On 10/21/2013 03:59 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > Craig <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > Who wants to slow down technology? I want to stop the subjugation of > people through threats of violence. > > > You seem obsessed by this notion. No one threatens you today with > violence if you do not use electricity in your house. It is a fact > that you cannot build a house in Georgia or Pennsylvania without > electricity and a flush-toilet. That's enforced by law, which I > suppose in some sense means it is backed by violence. For that matter, > so is a library fine. In actual fact, no one is going to come after > you for having a house with no flush toilet. (I have one.)
Yes, I'm referring to the law. The law is backed by violence and threats of violence. Library fines are agreed upon when a person signs up for the library; but it's not valid to take a large geographic area and claim the authority to control the actions of all the people within it. > > Technological imperatives enforce themselves. As Kettering said, you > will install self-starters, willy-nilly. > > > > A couple of points: > > If human labor is worthless, then wealth will be prevalent; and when > wealth is prevalent, there will be a lot of people willing to share > wealth. > > > History shows you are wrong. Present conditions show you are wrong. We > have tons of wealth today, but it is concentrated in the hands of very > few people. If they had their way, they would take the rest if it. > Wealthy people in general are never inclined to share their money. How many billions is Bill Gates giving away? Warren Buffet? There are a lot of wealthy philanthropists. But the wealthy don't become wealthy by stealing money. They acquire wealth through voluntarily providing goods and services to others. When you go into a Starbucks store and buy a cup of coffee, there is a win-win relationship established. You value the coffee more than the $3 in your pocket, and Starbucks values the $3 more than the cup of coffee. You can't aggregate millions of small win-win transactions into a large win-lose transaction. The wealthy can't hurt anyone. If one person was able to acquire 99% of all the world's wealth, the no one would be worse off because wealth is not money, but rather, it is the sum of all goods and services produced in society which is wealth. Such a wealthy man as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, are only spending money they acquired by giving value to other people; and when they die, they've pledged their money to causes that even you would probably think good. > > > You don't have to force people to use your currency, fill out > your forms, pay your taxes, so that you can then distribute the wealth > through some central bureaucracy. > > > You do if you want live in a first-world society, with traffic signals > and influenza vaccinations from the CDC. If you do not compel people > to pay for these things, you end up with a country like Mexico, China, > or at worst, Somalia. We may have to disagree on the facts here, but if a person 'wants' to live in a first-world country, and it is a 'fact' that the only way to do it is to give money to a central authority so that the central authority can spend it, instead of allowing the individual to spend it himself; then once these facts are presented to people, they would sign up for such an arrangement voluntarily. This is my point about the Woodlands. People like order. They like beauty. They like roads, courts, police, parks, and all things they take for granted, and it's not difficult to get them to agree to it once they see how these benefits will be provided for the money they spend. > > > > None of these things: highways, airports, telephones, sewers, > water, and > nuclear power plants, have to be centralized through some government > agency, which prevents competition. > > > Yes they do. That's how things work today. Maybe in the future they > will not, but most of these things are paid for by taxes and > administered by the government. This is how things work because governments prevent competition through laws, taxes, and self-imposed monopoly privilege. It never had to be this way, and in most cases didn't start out this way. > > > There are many people who are more > than willing to provide the services that other people need. > > > No there are not, and even if there were, they could not afford to do > it for free. I did not mean that they would be provided for free. Craig
