You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Steemians: What's your economic philosophy?

in #dtube7 years ago

Nope. It hasn't been tried. Yet, is that a reason to keep trying the same things over and over again? Is that a reason to keep having the same arguments that have already occurred for more than a century and not learn the lessons from the outcomes of those discussions and experiments?

I tend to believe in Anarchy as my Utopian goal. Not Anarchy in the Chaos bent but rather in what it really means. From Anarchos meaning No Rulers. Noone with the right to tell others how they must live. There can still be naturally occurring leaders you can choose to voluntarily follow or not follow as time suits you and depending on the task/purpose. Yet a leader is not the same as a ruler.

However, I do try to be realistic. I do not believe the world is ready for Anarchy. We have some human nature problems that are great at corrupting ANY system no matter how great it sounds. The only way to counter human nature is with education and giving people the tools to notice those things and resit them. The problem is the education systems seem to be removing those tools at a steady pace. It leaves the populace largely emotionally driven rather than rationally. It turns most topics into something akin to a religion with how intractable people are. It leaves a population that has forgotten that not only is okay to be wrong occasionally, it is an important part of learning. The tool that is lacking is critical thinking, and particularly the ability to identify and notice the large amounts of logical fallacies that are used in almost every discussion. A lot of appeal to emotion, appeal to popularity, appeal to authority, and appeal to the stone fallacies. Being able to critically think gives the tools for people of disagreeing points of view to still be able to work together. Without it, it tends to lead to intollerance and one trying to destroy the other.

This is not an environment Anarchy would do well. Honestly, it is not an environment that ultimately any ideology will do well in other than for the short term.

We need to be willing to try new things. If they fail. Learn from it. Adjust. We need to stop recycling the same ideas and same systems and expect a different outcome.

We also need to stop WHAT IFing to death things that have not been tried. Some things we may not be able to see other options until we at least try them. Does the new thing have to be anarchy? No. Yet it should be new, rather than being stuck on the hamster wheel repeating the same crap over and over that has been done in history.

I choose to target critical thinking as the windmill I tilt at. Why? I don't see most ideologies working in the long run unless most of our population becomes skilled at critical thinking.

I believe in freedom. I endorse voluntarism.

Free Market Capitalism only remains Free Market until the government steps in. All aspects of monopolies and such people try to lay at the feet of Free Market actually seem to involve government interaction either in the form of laws, restrictions from competition, etc. Do they happen yes? Yet, I haven't been able to find examples where that happened for longer than a short period before the market corrected that didn't persist without the assistance of government.

Furthermore socialism and communism basically both become ultimate forms of monopoly. Socialism is cronyism to it's core. The thing that corrupts capitalism is cronyism. It also impacts communism. Could any of those ideologies work? Maybe. Yet that same human nture problem can corrupt any ideology. That is what I was getting at.

I don't believe I have the right to tell you or anyone else how they should live.
I also don't believe other people have the right to tell me how I should live.

Quantity of people is irrelevant. There is no magic number where force suddenly becomes acceptable.