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To: goldsnow who wrote (9827)	4/11/1998 10:51:00 PM
From: Abner Hosmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116759

Goldsnow - I hadn't thought of that. There is a great deal of irony in an administration which attacked Reaganomics now demanding of Japan to implement the same remedies. There seems to be a bit of cognitive dissonance going on there. In 15 years the US will be facing some of the same problems Japan is dealing with now: an aging population and huge off-budget unfunded debt obligations. Although I have never explicitly stated it on this thread, I have often thought that the enormous US debt is the Achilles Heel of this economic boom, and that it will end when we are forced to face the reality and the cost of paying the money back. That being said, I think that the Asian crises is a blip in an ongoing worldwide economic expansion which yet has a long way to run. At least I hope that it does. Much of that will depend upon China, which I think will continue to be a great engine of economic growth. More problematic is the case of Russia, which is a wreck, and of societies such as those in the Mideast, which continue to be economically and politically isolated from the world by systems of govt that are unimaginably destructive and corrupt. I think it's a given that a society suffers to the same extent that it becomes insular and isolates itself from the outside world, and I think to some extent this has played a role even in Japan's current difficulties. I don't know how much of a drag these societies pose to economic progress for the world as a whole, but many of their their own people certainly live in dehumanizing conditions. An instructive case is that of China, which remained hopeless until it opened the doors leading West. Hopefully the spread of communications technology will help to open these societies up. My thoughts about entitlements are not derived from a political desire but instead from my thoughts about politics, as they relate to psychology and human nature, a subject that I think bobby and I share more agreement on than on policy. Since it is not necessary to regard someone as "entitled" in order to help that person, I think the concept is embraced by politicians and groups of a certain political bent precisely *because it implies possession of the right to use force. This may be seen from the fact that although the possession of the right to force is implicit, it is never* verbalized or acknowledged, and is instead cloaked in all forms of altruistic devices. I repeat that is it not necessary to regard someone as "entitled" in order to help that person. And there is another concept imbedded in the idea that goes to the root of the political motivation it contains, which is this: *the idea that another is entitled to your property implies that you are a criminal who has obtained his property by stealing it from that person. Thus, we are all presumed to be guilty in the eyes of the law. And the fact that we are guilty implies the right of those in power to dispose of ourselves and our possessions as they will. One is reminded of a certain story by Franz Kafka. We can see this sensual enjoyment of the right to power, and the constant striving for it, in many different groups which dwell in our society today. They are an inevitable outgrowth of the govts seizure of the right to dispose of a person's property, his possessions, his life. I may be on shakey ground here, but from a psychological standpoint, one might say that the inner motivating force is the desire to play God, and history teaches us that human beings are especially prone to becoming extremely cruel gods. We can see this in many political systems in the world today where each member, no matter what his position on the rungs of power, is allowed the pleasure of exercising absolute power over someone else. Now, if we give someone credit for genuine altruistic impulses, and that person still insists upon the concept of an entitlement, then the inescapable conclusion is that the essence of the argument boils down to this: we must help you by forcing you to help others*. This would lead us into a debate about whether the use of such force may be justified, who is qualified to exercise it, and the ethics and propriety of using force thus indiscriminately, without regard to any circumstances of an individuals responsibility for their own predicament or that of others.