On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 05:30:01AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
In 40+ years of going to libertarian meetings, I have rarely (and, perhaps never) been in the situation where another attendee was even in the position of demonstrating a "Libertarian [seeing] absolutely nothing wrong with the very rich 'gaming the system' for personal advantage". It just doesn't happen! They are usually a bunch of people in a room, talking, none of whom engage in "gaming the system." They may certainly talk about living with the existing system, true. But not "gaming".
I think the poitn is, the greatest challenge may be how to handle "where we're at now" wrt "where we want to get", and that the mega "wealthy" of today have gamed the system, or played the games of the system as designed and intended (thanks Juan :) , to get to where they are today as, say $100billion-aires. I spoke to this, but much clumsily a couple months back when I suggested we ought consider how to transition "existing wealth/ structures" into a "better" future. At the moment, such transition will be, say, global hyper inflation wiping out a lot of those billion dollar bonds owned by the global elite, but unfortunately the transition will likely be set on their terms. Given that we know a big transition is not far away (perhaps just a few short years), how can we libertarians, anarchists, etc, expect that transition to be to the benefit of say 50% of the individuals in the world (or more), rather than just the 0.01%, if we cannot even speak clearly a sane/ better transition plan? So Razyer may be saying "Libertarians are happy with system gaming", but perhaps could challenge with "ok, you say you're a libertarian, what system do you propose that won't be so gamable?" It seems the real challenge here is envisioning a better system, and more than that, not only the foundations of the ultimate libertarian utopia, but the planks of action/ steps of system change (other than "revolution") to get us there. And don't get me wrong, "revolution" may well be a valid step - but as we've seen so often (in -all- cases?) of historical revolution, the result is worse, or at least no better, or worse within a short period of time. So, for the political philosophy acolyte, abstracts, absolutes and meta discussions, along with bold statements and challenges, may well be useful to help crack the existing mental programming. But beyond these simplicities, we need a series of practical, comprehendable, communicable steps, steps that we can see have a genuine possibility of achieving something better than "democratic" corporate fascism, something that has at least a reasonable chance of being "better" in the face of our civilizational history of "revolutions". Good luck all ;)