"Parenting Without Punishing"

"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message
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Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

Tribes of people in the wilderness before high population densities
numbering 50 to 200 couldn't be anything else, they wouldn't be able
to agree to do anything except voluntarily, and that means informal
democracy. If they ****ed off their members they'd leave, they had
nothing keeping them there unless their primary ethic was to get
along, and that points to even better than mere democracy, but to
freedom and consensus!!

You're ignoring the fact that living on one's own was both lonelier and more
dangerous than living with the tribe. Thus, the power to banish people from
the tribe, or to impose punishments that members of the tribe would have to
banish themselves to avoid, offered the potential for a great deal of
leverage. That would certainly have undermined freedom and the need for
consensus.

Further, it would not be especially hard for a tribal government to take the
form of a "big-tough-hunter-ocracy" where a group of the biggest, strongest
men impose their will on the rest of the tribe because the others don't dare
to challenge them - and aren't willing to take a chance on whether they
could survive if they killed off their best hunters in the night, even if
they would be willing to kill them and even if they were not too afraid to
try. There is no particular reason to think that everyone would be given an
equal voice and vote.

I'm not saying that an essentially democratic tribal government would be
impossible. I'm just saying that it cannot be taken for granted.

Can you provide some practical, real-world examples?
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We use collective greed constantly, in wanting things from government
we exert collective greed, in wanting peace and law and order and
rights and infrastructure and social guarantees. Most of the things
you probably imagine to be private greed are actually expressions of
collective greed that motivates us to good ends! You see, greed itself
is not the problem, but only whether it brings us together or pushes
us apart.

I will certainly agree that collective greed works well in pursuing
collective goals - goals that are shared and that can be reached more
efficiently working together than working alone. But many goals are
individual, not collective, and your own stance against vouchers shows how
miserably collective greed can work when different people have different
goals.

"I want a Viper."

"Sorry, but our collective greed says you have to get a Porsche instead."

"I want a house with yellow bricks."

"Sorry, but our collective greed says that houses have to have red bricks."

A system centered around collective greed can fail miserably when
individuals need or want things that the collective does not care about, or
when the collective takes advantage of differences in what individuals want
as an excuse to provide them with less.

Over the long term, an economy that is growing will inevitably
eventually become bigger than one that is not. The process
might take years, or even centuries, but it will happen.
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Duh, I think that's what "growing" means. But what growth means to
Capitalists is actually the migration of wealth to the wealthy, not
actual growth in our productive capacity due to organization and
technology. These are actually opposites.

You're being absurd.

Suppose I spend $5,000 on a machine that lets me produce widgets in half the
time it takes other people to produce them. That provides economic growth
because I can produce twice as many widgets in the same amount of time.

If widgets normally cost $50, it might look at first glance like I can keep
selling my widgets for $50 and pocket the difference for myself. But if I
would try such a thing, other people would notice and start thinking, "Hey,
he's getting rich off those widgets. I'll buy my own widget-making machine
and make some of that money for myself." Once widget-making machines become
more common, we have to reduce our prices in order to compete with each
other, so most of the benefit from the widget-making machines ends up going
to people who buy widgets instead of to us. If I'm the first one to get a
widget-making machine, I might make a lot of money before that happens. But
in the long term, it is the customers that can now buy widgets for maybe $30
each (since some of the money has to go to pay back the cost of the
machinery) instead of $50 that get most of the benefit.

That phenomenon, repeated over and over, is why America's economy has grown
to a point where our poor would be considered rich by the standards of quite
a few other nations. You can argue that you think your communistic approach
would work better, but you would have to be blind, a liar, or a lunatic to
claim that the rich are the only ones who benefit from a capitalistic
system's growth.