Do you think 100 billion dollars in assets can be morally accumulated? I do not. — Bitter Crank

Neither do I. In America, we have this notion of "deserve" which is often tied to having worked hard, or worked smart, or having worked hard and smart. We also have a high tolerance for "luck", as in the lottery. But the lucky usually pay taxes. Those who work hard also pay taxes.

Those who work smart think it's smart to legally avoid taxes. Indeed, they shovel a percentage of their gains into lobbying for legislation which makes as much tax avoidance as possible legal. So, basically, we need to do two things: 1. Amend the laws and apply a progressive tax with deductions limited to proven investment into something that benefits everyone except for the would-be taxpayer; and 2. Enact claw-back provisions for anyone who would try to run or hide, especially when they see #1 pending. This would include civil, peaceful means, of course. Followed by draconian criminal pursuit. Followed lastly be Tier One Operators rolling these ex pat criminals up in the middle of the night and spiriting them off to black sites for "enhanced interrogation" regarding where they stashed our money.

It's good for people to understand civic responsibility.

Let me clarify a point: There is a great deal of difference in quantity and quality between a low level of inequality and an extremely high level of inequality. Perfect equality is unobtainable, but a low level of inequality can be obtained. A low level of inequality might be where the average high pay, average large asset holdings, is only 10 times the average low pay, average low asset holding. So, a 25,000 a year wage earner would be on the low end, 250,000 would be on the high end. A low level of inequality also means that most of the people would hold most of the assets. There would not be room for Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

First, we, as a society, need to distinguish between true capitalism and the faux shit spouted by today's self-identified capitalists who are quick to socialize their costs, hide behind big government's skirts, and refuse to take personal responsibility for their own actions.

Once we understand that difference, then the only objection a socialist might have to capitalism is how the capitalist came into possession of "his" personal property in the first place.
18 hours ago — James Riley

Oh yeah! If it were not for government contracts there would not be so much wealth. This is one of the biggest problems with big government! There is virtually no control of the money.

Corporate personhood should NOT exist legally because a corporation is not a person.

All human beings should have the right to unionize just as capitalists have a right to form corporations.

But this might be getting off-topic and in a philosophy forum, some interesting things might be said of the power and purpose of the different human unions? Should we start such a thread?

If it were not for government contracts there would not be so much wealth. This is one of the biggest problems with big government! There is virtually no control of the money. — Athena

There is no problem with big government. The problem is those who own and operate it. And that is not the people. That is the Plutocracy. And make no mistake about it: They control the money.

Corporate personhood should NOT exist legally because a corporation is not a person.

All human beings should have the right to unionize just as capitalists have a right to form corporations. — Athena

:100: :up:

P.S. People do have the right to unionize. Unfortunately, they don't have a right to prevent scabs or other efforts by the Plutocracy to increase the labor supply, thus reducing demand and value of labor. They just run over seas to the billions of people getting 30 cents an hour. The Plutocracy's rising tide lifts Chinese boats.

↪Athena Let me clarify a point: There is a great deal of difference in quantity and quality between a low level of inequality and an extremely high level of inequality. Perfect equality is unobtainable, but a low level of inequality can be obtained. A low level of inequality might be where the average high pay, average large asset holdings, is only 10 times the average low pay, average low asset holding. So, a 25,000 a year wage earner would be on the low end, 250,000 would be on the high end. A low level of inequality also means that most of the people would hold most of the assets. There would not be room for Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. — Bitter Crank

:lol: Zuckerberg sponsors public broadcasting shows, and with my limited hearing I hear "suck a bird". Not until I saw your spelling of the name did I realize what I hear is not exactly what is said.

On to the point you made. I wish my poor brain would do math and then that economic explanations came with the math. I think it is stupid as hell to demand higher wages and then blame the government for inflation! And what kind of sense does it make to restrict how rich a person can get? Restricting how people get rich makes sense to me, but not the amount.

Now taxing the wealthy makes sense because I knew a man who won a shrimp picking plant in a poker game, and this resulting in him having so much money he had to invest it to avoid paying too much in taxes. Of course, his investment would mean more money the next year, so he would have to invest even more money! That meant his need to invest lead to the community having new businesses and more jobs.

But the shrimp picking plant put many people out of work because before the machine came in, the shrimp was picked by hand and this meant more people got a wage off of the same industry. I thought it would have been so much better if the people who lost their jobs, could have bought the plant and each taken a turn at doing the far fewer jobs, with everyone getting a wage. But- maybe someone getting rich and starting more businesses was better for the community? Only with math can we know that. Capitalism is not just getting rich, it is developing a growing economic base for increasing wealth.

And all those silver and gold mining towns that went belly up when the mines were exhausted were very poorly managed because the profit from the mineral should have been invested in a source of income that would replace the income from the mine, then all the landowners and businesses would have kept the value of their land and businesses. I think that is how government should work. It is really stupid to build up property value and businesses and let it all die because of poor planning.

:lol: At this moment in time, I wonder if anyone would believe I normally argue in favor of socialism. But it is my nature to be contrary and no matter what someone says, I am going to think of an argument.

Same guy. But he was not alone. Most men of the Enlightenment were headed down a liberal, if not radical road. — James Riley

I think that needs to be clarified by saying most educated men. The masses were not educated except by their church. Some churches had well-educated leaders and many did not. The well-educated men were literate in Greek and Roman classics (classical/liberal education), but even their colleges were tied to religion, not science and technology. On the other hand, the Masons were more excited about what science might reveal and really focused on the Enlightenment and New Age. They might have been deist, but not so much interested in unenlightened religion. I feel like this needs to be brought out because Christian control of education would lead us to believe Christianity gave us an understanding of democracy and that is not exactly true. No one saw anything to do with democracy in the Bible until there was literacy in the classics and if we are to defend democracy we need to be literate in the classics, not the Bible.

I think that needs to be clarified by saying most educated men. — Athena

:up:

P.S. People do have the right to unionize. Unfortunately, they don't have a right to prevent scabs or other efforts by the Plutocracy to increase the labor supply, thus reducing demand and value of labor. They just run over seas to the billions of people getting 30 cents an hour. The Plutocracy's rising tide lifts Chinese boats. — James Riley

“Right to work” is the name for a policy designed to take away rights from working people. Backers of right to work laws claim that these laws protect workers against being forced to join a union. The reality is that federal law already makes it illegal to force someone to join a union.

Right to Work | AFL-CIO — AFL-CIO

The price of the $5 dress is sweatshops and low wages. This is a consumer choice, not just the plutocracy's choice.

Greenspan would have loved to have had the control of money that he thought he did. He was wrong to deregulate banks, and that crashed all the industrial economies. That was not within the power of a plutocracy. There are different economic theories and for sure big government can not control money. One reason our government can not control spending is that the amount of money that is being spent is beyond comprehension.

“Right to work” — AFL-CIO

I live in a RTW state. RTW for starvation wages so the tax payers pick up the tab with food stamps and the Plutocrats laugh all the way to where ever they feel like.

That was not within the power of a plutocracy. — Athena

Everything except time and nature is within the power of the Plutocracy. And they are fighting those, too.

Everything except time and nature is within the power of the Plutocracy. And they are fighting those, too. — James Riley

It is only Satan. The Bible has told us of the last days and here we are. I think that is as much of a fact as I believe Plutoncrats are the problem. In other words, I don't believe those explanations and think things are more complex than those simple beliefs of evil powers.

I don't believe those explanations and think things are more complex than those simple beliefs of evil powers. — Athena

To each his own. Nothing is more simple or lacking in complexity than pointing a finger at "big government" with no understanding of how governments can and should work. How the Plutocracy prevents that understanding is anything but simple, and they even have people thinking big government is evil. But yeah, you can keep following their lead if you want.

.

Of course nobody wishes...to fall into severe addiction or substance abuse... — Outlander

Ah, sorry...just can't help responding to this one. When you say "fall into", you mean as if one slipped on the bank and fell into the river? This is a sloppy use of a pat expression which is hopefully not reflective of your thinking. Saying that "I fell into drug abuse" is akin to the young lad saying "that rock broke your window, Mr.Jones", as opposed to "I broke your window with that rock, Mr. Jones"...a linguistic evasion of responsibility. Better had you simply said "Of course nobody wishes...to become a severe addict or substance abuser."

NO ONE WANTS TO BE JUST A HOUSEWIFE!
— Athena

Just a housewife? Oh.. oh wow. My dear lady, with all due respect have you gone mad? What greater role is there in human development than the role of a constantly present and nurturing mother? — Outlander

I think you might have misread Athena's use of this expression. Rather, I think she(?) used it as exemplary of the social thinking against which she is railing with this thread, the fact of which becomes clear from her following sentence:

NO ONE WANTS TO BE JUST A HOUSEWIFE! How well I remember the "New Woman" magazine and the destruction of the value of a full-time homemaker. — Athena

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and as Hitler and Neitzche, the cry is to be superior and crush the weak. — Athena

As did Adolf Hitler, Athena, you completely...utterly misunderstand Nietzsche, which is easy enough to do as he often wrote in allegory, but I enjoin you to read him a bit more deeply, and with some guidance if that is found necessary. You cheapen he who was a profound thinker when you place him in category alongside someone like Hitler. In a nutshell, Neitzsche's "will to power" did not describe the striving to be superior over others, it described the striving of one's own will against other wills, in other words the striving to have one's own will done, as well as the striving to self-mastery, and his "Ubermensch" is he who has perfected self-mastery. @Joshs renders a clear though succinct exposition of this in my current "will" thread. Wait...am I still on the "Philosophy Forum" site??

Loyalty to the family has gone to hell and dependence on the state has increased. — Athena

Personally, I believe family is more important than individuals. Love of state over love of family is reminiscent of Hitler's fascism. — Athena

Your thesis in brief. I agree with your observations for the most part, but I disagree with your conception of the mechanism at work. I don't think that the percieved "decline of the family" is caused by an increased dependence upon the state. Rather, I think that the erosion of the concept of family, and particularly of "lineage", attended the revolutionary genesis of the American nation. This country was formed as a reaction against aristocracy, and by extension thereof, as a reaction against the concept of "lineage". This anti-lineage stance was early on codified within American law within such principles as "the Rule Against Perpetuities". The results of this today are that the concept if "lineage" has been so weakened in the American mind, that the expression of that concept is usually met with reactions of incredulity.

When you do away with the "lineage", all you are left with for a concept of "the family", is the impotent "nuclear family", which is not a strong enough conception to withstand the onslaught of society's claims upon the individual person, and the claims of the nationalistic spirit for the affections of the individual. Why do you think we have the national anthem, the "pledge of allegiance" to the flag, various allegorical stories about the "founding fathers" of the country (many of which are utterly fabricated, like the G. Washington "cherry tree" fable, or embellished to the point of unrecognizability, like the "Paul Revere's Ride" nonsense), and other similar nationalistic devices? These are simply items of propaganda meant to secure the affections of a people left rootless by the destruction of the concept of "lineage", to a giant abstraction called "the state". This, of course, supported by more recent types of propaganda emanating from socialist thought (oddly placing nationalism and socialism in bed together), has been wildly successful in America, and are the reason for the diminishment of the weak "nuclear family". I might agree with @James Riley about the importance of community within a tribalistic or small communistic context, but within the context of "the state", the word "community" loses all of it's meaning, since the state makes all of the claims upon the individual that the community once did. This claiming obscures the fact that there is no true community within the context of the state. In the end, all who buy into the state's remonstration about "community" are left as no more than isolated individuals dependent upon and utilizing the state's willingness to mediate all traditional community functions in the creation of a type of "community by proxy", which leaves the state as the intermediary and arbiter of all function.

I might agree with James Riley about the importance of community within a tribalistic or small communistic context, but within the context of "the state", the word "community" loses all of it's meaning, since the state makes all of the claims upon the individual that the community once did. This claiming obscures the fact that there is no true community within the context of the state. In the end, all who buy into the state's remonstration about "community" are left as no more than isolated individuals dependent upon and utilizing the state's willingness to mediate all traditional community functions in the creation of a type of "community by proxy", which leaves the state as the intermediary and arbiter of all function. — Michael Zwingli

That makes a lot of sense. I just think it's never been tried here, and where it has been tried (almost every first world ally we have) it beats the hell out of what we have now. The "state" will indeed make demands on the citizens, but the citizen will be making demands too. In fact, citizens are now making demands but they are drowned out by counter-democratic marginalizing and division techniques of the Plutocracy and their foreign allies like Russia.

But here's the upshot, for me anyway: After what we just went through, and what I perceive to be as the accelerating vortex, I'm willing to throw what is left to lose on the table with a roll of the dice. I know I'm not the one to suffer the most if it fails, but who dares wins. Go Bernie! Go AOC! What we usher in could be better than what our allies have.

YMMV.

That makes a lot of sense. I just think it's never been tried here, and where it has been tried (almost every first world ally we have) it beats the hell out of what we have now. — James Riley

Sure, it's not been fully realized, but we can yet draw some conclusions about the relationship (or the lack thereof) between state brokerage of social function and it's effects on "community" from the tendencies that we have experienced as a society, can we not? From the height of the Industrial Revolution, say roughly 1840, until the present time, we have experienced the government, the "state", gradually increase it's role as the intermediary of social function. This has been absolutely necessary, especially in countering the effects of industrialists' creation of a situation which ignored the humanity of it's human resoure, and of industrialization's causing a static social milieu devoid of any mechanism for social mobility, and of a wealth gap which had the working class living in squalor. The.part played by the state in remedying that economic situation has been necessary and good, and was well executed by the government. However, as the government has picked up more and more function over the years, we have experienced an increasing personal isolation in American society. The individual American seems more isolated now than he was before industrialization, with each of us occupying, both actually and metaphorically, our own little boxes.

This is good and bad, but has been largely good...for at least most of us all have little boxes to occupy! Even so, "community" as I understand that word, seems to neither have been built nor increased. The modern "epidemic" of American homelessness, which has grown alongside increasing social brokerage by the state, testifies to this fact. I have known people from West Africa, for instance, who cannot comprehend how so many people can be homeless in a country like America, where there are so many resources. In their countries, anyone who has no place to live is generally taken in by family, friends or acquaintances...the concept is that people cannot just be left out in the byways without help. This type of idea, of course, is a communal one, a notion of community. The fact that it appears to be absent here in the U.S. seems indicative that there is no sense of "community" here. The suggestion that an increased brokeraging function by government results in society becoming more communal appears, to myself, illusory. Individual communities of people (in the truest, fullest sense of that term) can exist within the nation-state, but I think that despite the fact of the state, rather than because of any action or functioning of the state as the intermediary of social function.

American government has always been a good faith actor throughout our history. We have been blessed, largely because of the Constitution and the structure of our government, with a government which has held the welfare of the populace to be of the foremost importance. But overreach is a potential problem for any actor, whether that actor be a government or an individual. Safeguards against overreach are always desirable. I think that our government has begun to overreach in certain respects of it's functioning, and to do so because of specific reasons. Recently, and going forward, there appear a couple of phenomena which have the power to threaten to make the government derail, and, while yet remaining protective of the society as a whole, jump to a track somewhat less friendly to the individual American. In particular, I fear that individual liberty and individual privacy, which have always been viewed as guaranteed, appear to be vulnerable to subordination to the attainment of certain social goals.

The phenomena of international crime and of international terror has caused the government to seemingly subordinate the civil and privacy rights of the citizenry to the desire for security. In general, I think this a bad development. The concurrent phenomenon of the institutionalization of the "progressive movement" within American liberalism, which institutionalization began in the aftermath of the "counterculture" movements of the 60's, has resulted in an increased willingness to subordinate those same individual civil and privacy rights to the attainment of (generally good) social goals. I am fully in favor of most of those goals, for example of universal healthcare (I don't know how anybody could oppose this from a conceptual standpoint), but not at the expense of my individual liberty or my individual privacy. The recent rapid increases in information technology have served to make my liberty and my privacy much more vulnerable to encroachment than they have been previously, which frightens me. The development of applicable law to safeguard individual liberty and privacy has not kept pace with the developments in information technology, leaving the population vulnerable. The recent Administration plan to have the IRS monitor the bank accounts of individual citizens is anathematic to myself.

There are a couple of things at play here. We can start with sheer population growth. To have a larger population without a larger government would be an interesting trick that I would like to see performed on some other group that wanted it. We can observe and see how that works out for them. But human nature has me not wanting to participate in the experiment.

Another concern is the same issue that I see with Athena: A continued focus on government itself, while giving a pass to the actors who have purchased the government; and who have it do it's bidding, run interference for them, and keep the population off balance so they can continue their idea of what constitutes "government". Some times that includes tossing a bone or some bread and circuses, but the the real goal is to walk that tight rope between keeping the cow alive and producing, right at the margin of bovine health. This results in virtually all of the problems you mention in the back-and-forth of government getting torn between caring for the cow and keeping the farmer from killing it. Meanwhile, the farmer just wants to make sure the cow doesn't kill him.

To the extent the U.S. government has always been a good faith actor, it is due to the few remaining glimmers of democracy that twinkle under the ever-growing cover of Plutocratic darkness. That darkness does not want community any more than a conservative wants their child to return from college with enlightenment. Produce, consume, shut up. Community is getting together to rail against government. That is the kind of community the Plutocrats support.

[Side bar: Did Venezuela fail because democratic socialism is inherently flawed? Or did it fail because external bad actors were ostracizing it on the outside and fucking with it on the inside? (Agent provocateurs, CIA BS, etc.) I think the latter. And those same tactics are used here at home.]

As far is privacy is concerned, I like to draw on an old health care example: I absolutely supported the confidentiality of me and my family's personal medical information . . . when I thought the health insurance industry was going to use it against me or mine. But once pre-existing conditions were met, caps were removed, and conditions covered, I supported the widespread dissemination of my private medical information to every freaking nurse and doctor on the planet. I'm always surprised out how there is no centralized data base somewhere that a doctor in Timbukto could pull up and consult if I get hauled in for treatment. I'm always surprised that I have to remember what happened to me 30 years ago, or what my ancestors experienced in the way of cancer or whatever.

My point here is, the only people who give a shit about your personal information are those who can or would use it against you. That is only government when government is controlled by money and not people. We, as individuals, just aren't that important for government to spy upon us unless government is controlled by bad actors. That is an absence of community right there. Community helps people. And community also recognizes the desire of someone to be left alone if they want. But being left alone might entail a limitation on access to community resources. Don't want to pay taxes? Fine, but stay off the roads the community built, etc.

I have a friend who works for FINCEN. They track every transaction of $10k. This is designed to track money laundering, drug and human trafficking, etc. In other words, it is designed to neuter cartel activity. Cartels are the other side of the Plutocratic coin: both leave the other alone to their shenanigans (caveat below) while maintaining government to do their dirty work and serve as a punching bag or foil. Both will cause government to fail in this or that provision of services, then provide that service and endear themselves to the "community". Anyway, I digress. What I'm getting at is, I don't know why the IRS is planning to snoop on yet even smaller transactions, but it will only be for nefarious reasons if government itself is working for Plutocrats or cartels. When the tug of war gets too close to the margins, then the Plutocracy will use government to pursue the the cartels. But those cartels are just wannabe Plutocrats so they have their own struggles.

The point being, if people want small government they should work toward a small population. If they want responsive government, they need to wrest control back to themselves.

man, you speak with remarkable shrewdness when not imitating a sailor firing the big "F bomb" guns of the main battery. It is very refreshing to read! I don't have time to write much at the moment, but I want to respond to a couple of your comments.

To have a larger population without a larger government would be an interesting trick...The point being, if people want small government they should work toward a small population. If they want responsive government, they need to wrest control back to themselves. — James Riley

Regarding this, I have come to feel that most of our nation-states are just simply too large, in many cases far too large, for them to operate on a reasonably human scale. Generally, our states were founded in one of two ways: according to shared language, with the idea being that the entirety of a linguistic group should comprise a single state, or otherwise by the necessities of colonial administration. This has resulted in a slate of very large states which naturally tend to develop an administrative remoteness from the concept of the individual citizen, leaving only the judiciary to be concerned with individual rights. I don't have any good answers for this, but it seems like a bit of a problem.

I don't have any good answers for this, but it seems like a bit of a problem. — Michael Zwingli

Agreed. I've long been an advocate of drastic population reduction (for environmental reasons). But I would not want to return to disparate groups of people scattered around the world in isolation. We'd just start the same roll all over again if that happened. We need to progress, forward, and grow smarter and wiser, not bigger. I don't see that happening but if we were all we crack ourselves up to be, then we could figure it out.

↪Outlander I think you might have misread Athena's use of this expression. Rather, I think she(?) used it as exemplary of the social thinking against which she is railing with this thread, the fact of which becomes clear from her following sentence:
NO ONE WANTS TO BE JUST A HOUSEWIFE! How well I remember the "New Woman" magazine and the destruction of the value of a full-time homemaker.
— Athena

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and as Hitler and Neitzche, the cry is to be superior and crush the weak.
— Athena

As did Adolf Hitler, Athena, you completely...utterly misunderstand Neitzsche, which is easy enough to do as he often wrote in allegory, but I enjoin you to read him a bit more deeply, and with some guidance if that is found necessary. You cheapen he who was a profound thinker when you place him in category alongside someone like Hitler. In a nutshell, Neitzsche's "will to power" did not describe the striving to be superior over others, it described the striving to self-mastery, and the "Ubermensch" is he who has perfected self-mastery. Joshs renders a clear though succinct exposition of this in my current "will" thread. Wait...am I still on the "Philosophy Forum" site??

Loyalty to the family has gone to hell and dependence on the state has increased.
— Athena
Personally, I believe family is more important than individuals. Love of state over love of family is reminiscent of Hitler's fascism.
— Athena

Your thesis in brief. I agree with your observations for the most part, but I disagree with your conception of the mechanism at work. I don't think that the percieved "decline of the family" is caused by an increased dependence upon the state. Rather, I think that the erosion of the concept of family, and particularly of "lineage", attended the revolutionary genesis of the American nation. This country was formed as a reaction against aristocracy, and by extension thereof, as a reaction against the concept of "lineage". This anti-lineage stance was early on codified within American law within such principles as "the Rule Against Perpetuities". The results of this today are that the concept if "lineage" has been so weakened in the American mind, that the expression of that concept is usually met with reactions of incredulity.

When you do away with the "lineage", all you are left with for a concept of "the family", is the impotent "nuclear family", which is not a strong enough conception to withstand the onslaught of society's claims upon the individual person, and the claims of the nationalistic spirit for the affections of the individual. Why do you think we have the national anthem, the "pledge of allegiance" to the flag, various allegorical stories about the "founding fathers" of the country (many of which are utterly fabricated, like the G. Washington "cherry tree" fable, or embellished to the point of unrecognizability, like the "Paul Revere's Ride" nonsense), and other similar nationalistic devices? These are simply items of propaganda meant to secure the affections of a people left rootless by the destruction of the concept of "lineage", to a giant abstraction called "the state". This, of course, supported by more recent types of propaganda emanating from socialist thought (oddly placing nationalism and socialism in bed together), has been wildly successful in America, and are the reason for the diminishment of the weak "nuclear family". I might agree with @James Riley about the importance of community within a tribalistic or small communistic context, but within the context of "the state", the word "community" loses all of it's meaning, since the state makes all of the claims upon the individual that the community once did. This claiming obscures the fact that there is no true community within the context of the state. In the end, all who buy into the state's remonstration about "community" are left as no more than isolated individuals dependent upon and utilizing the state's willingness to mediate all traditional community functions in the creation of a type of "community by proxy", which leaves the state as the intermediary and arbiter of all function. — Michael Zwingli

It appears there is no awareness of intentional propaganda to double the workforce, such as the USSR saying "the full-time homemaker is a non-productive member of society". The point I was making seems to have been completely missed. the very dramatic social changes we have been through did not just happen. They follow a change in education.

It does not matter if I miss understand Nietzsche. It matters how his philosophy encouraged Nazi behavior in the past and present. This includes believing one's self to be above the law and storming the Capitol Building. His effect has gone far, far beyond those who read his books. So to has the effect of Hegel's philosophy had a much greater ramification than influencing those who read his books. At least Charles Sarolea was concerned about Hegel's and Nietzsche's popularity and the possibility that Germany was preparing war.

We might argue which came first the egg or the chicken? As I said happened in the USSR when women were "liberated" there was a rise in divorce and abortions rates and increasingly women and children fell below the level of poverty. It was realized working mothers made it necessary to provide child care. In the US marriage law was weakened following WWII and increasing jobs for women made it possible for them to get divorced, or for their husbands to be less concerned about the family they leave behind. This is a little complicated and it is not this or that but an interaction of this and that and the end result is we are no longer living under family order and we no longer valuing women as we did in the past and children are not growing up as they once did under the care of a mother. More and more is falling on the state, and more and more some religious folks are talking of how bad things are.

I never knew of "the Rule Against Perpetuities". or even imagined a dead person had any power after death. That is an interesting subject. I noticed a failure of leaving behind estates and no longer thinking in terms of a man's home being his castle, did play into a weakening the family. So have the values of a technological society played into the weakening of family.

"When you do away with the "lineage", all you are left with for a concept of "the family", is the impotent "nuclear family", which is not a strong enough conception to withstand the onslaught of society's claims upon the individual person, and the claims of the nationalistic spirit for the affections of the individual"

That is nicely said however, I thought we have a national anthem because we go to war and when we are in a state of war we need to be strongly united and working together. Well, we did in the past. Our high-tech military has made that totally unnecessary. Now because we are not firmly united against a foreign enemy we are at war with ourselves. Our culture war is tearing us apart. Religion and changing social values are very much a part of our culture wars. It seems extremely few women want to be valued as we once valued women, but I think there are good reasons why we should.

Until merit hiring we had nepotism.

Nepotism is a form of favoritism which is granted to relatives and friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, fitness, religion, and other activities. The term originated with the assignment of nephews to important positions by Catholic popes and bishops.

Nepotism - Wikipedia — wikipedia

We still have nepotism because it is human nature, but legally and by policy people are supposed to base decisions on merit. But that does not prevent family businesses and I am glad of that. The Maccabees fought a war with the Greeks because the Greeks were doing merit hiring and not basing the decision of who got a job on the person's linage. Merit hiring kind of goes with democracy. And at this point can I thank you a lot for opening this expanded discussion of family verses a lack of family values. You have made this a much more meaningful discussion.

"but within the context of "the state", the word "community" loses all of it's meaning, since the state makes all of the claims upon the individual that the community once did. This claiming obscures the fact that there is no true community within the context of the state. In the end, all who buy into the state's remonstration about "community" are left as no more than isolated individuals dependent upon and utilizing the state's willingness to mediate all traditional community functions in the creation of a type of "community by proxy", which leaves the state as the intermediary and arbiter of all function".

wahwho! :cheer: "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman; ‎Nathan Glazer‎; ‎Reuel "Democracy in America" by Tocqueville and the new despot we will live under. And Hegel the state is God and how about the Bible and God's kingdom, but that kingdom does carry family values, Paradoxical. Do we want our children growing up without being bonded to family and being only members of the state desperately seeking their own happiness without family bonds?

To each his own. Nothing is more simple or lacking in complexity than pointing a finger at "big government" with no understanding of how governments can and should work. How the Plutocracy prevents that understanding is anything but simple, and they even have people thinking big government is evil. But yeah, you can keep following their lead if you want. — James Riley

Excuse me, I studied government policy and administration at the college level. Did you say I do not understand how government works? The most important thing I have said about the shift in power and authority is the change in the bureaucratic order that now crushes individual liberty and power and controls everything by policy. If this form of organization stopped with the federal government, I would not object, but it has consumed every aspect of our lives. Individualism has been destroyed and we are all reduced to being members of a lonely crowd with a despot controlling even the minute details of our lives.

It was the German model of bureaucracy that the US adopted that made Tocqueville's fear of what would happen to Christian democracies, a reality.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. — Tocqueville

Did you say I do not understand how government works? — Athena

Read what I said again: "can and should."

If you keep blaming big government instead of those who use it as their personal tool, then you clearly don't know how it can or should work. Did they teach you about how money buys government? Or did they just teach you that we live in a democracy/republic/federal system and all the good little citizens are in charge and actually slitting their own throats with their own government for some silly reason?

You keep raising 1958, the German model, bureaucracy, etc., as if government is this thinking individual evil person who pulled all that out of thin air as a way to better manage the serfs. I keep telling you to quit doing what the Plutocracy has trained you to do: blame big government, so you don't focus on what they are up to. It's like taking a gun and throwing it in jail while letting the shooter walk. It's like the shooter saying "Don't blame me, blame the gun!" And then you are like "Well, let's render the gun inoperable and all will be fine." It makes no sense.

Thanks for the education on Alexis, et al. I digested all that forty years ago. I'm looking at what is happening in the U.S. today. It's the same thing that has been happening for over a hundred years. It is not what you find in Poly Sci text books on forms of "government."

We need to progress, forward, and grow smarter and wiser, not bigger. — James Riley

Yeah, two thumbs up for that one. :up: :up:

I don't see that happening but if we were all we crack ourselves up to be, then we could figure it out. — James Riley

Alas, we are not.

Alas, we are not. — Michael Zwingli

Sad, but true. The only slight glimmer is youth (and maybe women). I like the 2015 movie Tomorrowland" with George Clooney. Short of something like that, we're screwed. The Earth, however, will carry on with a "Meh."

... I thought we have a national anthem because we go to war and when we are in a state of war we need to be strongly united and working together. — Athena

National anthems are symbols, just like national flags and any other type of nationalist symbolic device. Their purpose, whether there is war or there is peace and prosperity, they have in common with all similar devices: the psychological, and especially emotional, binding of the individual and his affections to the state, particularly at the expense of other institutions such as the lineage, the tribe, and the ethnicity.

Read what I said again: "can and should."

If you keep blaming big government instead of those who use it as their personal tool, then you clearly don't know how it can or should work. Did they teach you about how money buys government? Or did they just teach you that we live in a democracy/republic/federal system and all the good little citizens are in charge and actually slitting their own throats with their own government?

You keep raising 1958, the German model, bureaucracy, etc., as if government is this thinking individual evil person who pulled all that out of thin air as a way to better manage the serfs. I keep telling you to quit doing what the Plutocracy has trained you to do: blame big government, so you don't focus on what they are up to. It's like taking a gun and throwing it in jail while letting the shooter walk. It's like the shooter saying "Don't blame me, blame the gun!" And then you are like "Well, let's render the gun inoperable and all will be fine. It makes no sense.

Thanks for the education on Alexis, et al. I digested all that forty years ago. I'm looking at what is happening in the U.S. today. — James Riley

I think your belief is limiting your ability to understand the change in organizational power that comes with adopting the German model of bureaucracy and the education that goes with it. It may be futile to continue this argument but I will try.

Tocqueville foresaw a change, away from family order to bureaucratic order. Do you have any thoughts on what makes the two possible forms of social organization different?

At a 1917 National Education Association conference a teacher quoted a poet in India, Tagore. "Whatever their efficiency, such great organizations are so impersonal that they bear down on the individual lives of the people like a hydraulic press whose action is completely effective in crushing out individual liberty and power." That defines the enemy we fought against. Then we turned around and adopted this enemy's bureaucratic organization and later the enemy's education for technology for industrial and military purpose. We are now what we defended our democracy against, and people feel this in their bones, and their desperation to restore their personal power, they have refused to wear masks in a pandemic or to get vaccinated when this became possible. We are living with insanity because there is no understanding of how we became as our enemy. There was a time when the most important authority in our lives was family, not the government.

never knew of "the Rule Against Perpetuities". or even imagined a dead person had any power after death. That is an interesting subject. I noticed a failure of leaving behind estates and no longer thinking in terms of a man's home being his castle, did play into a weakening the family. — Athena

The weakening of the concept of "perpetuity" both in general and in particular: familial, social, environmental, etc., has definitely weakened the concept of "family", and nearly destroyed the concept of "lineage". Genealogical research has today become no more than an exercise in curiosity. The weakening of perpetuity has also resulted in modern cultures having become "rootless", and in the citizens of modern societies having become absorbed in their "selves" (self-absorbed), as that rootlessness has increased and the importance of place and of extended family have diminished.

National anthems are symbols, just like national flags and any other type of nationalist symbolic device. Their purpose, whether there is war or there is peace and prosperity, they have in common with all similar devices: the psychological, and especially emotional, binding of the individual and his affections to the state. — Michael Zwingli

That is well said, and this thread is about our liberty and power being crushed by loyalty to the state, and what family order has to do with having liberty and power. The US has stood ready for war ever since Eisenhower established the Military-Industrial Complex and education for a technological society with unknown values.

My parents came unglued when I told them I was looking for fire hazards in our garage and had to report them. That night at the dinner table, it was made clear, our evil enemy required people to carry ID and to report their family and neighbors to authority. We now carry ID from the day we are born and Texas has really gone overboard on reporting family and neighbors to authority.

As I just said to James, people are aware the US has changed and they are desparate to get back their liberty and power. But refusing to masks in a pandemic and refusing to get vaccinated is not going to make things better.

The weakening of the concept of "perpetuity" both in general and in particular: familial, social, environmental, etc., has definitely weakened the concept of "family", and nearly destroyed the concept of "lineage". Genealogical research has today become no more than an exercise in curiosity. The weakening of perpetuity has also resulted in modern cultures having become "rootless", and in the citizens of modern societies having become absorbed in their "selves" (self-absorbed), as that rootlessness has increased and the importance of place and of extended family have diminished. — Michael Zwingli

I think you have made a very important point and the efforts by Native Americans and people of color support that point.

Native Americans are doing a good job in fighting against that rootlessness and so have people of color stressed the importance of family and knowing our roots, but the fight of people of color is different from the Native American one. Native Americans have a chance of reclaiming their ancestral land, and that just doesn't work as well for people of color, however, people of color are making progress on claiming historical sites and being sure their story becomes part of our national consciousness.

It does not matter if I miss understand Nietzsche. It matters how his philosophy encouraged Nazi behavior in the past and present...His effect has gone far, far beyond those who read his books. — Athena

That is unfortunately true. The leadership of the Third Reich (who probably never even read Nietzsche) cherry-picked utterly uncontextualized terms and phrases from his writings, and applied them in grotesque ways as suited their own purposes. Nietzsche was a highly analytical and complex thinker who dealt with some of the more difficult questions of the philosophy of mind, and had the misfortune while publishing his thoughts, of being a highly introverted personality which was itself urgently suppressing the effects of a latent mental illness. This has made him an easy mark for characterization as some type of "Proto-Nazi" monster by those who have not bothered to study and come to grips with the meanings presented within his opera. There is a good presentation of Nietzsche's personality online here if you are interested: https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA005/English/RSPI1960/GA005_c01_1.html

Tocqueville foresaw a change, away from family order to bureaucratic order. — Athena

@Athena, this is presented within The Old Regime and the Revolution, no? I would like to look this up, and read about AdT's thoughts on this. Can you easily provide a rough reference?