NP PRC-related

[Teufelsdröckh]

calbert at tiac.net wrote:
> 
> Doug:
> > Comparing national atrocities is going down the slippery slope; the
> > Western powers, U.S. included, hardly have the moral high ground in
> > this regard,
> 
> STOP RIGHT THERE....Now cite me two instances of such "national
> atrocities" which even begin to compare to the "engineered" famines
> in the USSR and the PRC in the past century.......You are currently
> down about 40 million victims - GO!

I hate to return to this ridiculous discussion, but 2 atrocities on
"our" side immediately come to mind: the almost complete genocide of
pre-Columbian inhabitants from these lands now called the U.S.A., and
what those anti-communist Nazis did . . . and the U.S.A. is the only
country to drop an atomic bomb on a city (twice! big cities, too!).


> Economics is, at its core, simply the study of rational behavior
> chanelled towards "self-interest", and how this "aggregates" from the
> basic household model to the larger polity. As such it considers the
> role that such self interest (some call it greed) plays in the area of
> asset allocation.
> ...
> Remove individual incentive, and, as history will show, an economic
> system ceases to generate necessary surplus goods, which form
> the capacity to invest in what economists refer to as "common
> goods", services, which though necessary, may not be "efficiently"
> addressed in a for profit context. Even in the realm of "common
> goods" capitalist systems have proven superior generators of such
> benefits to existing alternatives. And this is why I love economics -
> those who would rail against the process of "privatizing" such
> services are blind to the fact that economic laws will very likely prove
> the proponents of such policies wrong. Common goods, by
> definition stands outside the "profit matrix"....

This last point is good, but while I'm here, may I interject a comment?
It has been established in these pages that capitalism is not an
ideology, but it seems often to be defended as such, as in "free markets
= democracy," or in the symbiosis of "Protestant Work Ethic" and
"western" capitalism. And surely capitalism has known excesses
(murdering union organizers, to start with) and called its critics
Stalinists, Maoists, Utopians, Terrorists as if they themselves are
above reproach, as if they are all that guarantees our freedom. (They
sure don't like self-interest when it's against theirs!) I don't mean to
fall into an us-them problem, here, because we're all in it up to our
arrears, but it does look that way rather frequently.


> Love is just as integral a component of human nature as greed - call
> it the "counterforce".....

Nicely said. And self-interest may well entail both sides there, as it
pulls in your loved one, your pets, your family, your neighborhood,
wilderness and its critters, your co-workers, your co-believers, your
town, your nation even, other people in other worlds . . . for love or
for greed is a good question to ask.

--
Diogenes Teufelsdröckh

P.S. Whether capitalism is a superior or inferior system of providing
goods people is not the issue. Criticizing capitalism is not "utopian"
-- it's democratic participation. To celebrate Cuba's successes in
literacy and health care is not to ignore Fidel's tyranny -- it's just
to point out that with all our freedom and free markets the U.S.A. is
lagging there.

P.P.S. I agree with Terrance that the concerns of Gravity's Rainbow's
are primarily "religious" because all good writing (all good art) is
religious. Pynchon quite clearly compares the rocket's white death to
angels of various grim sky-borne message. He quite clearly explores the
fetishization of power and submission that are part of every religion.
But as Pynchon explores the paths to reconciling oneself with fate --
nature- and man-made, imagined and true, self-created and imposed (by
history, by parents, by circumstance, by the system, by Them) -- he does
not refer responsibility to an unknowable god. In that, the book also
becomes spiritual, recognizing that history at least is human activity,
including our own, not unknowable fate, and at least in Slothrop's
metaphoric standing in for us the reader, Pynchon provides escape, if
only in metaphoric katharsis as the rocket drops onto our head and the
book is closed, from the horrors of the systems we create . . .