Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Freedom Is Freedom From Abuse, Not Freedom To Abuse

Economic freedom is freedom from abuse and not freedom to abuse others who should be free of your abuse. The primary vehicle that a society has to restrain such abuse is the government. There is almost nothing that can be accomplished by one person alone. To accomplish a goal everyone working on it needs to do their part, and always it comes to one person to make the final decision or there is a contest of opinions that one person wins, or the goal is not achieved.

This job of making those decisions is just a job, it contains power, but is rarely the most difficult, and certainly not the most effort. But in holding that power, the person with the job is the Agent, by some level of assent, of everyone else that is affected by that goal, and how it is accomplished. As the Agent with the power, there is special responsibility to act in the interests of all, and giving one's self all the goodies and dumping all the costs on to others is tantamount to embezzlement, and criminal at least in intent.

Forming a society is one of those group goals, more complicated and spread across generations, but the structure underneath remains. Like many such groups you can only opt out by suicide, or at best distant travel, and you give assent by not doing those things.

One of the decisions in any group goal is indeed the distribution of goodies usually called wealth and perks, and it is a dysfunction of most groups that Agents see themselves as so deserving of that power that they have the right to embezzle all the goodies. They have even spent an enormous amount of those ill-gotten goodies to try and convince their clients that they actually deserve the situation as they have made it.

However any sane person who looks at the situation can see that all that embezzlement has reduced not only the lives of the client/victims but made the entire society more dysfunctional and less capable of functioning overall. Looking back we can see that even Kings lived pretty wretched lives because the freedom they suppressed prevented the accomplishments that would have benefited them as well.

It is hard to see what might be, but you can bet that this society has already fallen short of that, and is falling further as I write this.

Quotables


Intolerance

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, "My son, the battle is between 2 "wolves" inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,
kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather:

"Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."



from an old tale.


The Golden Rule
“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.”

- Rabbi Hillel


Libertarians



1.

The self made man just isn't admitting how or where he came by all those parts

---FreeDem---- Aug 2005


2.

If a man tells you that the Government cannot accomplish anything of value, then voting for him would be like hiring an Amish Auto Mechanic.
If they don't believe in the concept, they are more than likely to do a very poor job of it.


---Bob Danforth Sept. 2009



3.

Republicans never meant to cut government waste, fraud and graft, from the get-go their plan was to organize, monopolize and privatize waste, fraud and graft.



They see the civil service as meddling “middleman,” who interfered with the free flow of cash from taxpayers into corporate coffers. Their intent was to eliminate the “middleman” as an obstruction to corruption.


---Unknown rabblerowser Feb 2007





Patriotism:


No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

Edward R. Murrow




In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot

Mark Twain






Leadership:





You see, we often get noncreative leaders, people most interested in preserving their own positions. They flock around centers of power. Such centers attract people who can be corrupted. That is a more descriptive observation than to say simply that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.



If you are corruptible and your imagination is confined to worries about loss of power, you exist in a self-destructive system. Eventually, as all life does, you must encounter something you did not anticipate, and if you have not strengthened your creative resources, you will have no new ways for adapting to change. Adapt or die, that's the first rule of survival.



The limited vision of noncreative people is not difficult to understand. Creativity frightens the unimaginative. They don't know what's happening. Things new and unexpected arise from creativity. This threatens "things as they are." And (terrible thought) it undermines illusions of omnipotence.

Frank

Herbert 1984 (the year not the book)






News:




"News is what powerful people want to keep hidden; everything else is just publicity."

....Bill Moyer






Religion:



1.
Just as having only a hammer makes every problem either look like a nail, or as something irrelevant, our very technological skills have had us look there for explanations and ignore reality it cannot deal with. With our powerful hammer, we seek only nails, and dump the rest as dross. Not all questions involve hammers, not all answers are nails.
-- Freedem---Nov., 2006



2.
My issue with Atheists is not that they have no God, there are many religions that have no God, but that they have no religion.
-- Freedem---Nov., 2006



__Note: by this I mean that there are many things religions do besides the discredited "science" and self serving promises (give me your money and God will hold and pay the note), many like charity or fellowship, even social accountability can be very good things not requiring a God.




3.

Many have been very disappointed that their "God-critter" was not to be found as a technology swimming about in the shallower pools of knowledge. So in the obsession basic to our culture, we search ever deeper and more difficult pools, and always the "God-critter" seems to wink at us from the pool just beyond.



In the process we have found technologies beyond the wildest dreams of our most sophisticated ancestors. The great joke is that the "critter" never existed except as the pools themselves.



----Freedem --- Oct 2006



4.
Indeed I do think that many folk, believe all kinds of stuff from the actually true, to the utterly illogical, with no personal discernment one from the others. But that would hardly make any of them a scholar to rely on, any more that one should get their theology studies from a door to door salesman, offering "get out of hell free" cards, on special because the creator of galaxies in greater numbers than beach sand, nonetheless has an ego so weak He cannot exist without shamelessly excessive psychophancy from a major portion of the inhabitants of this particular dust speck.



----Freedem ---June-2007



More to come