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The Forum > Article Comments > Can Western nations remain fair and affluent? > Comments

Can Western nations remain fair and affluent? : Comments

By Chris Lewis, published 6/1/2011

Western societies will have to think that much harder if they want to remain affluent, equitable or even influential.

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Peter,

Just briefly - What purpose and motivation can an individual have outside of a human social construct? Doesn't the human collective define the purpose and motivation of the individual?
Posted by Poirot, Thursday, 3 February 2011 8:56:28 AM
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Poirot
“What purpose and motivation can an individual have outside of a human social construct?”

There is not an issue as between motivation-by-social-construct eg desire to wear fashionable clothes, versus motivations by not-social-construct e.g. a motivation to drink water because thirsty.

Any human action is motivated by a desire to exchange a less satisfactory state for a more satisfactory state as judged by the individual taking the action. This fact, and logical deductions therefrom, are all that’s needed to derive the science of human action which applies *whatever* purpose motivates the action, that’s the whole point.

“Doesn't the human collective define the purpose and motivation of the individual?”

Briefly, no. Human society is just co-operation by another name. It could only have arisen from increasingly suspending the principle of violence, in favour of the principle of consent.

It’s not about individual versus collective. It’s about consent-based versus coercion-based social co-operation.

Squeers
“… ergo nothing is "axionatic".

So, back to ‘nothing can be proved’.

So…. can Pythagoras’s theorem be proved? Or not?

You don’t need an “ultimate” truth – a God - to prove something logically. You only need an axiom, and formally valid deductions therefrom.

“[…] a … system … would be better acheived for me if the competitive element were removed”

By force?

Fighting for peace…

“and the sustainably available means of existent were distributed according to reasonable need.”

…made sustainably available by coercive bureaucracy…how? “Might is right” would decide what’s reasonable?

You also assume your ideal is possible in practice. How would it work without the possibility of economic calculation? And without ever-increasing government to try to solve the problems caused by past interventions? What would stop it descending into more and more government intervention?

“This precludes the ideology of the free market.”

There you are, back to ‘everything’s only ideology’ without defining it. Everyone else has to struggle with the reality of rationalizing natural scarcity, but not the divine State, which makes available magic pudding.

It’s not science, it’s religion.

“But for now, all I can allow myself on OLO are bagatelles.”

French breadsticks, right?
Posted by Peter Hume, Thursday, 3 February 2011 2:28:49 PM
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Thus there are three major classes of error in the belief that government economic interventions make society fairer or richer:
1. in blaming capitalism for problems caused by interventionism; or blaming capitalism for problems caused by nature and which would affect all alternative systems just as much (unless they killed large numbers of people, which is hardly a recommendation!)
2. in assuming without proving that coercive bureaucracies could provide a better alternative, despite the fact this is obviously false, and
3. in the shamefully blatantly illogical intellectual methods used - no better than the mediaeval belief in the church and the selling of indulgences.

Imagine if someone said we could have a fairer and richer society by using slavery, AND DIDN’T EVEN REALISE THIS WAS A PROBLEMATIC THING TO SAY.

That’s the intellectual level at which the statists are operating: A COMPLETE NON-RECOGNITION OF THE ETHICAL OR ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES THEY ARE INVOLVED IN.
Posted by Peter Hume, Friday, 4 February 2011 2:13:57 PM
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