| | Great piece, Michael. I echo the previously expressed sentiments. Really almost flawless.
As you may have noticed, however, I make a point of nit-picking.
I share your outrage at the idea of "needs based justice." But, I'm sure that it is not restricted to a particular sub-sect of anarchists. As you are well aware, there are about as many radically different brands of anarchism as there are of statism. Tarring a republican with a communist brush would hardly be fair. And there are certainly statists who share similarly destructive ideas. Unfortunately, I fear that branding anarchists will be an unwanted consequence of this, in as much as the authors of the piece with which you started claim that this is unique to anarchists. “Anarchist criminology is unique among the many criminologies because it grows out of a needs-based political economy of relationship and conception of justice..."
As you're well aware, this would hardly apply to the agorist anarchists or anarcho-capitalists, at least not in the sense that your response implies. Was Rand then speaking about anarchists - and ONLY anarchists - when she decried a "needs" based ethics? Hardly.
Starting from a somewhat flawed beginnning, you have created one of the all-time best, most thorough, fundamental and eloquent attacks ever on the needs-based position. So, what are my complaints? They are in what was left out or implied by omission.
For example, from the "Spaceship Earth," perspective, from which we can percieve that we are a little too crowded and connected to think that we can just drop off the planet or ignore the impacts and costs of what we do, it is clearly critical to start thinking about how we can all survive and prosper. That doesn't mean that we reward laziness or irrationality, as we know - and most people would doubtless agree - that that policy would be destructive to any rational, moral person's ends and values.
What we need is a comprehensive system that gives us the information to make intelligent, rational decisions. The world monetary system of state fiat currencies has demonstrated that it is not that system. Rather, it sets every nation and concentrated interest against every other, with the devil take the hindmost as far as general consequences. If our actions have worldwide consequences and cannot be isolated, then the only solution is a system that enables accurate accounting universally. The best model may be one in which we essentially incorporate the planet - and not via the state corporation! - so that everyone becomes a shareholder in Earth, Inc., literally.
Under such a model, everyone who was basically rational would want the total pie to get bigger, so that their share would increase in value, if nothing else. Short term would hopefully be discounted - as in the model of the Mondragon Cooperative - in favor of rational policies that capitalized on promoting individual creativity, rationality, diversity, productivity and responsibility. The market and private enterprise would be treasured for their efficient and moral distribution of resources. The general fund of the corporation would be filled by the leases of the various properties of the planet, on the model of the common law - the renting of the commons, with the expected kind of impact of the Georgist Single Tax - to encourage the most productive use of resources.
In such a model, no one would vote their share in such a way as to lead to their destruction or impoverishment, clearly. But neither, with adequate knowledge of the basic economics, which most people are able to comprehend, would they mortgage the future for short-term gains. So, we would likely see the bottom rungs - of people trapped in abject poverty under tyranical regimes - voting for enough dividends to eat and to start climbing out of their situation, while the majority of the Earth's shareholders would be realizing that those people are only going to accept a system that enables them to survive, just as they would vote in the same circumstances.
The near universal willingness to work for a better future would however set a natural limit to such a stipend. Clearly, nobody would prosper in a system as you describe in which anyone's "needs" are a claim upon anyone else. Most people realize that, and would reject any system or policy that was seen to lead to that.
We are not yet at the brink of a global lifeboat situation, in which there has to be a die-off of humans for the remainder of us to survive. However, we are headed in that direction, because the systems that rule us now create the incentives for a world culture of universal plunder, in which power at the point of a gun at the behest of concentrated interest supercedes any common interests in the prosperity of the planet. Clearly, this will lead to doom, and to a competition of needs as we do sink to the lifeboat stage.
I suggest that we can forestall that scenario by recognizing that people are the most valuable thing on the planet and by creating a system that recognizes that as a fundamental principle. We have health insurance and private employment insurance today to cover the possibility that we may have unexpected needs. We don't arbitrarily make claims against them, as the claims have a cost in terms of future premiums. Most people prefer to be healthy and employed. Creating a system that is based in correct accounting and rewards productivity rather than need, while at the same time provides for the essentials of universal survival is the challenge facing us.
|
|
