Day 2156: Strategy

3 Responses to Day 2156: Strategy

1. Robert Gregory Evans says:

   May 2, 2021 at 7:39 pm

   I’d be inclined to call you a statist rather than a libertarian, since you seem to view taxes favorably in comparison to someone like magician Penn Jillette, who has the following to say about the subject:

   “It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral, self-righteous, bullying laziness.”

   and

   “If you don’t pay your taxes and you don’t answer the warrant and you don’t go to court, eventually someone will pull a gun. Eventually someone with a gun will show up. I want everything the government does to be done, I just want it to be done voluntarily.”

   You refer to *hoarding* money in a disapproving way, and yet you rue the fact that you don’t have enough money hoarded yourself to engage in philanthropy. Disconnect there, I think. As economist Milton Friedman once said to Phil Donahue when that worthy spoke of the “greed” of the rich, “What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who is greedy.” Or who hoards. Barack Obama once said that “At a certain point you have enough money.” Apparently he hasn’t yet reached that point, as he continues to accumulate wealth – – hoarding it?

   I like the idea of crowdfunding, *that* is a libertarian idea of helping people, since there is no compulsion involved other than the mild one of shaming, which was the same impulse when the collection plate is passed in traditional churches.

   I’ve thought for a while that you seem to regret writing a successful series of books showcasing the rewarding of bourgeois values of hard work, thrift, and moral behavior – – Ishmael Wang literally pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become a self-made millionaire and shows crewmates and, later, subordinates how to do the same; the whole latter set of books about the Toe-Holds seems to be an attempt to reboot the series, showcasing how much superior the Toe-Hold paradigm is to the CPJCT paradigm, based on having the “cool” artsy-lefty people in Toe-Hold space and the lumpenproles (who need regulation and a firm hand) left to struggle along in CPJCT space. This seems to me to be a metaphor for the Balkanized USA, with Toe-Hold space standing in for the blue states and CPJCT space standing in for the red states.

   Reply
   • Nathan says:

     May 2, 2021 at 7:57 pm

     An interesting perspective.

     You might be right in this.

     Penn Gillette is *certainly* right.

     Reply
   • Nathan says:

     May 2, 2021 at 9:38 pm

     I may talk about this tomorrow.

     My problem with the series as it developed is less about rebooting to satisfy some political agenda as it is trying to figure out how to get back to the stories about people who aren’t rich or have a lot of agency. I also want to play with the idea of “what if the interstate hadn’t by-passed the small towns?”

     There’s a lot going on in my head and I’m pretty clear about only one thing.

     I have no idea.

     Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.