this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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"Uncorrupt government"
This is as delusional as anyone can get.
A wise man said it all once: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is why we throw them out every couple of years and choose someone different.
I do the same with my underpants.
My underpants are also corrupt
Right... you do understand that most politicians in western countries are career politicians that have been there for decades, right?
A good example is Biden himself. He's been there in politics for like 50 years. It's a geriatric club at this point it's become a common joke.
Same delusion as the poster of the meme. People believe in the same ideals that created the problem without looking at what it has become. Not everything that sounds good is good. Life is more complex than the simple model that simple people keep believing in. People will always find a way to abuse a system for their own benefit. That's the result of "power corrupts".
I don't care about your US politics. It is a shitshow no matter how you look at it, with your undemocratic gerrymandering and 2 party oligarchy.
With voting it is at least possible to change the government. The same can not be said about corporations.
would be nice, but doesn't seem to really happen, (incumbancy advantage). Also the bigger problem that isn't solved by voting them out or even term limits. Access to money is important to win an election. Same people have money, those people pick candidates that are loyal and see to it that they win. When one old corrupt politician dies we'll get a new one pushed by the corporate media.
Oh so pragmatism would have that we abandon any hope at equality and we should accept to be slaves for the rich?
I don't get why the only solution is to trust others to take care of you. I have some bad news: No one gives a crap about you. The sooner you realize this the better. You should be responsible and learn more on how to manage your assets, investments, money, etc. In my opinion, this idea that we have to keep trusting the elite to run our lives is ridiculous. People should be more responsible and manage their money in an independent way.
I like cryptocurrency for this, because I have full control on my money and no government will be able to rehypothecate my money for whatever risky nonsense they're doing. But you don't have to be like me or like cryptocurrency. All you have to do is start thinking of a solution that works for you. You can start saving now, diversify in the world economy, and take risks that are appropriate to you, and prepare for your retirement. No need to act as if you have zero power when there are enough tools to give you power over your own money.
I'm the kind of guy that takes all my matters into my own hands, because I trust no one. I even run my email server, my cloud, my VPNs, my everything. I don't need anyone, company or government, and I have calculated risks in all my endeavour. I can migrate whenever I want. I believe everyone in the world should strive towards that. But we're living in a centralized world where google alone can just block almost everyone's life. I'm not in that club.
Society is built around people "taking care" of you in different ways. Like being a doctor, a teacher, an employer, the police, etc.
That's why we grew out of being caveman, because we're built to be cooperative with each other in our DNA. If we didn't, we'd either be small tribes or individuals and probably die out really fast. It's because we need others to rely on or we'd literally be extinct.
I don't think you understand what trust means. There's almost zero trust with doctors, teachers, etc. You don't trust doctors out of the blue, but you build an informed decision from the reviews of such a doctor by seeing if they're good at what they do. This hunky dory delusion that everyone trusts everyone is not real. The doctor, teacher, etc, will be punished if they misbehave and that's what the free market is about. Keeping them in line as a kind of incentive to behave well.
On the other hand, what you guys want to do is hand all your wealth and power to elites that don't give two craps about you, have zero consequences in the case they mess up, and have zero incentive to do the right thing (as opposed to make it look like they're doing the right thing), and then expect them to not steal your hard earned money, and then cry about it when they do it. Well, guess what? I don't trust the fed has my best interest when they printed 80% of the US dollar money supply over the last 3 years. Why should I store my wealth in USD? Now you go ahead and trust them and do that, and keep complaining on lemmy that the rich are getting richer (NOT because of the printing) when someone tries to talk sense into you. I guess everyone will pay for their decisions after all.
Doctors are doctors because they passed their doctorate.
Someone more knowledgeable than you set the minimum bar of skill they require to practice their craft.
You don't get to make trust based decisions on doctors because you don't know what a good doctor looks like. You lack the knowledge to do so. Unless you are yourself a doctor.
I have even less trust in corporations than the government.
If you let those, they would bring slavery back if they could. Since that improves their bottom line.
Dude everything you said is wrong... doctors don't have doctorates... PhDs do. Also you didn't invalidate my point, which is that trust isn't blind. You sound like a teenager. When you grow up you'll understand what accountability means and how governments have none.
So not only do you have no idea what you are talking about, you also fall back to ad hominem fallacies because you are unable to debunk the stuff I said.
Your knowledge is lacking, so your opinion on who you can trust is worthless.
You sound like a science-denying anti-vaxxer.
You sound like a teenager. We can talk after you finish high school.
An MD is literally a doctorate
Cool! Another capitalist fanatic!
You know people invented society some millions years ago because it was better, more efficient, so much so that we evolved social abilities. We are social creatures. We evolved to live together and care for eachother.
With your selfishness you are not only a lower creature in the evolution tree, you are also a parasite for the society you live in.
I have a family, friends and community that I trust, and we help each other to make our lives much easier. They use my knowledge in what I'm good at and I use their knowledge in what they're good at, and this way we're always winners. That's the correct way to do things.
I'm no parasite because I don't need anyone outside my community. On the contrary, I'm a net producer in the economy and a positive contributer to society. Everyone who doesn't like what I'm saying should ask themselves if they're a positive contributer. The only difference is that I'm not gonna let you steal my hard earned money after I have paid my dues. Good for me.
Trusting "society" is a dumb preposition, because trust is based on maintaining mutual interest and ostracizing bad actors, which you can't do in a society without complex contracts that emphasize the lack of trust, which cause enforcing contracts to cost a lot of money through the current laggy court system. This isn't an efficient solution for you as a person. You trusting the elites will only lead to your demise, as we've seen again and again and again over history, starting from the earliest examples in ancient Rome and the kind clipping coins and increasing the supply of money by mixing it with other metals... because he could. This is nothing new. There are people who learn from history, and there are people who pretend humans act differently every 100 years and learn their lesson the hard way again, and again, and again.
That's an interesting statement. How are you measuring whether you are a "net producer"?
There's no modern metric that would ever put me in a non "net producer" bracket. I don't know whether this can be twisted somehow. Let's find out.
Am I missing any additional qualifiers?
Sounds like you're approaching that claim more from an ideological basis rather than any sort of analysis.
The question of whether you're a net producer probably depends on what your employer does and asks of you, versus what you consume. Some organizations absolutely do not have an even balance between their dollars and their consumption (an extreme example: any organization profiting off of slave labor is undeniably consuming more than they're paying--that's just how externalities work).
So yeah, I don't really expect more details because your privacy is your privacy, but if all you can say is you're net earning money, I wouldn't equate that to being a net producer.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
~Carl Sagan
You will always have people taking care of you, from the clothes you wear to the things you eat. There is no escape.
Not even by living on your own are you not using other peoples knowledge or products.
What kind of logic is that? You're confusing "taking care of you" with "making trades". My life doesn't depend on one person making clothes for me. I can switch them whenever I want, unlike your monopoly government, or Google for that matter.
A leftie who tells you the government can be "uncorrupt" deserves all the laughter you can aim at them.
Uncorrupt is impossible, maybe it is better to advocate for low levrls of corruption. Less corruption --> less damage.
I've seen this sentiment being repeated in the replies, yet this also applies to private companies that are run by absolutely powerful people. It's true that Lord Acton wrote this about the monarchy, but some execs in multinational corporations today are just as powerful as old-timey monarchs.
I don't disagree with you. My contention is that the assumption of "uncorrupt power" is just naive and short term, at best.
cliches are lame