On Dec 31, 2003, at 8:21 AM, Freematt357@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 12/31/2003 4:44:34 AM Eastern Standard Time, jya@pipeline.com writes:

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Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and wealthy individuals like himself

Government favoritism? It sounds like you don't believe a raising tide lifts all ships. Tim is entitled to keep the wealth he has earned, when it's taken its called stealing.

I prefer NOT to use language like "a raising tide lifts all ships," as it essentially endorses the pragmatist view supporting capitalism. Rather, I favor the fundamentalist view that if Alice and Bob make a transaction, be it a trade of goods or labor or whatever, it is not right/wise/proper/constitutional to take some fraction of the alleged profit to give to someone else. It is "redistribution" that I am mostly arguing against, for multiple reasons. (Including the corrosive effects of teaching a growing fraction of the population that they are "entitled" to things.) I don't claim this is a "right" implicit in the fabric of space-time, or handed down by Moloch or YHWH or some other supernatural myth-figure. Rather, societies which have taken money from workers to give to others to sit at home and breed or eat Doritos while watching Oprah have failed. Jamestown was a recent example, with the initial settlers adopting the usual "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" arrangement. It failed miserably, as various settlers found good reasons--exhaustion, the hot sun, to much to drink the night before, sex, or just laziness--to not show up for work parties. This meant those working had to work even harder. A vicious circle, much like the one now facing American industry, where more and more workers are claiming bogus "disability" and where the insurance costs are driving companies out of the country. And where some ethnic communities treat those who work and study as "suckas," as "Oreos." Jamestown's solution was a harsh one: "no work, no eat." This sounds harsh ("what about cripples?"), but it's basically the only stable attractor, in a Schelling point sense, that exists, along with the other attractor, where a growing percentage are not working, on disability, on unemployment, etc. and the remaining workers are carrying a heavier and heavier burden. This Schelling point analysis applies to a lot of our so-called "rights," as with religious expression (where the non-coercion principle is that neighbors will come to a "territorial boundary" arrangement not to interfere with the religious views of each other, as dogs might reach a territorial boundary arrangment with other dogs. So the issue is not "a rising tide lifts all ships" as the defense of capitalism, the issue is one of stable attractors. That this lifts all ships is because, as Jamestown learned, having nearly all able-bodied people working to grow crops and make things and trade is, for nearly all involved, better than having 30% of the workforce slaving away in the hot sun so that 70% can find excuses not to be working. That is not a stable attractor. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are using the tired old cliches about how it is "society that paid for business" and hence "society" has some right to take a cut of each transaction between Alice and Bob.

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The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays for their perks.

What commie nonsense.

A lot of collectivists here on the Cypherpunks list. Chortle. For them to think that strong crypto means more freebies and entitlements for "the poor" is hilarious to see. --Tim May

On 31 Dec 2003 at 12:45, Tim May wrote:

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People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are using the tired old cliches about how it is "society that paid for business" and hence "society" has some right to take a cut of each transaction between Alice and Bob.

No, Tyler, James and John said none of the alleged cliches. These are chimeras Tim fantasizes to buttress his demotic vainglory, bless his shriveled heart, his throbbing headcrimp. Still, I think Tim is the funniest of cypherpunks, though it takes a strong stomach, or a cruelty-is-pleasure likemind, to enjoy his dry as sand grist. Gypsies, as with welfare cheats, talk the talk of Tim, imitating those who disparage the outcast, who refuses to hold a steady job, too smart to fall for the call to pull your fair share load. When Tim gets going on his seemingly vile attacks on the downtrodden it is admirably like the downtrodden I grew up with: it takes one to know one, and their vulnerabilities, those of the outcast eager to hammer, ridicule, belly laugh at, those of similar condemnation by inbred supremacists, themselves not long out of the ghetto. Nietzsche called this shot as he too shot himself futilely professing claims of superiority. What can you do when society at large remains indifferent to your plight except propound your virtues despite those virtues being named by the dominant society as faults. Calvin spouted the lament of the excluded, proclaimed the outcasts the chosen, aping those who armed the peasants against their masters. Stigma is inescapable until you overthrow the stigmatizers, and in turn stigmatize others to maintain your evanescent superiority, as did your oppressors, and will do again as soon as they whip your lazy ass grown soft by belief you're impregnable. So goes the fall of empires, so goes the blinding conceit, crippling addiction, of supremacists of any skin hue, of any economic surety. The yawning grave beckons the folly peddlers of immortality, of singular salvation from terror of utter cessation. A joke, human aspiration for higher being. Thus spake Zarathrustra.

On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 12:45:51PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

those working had to work even harder. A vicious circle, much like the one now facing American industry, where more and more workers are claiming bogus "disability" and where the insurance costs are driving companies out of the country.

One of my cousins is married to a private investigator who does work for insurance companies. Over the Christmas holiday I chatted with him for the first time in some detail about his work. Turns out that many people (he says) take paid disability leave from their company to work at a temporary under-the-table job or take legitimate disability leave and then decide they like not working so decide to make it permanent. He sits outside their houses in a van with tinted windows and takes video and photos of them driving to their temp job, cleaning gutters, going for a jog, and so on -- after they claimed they are no longer to walk. With that evidence in hand, the employer calls them up and tells them to be at work the next day -- or be fired. If I were the employer, I wouldn't even give them that second chance. -Declan