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As a conservative my preferred strategy for ensuring the wrong people don’t get power over the right people, is to minimize the degree to which any person has power over any other person.
I guess if you’re certain who the right and wrong people are, you can encourage asymmetric power structures with the right people on top.
But part of my political philosophy is the recognition that (a) it’s gross to separate the world into the right and the wrong people to have power, and (b) I have biases and limited point of view and wouldn’t even know who the right and wrong people are.
We fear big government because we worry that the wrong people will end up running it.
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I contend that I am a wage slave and, far from being free, I am in a position where my boss has absolute power over me and can ruin my life whenever he wants. If I piss him off he can find a reason to fire me with “cause” (everyone is guilty of something) and then I can’t get unemployment, and this is the only job that pays enough to pay all my bills anyway. I’d lose my health insurance, I’d lose my house, I’d lose my car, I’d lose everything. Maybe I could recover, but honestly I doubt it. If my boss asked me to suck his dick I’d ask “how hard?”
You fear big government, but the wrong people are already running our entire society.
You bring up a good point: if you’re dying of thirst you aren’t really agreeing to a deal you’re actually giving up everything you have to what amounts to a robbery. Someone with a stranglehold over your basic needs is coercing you, not doing business with you.
And not just is that a fact about the universe in general, it’s also a fact manifesting actively right now in our economy. People are actually stuck, with zero power, and are being milked like cattle because the wealth divide is too large between employers and employees.
Am I summarizing that right?
I think I know how I’d respond to that but before I do, I want to make sure I’m hearing you and not just arguing with some mental projection of my own
That’s basically what I’m saying, though this is a problem that has always existed in the US and isn’t just something that’s started recently. It’s also a problem that is unevenly distributed along racial, ethnic, ableist, and sexual lines.
Essentially, all agreements are coerced by the surrounding material conditions, which themselves are created by private property. I can’t just go out into the woods and catch food, I need a permit or permission from the local land owner. I can’t just tear up the ground and grow crops, I need to own the land or make a business arrangement with the person who does own the land.
Society is run by petty tyrants, the fact that my Lord is a business owner instead of a member of government makes no difference to me.
Man I wish I weren’t so sleep deprived. These are all good points, though I feel I have a response to them after having wrestled with them for many years.
Just imagine I’m way better at articulating this than I actually am right now. Imagine a well-structured response to that is built around these points:
- Yes it really sucks that civilization has covered the world, leaving no opt-out option.
- You can’t really just go catch food in nature either because the food doesn’t want to be caught. Snark aside, what I mean is that nature isn’t easy. Despite being unconscious, nature is brutally coercive to everything that lives in it. Basic point is not to compare this life of being stuck in arrangements with a hypothetical life free of that, because it doesn’t exist. The watering hole controls a radius of where you can go. The hyena pack doesn’t let you kill a gazelle and eat it in peace. The sabertooth tiger imprisons you in the cave and forces you into sleep deprivation on threat of death as you stare at it in a miserable standoff you can’t leave no matter how exhausted you are. I’m rambling.
I think I better keep it to one point at a time. Basic thesis here: comparing life of relative bondage under free market to hypothetical life without bondage is unrealistic. No such life exists.
Capitalism produces great wealth. We are free from seeking food. That’s huge.
Animals are a lot less numerous and a lot easier to deal with than humans in society. A lot of people would genuinely be better off back in nature and out of society.
I don’t disagree - I’m not some anarcho-primitivist that desires a return to hunter/gatherer tribal life. Civilization is good!
My disagreement comes from the hostility to government authority while accepting privatized authority. The government is at least democratic. I get to vote on who runs my city and state and country. I don’t get to vote for my boss or my landlord, making private authority inherently tyrannical.
And before you say the free market gives me the freedom to seek a different boss or landlord, that’s only possible if I uproot my entire life and move to a different area. Imagine if we didn’t get to vote on our government and instead just were expected to flee the country if we don’t like it!
Democracy is good, and capitalism is not democratic. Instead you vote with your wallet, which means us poors don’t get a say.
