Bill Lear wrote:
So, we should cheer on the Nazis as they exterminate and rampage? We should deplore the slaughtered Czechs and Poles, Jews, gays, leftists, and others?
I truly resent this insulting when-will-you-stop-beating-your-wife kind of argument. With all these references to Nazism and stuff, it is really disgusting. How can anybody read in what I wrote a defense of the Nazis? It is really low. I could easily pay Bill in kind here, but I am not going to reply that way. Instead, I'll explain for those who got late to the thread: We were discussing the tragedy of the commons, a standard argument against communism. Wrongly or rightly, I read Paul's argument as saying that the commons are degraded not by its own internal troubles, but by the attacks from the capitalist environment. I contend that this is a very weak defense of the commons and say why. Now, isn't it evident that, if we're to build a society where exploitation, oppression, and barbarism are precluded, then such society will have to be robust? Won't it have to emerge in the middle of all that shit and prevail over it, sustain, reproduce itself?
Efficiency, elegance, beauty, fairness, and solidarity are things we should value. Brutality, waste, and selfishness are things we simply declare to be out-of-bounds, and thus not subject to any "efficiency" measurement.
You contradict yourself. Efficiency is maximal social wellbeing. It is about the value of human life. How can brutality, waste, and selfishness be out of bounds?
