This article is dedicated to: A man I met, with most of his body heavily burned, simply because he was a Chinese during the 1998 May Riot in Indonesia. Lots of capitalists that are slaughtered during the cultural evolution. Ten thousands of peaceful smugglers that are massacred in Banda island by the Dutch for conducting peaceful spice trade and all that are similar to them. All minority groups and individuals that face discrimination, even genocide, for economically contributing too much for their society. All customers that have to pay higher products due to protection of tariff and trades. Productive people that are fined with income tax for the victimless crime of making honest money. Smart students that are slowed down so not to move too fast. Industries that do not get subsidy, or even banned to protect unproductive industry and laborers that earn much less due to such restrictions. Poor starving people that could have been rich had their countries choose to embrace free market. Women and males that are trapped in unhappy marriage which they have a hard time getting out. Women and children that have lots of their best choices taken under the pretext of protection. Immigrants and refuges. Is welfare part of capitalism?
In short, no. In consensually, punishing the productive through income tax to reward parasitic behavior is the biggest affront against the principle of free market. In fact, from many governments intervention in economy, the one that proponents of free market often oppose the most is welfare. However, when we look further, capitalism and welfare is not really total opposites. Most importantly, properly done, a straight forward welfare program can cause less market distortion, and hence an efficient replacement to buy votes from losers, than farm subsidies, public schools, minimum wage, trades restrictions, tariffs, and sex laws. If it's done by taxing wealth, rather than income, the amount of market distortion can be minimized further. Welfare is also cheap. It'll cost $5000/year to a welfare recipient in USA, for example. However, we need to remember that the recipients' lifestyle worth only $500. The other $4500 goes to implicit welfare due to higher living costs. That implicit welfare includes minimum wage, immigrations laws, and food subsidy, or protections. If somehow a straight forward explicit welfare program can replace all relatively more evil governments' interventions, then capitalists are probably better of not opposing welfare so much. Even Milton Friedman supports schemes called guaranteed minimum income, which is like welfare but with much less market distortion. That's not where the similarity ends. One of the main creeds of capitalism is that consent and competition should be preferred over force. Without that consent, anyone can simply make us choose to make our self worst of under the pretext that it is for our own good. In fact, most laws against consensual acts can be traced down to protection of some disgruntled competitors often done under the pretext of the consenting parties' own good. Anti prostitution and anti polygamy laws, for example, is there to ration females to poor dumb males under the pretext of protecting the consenting women. Of course, all natural resources tend to be rationed somewhat proportional to ones' voting power. And that does explain why democracy and anti polygamy laws go hand in hand too. One man one vote soon leads to one man one wife. Well, at least Matt Ridley agrees with me and he's a well known mainstream scientific researchers. I guess that's also why so many uncompetitive people want to ensure that evolution theory is not taught in school. You can also read a famous psikiatrist book, "The road less traveled," you'll see that life long monogamous marriage is just a trap to prevent highly desirable people from being available to those who they want more, and romance is just the lure to that trap. On the women side, anti pornography laws is really meant to prevent highly desirable women from advertising her assets and hence protecting less pretty women from the higher industry standard a public display of superior desirability might cause. Countries that embrace porn tend to have prettier women. Where did all the unsexy ones go? They're all shifting out of the gene pool, and hence are doing their best to oppose porn preaching religious doctrines that men should judge women based on any features but beauty, which they can't offer. Another issue is consent. Welfare program is not consensual; however, it's relatively more consensual then civil war. In ancient time, when we have different ideological opinions, we end up killing each other to proof who are "right." The Catholic would kill the Gnostic, the Sunni would kill the Shiah. One King would kill the other. A younger prince will argue that the older prince is demon. Might makes right. Such differences of opinions are of course solved with war, which is a very cost inefficient way to know who're "right." However it does work in some subjective practical sense. If we look in the past and try to figure out whether the Gnostic or the Catholic is the one that's heretical or "right" respectively, we need only to see who won. The Gnostics are slaughtered, so they must be the heretic, or do they? At least I bet there are way more people in the world that think that way than the other way around, excluding me actually. It doesn't matter how many books many institutionalized religions burned, how much restrictions of freedom of speech and irrationality they embraced, how many witnesses they snuffed outs and all other techniques that would not have stand the scrutiny of a peer reviewed scientific journal, or even a reasonable jury in the court of law. Too many people don't believe who are right and reasonable, they believe who are mighty. Right or wrong, the win will always become right anyway. Now, under democratic context, we don't kill those who oppose us, rather we try to persuade enough people to join our cause. How do we persuade them? By money of course. Welfare program is then a reasonably cost efficient method to buy votes. When too many people are on a side, we will sort of know that going to war will hurt the other side; hence we comply anyway with the whim of majority avoiding the costly alternatives. While not ideal, this is indeed how right and wrong is really decided, proper assessments of each sides' bargaining position and mutually cherished compromised line of war, plus a bunch of lies covering what's going on to safe each sides' face. No matter how noble the purpose, lies and prejudices lead to misunderstanding, that leads to more war. Hence, the best contribution is simply to unmask all lies. All in all, peaceful democracy is indeed a more cost efficient ways to measure ones' bargaining position. While democracy often lead to decisions opposites of freedom, like popularly supported victimless crime, income tax, and welfare, it's indeed relatively more cost efficient than civil war. That's not when the coherency end. Various natural laws restrict various possible political outcomes. We can't expect a stone will fly to the sky when we drop it as much as we cannot expect a human to be generally unselfish. If we want to kill our enemies, we'll do well dropping a big stone on top of our enemies head rather than dropping the stone on top of our own head expecting the stone to somewhat magically fly to the enemies head. The same way, we can't demand market distortion and expect that the best and brightest among us to still magically be a nice tax payer rather than dictators and corruptors. In a country where selling porn or building a good franchise chain is more difficult and less lucrative than becoming a dictator, guess what the smart would end up doing? Ask Saddam. If we want rich and prosperous countries, we must know that it will and only will happen when we properly align individuals' interests with productivity. Such coherency tends to make certain things come in package with another. We can expect that moving electric field will induce magnetic field. The same way, in life, we observe similar things. Communism and socialism, for example, always come in package with dictatorship and corruptions when smart people realize that being dictators pay more than building a business empire. To the opposite capitalistic countries comes in package with softer deals for losers, such as, guess what, welfare. We know from our economic classes that free market capitalism brings prosperity within market mechanism. However, it turns out that the prosperity that free market brings also profit the less successful beyond market mechanism. Capitalism and the prosperity that come with it tend to facilitate ideological changes in ways that benefit the less successful. One such ideological change is the popular support for losers' benefits. One such benefit is, guess what, welfare. The most obvious samples of such ideological shifts the free market bring are the elimination of slavery in US. What happened? As usual, the northern part of America is an industrial country. At that time, steel industries are relatively more modern than the farming industry. Higher tech industry increase labors' productivity. When labor's productivity goes up, entrepreneurs will want to hire as many workers as possible. Hence, labors' salary will go up. This will kill of industries with less labor's productivity. At the end, the marginal productivity of labors in the least productive industry will go up. That value is labors' salary. Under competitive equilibrium, the more productive and efficient a person is, the more he benefits everyone in the chain of productivity except those similar to him. Hence, an entrepreneurs coming up with ways to improve labors' productivity would benefit everyone, including workers and consumers, at the expense of other entrepreneurs and capitalists. Read that Karl Marx! Then what? When labors' salary goes up, obviously labors will move to the employers that pay them higher. Hence, farm labors in the south want to move to the north. They can't do so legally though because they were slaves. Hence, the northern capitalists in US want to free slaves so they can hire more workers. And then the southern capitalists in US want to keep slavery. This then results in war. The bigger the labors' productivity, the more intensive capitalists have to free slaves. The more supporters there will be on a cause the more likely the cause won. Hence, slaves were freed. Unfortunately, people still want to help losers and buy votes from those who are too expensive and too stubborn to switch. That explains why the farms in US gets subsidy. If losing means not as successful as the other, then there will always be losers. However, we see how free market shifts the worlds' system in ways that benefits the losers too. Unlike the commies' propaganda, capitalism does not cause or even enlarge disparity of wealth. Capitalism only changes the way such disparity are earned to the benefits of all. At the end of the warring states period in China, the king of Chin, Shih Huang Ti, and his prime minister, Li Si were the winner. Within one generation they have all their family slaughtered. If that's what winning means, what did losing means in pre-capitalistic countries? In ancient time, losing meant having all the males slaughtered, enslaved, or castrated and all the females raped and winning means risking your whole family slaughtered by rebels. In socialists countries the rich are corruptors and dictators that slice each other throats while the poor are starving. Now, thanks to the prosperity only free market can bring, losing means they can leave on welfare, with plenty of chance to climb back and proof their worth, like J. K. Rowling. Now, slaves are so free and highly paid thanks to increase in labors' productivity. In fact, when slave jobs are moving to China under globalization, slaves in US refused to be emancipated and want to keep their slave jobs in US rather than evolving into entrepreneurs. So, much for the land of the free and the place of the brave. Some people don't mind dying for what they believe in but are too scared to start a business. Evolutions will fix that I guess. Free market gives abundances to everyone. The benefits the free market brings benefit those less capable from being successful not only within the system but also through non market mechanism, like the ending of slavery and the start of reverse slavery we call welfare. But how do those really work? Is there a general principle? Each of us is greedy and selfish that we want as many as possible for us. Humans' greed and selfishness is an undisputable scientific facts, as sure as the sun rise in the east, as sure as a stone will fall to the ground pulled by gravity. We're not just greedy and selfish. Greed and selfishness doesn't explain all the war, suffering, and poverty we face. In fact, greed is good. Properly aligned, under free market, the greatest among us shall be the one productively providing the best service to the most customers. Blessed be the productive because they'll be rich. This will encourage higher and higher standard of living that we are currently enjoying. Free market allows those who serve more to grow richer. To those who have more profit, to those more capital are given. Even kingdom of heaven don't mind using this nice positive feedback effect. Who needs new deals to break up companies? Also, women prefer the rich. The next time you watch soap opera, make sure it's made in some country with the highest IQ in the world, like Hong Kong. Free sex means richer males will consensually attract and mate with more women producing more kids. That's the whole point of getting rich by the way. Duh? In fact, that's what being a living human male is all about: 1. Gain control ship of as much money or power as possible. 2. Attract or in anyway acquire as many females as possible. 3. Make kids. 4. Use that kids as tools to make grand children. You bet it's right because it's science. Of course, they don't teach this important fact in biology class because government interfere in education. Hence, when we're free, without genocide, without war, even with humanitarians aids given to appease enemies, the meek will indeed inherit the earth. More than greedy and selfish, some humans are simply not humans because they embrace the root of all evil, envy. That explains why we have so many laws against mutually beneficial consensual acts and governments regulations to protect us from our own choices. The truth is, all those laws and restrictions are more often not there to protect stupid people from making mistakes. All such laws are there to prevent the smart from making the right choices. That's why, for example, every body has to move equally slowly in school, to prevent the smart from moving faster. That's why various reproductive techniques are politically incorrect proportional to the expected quality of genetic material that will be duplicated. In particular, life long monogamous marriage, free sex, prostitution, polygamy, and cloning are sequences that both have increasingly expected value of genetic quality outcome and politically incorrectness. In Europe and China, the smart monks are encouraged not to get married. When some minority groups don't buy the bullshit and hence greatly improving their productively earned wealth and genetic quality, such minority groups somehow become victims of genocide. Life is like a real time strategy games. That means when we're not at war, we're in a race. That's simply how we evolve. Morality, religions, and ideologies, are stuffs created by really smart people to persuade us to run backward. Peace means we're in a race. Freedom means we are in a competition. Some people just don't want to compete. Hence, they craft lies and prejudices against those who are in front preventing progress to prosperity. I'll tell you the scientific truth. It's from the fruit we knows the tree. Anyone opposing free trades and globalization is more evil than Hitler or Nazi. If only Japan and German could have acquired natural resources through consensual peaceful trade, Nazism wouldn't have been popular there and Hitler wouldn't have risen to power. With his mass hypnotic skills, he may have ended up as seminar speaker I guess. If only those who had wanted to incite the Second World War see all the miracles and prosperity the free market brings, they would have repented and embrace free market. Yet, after all the prosperity and wealth the free market is bringing to all of us, still many people choose to oppose competition, and hence, miss-properly align our interests from productivity. That is the cause of all evil in the world. All causes opposing free market can be negotiated and appeased. However, if the very thing that a group of people want to prevent is the success of the others, then the situation is pretty much kill or be killed zero sum game. How does such situation usually end up? What would be our optimum solutions for such situation? Under normal circumstances, an optimum solution of any business decisions is a solution where the marginal revenue equals to the marginal costs. Hence, in a zero sum game, each party will try to maximize its benefit to that point. Sometimes, the marginal costs have a spike. There is a certain point where increasing a resources allocation beyond a certain point will create adverse costs. For example, increasing the number of labors will increase revenue. After a certain point, increasing one additional labor will mean buying a new machine or building a new factory. We may end up choosing to do it, we may not. In either case, discretions are the better part of the valor when it comes to that line. The same way, in most countries, each of us can increase our profits using property we own or consensually rent. When we maximize our profit that way, the public will, ideally and some times truly, not interfere, and defend us from being prevented to enjoy our "rights" by others. However, when we start using others' property to maximize our gain, say by stealing, public opinions may shift from protecting us to against us. Hence, the choice whether we should steal or not depends on the extra costs of crossing the politically correctness line of war. If a person sees that the potential gain justifies the increase costs of public support shifts, he'll still steal and make a great career out of it. Otherwise he'll stop stealing while coming up with a pretext to justify his cowardly decisions, such as morality. But what do the people choose their reaction to a specific act like stealing? They do so based on their sense of fairness, justice, and right-wrong discernment. How do people get that sense? From ideology. The ideology, religions, or whatever, then decides the line of war where the rest of us should consider before crossing. But how does the line gets drawn? By estimates of bargaining position. Let's examine an example. Is the King (or Queen?) of England the King of France? Don't know. How do we know? In the beginning, a ruling class from France went to England and become king of England. Then they lost control of France. Hence, king of England wanted to take back the controls they have lost. Well, such conflicts are solved by war. In this particular case, the war lasted 100 years. The British attacked France and successfully route knights with long bows. Then, the Frances stroke back driving the British back to their isolated islands. However, the France cannot move further and go all the way to attack British because of the Strait of Dover separating the two nations. Finally both sides realized that the straits somehow became the sacred line of war. It's not auspicious to cross the line of war for either side. The France, having more army and larger population would beat up the British on land, and the British being stronger at sea can always repulsed France sea invasion. Hence, we got peace. Such natural separators like straits and mountains explain why Europeans are divided into many different countries. The Chinese, not having that natural line of war, end up getting united all the time. Now, let's get back to the question whether welfare is part of capitalism. If all of us have just enough food, and some people don't work, what would we end up doing to those who are not productive? Humans' basic instincts and preferences lead to gene pool survival. When food is scarce, such as when the people demand centralized planning, it would serve ones' gene pool survival to slaughter the parasites rather than sharing food to them. That's because sharing food to those who do not earn it means starving ones own self. In fact, humans will kill each other to literally eat each other when food is scarce. Such is what happened in China and Rusia when centralized planning, governments' intervention in economy, and prejudices against successful capitalists became the norm. However, when food and money are abundance, such as when the people embrace free market, fighting the parasites might cause more gene pool survival lost than feeding them. On the other hand, simply giving and yielding toward threaten will motivate people to keep pushing us around. Moreover, giving in to those who can use force against us will motivate countries to build arms rather than say, better video games. Hence, one possible strategy to minimize open war while still properly aligning ones interest with other individuals around them is to give to those who ask nicely and ask less. As free market brings a lot of abundance, those who are needy can be appeased much more cheaply than those who are envy, and hence, we got welfare program. To be frank, I'd rather see the unproductive people have bigger TV rather than letting them make more kids. It's more humane, and cheaper. Guess what? Most people that know they're not very capable either would rather have that too. Back to the France vs British. If only both sides have realized the true bargaining positions of each, they wouldn't have to resort to such expensive 100 years war right? The thing is, the 100 years war are the most credible and accurate ways to measure ones' bargaining position. War shows which one is stronger, and hence leads to a mutual understanding of where the line of war might be. If only we can wave our gun and scare the enemies, it'll be great. However, the only threats that are credible are those actually done. How do we know a cause's bargaining position? Democracy might give some light by counting the number of those who are in favor or against what we consider lesser evil. However, number counting can be deceiving. We hold this truth with plenty of evidences, that humans are inherently different. We have difference capability and preferences, and hence different choices and outcome. It's useless to lay net in front of anything with wings. Those who are genetically predestined to be successful will get rich anyway whether through honest capitalistic means or through dictatorship. Those who are small in numbers can hence be quite strong. Preventing the smart from making money honestly will then turn them into corruptors and dictators. When the Chileans demand to prosecute their entrepreneurs, they end up getting a dictator, the way any country that demand slavery over freedom deserves. Fortunately, Pinochet are relatively benign compared to others dictator and embrace free market giving the miraculous prosperity that the Chilean now enjoy. Now, US government arrested his daughter for a crime of tax evasion. An act that wouldn't have been a crime if making honest money is free. The miracle of Chili becomes the model of China's moving to free market. It also helps to end communism all over the world peacefully. If capitalists fail to show thanks to Pinochet family, I don't know what would happen to all of us. So, beyond number counting, the more accurate ways are then through skirmishes. When people cross the public's opinion line of war and we don't strike back, the line of war will shift against the coward by precedence. By fighting back, we'll then have a more accurate knowledge of which one the public would agree with. Hence, it's very important to retaliate to what others do to us, either good or bad. It's a pleasure to serve my friends, it's also a pleasure to wipe out envy enemies that are on our ways, should my friends wish or don't mind. When a fraudster tricks my brother over $3,900, my main concern is not to get my money back. My main concern is to get the fraudster to jail even if that will costs far more money than the $3,900. When a thief steals my money on 2001, my concern is also not to get my property back. What's just is to encourage the whole world to post any thieves conviction records on the net to prevent further larcenies. It makes me wonder though. Why people consider it cruel to damage a thief or a fraudster' reputation? The mere acts of making honest money are punishable by income tax. When Everett O. Lasher makes an argument in court, the case leads to $5000 fine, and understandably, a suicide. The mere acts of successfully fending of ones' home from thieves lead to a life long jail term for Tony Martin. Thousands would march against WTO demanding harsh laws to punish those exercising consensual trades. In Iran, the mere acts of switching religions can lead to death penalty. In Indonesia, new laws are being drafted giving years in prison for kissing in public. Of course, public rape during May riot are still far from being punished. This while murderers of Vincent Chin went free without jail term. Thousands would march to end death penalty against murderers. In Indonesia, religious fundamentalists can come to a house and destroy properties from houses providing consensual entertainment with polices watching. Those people often get away or lightly punish. If consensual productive acts are punished while damaging inconsensual forces are not, soon, all highly productive people would end up in gas chamber after the next Cultural Revolution, or what ever. Those who are left are those smart enough to be dictators enslaving the rest of us. Prejudices reminds me of an envy old hag that's so determined to ruin my reputation for being friendly to her and her friends, after her own friendly communication. I never intended to fraud anyone or steal her money yet I got my reputation ruined. I am very disappointed to see that there are people in the world that want to bring me down more than they want to bring down a thief. I have tried to resolve the issue privately by suggesting to that thing that she's really not important enough for anyone to pretend to be her friend. Moreover, I didn't need her as a friend. All this was just a damage-less misunderstanding caused by her own friendly communication which I could simply publicly straighten out. At least, it used to be. However, that vermin really wished to get the issue public telling lies that she never communicated with me, possibly to boost that things' feeling of importance her genes deny her. Well, if she got so mad over a few friendly introductions, I can only wonder what that thing would do when it finds out that her true envy natures are revealed to 55000 newsgroups several times. It'll happen again and again whenever I feel like. Hence, just look for "envy vermin" on the net to find out what's really going on including what she said privatedly. Let the public decide who are more honest, rational, scientific, and straightforward. Let the market decides which one are worthy and who are worthless. It's a great mistake to ever consider such thing as a friend, a mistake no body should do. It's her kind that turns people of from making money productively. Hopefully we can undermine public opinions against all form of envy motivated lies and prejudices. At the end, we'll greatly weaken laws against victimless crime and easily out compete all envy people out of the gene pool. That'll ensure that the free fair market competition would reign over war when all lies and prejudices against those more successful are gone. Now that being said, I want to move all jobs that can be done online to Asia, especially, copy writers. Take advantage of the value difference and leverage like hell is how we all make money in any system. Who's with me? Free market is all merciful and all compassionate. At the end, even those that oppose free market will benefits from free trades. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
