🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1gc05sINNq1u@agate.berkeley.edu> curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
>
>If fifty-one percent of the population of Canada decided that
>anyone with a post-consonant 'h' in their name should be sent
>to a concentration camp, would you go?

The old Libertarian analogy, based on the idea (clearly stated in
Libertarian ideology) that money has the same basic value as Life,
Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness (to borrow a phrase from that
country to the south of here).

This is nonsense.  Money has no intrinsic value - it is a social
convention, an artificial measure of prosperity.  How much money you
have is a direct result of the opportunities provided to you by the
society you live in - in other words, you didn't earn that wealth all by
yourself, but had a lot of help doing it.  You didn't pay for the roads
that brought you food, society did.  You didn't pay for your schools,
society did.  (You may or may not have paid all or part of the direct
costs of your education, but that wouldn't have done you much good if
others hadn't built the schools, accumulated the knowledge.)  So the
idea that you single-handedly earned the money that goes through your
hands is either naive or arrogant - the society you live in helped you
get your hands on that money, and therefore has a partial claim to it.

Before you can claim that that money is all "mine mine mine!", you'd
better be prepared to show that you really did earn it all by yourself,
without any external assistance.  (And not all this assistance can be
quantified, priced, bought and sold!)

       The Rhealist - nadeau@bnr.ca - Speaking only for myself