Letters from Jordan – IPC10 Conference Day

JBob. I’m sure we’ll go round and round….

I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all that the ‘chief’ is more motivated than the owners of the trees. The chief, if he’s acting as representative of the owners, has pressure from those same owners to ensure all owners fulfil their obligations — for the good of all. As the old saying goes, it just takes one bad apple….

As you’ve made very clear in the past, every individual in your eyes should be left to make their own decision. For example, some time ago I wrote:

Consider the bears… Where I live, people shoot them. But, they are only allowed to shoot a certain number, and they must have a license. Bear numbers are carefully monitored. This is government enforced for the benefit of the bear. It is to protect them from the few who’d like to see them all dead. These laws are a reflection of the will of the majority – a majority who don’t want to see them become extinct. Because of these laws (which are a restriction on the freedom of private individuals working in their own self interest – which is your ideal) the bear population stays relatively stable. What happens if you (somehow!) privatise all the land? Well, all the bear will get killed, that’s what. The bear will be imposing his own restrictions on your freedom of movement, and he/she might even steal some chickens from your yard. If a bad human neighbour did this, in your ideal libertarian world you’d take him to court, but what about the bear? You can’t sue him – so you’ll have to shoot him.

Your response was:

Bears: private property rights should apply to wildlife. If you own the land, you can decide what happens to the bears. Some people would kill them, some wouldn’t kill any, most would probably hunt a sustainable number.

Privatising wildlife is a reprehensible concept to me, as it would be to probably all traditional cultures. You say “most would probably hunt a sustainable number”. You’ve got to be kidding!! This has proven wholly incorrect throughout history. Open your eyes, and you’ll see that almost everywhere where there were no constraints placed on human behaviour, the last bear was killed, the last wolf, the last cougar and even the last tree. Why are there no large predators virtually anywhere humans have settled? You are effectively leaving the right-to-life of the bears and every other creature and organism to chance and the whim of private owners – people who consistently prove that they cannot find a ‘self interest’ reason to keep them alive.

JBob. Again, you love to find examples of where your thoughts are vindicated, but you pick them out of the pot, ignoring all the other elements in the soup. I truly believe you fail to look objectively at these issues. I fully agree that people having a sense of ownership is important. But you take this as a magic mechanism, all on its own, and don’t manage to find any balance. You take it too far.

Privatising everything gives us prisons with a vested interest in society having more criminals. It gives us hospitals that incentivise sickness. It gives us schools that incentivise career students who can’t actually do anything. Unless there are regulations in place to ensure balance and ethical behaviour, then self-interest will naturally lead to short-term thinking for the individual, at the expense of the needs of community and society at large.

If I bring up tangible examples of ‘free market’ mayhem, like Dead Peasants Insurance, for example, you don’t respond — Your way of thinking results in the kind of nonsense we see in the U.S. – where big corporations, without knowledge of their employees, purchase life insurance policies on those employees so they can profit from their death. The husband dies, the wife gets nothing, but the employer rakes it in – and often even though the employee was not even in their employ at time of their death. This is free market capitalism at its finest. The employer is actually incentivised to sabotage their employee’s car, for example, so the CEO gets to fulfil his duty, of increasing shareholder profits on the latest quarterly statement. (‘Dead Peasant Insurance’: see here, here, and here).

I mentioned prisons above, where if privatised they have a vested interest in society having more criminals. This was well played out in reality with the ‘kids for cash’ scheme:

https://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/22/judge_convicted_in_pennsylvania_kids_for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ciavarella

This judge and his industry collaborators put children away in a for-profit detention centre when they’d done little to nothing wrong. The prison simply needed paying customers at their detention centre, and the judge was happy to take payment to provide these.

For you, all problems should be solved in a court. Yet, this situation was fed by a court and its corrupt judge!

Thankfully, the judge, Mark Ciavarella got a 28 year sentence for his involvement – but this does not bring back the stolen time for these children, nor give them back any sense of respect for the ‘system’ they’re living within, and it certainly doesn’t bring back the life of the boy who committed suicide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugCrczkMo8c

You want to create a court system to solve everything, but in doing so all you’d be doing is creating a new form of government – one where a privatised, profit-motivated court governs. Where would be the defense for the penniless? Indeed, where in your privatised utopia would whole sections of society fit? The physically and mentally disabled, etc. etc.? These would also be left to chance, like the bear. If they have no value to the monetary system, they’d simply perish.

I have repeatedly requested you write up a post for publishing, detailing how your libertarian world view would be played out in reality. I’d still love to see it, rather than your constantly spraying your dimly-thought-through magic potions onto this site. Why not take up the challenge JBob? Write down your thoughts, draw the lines from your ideal concepts into the heart of society, join the dots, tell us how it can be implemented and how you expect it to play out. Tell us how you’d keep your system based on self-interest from destroying itself for short-term gain.

For myself, I’d far prefer to see a system based more along the lines of the more successful traditional societies, where small groups put representatives they respect forward. I’ve shared this already:

Imagine instead, a lucid, educated populace organising themselves into groups that are like the cells of a body, or a plant. Imagine, say, the ten houses in your street forming a committee to discuss the needs and development of your street. From the people living in those ten houses you would all elect the person who you believe would best represent you all – someone you all respect for their ethics, practical wisdom and egalitarian attitude.

If other groups of houses in your local community did likewise, then your suburb (if urban) or locality (if rural) would then have localized representatives all representing the needs and wants of these sub-communities.

Now, taking this further: What if, say, ten of these representatives (each representing ten households) were to get together and elect from amongst themselves the best person to represent THEM, then you’d have one representative for a group of one hundred, all answering to the representatives of the groups of ten.

You can see where I’m going…. You then get ten of the representatives of one hundred together, and they elect a representative from amongst themselves, so you then have one representative for 1,000 households…. And so on, and so on.

The end result is a bottom up democracy where everyone is represented by people deserving of respect. If any of these representatives dishonours him/herself or fails to convey and work for the wishes of the people, then they’re simply replaced. Such a situation cultivates social advancement of the best kind – people striving to earn a reputation for being just. And, just as importantly, it creates a stable system. Representatives of cells might get swapped out from time to time, due to retirement, or perhaps someone losing credibility, but as a whole, the system remains largely intact forever – rather than the present situation where we have a complete change of government, and a potential complete change of direction, every four years, which discourages long term planning. (In this sense, monarchies are better than present centralised governments, as at least, if you’re lucky enough to get a ‘good’ King/Queen, they’re thinking over their lifetime.)

And, such representatives would be seen as servants of those they’re representing, not ‘leaders’ or ‘rulers’ of them.
Then, when policy decisions are made at the highest levels, they happen because from the ground up they’re reflecting the wishes of the people, or most of them. Such a scenario, combined with the right kind of education – practical and holistic – could transform society in very positive ways.