Hawk, you might think slavery is bad, but the monopoly problem was the state approval of slavery. For some strange reason, people think of slavery as bad, but they remain happy about and continue to vote for themselves and others to be and to remain mere state chattels. Nobody owns their share of the state in the form of a Tradable Citizenship. Everybody is owned by one state or another. They can only "escape" by leaving, barehanded, to go to another country if that country will accept them as another piece of property to use.
<As they showed, slavery produced huge profits for southerners who invested in slave capital — to the detriment of all other portfolio investments, as the value of slaves soared in the mid-19th century. By that time, by far the largest cotton-growing states’ wealth was in slave stock, not in real estate or other investments. >
In a labour intensive industry, of course the value is in the asset producing the labour. When governments take about 60% of our income [don't just count income tax, but goods and services taxes, duties on booze, smokes, petrol and lots of other things, import tariffs, fines, road user charges, permit fees, resource management act costs, compliance costs by the ton], we are pretty much slaves. Incredibly, people go on voting for more of the same.
We 1%ers are not at all thinking of our customers as slaves or chattels. We are thinking of them as reflectors of and literal creators of our own identity and being in a symbiotic aethereal ballet of consciousness, like Schrodinger's cat and Mr Schrodinger admiring each other.
That's we honest 1%ers who live by voluntary interaction, not those 1%ers who are rentiers and friends of governments who the Left are so keen to keep in business in a nightmare version of the ballet of consciousness = a cannibalistic mutually self-destructive spiral into doom, lasting only as long as they leave enough of the Good 1%ers and other producers right down to the lowest 99%er who can still live in voluntary association with others, to create the good off which the Doomsters feed.
They deceive the bottom 1%ers into believing the lie that the top 1%ers are somehow evil. That seduction is nothing less than the line between good and evil. If they succeed, the spiral into catastrophic calamity plays out once again as in Germany, Russia, France, China and many others.
Unfortunately, the lines are blurry and it is not easily clear which 1%ers are the dinkum great guys like Dr Irwin Jacobs and which the evil-doers in the pockets of government. Well, it's easy to see in his case. People thought Bernie Madoff was a top bloke too [the SEC harassed me but he was sitting right under their noses, showing how misplaced their priorities are, as with all government people who are primarily sitting on a sinecure].
Until we have Tradable Citizenships, we are all just slaves of the state but euphemistically called "citizens".
Fukuyama was wrong about The End of History. He didn't conceive of that next huge step in the democratic process to Tradable Citizenship. The philosophical shift in citizens' perceptions of their relationship to the state would be profound. Their interest would align towards protecting the commons rather than destroying it to get their piece of the action before the debt piled up to the sky falls over.
Mqurice |
