/liberty/ - Liberty

1. Higher EFI = more capitalism. Basically the countries tauted as socialist by lefties are actually capitalist and vice versa.

2. More Federal Register pages = more regulations imposed. Basically disproving the statement regarding deregulation since Bush was responsible for several of the top 10 years.

>>85971

>Market socialism is the same thing as capitalism

LOL

>>85977

Market socialists advocate low EFI measures.

>>85985

Market socialism is very free anon.

>>85971

How did Obama add pages to the registry in 2006 though?

>>86071

negro magic

Most people who hate the government are actually power-mad, and they want the government to go away because it's the only organisation strong enough to stop them and they resent it. For an example, see anyone whose last name is Koch. Those are the type of people who cannot stand having any power imposed upon them, but they desperately want to have power over everyone and everything else - the prime ingredients of genuine sociopathy. These are the type of people who don't want bad things done to them, but only them. These are the sorts of people who, even if you showed them terrible suffering from which they are insulated or actually inflicted any on them, they would still use their power to hurt other people because they simply have no ability to feel what other people feel, yet we applaud people like that and are expected to admire and emulate them, which is insulting. I've come to the point that whenever I see a "successful" person (a.k.a. anyone with far too much money), I don't see a rich person… I see the many, many people who are poor because of that person.

On the other hand, you have people who don't want horrible things done to them but don't want those same things done to people either… they have actual empathy. They know how it feels to suffer and they don't want to inflict it on anyone; I fancy that that would be true for most of the people contributing in this thread. I think that most of us have realised that wealth is power and that concentrating wealth makes for terrible power imbalances that inevitably lead to misery. What corporations have done, and it's devilishly clever, is that they have convinced the world that the government is the big bogey man even though government is the only thing powerful enough to reign in, even a little, corporate greed and indifference. I'm reminded of that great quote by Charles Baudelaire: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas" - I think that you recognise that one without me translating it. Despite mounting evidence, people are still appallingly greedy and they buy into the narrative that the government is stopping them from being rich and powerful instead of, well, the rich and powerful; the classic Steinbeck "disenfranchised millionaires" rhetoric. The government is doing fuck all apart from insisting on naughty taxes, but the huge corporation that has all the market share and uses its lobbying power to foster anti-competitive behaviour wants nothing more than to crush you under its jack boots. Yet big corporations control the medias and, consequently, the narrative.

The latter paragraph is why I hold out no real hope of a peaceful transition from cut-throat capitalism to utilitarianism: a combination of overly-centralised wealth and power combined with horrifying human selfishness. The only possible way that corporations will give up all that they have taken is if the government forces them, and that will only happen if the people force the government and we are nowhere near that point. I am also convinced that, even if we could provide everyone with what they need to live well, people are desperate to find ways to feel superior to others. I feel that racial/gender/etc bias is a product of social conditioning, but selfishness is encoded in the human condition and all of the improvements in race relations have not made people any less greedy. Economic discrimination is the modern, socially accepted form of "bigotry", and I just don't see a way around it because change would require sacrifice, which is counterpoint to human nature and capitalist indoctrination.

>>86106

Nice essay, faggot.

>>86106

>Most people who hate the government are actually power-mad, and they want the government to go away because it's the only organisation strong enough to stop them and they resent it.

Do you really think everything is about power power power and an oppressed/oppressor narrative?

>I don't see a rich person… I see the many, many people who are poor because of that person.

Do you really think economics is a zero-sum game?

>On the other hand, you have people who don't want horrible things done to them but don't want those same things done to people either… they have actual empathy.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”

>I think that most of us have realised that wealth is power and that concentrating wealth makes for terrible power imbalances that inevitably lead to misery. What corporations have done, and it's devilishly clever, is that they have convinced the world that the government is the big bogey man even though government is the only thing powerful enough to reign in, even a little, corporate greed and indifference.

You go from saying, "Concentrations in power is a bad," to forgiving government for this in one sentence.

But, fwiw, I don't think concentrations in wealth is bad. It's what you'd expect with any kind of standard distribution.

I think there is a lot more evil in the world from people with the hubris to say, "I know what is right and I will use the government to get my way," than people who say, "I have absolutely no sense of what's right or wrong, so I want a lot of money." At least the latter acknowledge their faults, try to do the best with what they know they don't know, and tap into a system that provides information operating at a higher level than individual people or even small groups of people.

> I am also convinced that, even if we could provide everyone with what they need to live well, people are desperate to find ways to feel superior to others.

At least we agree here. Dominance hierarchies in the animal kingdom go back since before trees existed.

>The negatives of corporations

Here's another point where I think you might be able to find some agreement and interesting inroads. It might be interesting for a different thread.