MLK was non-conformist. Aligning oneself with the hegemonic theories of the wealthy and powerful however, is not.
What your argument boils down to is an attack on hierarchy qua hierarchy. Very common to see these days as it is a classic revolutionary/Marxist ideal but it's also entirely inconsistent with natural law. Even within the revolutionary ideal, every revolution has its leaders and its strongmen because that's just how people organize themselves and those at the top live better off than those at the bottom (think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses).
You're equating your subjective ideas with natural law? Seem a bit over-confident to say the least.
> There are righteous forms of hierarchy
Yes, a parent towards a their child. What other forms of righteous hierarchies are you thinking about?
> think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses
That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.
Head surgeon and other surgeons. CTO and other engineers. VP of sales and sales people, etc.
Other forms of hierarchy would be upper and lower courts.
Whether or not these are righteous is dependent on if, for example, the head surgeon is actually experienced and talented and a good leader. If he's just some shmuck they pulled off the street or if he's only in that position because he's friends with the hospital president then that would be a tyrannical or dysfunctional hierarchy.
>That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.
That's my point. But hierarchy itself is not illegitimate. That hierarchy itself is legitimate is a reflection of natural law. That was my assertion.
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult the architect or the engineer For such special knowledge I apply to such a "savant." But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the "savant" to impose his authority on me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure."
Mikhail Bakunin
VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority. What Bakunin is describing are hierarchies of competence in a particular art (techne) but what would he say about parent-child relationships?
I had never heard of Bakunin until now. I'm not an expert on the schools of anarchist thought by any measure so I won't pretend to really be able to hold a discussion you want to get into analysis of various schools of anarchist thought.
Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. A top-down vanguard too.
> but what would he say about parent-child relationships?
The same competence argument applies to child rearing.
But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.
They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.
Yes, and more.
> and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?
Is this the level you sink to as soon as Capitalist dogma is questioned? It's not the poor and workers that have servants in modern society.
You really should read Human Action by Mises. It lays out on a philosophical level why all this stuff is fundamentally irrational and necessarily leads to mass human suffering.
71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare. You need to open both eyes.
I should read a book by the some libertarian god that unsurprisingly dismisses socialism, while your own knowledge about socialism is obviously paperthin? If it's so clear and obvious then you should be able to explain it in a paragraph or two?
Yes I know they do. This is a bad thing. The Founding Fathers were famously skeptical of democracy as were many, many thinkers and societies before them.
And yes it's always democratic in the beginning but democracy is not a panacea (as the Founding Fathers understood) and quickly things devolve into despotism. Just because someone exists doesn't mean they should have a say in how a society is run. Existence is a pretty low bar compared to how developed and complex the structures of a well organized society are.
> 71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare.
Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
Again I think you should read Human Action, even so you can just understand your 'enemy'.
It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.
> And yes it's always democratic in the beginning
Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
> Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).
That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.
Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights. We have a Constitution because individuals have human rights that cannot be violated no matter how many people vote on it.
Pure democracy is evil.
> Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.
What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
> That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.
This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
"There are three questions which will destroy most of the arguments on the left: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have?" – Thomas Sowell
It's not a secret no, but it's certainly not part of the propaganda.
> Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights.
Why is that? Maybe you should be blunt here too and just say private-property enforcement instead of human rights?
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
Are you really going argue that it was a democracy because of the name? Why are you doubling down on your own ignorance? Even the link you yourself posted contains this:
"After Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, only got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he disbanded it by force after its first meeting".
The Bolsheviks took power in a coup for themselves and never let go of it.
> This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.
What? There's nothing utopian about universal healthcare and that's firmly established by now. That also sounds like a means to an end argument which is sociopathic if anything is.
Universal healthcare necessarily means rationing of healthcare resources. Universal healthcare does not mean that every person who has an ailment gets treated. A market naturally matches supply (healthcare infrastructure) and demand (sick people). When you remove the market it's up to government to do this matching process which means rationing.
Not every person under a universal healthcare system gets the treatment they want when they want it. Are you disputing that?
It's an irrelevant distraction. What's important is not to deprive people of care to such an extent that 71k people dies every year in a country fully capable of providing universal healthcare. You're using dogma to justify that. What you're calling "get the treatment they want" is just to allow rich people to get priority.
I'm not using dogma at all, let alone using it to "justify" anything. It simply is how it is. There is no panacea. You're totally captured by a utopian vision which is why you can't comprehend that.
Even countries with universal healthcare can't provide healthcare services to everyone who needs it or wants it. Healthcare resources are finite. No amount of arguing on your part will change that.
I haven't argued that healthcare resources aren't finite. But what kind of pointless argument is that? "Housing is finite", "Clothing is finite", "Food is finite". Well, yes? But what kinds of housing are plentiful and what kinds of housing are not? And what need kind of housing is needed to make sure people doesn't die of exposure, even the poor? What's utopian about not having 71k people per year die due to lack of healthcare coverage? Do you think all of these 71k would end up on some brain surgery queue and die anyway?
You're just making pointless statements without any depth. Dilettante.
Certain types of housing are plentiful and some are more scarce depending on what homebuyers want at some price and homebuilders can build at some price.
> And what need kind of housing is needed to make sure people doesn't die of exposure, even the poor?
Again even if you were able to determine that (which you aren't, given that most of these people are severely drug addicted or mentally ill, homelessness is more complicated than just people not having a home), how are you going to convince or force people to build these houses that you (Supreme Decider of America) determine to be necessary?
> You're just making pointless statements without any depth
I'm actually making very pointed arguments that fundamentally invalidate your whole world view. That's why it's upsetting to you.
In Sweden we had a government agency that both identified the need (not rocket science) and government building corporations that actually built the houses.
> I'm actually making very pointed arguments that fundamentally invalidate your whole world view.
It must be handy to be so ignorant and yet so cocksure. That's so arrogant that I'm starting to think you're actually trolling.
Even ignoring that healthcare lacks the factors that approximate the rational choice model’s information requirements well enough for it decisions in that space in a market to even reflect average net utility well, a market matches supply with money; it matches to need only to the extent that willingness to pay is driven only by expected personal utility, which it's not (because money also experiences declining marginal utility) when financial resources of each potential customer vary wildly.
How else would you define need? The alternative involves some third party that determines need aka rationing.
> How else would you define need?
The question seems odd and seems to likely to be driven by a misunderstanding of the quoted material, so I'll try to reexplain what I intended in a way which I hope resolves the question.
Expected net utility given complete information of the consequences of a decision is the only plausible definition of need.
It doesn't, however correspond in any particular way (even ignoring the information problems that are enormous in healthcare) to the number of tokens one is willing to exchange for a thing in the market compared to other participants unless the quantity of tokens available to each participant is the same.
When the tokens are money and the context is a real capitalist society, that's decidedly far from the case.
"How much would you pay for it" clearly is comparable between individuals, but (IMO) declaring that doing so defines the proper outcome is circular and/or verges on the naturalistic fallacy.
This doesn't exist in real life so it's almost laughable to talk about it like it's an actual thing. People don't have "Expected net utility" functions that spit out a number (denominated in what?) when faced with some choice.
> It doesn't, however correspond in any particular way (even ignoring the information problems that are enormous in healthcare) to the number of tokens one is willing to exchange for a thing in the market compared to other participants unless the quantity of tokens available to each participant is the same.
1) Even if everyone had the same amount of tokens at some time t different people have different values and thus would allocate their tokens differently to different things as they saw fit, not to mention there are other circumstances that people have in their life that are beyond cash reserves (having a house, having a car, having a family, having a pet, having a passion for art collection, etc). They would be allocating their tokens in accordance with this hierarchy since they need to reserve their tokens for other priorities in their life.
2) There's no way to even quantify "needs" across people without some market/pricing function unless you have some third party quantifying or ranking the needs of everyone but I already mentioned that. This is what universal healthcare does where some bureaucratic apparatus determines, quantifies, and ranks the needs of patients and allocates healthcare resources.
That's implausible, since sufficient people voting on it can change the Constitution.
> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?
It means “council”. Leninism was vanguardist, not democratic; vanguardism is a top-down paternalistic elite-led structure based on the idea that the masses aren't ready to lead themselves, and would lead to bad outcomes if allowed to do so without guidance from their more sophisticated betters to direct them to observe proper ideological constraints. Basically, the same position your espousing, but differing only in what the right-thought is that it is feared the masses would depart from if not constrained.