Is Capitalism Moral

[Kat]

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[syrakusos]

The feed was not good, but from what I saw, John Alison is not a good debater. Ezra Klein asked, "Can you think of a free market business that 98% of the people if they cannot afford it can still shop there?" Alison offered Walmart and their televisions, to which Klein replied that health care is more expensive than televisions. The feed broke up there.

The thing is that debate is itself a skill. The ancient Greeks at first - being implicit "objectivists" - believed that the most logical argument was most correct and most descriptive of reality. By the time of Socrates and Anaxagoras, the Sophists had shown that clever argument wins debates without describing (or changing) reality, giving sophistry a bad name. We still fall victim to it.

George Orwell's 1984 scares different people in different ways: the tv cameras, the horrific oppression, the no-win wars, the control of news media... For me, it is the "ducktalker." Newspeak was invented to eventually reduce human vocalizations below the cognitive level. We have that in the sound-bite. For generations, we have been rewarded in school for short, declarative answers to complex questions.

Thus, if you ask a clever question to which your opponent has no answer, you score a point. Score enough points and you win the debate. Supposedly, you win the audience as well.

However, as in my case here and now, no thinking person is convinced or converted by sophistry. Therefore, I must ask: what is the purpose of these "Demos" debates?