On 2012-11-07 1:13 AM, Ted Smith wrote:
This is an extremely tired libertarian-type argument, and the
corresponding leftist-type tired argument is that the choices people
have are not real choices, because the set of choices is limited (it
isn't possible to opt out of the exchange economy) and because practical
factors (like the need to survive) act as coercing influences towards
some choices rather than others.
And when leftists take over from the market, observe what happens.
Further, as a practical matter, you cannot replace the market except
that people like you get to kill people like me while people like me are
not able to defend ourselves.. A genuinely p2p system is necessarily
anarchic, therefore necessarily market based.
When the government takes control of food to guarantee that everyone
gets fed, millions starve. In the US, the government provides
education, and most people do not get educated. The market provides
clothes and food, and everyone gets clothed and fed. The government
provides policing, and many people do not get protected. Homelessness is
pretty much proportional to government intervention in the housing market.
The argument that you are making leads to at best to the Austrian,
German and French hyperinflations, as the ever more broke government
prints up money and gives it to bums and assorted squeaky wheels, at
worst to slavery, mass murder, and famine.
If the government guarantees that everyone gets fed, it really has to
take over food production and distribution. President Camacho's non
coercive program will be attempted, but will fail
<http://blog.jim.com/economics/the-end-state-of-democracy.html>. Mao
attempted to take over food production and distribution.
Collectivisation failed. People did not voluntarily collectivize. So he
intensified the coercion. He set execution quotas. Commissars had to
find a certain percentage of traitors, and kill them. Still
collectivization failed. Collectivization was never completed, and had
it been completed, there would have been even bigger famine than there
was. The attempted collectivization resulted in something like seventy
million deaths from famine and execution.
Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" predicted the US indecisively waking a path
about half way between that which led to the hungry ghosts famine, and
that which led to the German hyperinflation, which is approximately the
path we are indeed walking, with exponentially rising deficits taking us
towards the German outcome, while legislation several thousand pages
long begetting millions of pages of regulation take us towards the
Russian and Chinese outcomes.
Leftist attacks on the market lead to social collapse and/or mass murder
where the armed left wages war on its disarmed subjects.
Leftists should stick to destroying the family. If you destroy the
family, people will not reproduce, but if you destroy the market, people
will not eat.
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