Month: August 2012

I don’t think anyone who refuses to see the evil in their own hearts can see evil outside of them.  I sometimes recall with fondness my past as a generic sybaritic leftist.  It is quite a congenial mindset.  All problems can be solved with government money, which never runs out.  No wars are ever necessary because all people are reasonable, and would never even consider lying to us.  Politicians who are Democrats really want what is best for the American people, and their policies work when not frustrated by the unintelligible, nasty, and morally repugnant Republicans.  Perfect peace and harmony is just a matter of electing blue candidates.  Life is simple and easy.

Consider, though, how easily someone like Bill Ayers swims in this soup.  All he has to do is act nice, be congenial, and agree with everything.  If you act nice, well, then there is no room in a leftists head for the possibility of disingenuousness, if that person is an ideological fellow traveler.

Sybaritic leftists cannot CONCEIVE that Obama would be lying consciously and often about very basic elements of his past, such as having been born in Kenya, or having a card carrying Communist for a father.  They put their fingers in their ears, and go naanananananaa.

Yet, I would stipulate that some part of all of us is always fully aware.  It is fully awake.  It KNOWS on some level that something doesn’t add up.  But people do not want to listen to that voice, the one that has real knowledge about how the world REALLY works.

Look at  Europe.  There are no major nations there that have not participated in mass colonialism, fascism, and the slaughter of innocents.  Look, for example, at Belgium, capital of the EU.  Just 100 years ago they were neck deep in mass murder in Africa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold%27s_Ghost

History was something they created, an evil which flowed from the hands of the supposedly enlightened.  Now, all these nations want to pretend that human evil is in the past, something that can never happen again.  Why?  Why can’t it happen?  Why am I not justified in seeing the present generation of children as more or less being bred to accept atrocity?

People don’t want to know how bad things can get.  We have grown up safe and sound, accustomed to the idea of a benevolent government tucking us in every night, maybe with milk and cookies.  I ask, though: what moral progress has happened that gives us cause for justifiable optimism?  The EU government is already trying to subvert the rights of member nations.

Look in your heart, carefully.  If you are honest, you will find vanity, greed, stupidity, heartlessness, and the capacity, in the right circumstances, for violence.  If you are a good person, all these things will only be present in trifling amounts, but I would submit that if you cannot find ANY of that that you are engaging in self deception.

I have no use for the word Libertarian.  Everything good in the “doctrine” (it has long felt more like an attitude to me than anything coherent) is already contained in Liberalism.  A true Liberal (and of course nobody on the Left qualifies) wants as much freedom for everyone as is consistent with public harmony.

In conception, our system grants to States the ability to regulate morality.  This point is crucial: to my mind, and I differ here from most Libertarians, liberty is both the right to be free from unnecessary burdens, but also to impose them, if they are generally desired.  As an example, I wear a seatbelt, but respect the right of those who refuse to.  At the same time, I grant that the State has the right to make that law. If people do not like that law they need to elect people who will repeal it.  They have that right.

Political progress is in my view cultural progress, which is to say the capacity of all individuals within a social order to respect the rights of those around them, and to make few if any impositions on them.  Given a sufficiently intelligent, reasonable, organized, goal-focused population, no government would be needed.  If a road needs to get built, somebody takes the lead, figures out how to pay for it, and gets it done.

In the present world, however, many people need to be told what to do.  We need speed limits, in my view.  People need to be told not to drink and drive.  We need to have laws against, and penalties for, things like theft, contract violation, fraud, murder, rape, child abuse, etc.  Given a perfectly reasonable population these laws could just fall away.  There would be no need for police. 

But to my mind most Libertarians want to live in a world which we do not live in.  There are many animals out there who will abuse people, given the chance.  Absent a government, the law of the jungle would prevail, and that law tends to favor the most vicious, not the most reasonable.

Few thoughts.  This is not quite as coherent as I would have liked, but it’s a start.

It seems logical to me that for minds like those of Bill Ayers, who can seemingly imagine mass murder and torture with equanimity, that an obvious preparatory step would be conditioning the American mind to accepting violence.  We see the results of this in the violent, abusive rhetoric that appears constantly on the Left (I will note that I have thousands of hours dealing with this abuse, and speak from VERY long experience), but I would suggest that movies like the Hunger Games on some level are working to condition the American people to accepting on TV some sort of show trial and execution of political enemies.

One sees constantly interviews with people who find themselves in violent situations, even war, saying “it was just like a movie”.  Even though on some level we know that what we see on TV is not real, I say “why watch it if you are unwilling to suspend disbelief?”  On some level there is no difference.

I don’t think you can understand an Anders Breivik without factoring in his video games.  He calmly shot dozens of screaming children who posed no threat to him, and did so without any apparent cognitive psychosis, or even outwardly apparent rage and anger.  He reached a conclusion he deemed valid and acted towards his fellow humans as if they were images on his screen, literally.  The evidence is clear that repeatedly watching acts of violence makes them less morally objectionable in the real world, and even FUN.  And most all of our children  live in this world.  A barmaid at a bar I go to took her 3 year old to the Avengers.  This is ridiculous.

These same tendencies could easily be turned by a would-be totalitarian towards the repression of cultural others–political opponents–in any form the regime deems fit.  We have kids growing up getting sexually excited by torture.  I saw Hostel for sale in my local Books-a-Million, with I doubt ANYONE caring if kids under 18 bought it.  Eli Roth SAID it was for the 13-20 demographic.

I remember saying to myself several years ago that Obama can get his army.  He can find mutated, morally febrile, sadistic children to do anything he wants.  All he needs is the pretext and the opportunity.

In that regard, it is my hope that all of our Armed Services have contingency plans for betrayal by our President.  I have been saying for years that it is legally and morally important that our Service Members swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.  As Commander in Chief, the President is in theory the chief guardian of our Constitution, but at the precise moment he fails in that duty, and seeks to arrogate power to himself, particularly through an emergency, it is my hope that the military acts decisively to protect our Republic.  Obama has no love for it. It is only a question as to how much space he can carve out.  These people think long term, so even if he is not able to pull this thing off, we still must look to all the long term patterns around us.

It is my sincere hope that in a  Romney Administration the Surgeon General could begin speaking out about the long term deleterious effects of media violence.  I watched the movie Contagion the other night, and could have gone my whole life without seeing a facsimile of Gwenneth Paltrow have the top of her head sawed off, and this is small change by comparison with what is out there.

I like U2.  They make enjoyable music, and clearly try to help improve the world.  Today I was listening to their “All that you can’t leave behind” album, and to the topic the song “Peace on Earth”.

As I listened, I thought to myself that “peacing” is a verb.  We assume that the polar opposites are war and peace.  I do not think this is true. There will be no war in Cuba any time soon, or a war in North Korea (unless they start it).  The goal is not just the cessation of conflict and hate.  The goal is a generalized perception of an alternative to war that is BETTER than war.

War meets many needs, not least as an answer to boredom, unexpressed anger, the need for power, and sex (through rape; still common even now in many  African countries).

What is needed is the capacity to build deep, qualitative joy.  THAT is the opposite of war.  I look at U2, and they just want something to stop.  That something seems pointless, and of course in many respects it is, but not for the participants.  They all get something.

For war to end, all human beings must know how to be happy without struggle, without needing power over others.  They must learn to self generate happiness.

I have said before and will say again that for me personally, what has worked best is the Tibetan discipline of Kum Nye, which teaches the ability to feel and express emotions.  Most of us are quite atrophied in this regard.  For me personally, at times, I feel a tremendous power swell through me, a light that is contagious, that is in my view clearly from God.  It is the power to spark power in others, to help them see, to help them grow, to help them return to a light they have forgotten. It is a power I use for my own happiness, but one that shares itself.  It grows, it amplifies.

Tonight I saw my first zombie “parade”, or rather the aftermath.  All these young people, with cut clothes, and fake blood on them.  I even saw an actually pregnant woman (she had on a halter top, and her belly was plainly showing) with a bloody gash down the middle, as if the baby had been taken.

I know all this is intended in fun.  You get with your friends, and zombify your self, and groan down the streets.  Yet, everything which attracts us contains us.  I may make that a bon mot, actually.

And what is contained in zombies?  Death, of course; the loss of free will and responsibility; and membership in a group.

Life in our modern world is so confusing.  I have reason to believe I understand, as an example, economics, but it has taken years, and I am very intelligent.  For the illiterate, how to choose between Romney and Obama, and neither of the above?  Job security is scarce, and most under-30’s are working bad jobs.  And we are always presented with the real possibility of some sort of apocalypse.  I just watched Soderberg’s “Contagion” last night.  It could happen.  Nobody denies it.

Iran could EMP us.  And over time it seems to many the Chinese will become the dominant world power (I personally very much doubt this, but it is an argument that is not without merit).  Whatever is going to happen, we DON’T know what it will be.  Surprise seems inevitable.

Given all this uncertainty, would it not be easier to be dead mentally?  Is this not what the Grateful Dead evoked: a drug stoked vacation from life?

What all these people are lacking is the capacity to recognize, cognitively, all these problems, and STILL be able to find peace of mind and active happiness.  “There have always been wars and rumors of wars”.  I tell myself this periodically, and the fact is it is true.

Few random thoughts.  Stupidly long day, and now time for my preferred analgesic.

I debated in high school.  The essence of an intelligent debate involves stating a clear thesis, defining your terms, then proceeding to outline the reasons which you believe support your thesis.

I am involved in what I will call a debate for simplicity with some people about “progress”, but debating an issue without defining the core word is like wrestling an octopus in the water.

For my own purposes, then, I would like to define progress.

This summary was at the bottom, but I decided to move it to the top.  My thought process is still included below.

Summary:

1) Progress in Meaning system formation is: improvements in moral and
emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual
capacities to feel deep positive feelings.

2)  Progress in truth formation is: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.

3) Progress in political governance is: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.

4) Progress in economics:  increasing ability to provide both necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.

As I see it, the human  cultural domain breaks down into four principle tasks, each of which is improved in its own way.  Those tasks are meaning formation, truth formation, political organization, and provision of physical necessities.

The most important cultural task is providing a sense of direction and purpose, which is the principle task of what I call the meaning system.  It may, of course, be survival.  It may be pleasure.

The defining realities of human life are gravity and friction.  By this I mean that we must work to survive.  Work is effort, which many will define as pain.  It requires volitional energy.  We cannot exist indefinitely without food and water.  Physical survival involves physical work, which I will define as quantitative effort.

Plainly as economic conditions improve, options open up, after which it becomes possible to ask whether or not life is even worth living, given that it necessarily ends, and involves emotional pain for most along the way.  Answering this question requires reflection, and what I would term qualitative work.

Logically, this question is about what end a given person should pursue, which requires answering the question as to what that person wants.  If they want sensory pleasure, one path opens up.  If they want to live a life of sacrifice and dedication to a cause, another path is required.

In the end, though, what is desired is a FEELING.  This point is critical.  Our minds support our emotions, not the other way around.  Even those who claim to hew to logic alone are hewing to the FEELING of being rational.  Morality is nothing but reconciling in advance how certain types of behaviors are likely to make us feel, and either avoiding or pursuing those behaviors.

We are all in my view by nature connected.  Hurting others hurts us, even if we have the capacity to deny this fact.  And the denial that is required necessitates psychological lying, and disconnection with our core.

Given the foregoing, I would define progress in Meaning system formation as: improvements in moral and emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual capacities to feel deep positive feelings.

By moral connection I mean principally trust, in which people feel able to be open with one another, leaving both figurative and literal doors unlocked.  By emotional connection I mean the ability to enter empathetically into one anothers lives in mutually reinforcing positive ways; to support the emotional growth of others, while allowing them to support your own.

By deep positive feelings I mean deep joy and contentment; peace of mind; tranquility; the ability to easily work congruently towards chosen tasks with warmth and vitality.

I will add that in conditions of deep emotional connection it is really not necessary to have ethical “rules”.  Ethics is a topic for pre-or postethical people.

Improvement in truth formation is simple: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.

I want to be clear on this: I do not believe it is most useful to conceptualize science as something that uncovers “natural laws”, or “causal” relationships.  I say this because, first, it is impossible to say that billiard ball one NECESSARILY moves billiard ball two (I am of course following Hume here); but secondly because one of the principle flaws of science as it exists today is the tendency to assume that it deals with “objects”, as in the claim that science is “objective”.

Science is NOT objective, not least because as near as we can determine, “objects” per se do not “exist” in any final way.  All existence is contingent upon consciousness.  Subatomic particles can come into being and disappear out of a primal energy soup posited by Quantum Physics, called variously the Quantum Vacuum and the Zero Point Field.

More importantly, I think the assumption that science is objective leads to Scientism, which I would define as the creed that everything that can be seen exists in a final way, and that anything which cannot be measured does NOT exist in a final way.  People who fall prey to this flaw tend to view emotions as objects.  They use evolutionary dogma and theories of neurological response and the like to model emotions, rather than simply observe their own emotions, and note persistent connections between their own actions and their later feelings.

I was in an art museum a while back when I first realized that in the modern world emotions are objects that have no innate validity of their own; that they are understood as artifacts of physical processes, and of no intrinsic interest.  This is in part why we see some of the savagery we do in art museums; artists intuitively feel violated and marginalized by our current cultural climate, even if they cannot articulate why.

Consider, though, that emotions are fundamental to meaning formation.  In this sense, Scientism is antithetical to meaning formation.  It is a doctrine that is principally attractive to people who love power and the FEELING that it gives them.

The political system ought logically to support meaning formation.  That system is best, then, which best facilitates the free interactions of individuals.  Progress is then defined as: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.

Madison famously posited that were we ruled by angels we would need not fear them, and that if WE were angels, we would need no government.  Progress is the reduction in the need for government.  By this standard, obviously, “Progressivism” is, like everything on the left, a precise inversion of what is actually sought.

In economics, the goal of course is to provide as much as possible with as little effort as possible, making all work chosen and voluntary.  Progress, then is: increasing ability to provide necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.

One must work, to be happy.  The question is what sort of work.

This might be one way of getting at the essence of the “birther” problem, which is that we know virtually nothing about Obama other than what he tells us in his books, and we are not even sure he wrote those books.  How can someone so secretive be credible?  The reality, of course, is that the media has CHOSEN to make him credible.  Had they chosen to destroy him, it would have taken less than a week.  He is a much lesser man than Rick Perry or Herman Cain.

In any event, I posted the following at The Blaze, which I do not believe is an actual conservative site, but rather one run in the hopes of corralling conservatives and preventing them from reading elsewhere.  They do what they can to pretend to parrot conservative views–enough to keep people coming–but I think it is in large measure a propaganda operation run by an ex-Huffposter.  I don’t believe my comment will appear.  I have recently been proven wrong, but it’s been ten minutes, and I don’t feel like checking any more.

Here is the link, on a comment Mitt Romney made.  I will actually add in advance that this thesis of Frank Marshall Davis being Obama’s actual father would explain a lot.  It would explain how his mother rationalized more or less abandoning him in Hawaii–he was after all with his father–and why the timelines with Obama, Sr. seem so squirrelly (for example why she moved back to Seattle so soon after he was born).  It would also, of course, explain easily why the President would not want a literal card-carrying member of the Communist Party and admitted pedophile listed as his father.

Here is what I wrote:

It is clear that Obama has proven nothing, and
in my view there are only two possibilities: either he doesn’t have a birth
certificate, which means at a minimum he cannot claim to be able to document a
“natural born” status; or that Frank Marshall  Davis is listed as the father.

I was sitting in a bar last night looking at glasses.  They have rims, which define them.  I was looking back at my own entry into self sufficiency in my late teens, at a time I really wasn’t ready for it, and remembering feeling a sense of my mind being confined between two lines, that somehow I could not expand past.

Pondering it, I realized that the process of adulthood, of maturation, is precisely living to live between lines, of restricting yourself in some way.  You can’t have it all.  You can’t do and be all things.  You cannot simultaneously have your freedom and be in a committed relationship.  You both lose and gain when you have children.  You can’t pick both of the career paths that you want.  You can’t (in most cases) marry both of the women or men you love for different reasons.  You can’t have this house AND that house.  You can’t live here AND there.  The money you spend on A is no longer available for B, no matter how much money you have.   The costs of A and B just go up.

Looking at it, thinking, I thought that the boundaries of self you choose are what enable experience to be poured into you and retained.  If you never choose a self, if you keep all options open by making no decisions, then the beer–the experience–poured into you is wasted, since there is no receptacle to receive it.

Now, of course we all “know” that we are supposed to find ourselves.  Maybe we are supposed to spend a year hitchhiking Europe, or join a commune, or climb all the mountains in North America, or study cooking in Paris, or whatever.

It seems to me, though–and I think I have said this a number of times–that no matter what you do, it is never enough.  The thirst never ceases for something else.  I lived in Northern California, and knew a lot of people who did a lot of interesting things.  But it always seemed as if they were comparing notes as to who did the coolest stuff, and competing with one another.  They were COLLECTING.

For my part, I had done enough crazy shit by age 23 or so that I am still processing it many years later.  And I don’t know if it was worth it.  I remember being driven to do “interesting” things, but never really savoring it.  I don’t know if this is my particular problem–and no doubt I have this issue at a minimum more than most–or something general.

But think, as an example, of a Tibetan monk, spending 3 years in solitary meditation.  That is an extraordinarily narrow definition of self: “he who meditates”.  But is this not a glass with a narrow lip, but enormous potential depth?

You have to choose boundaries.  You must accept, in principle and reality, the limitations that are inherent even in the wealthiest, freest, most opportunity-rich world in human history.  This should not need saying, I would think, but I feel that it does.  I feel that we are given the implicit guarantee as children, in this country at least, that life is supposed to be easy.  This means that when confronted with the necessity of sacrifice, of constant choosing this over that, of renouncing this to have that, many of our children balk.  This is the root of grunge, and even of hippies: it is the perpetual adolescence necessitated by refusing to accept that choices have to be made.  Why not keep all options open in a dreamland fueled in no small measure by drugs?

Then I was thinking about the Buddhist concept of No Self (anatta).  Does not the Buddhadharma very narrowly define correct action?  There are all sorts of boundaries Buddhism places on monks, which are very much more strict than those of normal society.  They get a self–a behavioral code–handed to them, in a manner not that different from military recruit training.  You are born again, into a new way of living, which defines you.

Then I got to thinking about the Taoist empty cup.  The cup is empty, but by definition it can be filled.  It is not empty space alone: it is empty space FORMED within delimited space.  You don’t want the cup filled because you want to be able to take in new experience.  But if there is no cup, there is no Subject, no?

Do you want a bottomless cup?  A transparent cup?  That is where I got a little off track.  Beer was after all involved. 

Anyway, few musings from a muser.

I read where a return to the Gold Standard may be in the Republican platform, and had several comments.

First, and most importantly, I have come to realize that most money in our economy is created by banks via loans.  That money is quite separate from the money issued by the Federal Reserve, over which we in any event have no control (Bernanke is even now considering a third many-billion dollar grant to large member banks).

The only TRUE gold standard, the only way in which it is not easy to monkey with money, is the use of gold coins.  Back when we knew the gold was in Fort Knox, we were on a fractional gold reserve, which meant that some percentage of our money in circulation was backed by gold.  After FDR’s little adventure in currency devaluation, which involved coerced gold confiscation, the gold was redeemable to foreign governments, but not Americans.  After 1972, we frankly don’t have the faintest clue what happened to the gold.  I have done work at Fort Knox, and most of the soldiers there don’t think the gold is still there.  It has in their view been looted, likely by the Federal Reserve banks, who have control of that gold, and the apparently even larger cache at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Most money today is electronic.  This raises serious questions about the viability of a return to the gold standard.  In its essence, a gold standard simply makes it harder to print money, since in theory you have to add physical gold in order to add to the physical money supply.  However, I suspect EVERY nation that has had a fractional gold standard has monkeyed with it.  Physical money printing is secret, so nobody really KNOWS when you’ve printed some.  It will have inflationary effects, but most people always think inflation is like forest fires–it’s just something that happens–and it is of course often difficult to separate inflation from supply and demand.

As an example, we are told inflation has been low for years.  But the fact of the matter is that wherever fiat money is directed, inflation is enormous.  The bubble in housing prices was not the result of supply and demand, but inflation.  This is a point that is missed by many: you can have local inflation while other items, like food and clothing, remain relatively untouched.  The boom of the 1920’s was characterized by inflation in the stock market enabled by margin lending and relatively easy credit.

In my own proposal I have suggested printing 50 currencies backed by a VERY fractional gold standard.  The issue arises, though, as to the ratio of physical money to electronic money.  I have seen proposals for chits which store value, but I don’t like the potential abuse of those by power mongers.  I actually think it might be simplest to revert to 100% physical money. For electronic transfers, you could store your physical money at the bank, and they could transfer it electronically.  But for every dollar in existence, there would be a physical dollar somewhere.  Most would, I think, be in banks, for safekeeping and convenience, and titles would simply float around.

This is perhaps clumsy, and I may do better, but I think a core consideration needs to be keeping the power of money from centralizing anywhere.  We need many banks.  We need many money printers (all the States).

I have been in correspondence with Ben Dyson at Positive Money.  He has some interesting ideas, and I am hoping soon to allocate a day to contemplate them.  I have a method: I get a bunch of cigars, and a bottle of vodka, and spend the day in a cloud of smoke, contemplating.  It is useful, even if perhaps a bit odd.

What I would suggest is interesting is that conservatives in this country are more preoccupied with the Federal Reserve’s creation of money, and in Britain they are more concerned with the bank’s creation of money.  In my view BOTH have to be addressed, but of the two I think money creation by the banking private sector is actually numerically the much larger, and thus the more pressing.  Bernanke printed something over a trillion dollars and disbursed it to his pet banks, and no inflation resulted.  This is because nobody is borrowing because nobody at present has faith in a future where we have a socialist president, and the pending destruction of our healthcare system as we have known it.

But that money is all poised to create inflation, if reinvested in this country (we of course have no idea where it went, and there were of course no strings attached to receiving it), if and when people start borrowing in earnest again.  The wealth transfer has already happened.  Its signs have simply not manifested.

Long story short, I absolutely, enthusiastically support auditing the Fed, but think putting us back on some version of the gold standard is a policy decision that should be postponed until the public has a better general understanding of how banking works.

I have in the past listed four different cultural orders: Sacrificial, Sybaritic Leftism, Cultural Sadeism, and Liberalism.  That essay is here.

Today, thinking about it, it seems to me I saw more than I realized in calling the first Sacrificial.  I would submit that all traditional cultures contain as a foundational element power structures which are non-negotiable and prejudicial to some group within the society, or to external groups.  Take as an example the American Indians.  Warfare was endemic, and constant among most of them.  They often took slaves.  War is a way of entering into a power relation, and war has been a constant of human society.  The precise nature of a sacrificial culture is that in some way it is non-egalitarian with respect to some other group.

And the important point here is how it deals with pain.  It deals with pain by making some group suffer more than others.

Egalitarianism–here I intend Sybaritic Leftism–responds with the claim that suffering is unnecessary, and that no one should suffer, including paradigmatically the pain of inequality.

Cultural Sadeists claim that EVERYONE should suffer, in the NAME only of compassion and relief from pain.  There is a duel element here, which alone distinguishes it from a sacrificial order. In practice, you still have an elite that lives a relatively better life than the subjects, but rhetorically, the suffering inflicted on the masses is called benign, necessary, and for the general elevation of society.

Obviously, there have been over the years many ideological justifications of slavery.  In America, blacks were claimed to be too stupid to take care of themselves.  I would submit, though, that in Communofascism the extent of the deception, and the fact that deceit is integral to the project, requires a separate classification.

Finally, in Liberalism you choose your own pain.  You have temporary leaders, but all power is understood as mutable and negotiable, and shared.

These are intuitions which I have perhaps not expressed coherently, and it may be that I have not in fact had good ideas, but I feel there is something here worth pursuing.

We need a direction as a society.  We need to be moving towards something, something we all want.  For that to happen, we need orienting ideas.  Providing those ideas is what virtually all my on-line work is dedicated to.

Communism could I think be neatly and accurately summarized as a doctrine which amplifies the worst elements of Capitalism while destroying its best elements.

Think about it: the claim is made, as an example, that workers are wage slaves. They are entirely dependent upon parasitical Capitalists who more or less own them.  What is the Communist solution?  More of the same, with the difference that your right to change jobs, protest bad work conditions, or organize a union is blocked.  Moreover, your freedom of assembly is vitiated, as are your rights to free speech, religious affiliation, gun ownership, a fair trial, privacy, governmental representation, and to vote.

For all this, you lose the actual productive capacity of Capitalism, which even when there are clear winners and losers, does a much better job of making stuff of various sorts.  We have not had bread lines in the United States since FDR did his experiments in socialism–which included among other things the completely wasteful slaughter of many thousands of pigs in order to push prices up for SOME farmers.

Quite literally, in order to embrace these contradictions you have to engage in a cognitive derangement that could be considered with justice a mental illness.