A friend shared this with me earlier today:
Suggesting that community is greater than the individual is not only completely contrary to human nature, it's not much of a stretch to nationalism and tribal conflicts, which lead to the psychosis he claims to oppose. 11 dead mostly old people at a synagogue, for a recent example. Either he doesn't know that's the result of the system he's advocating, or he doesn't care.
So I would suggest he apply his own rationale to himself. Because he's self-deluded. Most of us are. We want to think we're little gods, and everyone else is at best an object to be used. If I'm the only one who's "right", that means everyone else is "wrong".
Which is why I often argue that there is no objective moral truth. We are all right and wrong, and none of us have the capacity to know everything, even if everything was known, which it is anything but.
I didn't run a free kitchen in Denver that fed more people than all of the shelters in that city combined because I gave a shit about community. I did it because I could, and because food is a uniting force that would bring people who were herded into divided little tribes together, but mostly because I got to eat as much as I wanted, people donated more marijuana than I knew what to do with, and it made me feel good about myself to do so. We are all selfish creatures - we perceive the world in terms of its relation to self. That is human nature. It's not something to be squashed in favor of the idolatry of "community" or "state" or "nation".
Feeding those people - and not just poor people, but anyone who wanted a meal - had a positive effect on my interaction with the people of Denver. There was a profit motive, but not in monetary terms. Otherwise I would have done something else, like I did after the city and state governments demolished our little setup and arrested us half a dozen times. Is capitalism to blame for that? No, of course not. Governments prevented us from feeding people because it wasn't benefiting governments.
After which I sold weed. In Denver. And am famous in that city for doing so. Because there was a profit motive. If you think I'm just tooting my own horn, go ask any of the locals on the 16th Street Mall who I am.
He's arguing for the very system he saw fail in East Germany. You can't have socialism without slavery at best, genocide at worst. Sorry/not sorry. This has been known for many years.
http://www.unionleader.com/column/Marion-Smith-On-May-1-remember-that-Socialism-is-slavery-05010218
He acts like capitalism itself is to blame, but politicians are infallible saints to be trusted with "oversight" or "regulation", which if he applied the same logic he would have to admit just translates to influence peddling.
There isn't a market for half-billion-dollar drill bits in the Arctic without government, for example.
It's delusional to think government is the opposing force whose sole concern is the well-being of humanity. Or why blame laissez-faire capitalism for the failures of feudalism, or at best mercantilism? There is a mountain of economic data proving him wrong, which means he's perpetuating that delusion.
A major part of the problem is ignorance of civics and economics. Not coincidentally, those subjects have been disappearing since the US Department of Education was created in 1979 to create yet another massive federal bureaucracy whose primary function is perpetuating its own existence. As all "institutions" do.
Or am I the only one who finds it ironic that someone who reported from both East Germany and Yugoslavia is using what amounts to negative propaganda (capitalism is bad, but he doesn't mention the alternative because he knows goddamn well what generations of us have been taught in that regard) advocating more of that in the United States?
Fucking cunt.
"Americans are so enamored with equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom." - Alexis de Tocqueville
https://fee.org/articles/poverty-in-the-us-was-plummeting-until-lyndon-johnson-declared-war-on-it
https://butnowyouknow.net/truth-vs-myth/stop-blaming-capitalism-for-socialisms-failures/
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