Response

I unfortunately feel the need to write this post in response to Pyrrhus’ tirade on my last post several days ago. I really have no desire to write it, but I feel it is necessary.

Pyrrhus: The last entry was provoked by your comment, but it was not an attack. It was simply something I believed and continue to believe strongly. If you feel personally attacked I am sorry. It wasn’t my intention. As for all you said; well I can’t really respond to it. It’s impassioned and eloquent. It is also clearly what you believe. You see, a lot of the basic premises that you hold up as absolute truths I just don’t agree with. You seem to believe the state is evil and wicked – I don’t. You seem to believe that an open market will resolve all ills – I don’t.

Though I do believe an open market with few restrictions is better than a controlled market and I am against a lot of the trappings of socialism – I don’t believe that you can trust the market mechanism completely. This is my personal belief and can’t be argued for the simple reason that no country has ever let its market be completely free and therefore any argument is mere speculation.

What I do want to talk about is your form of argumentation. If you want to convince me you’ve got to argue from my perspective. You argue (and I see this a lot) from a completely different base. It’s a lot like how the religious argue against the non-religious. This has actually happened to me on a number of occasions where a person says ‘this is so because it says it in the bible’. Then I try to explain to them that I don’t consider the bible an authorative source, but they don’t understand that. We but heads, we cool down, we try again. I try to explain something from a scientific perspective and they look at me like I was born on another planet. For them putting science on par with the bible is impossible; the latter is obviously – quite literally – the more authorative source.

The same thing is happening here. You argue from how you beliefs about how the world should be which obviously clash with mine. You want a state as free as possible from government intervention, because you believe that every man, woman and child should be free to lead their own lives as they want. I have no problem with that belief and agree with it to a large extent. I just don’t see it as the end all. I ultimately am more interested in the future of our species and our evolution into something more than we are today.

For that we need education for all that want it, as cheaply as possible. Yes you’ve got your sales men, your Bill Gates types and your Enron scandals (all of which are big news, of course, because they go against the grain, but never mind) but that doesn’t change the fact that people’s average chances improve with education and that the more each individual can do, the better off we are all together (you can’t get more capitalist than that).

Oh and lastly, simply because I argue against an idea doesn’t mean I automatically embrace the available alternative. If I argue against capitalism that doesn’t mean I’m promoting socialism. There is always a third, possible alternative, which might still need to be discovered. Just like if somebody manages to poke a hole in evolution theory that doesn’t necessarily mean god exists (there might be a third alternative) me saying that capitalism doesn’t have all the answers doesn’t mean I’m embracing socialism or communism.