04-18-2021, 05:30 PM
(04-17-2021, 07:16 AM)David Horn Wrote:(04-17-2021, 03:04 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-17-2021, 01:16 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(04-17-2021, 12:41 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I'd say that's an illusion associated with money and I'll leave it at that. As far as it flowing in accordance with natural laws, it's pretty much true. The fittest either have or end up with most of it. There are some exceptions, Kamala Harris comes to mind. She must have a magic pussy to get where she is today. You know what a magic pussy is right. I'd say most if not all of the exceptions are directly related to the Democratic party these days.
Us Democrats have a way of seeing that some money flows away from whom you think are the "fittest." So, when we win, we interrupt that flow and steer some of the money away from the "fit" fat cats. So much for "natural flow" eh? Unless the state is pretty "natural" after all. Humans have never been without one. But as for Harris, yes I think she played her feminine assets very well, but I don't know if she is rich. Powerful, maybe a bit.
You must have missed this sentence. "The fittest either have or end up with most of it." Read my post again, you'll see it. I acknowledged that the laws of nature aren't always perfect. I mean, a corporal being granted ultimate authority over generals defies the laws of nature but nature prevailed.
Replace 'fittest' with either 'most aggressive' or 'greedy' if you prefer, but fittest is simply wrong. Mahatma Gandhi was penniless but more than fit. He is only one of thousands ... maybe millions.
Moral strength means not needing to indulge oneself, which distinguishes Mohandas Gandhi from those who have their own self-indulgence as an objective. Think of how pathetic it must be to be a crooked hustler like Steve "Caught on a Yacht" Bannon or Don Lapre, a real-estate hustler who allegedly showed people how to get rich in real estate but simply took their money, committed suicide when caught for fraud. Lapre was living some exaggerated Good Life until he faced a not-so-good-life as a long-term denizen of some federal penitentiary. The crookedest politicians of all time, the ones who use their authority to enrich themselves, are abominations. Yes, high political office and senior military rank typically comes with nice perquisites, but those are privileges necessary for doing the job.
It may be that the most effective entrepreneurs are so busy creating wealth that they don't get a chance to enjoy it. (It is also possible to create wealth without enjoying the wealth, which one can say of people greatly overworked and underpaid; people terribly overworked and underpaid are creating wealth for people other than themselves. Such is the potential for great inequity within capitalism, and one of the great objections that can arise from capitalism. Maybe such is necessary in the early-industrial era in which skill and productivity are both low and the economic order needs severe exploitation to create wealth in the form of productive capital. In times more clearly modern, when capitalists need a market and the proletariat must become mass consumers as well as toilers, volume makes up for reduced margins of profit.
Some people are far better at making a contribution than at demanding their due. To ensure that they get their due, they may need a labor union so that they not be exploited egregiously. Let us remember that we still need far more people making the banal stuff and servicing it or making it useful. We need more movie ushers than film stars. We need more people to milk cows than we need dairy owners. We need more people to clean at the universities than we need college professors. Figure that if one is a highly-successful pop musician that one contributes to making jobs for delivery people and warehouse workers than for fellow musicians, and that if one is a successful author, then much the same is true.
I don't know where the line is, but an economic order that requires mass suffering to make the wealth of a few possible is still poor. Obscene poverty may be a characteristic of a very poor country that hardly has enough to share, but a country that uses hunger and homelessness to ensure that the masses suffer (which includes hating their very lives) so that the elites have command and control is sick. Slums and sweatshops are evidence of either underdevelopment or a perverse economic order. To be sure, profit is necessary for keeping owners and administrators rational in their behavior (so that pork producers do not feed pork to their pigs, which would violate the economic equivalent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics), choose efficiency over sloth and obsolescence, and heed the desires of customers; even so, some of the means of getting or enhancing a profit can do great harm. Nobody denies that human trafficking and drug dealing are profitable even if such activities are abominations.
Egregious displays of wealth in the presence of great poverty offend many sensibilities.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.