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Awesomelyglorious
Destroyer of worlds, reaver of souls
Joined: Dec 18, 2005
Posts: 5708
Location: United States
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 Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Authoritarian structures arise out of societal organization, yes ... but, in the United States and many other places, the dominant societal organizations in power are related to property management. Work, which is technically seen as labor, is seen as a resource. When most people work, they are a wage slave. They submit themselves to what is called a job market, selling themselves for some sort of price. This resource is managed by authority, notably those at the top. They make the decisions. If the workers are suffering under a hideous health care decision, it is quite rare that the authority is going to make life better for them. Think about what sort of crime that could create. The movie "John Q" more or less was dramatic about it, and to call that a crime? Well, it's simply survival in a hostile and very competitive world. |
Even though many sources of authority have to deal with property, I would still have to claim that most have to deal with social organization. We can even look at it this way, property can be a form of social organization but certain laws have very little to do with property, social organization is always a more complete model due to its broadness in covering all things. The workers in most industries are not slaves and have the freedom to leave their job if they desire to do so and the authority of the bosses while derived from the mutual benefits of the trade is used for managing the workers into an effective workforce, the authority is a tool for societal management and is created from a need for societal management towards societally beneficial tasks as bosses exist in most if not all economies. Anyway, my point is that workers do not have to work for the boss that they do and even though the exchange has property central to it, the authority is also largely due to societal organization as some groups will always be at the top and others at the bottom. Authority has never really cared for what is expendable, to some extent human life has a set monetary cost even though most don't like to think this way, it always has been from ancient societies all the way forward to modern societies, to ignore this fact is to forget economic facts that certain forms of labor can be really cheap. However, even though people are a resource they are still not the same as physical property, they fall under the category of societal organization. John Q was a criminal, he forcibly forced certain goods and resources to be used towards his own benefit. Stealing food and stealing a car may be different morally but they are not different in what they are, stealing the efforts and possessions of other beings for your own benefit. Of course, noting how crime negatively impacts systems we must find ways to reduce it while still allowing for good economic growth and for societal mobility. High crime hurts economies as does blind benevolence.
| Quote: | | Megan's Law is unconstitutional. Once someone is released from prison, his record should not be made public. If there is a need for Megan's Law, the only people who should have access to it are the authorities. Also, statutory rape is not "rape," and the idea of placing a minor under Megan's Law is absurd. Also, you do not have to rape a woman or be a pedophile to be placed on Megan's Law. There are a lot of inconsistencies to this law that are very unjust and unfair, placing a wide array of people as rapists and pedophiles in the public eye who were convicted of far less crimes, and I think bigamy is one of them. |
Well, Megan's laws are decided by states to a large extent and as such reflect state's beliefs. In Kansas, sodomy is something that is subject to Megan's Laws, this might not be right but it is what the population of the state apparently wants. If people believed that these laws were unjust they would fight back against them, but people believe they are deserved. The world does not have a uniform code of justice and really, I would feel a lot better if I knew who I could trust and who I might be suspicious of, although the chances of sex offenders offending again is less than that of other crimes according to some sources, the chances of them doing something bad still seems higher than the average. If I was a parent then I would want to know who in the neighborhood I could trust and who I would have to keep an eye on. Megan's law is a matter of making people feel safer.
| Quote: | I see that you're commonly using words that express a whole of society, such as "our" and "we." This leads me to believe that you're seeing the world from the perspective that we are all one whole family, with commonly-shared goals and commonly-shared views. This is not true, because the nation is heavily divided, between race, age, gender, class and probably other things, even NTs versus autistics, if you will.
Who really is the "our" when you stipulate "our desire to protect the environment?" If I use the word "our," I tend to do so to mean the system as a whole and to what it stands for in terms of everyone. You're using it to justify a viewpoint. I do not see an "our" in who protects our environment. I see a wide range of environmental views that need to be worked out in concensus to come up with a viable working plan. The oil industry stands on the other side of the environment, but maybe BP has made miniscule steps of progress for supporting a concept called "sustainable development."
I could go on and on about this, even form an economic perspective ... like why the GDP is flawed and why I tend to support its replacement with the GPI. |
The reason I use our is because despite the different views some things are still true, people still on average do not really care too much on the environment unless it directly impacts our lives, we like the environment in the abstract but we still value our gas more than the environment. If we did value the environment so much then we would change our spending habits and stuff like that but we don't. We still buy big ol' SUVs, we still will pick cheaper power companies even when given an option that it more environmentally friendly, we will still complain about gas prices being too high even though there are economists that support a gas tax. We, on average, do not really care because we may not be a family but we are part of a society. Honestly though, I would actually support more methods to reduce gas spending such as promoting economical public transportation or alternative fuels and stuff like that because of the need for future economic success, however, most people don't really think in such terms and we as a society really are not embracing the future and trying to change our ways as much as we need to.
| Quote: | Well, the government may not interfere with the market, but it has created the market. Everything that runs our economy, from aviation to biotechnology to oil to computers, was done so at the expense of taxpayers. The entire computer industry, for example, was borne out of the military. It had nothing to do with the private sector, and the same can be said about the Internet, when it used to be called ArpaNet. Automation was also borne out of military forces, and now it is being used to throw people out of work.
Not all, but a lot of crime relates from inconsistency. Yeah, people may know what crimes are and that they will get punished for them. If I steal a loaf of bread for my starving son tomorrow, I could get punished for that. If I blackmail or hold a doctor hostage for refusing my dying son cancer treatment, I could get punished for that. And then a lot of crime is simply anger at the inconsistencies of the system. If I am evicted from my house beacuse my landlord raised the rent, what can somebody do? You surely can't look to a government to help, because they are too worried about the market and supporting the interests of landlords. In New York, they'd even arrest you for sleeping on the sidewalk. So, what can some people do? They do what they know how to survive, and they may do things out of sheer frustration. I think we, with many of us having AS, should know what that's like. |
Government influence in the economy has done many many things, however, many economists see this government influence as a bad thing. Neo-Classical economists see taxation as a distortion of the market that results in economic inefficiency and Austrians, and Supply side economists, and monetarists and so on also disagree with the goodness of government intervention in the economy. Now, if all of the groups are added together it would seem to be a lot of economists. Certainly some groups are fringe groups but many groups have great intellectuals as members and have contributed to the study of economics as a whole. Certainly the views of people who have studied the economy for years would be important to listen to on a conversation about economics?
Well, there are no contradictions in the examples that you have given, only bad situations. How to deal with these people is something that does need to figured out I suppose, I mean, crime is a bad thing as it damages the market. We need to find a system that does the most good for the most people.
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Destroying reality since the end of time. |
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