Hi Kevin,
As I read through your many defenses of democratic socialism, I didn’t
fully comprehend the full measure of your intentions until you wrote:
"You wanna tell the starving mother with four children to die or compete
her brains out? I don’t. I wanna take money out of Bill Gates' pocket and
give it to her. That to me is fairness because it advances society more
than letting Bill Gates make an extra million.
It's impossible for someone who doesn't have at least a slight totalitarian
impulse to type a sentence like “I wanna take money out of Bill Gates'
pocket…"
By your own hand you've unmasked your fairness ideology for what it is,
warmed over Marxism--"From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.”
We all know how Marxism ended up--on the ash heap of history along
with millions of slaughtered innocents.
I don't want to tell a starving mother with four children anything. I don't
want to take anything from anybody without paying for it. I believe
individuals are ends in themselves, not means to the ends of others.
In other words, I believe in Dynamic Quality that Pirsig describes thus:
“Its only perceived good is freedom and it's only perceived evil is static
quality itself--any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain
and kill the ongoing free force of life.” (Lila, Chp. 9)
Like the one-sided, fixed ideological value of "fairness,” an evil pattern in
disguise--as you have so clearly, if unwittingly, pointed out.
Platt
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