On 10/04/14 03:56, RJH wrote:

And why should we subsidise a workforce we cant employ, because they
have not been looked after and encouraged to work, and get brought up on
the basis of being helpless? Should we rather not discourage them from
being born at all, and if they do, look after them better than their
biological parents can?


OK ... moves slowly towards the door

At some point you cant shrug off the deeply unpleasant choices that we
have to face up to.

I know the Left is all about shrugging off the deeply unpleasant, so it
happens 10 times worse, by dint of never having been addressed.


If we start from the basic premise that aroud this point in history, we
have changed from a nation, and an economy that is bounded by our human
capacity to explot repources exponentially, to one which is reaching
the ECONOMIC limit of those resources, and therefore cannot sustain a
rising population and a rising material standard of living together.
then you are in a position of something approaching a zero sum game.

You can have more people, bit it will be more poverty as well. Or less
people but individually they will be richer.


Those are the stark and only possibilities IF you accept that we are
resource limited economics wise. That energy and food cannot be
increased by 'adding more people'.


So the first thing to agree or disagree on is whether you are a
Malthusian or a Cornucopian, whether you think that unlimited population
expansion is possible forever, and there are unlimited resources in the
world to support them.

If you are in anyway a Malthusian, you are either in the camp of
'laissez faire and let disease, starvation, internecine violence and
poverty take its course (think Rwanda, Somalia, etc etc)' or 'get people
not to have so many kids'.

IF you are in the 'get people not to have so many kids' bracket, you are
merely now talking about ways to achieve that.

And all I am advocating is that financial disincentives to children are
the softest least draconian approach possible. Or at least removing the
financial incentives to *have* them.

And clamp down on uncontrolled immigrations as well.

You have to understand in the end that what egalitarianism of the most
lofty and idealistic sort that you seem to advocate, irrevocably leads
to is a world where everyone is uniformly poor miserable and has a
limited life expectancy. You are not levelling up, you are levelling down.

The problem of 'why should the west enjoy a lifestyle 100 times better
than the average Sahel pot bellied starving kid' is simply solved by
importng all the things that make them stay that way into Europe and
giving them incentives to continue in that way.

I used to be like you, till I lived in Africa for a while. Why should
the Whites, they asked, have nice houses, swimming pools and clean
water, and cars and stuff when they had nothing?

A very good question, and one it took a little research to answer.

In S Africa there were at that time 5 million 'whites ("Europeans") ' 25
million 'blacks' and a few million of people 'caught in the middle' that
the systme broadly classified as 'coloured'(included 'cape coloured,
East Asian Tamil and other people who had arrived there as workers, or
on ships form various other parts of the world other than Africa or
Europe). Never mind the stupidity of basing policy on arbitrary ethnic
origin, lets say you have 5 million haves, 25 million have nots, and
about 4 million 'have a littles'.

You do the sums, and realise that the total economy of te country is
utterly incapable of sustaining more than about 7 million people in a
'white lifestyle'. It only has so much agricultural land, it only has so
much mineral wealth and it only has so much water.

And it only has so many teachers.

The stupid egalitarian approach would have you removing all property,
and all wealth from the 5-7 million reasonably affluent, and giving it
to the poor, who would because that is in the culture, simply have more
babies. Nothing would be solved. Worse still, the nature of the
egalitarian process is that instead of a few people getting a good
enough education, and by dint of the fact their parents did NOT pay 100%
death duties, be able to preserve some sort of elite that was actually
capable of being educated and literate enough to run and develop the
infrastructure that enabled the whole populations to support itself as
well as it did - and trust me, in comparison to Zimbabwe, Angola and
Botswana, South Africa at that time despite apartheid was a HOLIDAY
DESTINATION for people from those countries.

And that is when the scales finally fell from my eyes and I realsied
that if you area real socialist, and you really DO care for the
greatest good for the greatest number, the worst thing you can do is
take from the rich and GIVE to the poor. Because it is the rich who are
the ONLY people who are in a position to deploy capital intelligently
because they have it, and ar eused to its deployment, into projects -
especially education - that mean that in the end the WHOLE standard of a
country is raised.

IT is FAR better to have a few well educated people than the whole mass
of the population educated a little bit, but no one well educated at all.

It is FAR better to have a few rich families that can do philanthropic
things, deploy capital to start business, than it is to evenly divide
all the capital amongst the people where there is never enough at ANY
point to make any difference at all.

You can, in short take a hammer and beat it into iron foil and spread it
thinly around the place, but it's at the expense of ever having any hope
of being able to drive a nail into anything.

Inshort you need to concentrate capital, and you need to have an elite,
not because its a morally good thing, but because you simply cannot
afford to make EVERYONE elite and neither can you afford not to have an
elite.

The bollox te Left then spouts is that yes, you need an elite, but its
going to be a Party, a State, that is 'democratically elected' and will
take ALL the capital to itself and then BE the NEW elite dispoensing it
as it sees fit.


And in Africa, that means Mugabe.

"Mugabe was raised as a Roman Catholic, studying in Marist Brothers and
Jesuit schools, including the exclusive Kutama College, headed by an
Irish priest, Father Jerome O'Hea, who took him under his wing. Through
his youth, Mugabe was never socially popular nor physically active and
spent most of his time with the priests or his mother when he was not
reading in the school's libraries. He was described as never playing
with other children but enjoying his own company.[14] According to his
brother Donato his only friends were his books.[16]

He qualified as a teacher, but left to study at Fort Hare in South
Africa graduating in 1951, while meeting contemporaries such as Julius
Nyerere, Herbert Chitepo, Robert Sobukwe and Kenneth Kaunda. He then
studied at Salisbury (1953), Gwelo (1954), and Tanzania (1955€“1957).
Originally graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University
of Fort Hare in 1951, Mugabe subsequently earned six further degrees
through distance learning including a Bachelor of Administration and
Bachelor of Education from the University of South Africa and a Bachelor
of Science, Bachelor of Laws, Master of Science, and Master of Laws, all
from the University of London External Programme.[17] The two Law
degrees were earned while he was in prison, the Master of Science degree
earned during his premiership of Zimbabwe"

Guess what. He is an educated elite himself, AND the state. And probably
a psycopath.

Again this is the uncomfortable truth that demolishes the Left's case
for 'egalitarianism' Its as stupid to have a one size fits all education
and reward system as it would be for all the cells in your body to be
brain cells. You would simply die without teeth. Or without a brain and
just teeth.,

Marxism and Marxist theory takes the principle of 'all men equal under
God' and turns it into a vicious attack against the establishment of
'the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate' and purports to
represent liberation of those born without access to capital education
or privilege.

But it never ever achieves it. ALL it does is replace one elite with
quite another, and the new elite is in general not concerned with
anything but the maintenance of its own position, and rewards come not
from wealth creation, but from political affiliation.

When the State owns everything, the only means to better ones lot is to
become part of the state, and have enough influence within it to grab
the biggest portion of it you can.

Never ever to attempt to make the states lot bigger.

And that is exactly what you see around you, the erosion of an elite
based on inheritance, and the further erosion of an elite based on
ability to add to national wealth, by allowing those who do to keep
large chunks of it, towards a society in which the only thing that
counts is what amounts to a one party european superstate.

You are a fool if you think that Clegg or Miliband or Blair are not the
toffs they claim to be against. They are the new toffs. The party
apparatchiks who drive down the Zil lanes of society, getting away with
anything they damned well please without a murmur because they have
convinced you they are on your side., and cut the media in for a huge
slice of the cake. Idiot. They are on no one's side but their own.


You may by now have realised that my objection to them is not that they
ARE an elite, but that they are the WRONG SORT of elite.

You need people running things who CAN run things. And one of the better
ways to do that is to remove restrictions on what people are allowed to
do, and let them keep as much of the results of so doing as you can so a
self forming elite is created out of people who actually have proven
track record in achieving success at SOMETHING.

And neither do I care about inheritance. All that happens with
inheritance is that rich spoilt brats end up losing the money that their
parents left them, and that's fine by me. It isn't destroyed, it just
becomes available fr smart people whose business it is to part fools
from money, and put it back in the food chain. Contrariwise IF they
prove good at keeping the family fortune they prove themselves exactly
the sort of people worthy of having it.

Look at where I live, near Newmarket, center of the horse racing world.
What cold be more socially irrelevant than horse racing. Billions of
pounds of Arab oil money pour into Newmarket, thousands of not very well
educated stable lads and lasses tender to million pound price ticket
horseflesh, that may or many not achieve 15 mnutes of fame and prize
money at a race lasting less than a couple of minutes, cheered on (for
no good reason that I can see) by an audience of tens of thousands.

And yet when you look at it, it represents one of the few ways in which
all the money we spend on petrol, comes back into this country, and
provides a way for people in this country to benefit from it, because we
have something that they want, and we have. Horses and places to train
and exercise them. And it is when all is said and done a relatively
harmless pursuit. And provides cheap entertainment and a colourful
experience for those with little else to get enthusiastic about.

Without personal and private and corporate capital accumulation, there
would be no horse racing. No formula one, no football leagues, no yacht
sailing, probably no films or theatre that people wanted - just state
propaganda instead.


Popular culture exists because the average pleb has a little money to
spend on what he or she wants to enjoy, and that's why it exists.

State sponsored culture is ghastly. I mean how many people actually
attend the opera or the ballet? so few that it HAS to be state sponsored.

How many people watch the Beeb compared to watch all the commercial
channels?


No mate, get over this lefty stupidity. The world works best when people
have the power to decide what they want, and lefty states don't give
them that, they take away their money and distribute it as they, the new
selfish elite, think fit. Mainly into their own pockets.

They dictate policy that's good for them, not for you or me.

It suits a lot of people in government and the energy business to deny
us nuclear power, maintain the fiction of its danger and create the
reality of its expense.

It also suits their book to pretend that more and more people is good
for everyone, when it is inevitably bound to create a non-working class
that owes the state its very existence, and thereby generate a new
generation of people who must vote Big State/Left, because they are
educated deliberately to know no better.

And its suits their book to have more pverty, because thats another
excuse to give them more money and more power to 'fix' it. But they
never do do they?

And it suits their book to attack anyone who threatens them with the
charge of 'elitism' when they themselves are the elite they are talking
about.

Stop wishing the world was other than it is, and look at why it is the
way it is, and what practically you can do about it.

Or you will get fooled, again, and again, and again.


--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.