As if I needed another reason to love Molly Ivins
“When the man says there will be a tax cut ‘for everyone who pays income taxes’ and that the average tax cut will be $1,100, he expects you not to notice that half of all taxpayers will get less than $100, while people making over $1 million will get an average of $92,200. That averages to $1,100 all right. As The New Yorker pointed out recently, if Bill Gates went to a mission where two nuns were feeding soup to sixty bums, the average net worth of everyone in that room would be $1 billion each. But it would still be Bill Gates, sixty bums, and two nuns.”
-Molly Ivins in “The Progressive”
If we want to live in a purely Darwinian society, where each person just grabs what they can, that’s not hard to create. But is that really the society we want to live in?
Unlike objectivists (poke) I’m all for altruism. However, is a “Darwinian” society really something that needs to be created, or does it just happen on its own? Is it really possible to create any other kind of enduring society. On a purely intellectual level, wouldn’t any enduring society be “Darwinian”? Gotsta maintain a perspective of scale.
Objectivists believe that rational self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfish people will let the world be destroyed for their short-term, animalistic greed. Rationally self-interested people will see that social justice, ecological protections, and Democracy are best for individual human beings in the long-run. Objectivists (myself sort of included) believe that altruism — i.e., hurting yourself to help others — is irrational. We help ourselves by helpinig others. We benefit our own lives by giving to others. An objectivist would reject karma, but he/she would eagerly accept “what goes around comes around”.
(poke)