Monday, May 29, 2017

Last Post of Memorial Day

The logical conclusion of the claims of such economists as Fridman, Bloom and Easley (as well as many others) that their economics advocacy is out of assumptions of natural selection inevitably gives their results the character of maximizing what they claim as "economic efficiency" as having the same goal as claimed by such scientists as Karl Pearson and such others as Wilhelm Schallmayer, of maximizing "human efficiency" through the mechanism of their understanding of natural selection "the selective death rate".   That can only mean eliminating groups of people from the future through preventing them from leaving children and grand children. 

Anyone who claims their economic proposals are Darwinian, are based on natural selection are, in fact, linking their claims and proposals and goals to a eugenic view of human society and life. 

Anyone who denies that all of those must, in any scheme that comes out of their understanding of natural selection - defined in their own terms - must include the planned or not prevented early deaths of people even on a "selective" scheme are either misrepresenting the real intellectual basis of their schemes or they are conveniently leaving out those features of them.  

I don't see how anyone who can read can avoid that conclusion and anyone who can think would not see that such ideas are entirely at odds with and destructive of egalitarian democracy, morality and a decent life.

3 comments:

  1. Well, you know, as long as our hearts are in the right place, that's what matters. Right?

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    1. I really don't think that where they'd like their hearts to be is dependable. The history of the world is that there is nothing for people to overcome quite so easily as their, all too often weak and temporary, inclinations to do good for others.

      If it were automatic and easy and dependable, The Law, summed up in "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, would ever have been worth mentioning, nevermind writing some of the most compelling texts ever written, making such strong intellectual and emotional arguments and such strong assertions of moral absolutes to persuade people of that.

      I have looked at reviews of a book about the private lives of people who ran the Nazi death camps, who would murder children by day and go home to their families at night, how their servants said that the same monsters were so affectionate and loving with their wives and children only to go back and murder as work all day long. But I haven't had the courage to look at the book, yet.

      I don't remember which of the death camp commanders it was who had a guard shot for brutalizing people being sent to the gas chambers.

      Decency and civilization are a phenomenon of a narrow way, which certainly wouldn't have surprised Jesus.

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    2. Precisely. The great American excuse is "We meant well, doesn't that count?" So we kill civilians (as we did recently in Syria; or was it Iraq? I can't keep up), and it wasn't our fault our bombs set off bombs. Or ISIS put civilians there to be killed (a perennial favorite). We did our best not to hurt non-combatants, so don't we get credit for that?

      "No one likes us, I don't know why/we may not be perfect, but heaven knows, we try!"

      Road to hell, good intentions; we keep forgetting that one.

      So, as long as we don't mean to be as cruel and hard hearted as Darwin in the 19th century, we're good, right? Because it's not what we do, it's what we intend to do that counts, right?
      The heart is devious above all else;
      it is perverse--
      who can understand it?
      I the LORD test the mind
      and search the heart,
      to give to all according to their ways,
      according to the fruit of their doings.

      Jeremiah 17:9-10

      That Jeremiah, such a buzz kill!

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