How Badly Does Modern Collectivism Hurt You?
Posted by CircuitGuy 11 years, 5 months ago to Culture
How bad is collectivism today? Clearly the US is not Galt's Gulch or Stalin's USSR. We're somewhere in between.
I'm writing down some negative ways collectivism could affect individuals, from most innocuous to worst.
A) Collectivism is an annoyance at present. I usually find good ways to work around it.
B) If it weren't for poor gov't policies and collectivism, we might have fantastical things like a cure for cancer, affordable space travel, robots than can do most human tasks.
C) Collectivism keeps me from my dreams. (e.g. “A union or affirmative action is keeping me for being promoted out of turn, and there are no other options for me to do the work I love.” “A personal passion of mine is illegal.” “I can't get funding for my organization because of a sweetheart network around gov't, financial institutions, and my industry.”)
D) One or more Gail Wynands, Ellsworth Tooheys, or Wesley Mouchs are out to sabotage my life and are having some impact on me. We all agree these types exist. This item says your name personally is on their “list” of enemies or people to sabotage.
E) My business or career is failing because of collectivism and poor gov't policy (e.g. regulation, taxes, monetary policy).
F) We are on the cusp of totalitarianism and/or severe economic collapse similar to in Atlas Shrugged.
This is not an exclusive list, just the first six things that came to mind.
I'm curious which of these things are happening to Gulch members. Is it we're at A and B and just mindful of preventing the more severe items? Or we over halfway through a real-life Atlas Shrugged?
Note: I expect it varies depending on location, industry, interests, experiences, etc. Also, it could be a mix, say A and F but not B-E; they don't necessarily happen in order.
I'm writing down some negative ways collectivism could affect individuals, from most innocuous to worst.
A) Collectivism is an annoyance at present. I usually find good ways to work around it.
B) If it weren't for poor gov't policies and collectivism, we might have fantastical things like a cure for cancer, affordable space travel, robots than can do most human tasks.
C) Collectivism keeps me from my dreams. (e.g. “A union or affirmative action is keeping me for being promoted out of turn, and there are no other options for me to do the work I love.” “A personal passion of mine is illegal.” “I can't get funding for my organization because of a sweetheart network around gov't, financial institutions, and my industry.”)
D) One or more Gail Wynands, Ellsworth Tooheys, or Wesley Mouchs are out to sabotage my life and are having some impact on me. We all agree these types exist. This item says your name personally is on their “list” of enemies or people to sabotage.
E) My business or career is failing because of collectivism and poor gov't policy (e.g. regulation, taxes, monetary policy).
F) We are on the cusp of totalitarianism and/or severe economic collapse similar to in Atlas Shrugged.
This is not an exclusive list, just the first six things that came to mind.
I'm curious which of these things are happening to Gulch members. Is it we're at A and B and just mindful of preventing the more severe items? Or we over halfway through a real-life Atlas Shrugged?
Note: I expect it varies depending on location, industry, interests, experiences, etc. Also, it could be a mix, say A and F but not B-E; they don't necessarily happen in order.
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No go back to the Koch brothers, left, right, left...
and before the supposed "outing" she was in a photo spread for a DC magazine-
Bush didn't lie; if he did, every intelligence agency in the world did.
Hussein had WMDs, because he'd USED WMDs. Aerial and orbital photography showed, while we dithered about invading, trucks of WMD equipment headed for Syria , *which used WMDs just a little while ago, of the same type used by Hussein*.
No, the ID thing is a way to keep dead people and people not eligible to vote from voting.
Identity theft is rampant (guess what segment of the population benefits most from it...) and you don't want to do a thing to prevent legitimate voters votes being stolen or nullified.
Not uncommon from the left.
Everything Mimi just said is true, and documented.
Not uncommon from the right.
Hussein fired on our warplanes flying the no-fly zone to keep him from using WMDs against his own people... AGAIN.
That's an act of war that nullified the armistice. It was an act of war that merited conquest of Iraq, all... by... itself.
But, the left never cared about that, because their general attitude was always "F* the U.S."
No, it didn't.
Leaking the CIA agent's name got people killed. And Bush let Scooter off the hook.
The ID thing is a way for the right to discourage segments they believe to be opposed to them from voting. Sadly that too is simple to see.
BTW, the George Soros quote turns out to be bogus.
Hussein *used* WMDs. Hence the no-fly zone as part of the armistice he violated. The WMDs used against the people in Syria most probably originated in Iraq, as we saw truckloads of such materials heading to Syria as we stalled our invasion.
Death panels... a real concern. There's already talk of rationing healthcare under Obama. Healthcare rationing will require some bureaucracy for determining whether a person's life is worth saving.
There may not be a serious problem with "voter cheating", but "voter fraud" is a serious problem, whether it's one vote or a million votes; and there has been examples and evidence throughout the history of the nation, mostly on the local level for local elections, of voter fraud; from ballot boxes being moved before voting closes in a district, to dead Chicagoans voting repeatedly, to military ballots being held up or discounted.
See? I can throw out out-of-context meaningless words, too.
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