Re: Barack Obama Pits Space Explorers Against School Children

On Dec 5, 4:15 am, American <samuelran...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

quoting me:
: My politics are simple enough. I think people ought to be left
: alone to mind their own business. America fought the Nazis, who

"Own business"? What dynasty are you living in, Ming, Xia, Shin?
Can we leave you alone now?

I know that these days, people have to pay taxes. But in most parts of
the world, ordinary people work to support themselves and their
families, and taxes are a small burden. There are a few wicked
dishonest people who commit crime, but the police take care of them.

Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, things are different.
People aren't left alone.

They live in fear.

Perhaps it is because a foreign aggressor is fighting a war against
their country.

Perhaps it is because they belong to a minority group whose rights are
not respected.

Or they live in a country led by a megalomaniacal dictator, with
delusions of world conquest, and so his armaments expenditures
impoverish the nation, and grumbling is suppressed by informers and
secret police everywhere.

So some people aren't as lucky and as happy as Americans, or even the
free but poor people of, say, Botswana (the former British
Bechuanaland, not to be confused with the old South African Bantustan
of Bophuthatswana).

The bad people responsible for these obvious sources of human misery
can be dealt with in a simple and direct manner. So I criticize those
who attack the United States on the sadly infrequent occasions when it
does something about evil tyrants.

Of course, we do have to look further than at bad people to find the
ultimate causes of all the problems in the world. Peaceful peasant
farmers, happily growing food for their families, usually end up
having more children than would produce replacement fertility only.
So, either gradually the farms become too small to feed people without
back-breaking toil, or younger brothers are left struggling to find
work in the cities as scribes (clerks, secretaries) or carpenters
(forklift operators, masons). Often, they become part of standing
armies, and eventually to feed all the soldiers, the nation has to
expand, and because its neighbors also had growing populations, this
requires military aggression.

Technological advance lets the same land feed more people. But
technical advance hasn't *more than kept pace* with population growth,
so humans have experienced population pressure throughout their
history. Even without bad people making trouble, we could not have
expected that, from the dawn of civilization until now, there would
have been nothing but full employment and prosperity as the universal
lot of mankind.

It is true that current economic theories that denounce "mercantilism"
have led to countries having to throw people out of work to prevent
themselves from going into debt. Limiting imports to what we can
afford to pay for through tariffs, so that the domestic economy can be
kept stimulated, maintaining the social and economic balance of the
early 1960s is preferable. Had the full employment levels of the early
1960s been maintained without a hiccup to the present day, what with
the end of racial bigotry and overt legal discrimination in the 1970s,
by now black Americans would be enjoying equality instead of so many
of them still living with little hope of advancing through honest
work.

This is possible for rich countries like the U.S., especially if they
strictly limit immigration so that they do not become overcrowded,
divided, and hence troubled like some unhappy foreign lands.

But the conspiracy involved is just Big Business supporting economic
theories that serve its interests; not some secret cabal in
Switzerland or wherever.

John Savard
.

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