Now here's a change of subject. Don't have the time right now, or perhaps I would start a new thread. It is inspired by my reading of this Zero Hedge posting for today:
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/what-would-better-system-look
The problem with this line of thinking is inherent in the central rhetorical premise: take your homestead and multiply it by a thousand or a million. Every utopian dream makes the same mistake: assuming that everyone else has the same heart, forgetting that to take the time to envision utopia already makes one an outlier, dwarfed by the number of people who are simply out to get whatever they can get, a large portion of whom would step on their grandmothers to get ahead.
That is the beauty of a true free market before it gets polluted by pity-ism, which is always fueled by sociopathic manipulation, all the while masked by a conversation that falsely blames inequity on greedy money-grubbers. The parasites who operate at the bottom and in the shadows are greedier and more vile than any corporate chieftain. Absent the corruption of socialism and its cousins, the free market simply rewards people for looking out for themselves in a way that doesn’t step on the ability of others to do the same.
Life is not fair. Things are unequal. We are only equal in the eyes of God. The genius of our Founding Fathers was that they took
that assumption and paired it with the free market and a mostly-decentralized government. Not perfection, but a better design than any utopian has ever imagined. We decry the inequity, but a wise man once asserted that, if we confiscated every last asset of every single human being and the redistributed all of those assets entirely equitably to every human being, it would take less than 2 weeks before some people ran out of money and less than 2 years before all the riches and all the poverty were possessed by the exact same people who possessed them before the confiscation. I would only add to that that it would take longer, but only because for a period of time pure anarchy would reign in the wake of what would occur if all the investors in the world had just been told that all the risks they had taken, all the sweat and financial equity they had invested, and all the rewards of having been
generous enough to offer to the world their products or services could just be
stolen from them like that – because after experiencing something like that, who would be fool enough to do it all over again, and without those who make the gift of taking those risks, etc., there would in very short order be absolutely
nothing for anyone to
buy with the assets they had so quickly and undeservedly acquired. It would even take some time before barter would assert itself as viable.
And those with the motivation and/or skills to create a viable economy would bide their time, waiting for some kind of meaningful assurance that such a confiscation would never again occur. My suspicion is that this would involve teaching their children to teach their children to teach their children that their children should be taught to wait until another reasonably trustworthy free market system arose again as the indication that it would once again be time to utilize those motivations or skills.
So please forgive me if I don’t welcome the possibility of being able to sit around a roundtable brainstorming what our next great new system would be like. We already have one. We just haven’t been properly respecting its parameters and have allowed it to be corrupted by elements of tyranny. It is not capitalism or our constitution that is corrupt; it has been corrupted by the true evil greed that hides behind the skirts of utopianism. Every example in our history of human government systems based on egalitarianism has degenerated into totalitarianism, partly because every one of those isms contains as a necessary component of its creation and implementation an assumption that those who came up with it represent a better class of people who will not only tell the rest of us unenlightened individuals how to live our lives but who will exempt themselves from the rules they create for us, compounded by the fact that they also exempt certain others from those rules (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., being exempted from having to be held accountable for the laws surrounding being public publishers, essentially giving them the monopolistic right to mold minds through the censoring of public discourse).
If I could wave a magic wand right now, I think I might choose to have a constitutional amendment passed that would prohibit our leaders from exempting themselves from the grand designs they create for the rest of us. But probably the better course would be to simply destroy the magic wand without using it, because if I used it I would then be setting myself above everyone else . . . and the temptation to use it over and over again would be far too alluring. So instead, given that I’ve seen no evidence that any utopian scheme so far has borne tasty fruit, I’m going to remain invested in the following: being prepared for the worst while maintaining faith that enough people will remain sane that the insanity will be overruled within the confines of the very reasonable system we already have in place.
It is not that the system is inadequate or even that it’s broken. We have simply allowed the system to be corrupted, but it’s also within our collective power to stand up and demand that the corruption be expelled. If enough people voice that sentiment and are loud enough in the exclaiming of it, they will have the power to heal this nation’s illnesses, because our Founders wisely provided us all the structure we need in our founding documents and the Bill of Rights.
It is why our enemies the Democrats, the media, the Deep State, the globalists, the anarchists, the communists and AOC's boyfriend are all sh**ting their pants in anticipation of the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. They are recognizing that they may actually have to go by the U.S. Constitution.
