK with science, and science is the only thing mankind has ever stumbled upon that makes the material lives of people better. We should keep the Free Market and simply shift the definition of "success" from amassing money to amassing money while respecting quality of life for the community at large. And most importantly, it should all be voluntary. It is no better to be ordered around by a lefty d-ckface than a righty d-ckface.
I think it is worth a shot, because the worm in the leftist apple has always been the threat of coercive power being used against individuals. Rousseau's (and hence modern liberalism's) original sin is the idea that forcing people to adhere to the general will is somehow
not contradicting their personal will because if they knew what was good for them they would naturally adopt the general will. Well, Rousseau was a little sh-t who was terrible to every actual human he ever met, and it shows. F-ck that noise.
We can do better. We've been thinking about socialist and communist and anarchist theory for 170 years. There are a ton of good ideas out there, from the left (mostly) but also sometimes from the right. Righties don't understand that starving is just as coercive as a bayonet, but that doesn't change the fact that they are right that bayonets are no way to drive people to do good, and the left has, on occasion, forgotten that.
