Some presidents were smart, some were stupid. Look how smart we
are, and yet neither of us has ever been president, so far. It’s better to be
smart, but better still to be lucky and have smart people around you. They all
learn to talk down to stupid people, because the undecideds, or as they prefer
to call themselves, independents, are generally pretty stupid. They are the
guys who want to go to war in Ukraine, but can’t find it on a
map.
Nixon didn’t surrender to Vietnam, I believe the popular term of
the time was bug out. He bugged out. He pretended the ARVN was a real army and
snuck out. We didn’t give them anything, though I can think of some states we
might be better off without.
The Tea Party may have ‘independent’ chapters, but they are in the
thrall of the big money folks to fund their crackpot candidates, and they never
publicly disagree with each other over anything. If Rushbo took off his clothes
(shudder) none of them would say that he was naked.
As for property is theft. I wasn’t a deep thinker, like I am now, in my hippie days. I suppose I meant something like we all come into the world naked, but after the slap some of us land on silken pillows and some of us on dirty diddies. So how come some of us have more rights to property than others? Aren’t we all equal? Shouldn’t we all start out with the same amount of stuff?
Well actually that sounds pretty good. How to achieve this
equality is a whole other problem, but shouldn’t this be something we should be
aiming at? I suppose the true capitalist/Randian/libertarian would say no
because if we don’t let some people pile up lots of property they will have no
incentive to do all the wonderful things they have done to advance
civilization. But that’s just my guess. It’s not nice to put words in the
mouths of others.
Way back when if one guy was fighting another for land, I suppose
if they were both about the same size and both had the same kind of club, it
would be fair and square. But in this modern day, if one rich kid is raised in
a nice environment and goes to a really good school, and has all kinds of family
connections and gets all rich, that would be all perfectly legal, but compared
to the poor kid who misses meals in his youth and goes to a crappy school and
has no connections and lives hand to mouth, that is not fair and
square.
But life is not fair, and I agree with that. I don’t know if you
were ever a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, but in I think it’s his first book, Welcome to
the Monkey House, he has a story where strong people have to walk around with
weights attached so that they are not any stronger than the average guy, and
smart people, I don’t remember, something like have to have a shot of whiskey
every hour so that they are not any smarter than the average guy, etc. That
clearly does not make any sense.
Your Irish story makes a lot of sense. This book I’m reading about
early Christianity, has this thing where the early Christians were the
downtrodden and the poor, but then rich guys wanted to join the church, and the
more pure among the Christians, clung to that thing about it’s easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom.
And the rich people were all like, hey we were born rich, that’s the way God
meant us to be, and the pure poor were all like, it wasn’t because God meant you
to be that way it is because somewhere up your lineage your ancestors ripped
that money and land off the people. I guess you can guess who won that
contest.
But still what to do, what to do? I guess we modern day liberals
push for things like graduated income taxes and making things like good
education and good health care available for all.
There is this thing lately where the rich are richer and the poor
are poorer and it’s getting more so all the time. Is this something we should
try to reverse, or should we just notice it and pass on? Is it something that
is just like a natural phenomenon like the polar vortex, and there is nothing to
be done about it even if we wanted to?
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