fiscal insanity...

[moralist]

15 hours ago, SteveWolfer said:

No.  I was speaking of the nature of government. 

...as you have personally experienced getting the government you deserve.

My personal experience of getting the government I deserve is different from yours because I live by different values from yours. Each person's own individual experience of getting the government they deserve is determined by the values by which they live.

The American Constitutional form of government was designed only for decent people.

“Our Constitution was made ONLY for a moral and religious people”. It is WHOLLY INADEQUATE to the government of any other.”

– John Adams

Decent people experience being governed by a Constitutional government because that's what they deserve, while indecent people experience being governed by an unconstitutional bureaucracy because that's what they deserve. So everyone is getting exactly the government they deserve, because this is NOT determined by the government, but by a HIGHER MORAL LAW to which everyone is subject including the government.

The American Constitutional form of government was wisely designed in this way by the Founding Fathers. Being well versed in Biblical moral law they understood the government was designed to be a duly authorized agent of moral retribution.

So to experience being governed by a decent government only requires living a life deserving of a decent government, and you will have it.

 

Greg

[BaalChatzaf]

No one deserves to be robbed or plundered.  In case you haven't notice,  the government has the drop on us. They have more guns, planes, tanks, flame-throwers, poison gas and drones than ordinary citizens  or the NRA.

[Peter]

"Apey" Greg wrote: The American Constitutional form of government was wisely designed in this way by the Founding Fathers. Being well versed in Biblical moral law understood the government was designed to be a duly authorized agent of moral retribution. end quote

“Get thee to a nunnery.” Shakespeare.

And if you shake a spear you get morons howling. Why are you on this secularist, rational site, anyway?

[Peter]

SteveWolfer wrote: No.  I was speaking of the nature of government.  All government, by their nature have only the capacity to prohibit (backed by threat of force), confiscate (backed by the threat of force) and the capacity to direct force (as with police or military actions). end quote

Well said Steve, but I am not sure your three laws cover the spectrum. Be all you can be. American exceptionalism. Would you consider government hiring or advertising as “the capacity to direct force” rather than persuasion?   

Peter

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, moralist said:

Each person's own individual experience of getting the government they deserve is determined by the values by which they live.

Greg,

That saying about a people getting the government they deserve, it isn't about a different government for each person.  It is a mostly true statement about a society over time.  If someone dressed you as a priest and parachuted you into ISIS-held territory, the horror you'd face certainly isn't something you'd deserve.

---------------

1 hour ago, moralist said:

“Our Constitution was made ONLY for a moral and religious people”. It is WHOLLY INADEQUATE to the government of any other.”

– John Adams

I disagree with the quote of John Adams that you provided.  I'd say that the constitution had to be understood and supported by at least a significant minority of the people.

----------------

1 hour ago, moralist said:

Decent people experience being governed by a Constitutional government because that's what they deserve, while indecent people experience being governed by an unconstitutional bureaucracy because that's what they deserve.

There are a lot of decent people, all around the world, who are victimized by their government.  Their decency doesn't change the reality.  Reality is what it is, and we may have some choice in how we experience it, and we each have somewhat different experiences, but those facts don't change reality.  Reality exists, and our consciousness is conscious of it, and out of that relationship we form an experience.  Our experience isn't capable of going out into reality and changing it in that fashion.

-----------------

1 hour ago, moralist said:

So everyone is getting exactly the government they deserve, because this is NOT determined by the government, but by a HIGHER MORAL LAW to which everyone is subject including the government.

 

If by "higher moral law" you are referring to a moral code derived from scripture, or revelation, or any form of mysticism or faith, then we aren't on the same page in a way that is more fundamental than political principle.

 

That makes absolutely no sense when you consider the hundreds of millions of people who throughout history have been killed, unjustly, by their own government.  That would be saying that not a one of them was a person who was living decently. 

 

I can see that you have a set of beliefs and you are applying them to the world.  But unless you are willing to use reason only to find ways to ignore facts, inconsistencies, and contradictions, then you have to be open to looking at those beliefs to see where they don't add up.

[BaalChatzaf]

8 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

Greg,

That saying about a people getting the government they deserve, it isn't about a different government for each person.  It is a mostly true statement about a society over time.  If someone dressed you as a priest and parachuted you into ISIS-held territory, the horror you'd face certainly isn't something you'd deserve.

---------------

I disagree with the quote of John Adams that you provided.  I'd say that the constitution had to be understood and supported by at least a significant minority of the people.

----------------

There are a lot of decent people, all around the world, who are victimized by their government.  Their decency doesn't change the reality.  Reality is what it is, and we may have some choice in how we experience it, and we each have somewhat different experiences, but those facts don't change reality.  Reality exists, and our consciousness is conscious of it, and out of that relationship we form an experience.  Our experience isn't capable of going out into reality and changing it in that fashion.

-----------------

 

If by "higher moral law" you are referring to a moral code derived from scripture, or revelation, or any form of mysticism or faith, then we aren't on the same page in a way that is more fundamental than political principle.

 

That makes absolutely no sense when you consider the hundreds of millions of people who throughout history have been killed, unjustly, by their own government.  That would be saying that not a one of them was a person who was living decently. 

 

I can see that you have a set of beliefs and you are applying them to the world.  But unless you are willing to use reason only to find ways to ignore facts, inconsistencies, and contradictions, then you have to be open to looking at those beliefs to see where they don't add up.

Moral Law (so-called) is a conceptual entity defining a set of arbitrary judgments.   Morality does not flow from the physical laws governing happenings in the physical cosmos (which is the ONLY cosmos).  Morality has no more physical validity than the rules of chess or bridge.  The Cosmos is physical from its top to its bottom and only physical laws and processes govern the events that actually occur.  At best morality is an inclination,  and urge toward rectitude.  At worst it is the basis of tyranny that leads one human to burn another at the stake.

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, Peter said:

Be all you can be. American exceptionalism. Would you consider government hiring or advertising as “the capacity to direct force” rather than persuasion?

Yes, I'd still say that government only has the capacity to prohibit, confiscate and direct force.  Government starts with nothing but its mandate (which might be just and sensible, or not).  From that starting point it can't produce - not in the way free enterprise activity in the private sector can.  In the private sector, I could go with nothing but my hat in hand, persuade, borrow money, hire people, produce a product or service, and, hopefully, make a profit - that profit would be like new wealth. 

Government has to confiscate the money needed to pay the salaries of the government workers, pay the rent or purchase or construction of the buildings that house them, pay whoever publishes the advertising you mention.  No matter what government does, if it involves even a penny of money, it will have to borrow that penny which will mean future taxes (confiscation), or tax (direct confiscation), or manufacture the money (which will be a confiscation in the form of reducing the value of existing money held by people due to inflation.)  And confiscation always rests upon, and requires, the capacity to direct force.

I'm not saying that confiscation, as such, is so wrong that we should never accept government because it must engage in a degree of confiscation.  What I would say is that to have a proper government the confiscation is kept to a minimum determined by honest, best efforts at fulfilling the purpose of a government that strives to do nothing but protect individual rights.  This keeps the directing of force (excluding self-defense and just retaliatory force by the government) out of the private sector and THAT is what makes for American exceptionalism.  When you are free to make your own choices, when people can't use force or the threat of force, or theft, or fraud then you CAN be all you can be.

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Moral Law (so-called) is a conceptual entity defining a set of arbitrary judgments.   Morality does not flow from the physical laws governing happenings in the physical cosmos (which is the ONLY cosmos).  Morality has no more physical validity than the rules of chess or bridge.  The Cosmos is physical from its top to its bottom and only physical laws and processes govern the events that actually occur.  At best morality is an inclination,  and urge toward rectitude.  At worst it is the basis of tyranny that leads one human to burn another at the stake.

There is a logical problem with that approach.  Physical laws, physics, are a set of understandings and beliefs that make up a segment of our knowledge.  A subset of our knowledge.  We also have epistemology, another area of thought in which we have a set of boundaries as to what we will consider as belonging to that realm of thought.  We have psychology.  We have geology.  We make these things up, not in a totally arbitrary fashion, but as an attempt to grasp what exists, and to do so in ways that will be useful.  People had to make choices between alternatives they held in their imaginations to put these structures together. 

At some level, we have to say that volition is real and in a way that makes us causal agents.  How can we know that?  Because to argue otherwise is an attempt to use logic to deny that any logic exists and instead all is just as determined as the path of a billiards ball.  There really can't be any soft determinism because we either exert some degree of independent choice, however small or we don't.

The Cosmos is physical from top to bottom, but there are relationships between physical entities and their are abstractable physical properties of entities that we can grasp.  In that sense, physics has no more validity than the rules of chess - in the sense that those relationships are understood in our minds.  The map isn't the territory, yet it has to represent the territory.  And without a mind, the words in a physics text would just be marks on paper.  What Rand and Objectivism did was to present an objective moral code - to show that 'should' can be derived from 'is'.

It isn't an arbitrary judgment to say that some modes of social interaction will be better than others as political environments for humans if pursuit of happiness of the individuals in the society is taken to be a good.

If humans have any degree of volition, and if some things will give a better life than others, then moral law is only arbitrary if physics is also arbitrary - only if all things are arbitrary - only if we are incapable of grasping any truth, or only if nothing can be true.  if we have any degree of volition, if we can reason, if reason can grasp facts, if reality is not only knowable, but exists as something other than an arbitrary state of flux where nothing stays the same ever, then there exist relationships we can understand that will fit in that area we define as 'moral law.'

Physics, as a body of knowledge, isn't something that is intrinsic to the physical entities described.  We created this body of knowledge to suit our purposes.  But because we created it, and did so for purposes that we created, doesn't make it less than an objective description of the physical entities.  Purpose is the key concept here.  it is what helps bridge our understanding of how the laws of physics can be objective AND so can moral law.  Purpose is a fundamental context.

 

[moralist]

5 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

No one deserves to be robbed or plundered.  

You do, Bob.

You're getting exactly the government you deserve... and so am I... and so is everyone else in America because that's how the government was originally designed by moral American men... for moral American men. Sorry, I have no compassion for weak cowardly whining secular liberal government educated failures. You have no one else to blame but yourself for the government you're getting that's robbing you as you fully deserve.

Greg

 

[moralist]

4 hours ago, SteveWolfer said:

Greg,

That saying about a people getting the government they deserve, it isn't about a different government for each person.  It is a mostly true statement about a society over time. 

That's right, Steve..

It's not about different governments, but rather about each person getting the different personal experience of government they each deserve as determined by the moral values which guide how they live. Liberals regard people collectively as a societal race/gender/class group...

...while Americans regard people as independent autonomous sovereign individuals.

Greg

[moralist]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Moral Law (so-called) is a conceptual entity defining a set of arbitrary judgments.

There you have it, Bob.

You have just described the subjective arbitrary nature of the values you live by.

Your secular subjective arbitrary values have rendered you as immoral as the immoral government that robs you.

 

Greg

[SteveWolfer]

1 minute ago, moralist said:

[It's] about each person getting the different personal experience of government they each deserve. Liberals regard people collectively as a societal race/gender/class group...

...while Americans regard people as independent autonomous sovereign individuals.

That still makes no sense.  Good, productive, intelligent people can be hosed by a bad government rule.  Scumbags can sometimes find a legal loophole that lets them act badly and get away with it.  There is an objective, actual government out there and there is a strict limit to the range of one's experiences of that government.  Those are facts.  They are independent of the liberal's collectivist views. 

A liberal might be having a good experience relative to ObamaCare - where is the justice in that?  Do they deserve to live happily as a parasite? A person who fought hard and did everything they could to oppose ObamaCare might be having a bad experience with it.  Do they deserve that?

[BaalChatzaf]

4 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

That still makes no sense.  Good, productive, intelligent people can be hosed by a bad government rule.  Scumbags can sometimes find a legal loophole that lets them act badly and get away with it.  There is an objective, actual government out there and there is a strict limit to the range of one's experiences of that government.  Those are facts.  They are independent of the liberal's collectivist views. 

A liberal might be having a good experience relative to ObamaCare - where is the justice in that?  Do they deserve to live happily as a parasite? A person who fought hard and did everything they could to oppose ObamaCare might be having a bad experience with it.  Do they deserve that?

Our correspondent Moralist appears to believe that if something bad happens to X  it is X's own fault.  Whatever happens to us, we "deserve". So if an innocent person is shot dead by some stranger it is his/her own fault for being in the way of the bullet.  

[moralist]

5 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

That still makes no sense.  Good, productive, intelligent people can be hosed by a bad government rule. 

If they can... they are not as good as they feel they are. If it doesn't make sense, check your premise because it's faulty.

 

Greg

[BaalChatzaf]

3 minutes ago, moralist said:

If they can... they are not as good as they feel they are. If it doesn't make sense, check your premise because it's faulty.

 

Greg

Once again the message:  if anything bad happens to you, it is your own fault.   In Moralist World there are no victims.  Only people getting what they deserve.

[SteveWolfer]

41 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Our correspondent Moralist appears to believe that if something bad happens to X  it is X's own fault.

There are people who seriously believe that if you get cancer, you deserve it.  Sometimes the reasoning is very backwards, as if they were saying, you got cancer, so you must have deserved it... maybe it is religious thing,  like, "God only lets things happen to people based upon what they deserve"?  I don't know... I just know that it doesn't track logically.  If you think of what the meaning of "deserve" is, then you posit an outcome for a person who took no actions at all to cause that outcome, how can you say they deserve it without totally severing choice/values/actions from the meaning of 'deserve'?  If I'm hit by a falling satellite, I deserved it?  Nonsense.

[jts]

Abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand if they are not embodied in concrete form. This is my attempt to understand Greg the moralist in less abstract language.

The USA constitution was made for self-employed people, not employees.

If you are self employed, then you don't pay taxes because you can pass your taxes to your customers and clients and employees. If you are a landlord, you add your property tax to the rent that your tenants pay. If you are an employer, you take your income tax off the paycheques you give to your employees. If you are Bill Gates, you add your taxes to the price of Windows. So therefore if you are an employer (we assume a successful one), government does not significantly affect you. Government requiring a licence to drive is not significant. But if you are an employee (working for someone else), then you pay everybody else's taxes (employer, landlord, etc) plus you pay your own taxes; and if you complain, it's your own damn fault for being an employee and you are the wrong kind of person.

Thumbs up self employed. Thumbs down employees.

So according to the above reasoning, everybody should be self employed and nobody should be an employee (with the possible exception of starting out in life until you can become self employed). So let's imagine a world where everybody is moral and almost everybody is self employed and almost nobody works for anyone else.

Then I have a question. I asked this question before but did not get a satisfactory answer. The question is: How could the world work without employees?

No multi-billion dollar business and no high rise construction project could be bigger than what is possible without employees. How could the world work without employees? How could you build a high rise without employees? Do you really truly believe you could construct a modern high rise all by your lonesome?

 You might say you would hire people to help you. But they don't want to work for you because they don't want to be employees because they want to be the right kind of people.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, SteveWolfer said:

There are people who seriously believe that if you get cancer, you deserve it.  Sometimes the reasoning is very backwards, as if they were saying, you got cancer, so you must have deserved it... maybe it is religious thing,  like, "God only lets things happen to people based upon what they deserve"?  I don't know... I just know that it doesn't track logically.  If you think of what the meaning of "deserve" is, then you posit an outcome for a person who took no actions at all to cause that outcome, how can you say they deserve it without totally severing choice/values/actions from the meaning of 'deserve'?  If I'm hit by a falling satellite, I deserved it?  Nonsense.

some people believe cancers happens if one does not eat properly or eats bad things or exposes themselves to harmful substances.   The right way of putting that construction is to say certain practices have  physical  consequences.  If one eats too much without exercising sufficiently then one will gain weight and perhaps become morbidly obese.   Rather than saying that the person deserved it,  I would say the person suffered the  physical consequences of certain of his acts.  In short causes produce effects.  This is a physical process,  laws of physics and chemistry unfolding as they do....

I don't like moral modalities applied to natural consequences of physical causes.  The world works as it does.  No morality flows from physical law.  That is an artifact or construction that people sometimes  erect.  Nature is, and nature does and nature does not give a damn for what we think to be right or wrong.

[SteveWolfer]

11 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The right way of putting that construction is to say certain practices have  physical  consequences.

I agree.  Let's assume I was talking about a kind of cancer that is not preventable (so far as we know these days).  That is what was in my mind.

 

13 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

No morality flows from physical law.  That is an artifact or construction that people sometimes  erect.  Nature is, and nature does and nature does not give a damn for what we think to be right or wrong.

Physical law would exclude laws of motivational psychology, and motivational psychology would exclude physical laws.  We construct areas of knowledge, but if they don't relate to reality, they are floating abstractions or some other kind of nonsense.  Humans are a part of nature.  We have a consciousness.  There are things that are good for us and things that are bad for us. 

Nature (if we discuss it from the perspective of being what is not you, and not me, and not another person, might not give a damn about our thoughts on right or wrong, but that is a kind of anthropomorphizing, isn't it?  A billiard ball doesn't give a damn, but this or that person might - so why put ourselves in the position of defining nature so as to exclude humans, much less the position of having taken that position, to then say non-humans don't concern themselves with our thoughts on ethics.

[moralist]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Once again the message:  if anything bad happens to you, it is your own fault.   In Moralist World there are no victims.  Only people getting what they deserve.

Wrong message, Bob. You do a much better job speaking for yourself than you do for others.

More specifically, there are no victims of the government in America.

I need to be absolutely accurate otherwise you slither away from the point. The American Constitutional form of government was designed according to moral law for the sake of the decent to enjoy liberty... but not the indecent. The government won't work for the indecent... and instead becomes an agent of moral retribution.

You were taught by your liberal government school that you aren't responsible for the consequences of your own actions, and that others are to blame for what happens to you. Fool. That's how your government set you up to screw you over... and you're dumb enough to let them.

To personally experience a decent government, all you need to do is to live a decent life deserving of it. But the subjective and arbitrary secular values you live by aren't good enough, and that's why you're getting screwed by your government... because it treats you exactly as decent as you are... no more... no less.

As long as you refuse to learn this simple moral lesson, the government will continue to screw you over for the rest of your life just as you rightfully deserve.

 

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, moralist said:

Wrong message, Bob. You do a much better job speaking for yourself than you do for others.

More specifically, there are no victims of the government in America.

I need to be absolutely accurate otherwise you slither away from the point. The American Constitutional form of government was designed according to moral law for the sake of the decent to enjoy liberty... but not the indecent. The government won't work for the indecent... and instead becomes an agent of moral retribution.

You were taught by your liberal government school that you aren't responsible for the consequences of your own actions, and that others are to blame for what happens to you. Fool. That's how your government set you up to screw you over... and you're dumb enough to let them.

To personally experience a decent government, all you need to do is to live a decent life deserving of it. But the subjective and arbitrary secular values you live by aren't good enough, and that's why you're getting screwed by your government... because it treats you exactly as decent as you are... no more... no less.

As long as you refuse to learn this simple moral lesson, the government will continue to screw you over for the rest of your life just as you rightfully deserve.

 

Greg

I consider this to be generally true with this or that particular exception--in America today. In Nazi Germany for the Jews it was much more the other way. It would be a moral indecency to tell the Jews they made themselves victims for too many didn't. And you yourself get too absolutist about your own suppositions. You knocked and are knocking Bob too hard on that. Well, same to you.

--Brant

[moralist]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

I consider this to be generally true with this or that particular exception--in America today.

Yes... in America today.

But the instant you put your head up your p-ass-t, all bets are off... because America is unique in it's Judeo/Christian morality based government designed to serve only moral people. To the indecent, it is their own personal tormentor which hounds them to their grave just as they deserve.

 

Greg

[moralist]

12 hours ago, SteveWolfer said:

I disagree with the quote of John Adams that you provided.

I can appreciate your honesty, Steve.

You have just clearly stated the specific reason why the government controls almost every aspect of your life just as you declared it does.

Greg

[moralist]

8 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Our correspondent Moralist appears to believe that if something bad happens to X  it is X's own fault.

In terms of your relationship with your government... yes.

It's your own fault that you made yourself into a victim of the government you unjustly blame.

Blamers are failures... and failures are blamers.

 

Greg

[moralist]

12 hours ago, SteveWolfer said:

There are a lot of decent people, all around the world, who are victimized by their government. 

Of course they are, Steve... because they're NOT in America.

America's Judeo/Christian values based government is unique and exceptional in all of the world.

 

Greg