On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Craig <[email protected]> wrote:
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. > We've had legal jurisdictions set out on the basis of geography since the time of Hammurabi, and no doubt long before then. What you're proposing here as valid and invalid are things that human society hasn't agreed upon in many thousands of years of its existence. I respectfully submit that your proposal, if it could be translated into a coherent program of ruling through "nonviolence," would be as radical as the cultural revolution in China was, or as radical as land reform in communist Russia during the 1920s and 30s was, during which many millions of people died through starvation. The way society currently works is it has law courts and police and elected representatives; I would prefer to iterate on this model than replace it wholesale. But the wealthy don't become wealthy by stealing money. They acquire > wealth through voluntarily providing goods and services to others. Many wealthy people make their wealth through legitimate means. Many others use everything up to and including illegal means to generate their wealth. In the past there were the robber barons and the industrial monopolies. Today we have a whole new bag of legal tricks to centralize wealth in the hands of a few. Legitimacy and hard work often have little to do with the accumulation of wealth in such instances. It can be as simple as using other peoples' pensions to game the stock market through leveraged trades -- this is the socialization of risk and the privatization of gain. The only reason such transactions have a patina of legitimacy is because people are ignorant about how economics and finance work. Eric
