Gary Childress wrote: ↑Thu Feb 23, 2023 3:17 pm
"Microenterprise" seems to be a fragile and artificial state of affairs at best.
No, it's not. It's really successful and really durable...amazingly so. It takes the sort of direct meddling from the government, particularly the global power-players to ruin it. While these power-players were out of the loop, it was becoming so successful that it was actually wiping out world poverty. If only we could avoid the sort of Socialist Globalism that is currently being practiced, a whole lot more people would soon be able to feed their families, get basic medicine, access education, get minimal sanitation, and so on.
A lot of people don't know that. They don't realize that prior to the COVID crisis, the poverty rate in the world was actually shrinking drastically. We were winning...slower than we'd like, but we'd found the right sort of strategy to beat global poverty. Here's a report from one of the most wildly Leftist sources you could possibily find, saying essentially the same thing:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press ... -to-a-halt
But we're busy ruining that, by interfering at the global level.
Capitalism as traditionally defined is the private accumulation of wealth and power as opposed to some sort of democratic administration by all citizens over those things. That's all it means.
Well, that's naive. And it's the Marxist take on things, which has never been right.
There's no such thing as "Capitialism," really; because -ism's are ideologies, like "Marxism." What we should be talking about is free, democratic access to markets. One needs no particular ideology to believe in such freedom. One simply needs to be secure and left alone to take one's opportunities.
Of course, regulation is also how people are protected to some degree from bad or dishonest business
Perhaps it used to be. But nowadays, it's how the pseudo-Socialist elite legislates to as to eradicate small business and free enterprise, and force us into globalization and poverty.
Tarrifs used to work somewhat when we had fixed national boundaries and national economies that could be closed or opened. We no longer have those, we are told. So tarrifs are a bit of a dinosaur, nowadays.
Where does the cycle stop? Well, maybe you're ultimately right. Maybe it stops with faith in God. If everyone could come together in some sort of common faith that was inclusive instead of divisive, then maybe there would be less insanity.
Maybe. But it would have to be something in which people could freely believe, and could freely opt not to believe, as well. Will human beings voluntarily agree to something like that? I think not. Should it be forced upon them, then? Definitely not.
Locke was right: our primary right is the right to freedom of conscience. It comes even before free speech (though closely allied to it). People must be allowed to choose what they will and will not believe freely. But all such freedoms come with responsibility, and all such choices come with consequences. There's no escaping that.
Thus, instead of focusing on the big, global problems, over which you and I have no control whatsoever, and will never be granted any, we ought to look to ourselves, and to the choices we, personally, are making.