You expanded my positions out of context above to support your philosophical slippery slope argument. You repeatedly argue that every top-down intervention must spiral into an out of control Frankenstein's monster "because you lower the entropy". This argument is simply untrue. Most top-down responses occur because they are necessary to keep individuals from defecting and destroying the rights of their fellows. Top-down control thus maximizes entropy and can only be relaxed when we learn ways to improve our behavior. Without moral progress any disturbance from equilibrium including those introduced by decentralizing technology will just collapse back into the old order because the old order remains the optimal configuration.
My point is that nothing is a permanent fix and there is no absolute truth. There are competing strategies.
There isn't one order, ever.
It isn't just an issue of moral progress. Even if you are extremely ethical, it is very difficult to raise kids in for example the USA. Your kids are very prone to become very disrespectful to the parents by being exposed to public education and the culture of their peers. So you move to Singapore, but then your kids grow up with the Asian influence of not being an individual and not being unique (e.g. memorization instead of creativity, etc). There is no single absolute truth or best choice for a society or strategy.
Also people don't agree on morals and culture. For example, they don't agree on the level of discipline in the home, whether young kids should have chores and work hard, etc..
You apparently myopically presume that the only purpose of decentralization technology is to enable illegal activities and defection from the aims of a well functioning society. The Internet is decentralization technology. Hello? Do you even understand that the base protocols of the Internet are decentralized.
Do you think blockchains are only about creating crypto-currency? Stay tuned...
And do you think crypto-currency only useful for subversion and investment and not for enabling production that aids a well functioning society that can't be done with the existing monetary systems. Again stay tuned...
Enforcing the sanctity of contracts is one of the primary roles of the state. This allows cooperative outcomes that require coordination. When we bring life into the world both parents impose a their will on the unborn. The parents assume the responsibility to raise the child into adulthood to the best of their ability. The child assume the responsibility of life and all the pain and joys life entails. You take the position that a contract forced upon another deserves less scrutiny than a contract entered into willingly. Indeed the opposite is the case. A contract forced upon another deserves more scrutiny and when there is doubt it should always be interpenetrated in favor of the unwilling participant.
For the State to do so is to claim it is God.
I know many humans haven't yet learned the lesson of Babylon, so please don't let me discourage you.
Again I think there will be many competing strategies. If the leftists succeed in forcing everyone into their system of playing God, then humanity could go existent. But I doubt they will be successful in achieving ubiquitous control over God's (nature's) contract between parents and children.
The Bible does say that humans who disobey the commandments will suffer the government they deserve. So you are not incorrect to say that such governance will rise. But it always overextends and starts to dictate one set of morals over another (political correctness), thus violating diversity.
They will tell you what teachings and culture your children must have. They will disallow you to teach your kids the morals and culture you believe in, for example by overriding you and teaching your kids to shame and talk back at you if you do (or to simply think their parents are wrong and archaic).
You can't create an enforcement controlled by the corruption of the collective (the Iron Law of Political Economics) and expect it to not destroy the goodness of that contract also.
Of course for a short while, societies may be functioning reasonably well, so you choose one and go. For next few decades, Singapore probably be a better choice than most others. But there are tradeoffs.
It is true that making men pay for child support allows immoral women to take advantage of men. Yes this is a massive shift in power from times past when immoral men competed to take advantage of women.
Actually it is empowering immoral men also. Afaik, in strictly conservative societies, the supply of easy women was curtailed.
Tough cookies the individual who's interests supersedes that of both the mother and the father is that of the child.
The problem with your logic is the child is nothing without its parents, regardless of how much financial support the State gives it.
A child needs an identity.
Thus the interests of all of the family is a mutual contract between THEM.
The leftists think they can engineer a better solution than nature did. Good luck.
• I have no responsibility to help the innocent. It is my choice whether I want to (and I very much may depending on my available resources). This diversity is necessary.
• There is no nirvana. Nature is what it is. We have to accept it.
Again and again and in various forms you repeat the argument that I refuse to allow failure. I do nothing of the sort. We have many responsibilities one of these is to help the innocent to the best of our ability.
But we are not God. We can't really help a child without also helping the parents, because the child is nothing without the parents. We could totally remove the child from the parents and given them new parents, but raising the child without parents is not successful.
You are saying essentially I am responsible for doing something that is impossible. And leftists always propose to do the impossible and that is why they are so destructive.
All that is necessary to preserve diversity is that we be given free choice to fulfill our responsibilities or reject them. Via our choices we succeed or fail. Freedom of choice and freedom to fail does not entail freedom from consequence.
Exactly. So you need to accept that child will suffer the consequence of the parents' choices regardless of anything the State does. The State can only end up making it worse, as it is has done in the USA and Europe. The evidence is clear that State intervention doesn't work. Look at the divorce rate, the birth rate, the level of hedonism, psychological illness, addiction, drug use amongst teens, etc..
The best we can do is community, i.e. personal connections to the parents. That way we can truly help our fellow man and woman and raise them up. With love and care.
Humans respond to human relationships.
Nature is what it is. We must understand it and the limits it imposes but we do not have to accept it as sacrosanct. Promotion and worship of nature and "natural outcomes" ultimately limits both freedom and progress.
Understanding which natural laws are inviolable are important to understanding how activist moralism can be amoral!
Again I think community is a much more optimum and persuasive method than employing the gulag of the State.
R&L: How would you respond to statements by bureaucracies of religious institutions who defend the welfare state?
Gilder: They don’t believe in their own teachings. What the poor really need is morals. The welfare state destroys the morals of the poor. Poor people in America live better than the middle class in most other countries in the world. The official poor in America have higher incomes and purchasing power than the middle class in the United States in 1955 or the middle class in Japan today. The so-called “poor” are ruined by the overflow of American prosperity. What they need is Christian teaching from the churches. But these same churches are mostly inept at actually preaching to the poor. Instead, they support the welfare state as a sort of proxy.
Because middle class white people don't want to develop personal relationships with dirty poor people.
I lived in the a squalor area. I was a middle class white person. I can attest that it further destroyed me (but I was already initially broken before that). So they aren't being illogical.
See it isn't as simpleton....
