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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (185832)	4/28/2006 1:03:13 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, when I thought of that little addendum regarding conscription, I thought it a very good point for you. <Don't know if that makes me the "worst", but I still stand by my view in the regard.. > I wouldn't pretend that children are anything other than barbarians who need educating in civilized philosophies. Not to mention self-preservation instruction which requires force at time to prevent them acting in a way that will harm them, even though they want to do that. So I agree with you and I have conscripted our children and lined them up and having them salute too. But at some stage, the youngster becomes an adult, which is a long process of gradual transfer of responsibility to the child, starting from when they are born. That includes compulsory community service which I required of them from very young ages, but reward-based. "If you are all ready by 8.20am, with house spick and span and everything perfect, you get an M&M each and we go and play in the park before school. If not ready until 8.30am there is tormenting and no reward." After a short training season [of a couple of days], we were invariably playing at the park. So I agree with you to some extent. But I would turn them loose younger than you would do and I disagree with the idea that there should be a one-way transaction in a state-run compulsory community service. I have seen enough of governments doing things that I would not want to see them even try. Earning their keep is a good enough discipline and community service. By working, they have to provide taxes and a consumer surplus to their employer, and their employers' customers. I consider that more than enough service to the community and that way individual value is achieved sooner than a Kremlin-organized time and life-wasting government-run shambles which would be time-serving, not achieving. I think 16 is too old for compulsory school. It's too regimented and more time-wasting on pointless effort. Many young people would be better off to get into an apprenticeship with a good plumber, or engineering company or something. I never had a marketing or business degree but seemed to do okay after learning at the coal face. Credentialism is a modern curse. The problem with independence of colonies was that there was no cultural affiliation with the philosophical foundations which made the success of the British Empire. Authoritarian kleptocrats would put on the silly hats the British had, copy some bureaucracy and think they had done it. With weeks, the hands were in the till and nothing was left but a charade. With most people being like Geode, who have confiscatory [aka thieving] philosophical foundations, democracies are no better than garden-variety totalitarians, though with luck, democracy sticks enough to throw the rogues out every few years. But there's a propensity for megalomaniacs to dispense with that democracy nonsense, in the national interest of course, under emergency situations only, of course. The philosophical foundations have to come first or the democracy achieves nothing more than uniform poverty [India for example], which can be achieved with no-vote communist systems just as easily. Mqurice