Taoism and Politics

[Apech]

Thanks for OP ... very good.

 

I'm not sure, or am still to be convinced that Lao Tzu's advice to a ruler in Ancient China can be taken to resonate directly with modern ideas of anarchism or liberality. Saying 'don't act' to an absolute monarch is a bit different to saying 'don't act' to a democratic government.

 

As a Brit living in Europe I have no direct stake in US politics (although the outcome affects us all of course) but surely the way you choose your candidates means you always get the ones with the big money backers ... and the one's who can pretend to have led blameless lives ... to be cynical even the so called minority alternatives are put there to give an appearance of choice. If someone enters the Whitehouse on the basis of someone else's millions of bucks then you can forget the philosophy and just hope they are a good administrator or manager because that's all they are.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

The whole notion of it being "free" is part of the problem. It is not free in any way shape or form. People treating it as free...when you dont have any dog in the fight, no skin in the game, you have less concrete basis for caring about a good outcome because you've never really had the resources confiscated to enough of an extent that you notice how badly those resources are being mismanaged. How many people go to the ballot box in order to vote for the person that will give them the most "free shit?" I had acquaintances of mine vote for Obama simply on the singular reason that they heard they'd be getting a decent tax rebate if he got into office! How despicable is that, especially in light of the fact that every dollar the government spends or hands out in whatever fashion is a dollar taken from citizens. When the government abuses its authority to legally take the fruits of its citizens labor to arbitrary extents, the growth factor suffers.

 

Liberal policies are sorta like "fully immersing oneself" in taoist practices, but then refusing to stop masturbating every single day, twice or thrice even, telling oneself that those extra resources wont be missed. Eventually one makes progress outwardly with a rotting shell on the inside because the mechanations that make it all work rely rather fundamentally on those resources. Hopefully the american people are over their hope & change orgasm and are moving on to supporting methods that actually work

 

I'll make an effort not to counter point on medicare more than one more time so as not to derail this, but

 

I think in the US, medicare would at least been a way to ensure that some of all that tax money is not going to get vacuumed up in the usual way by the military-industrial-political complex. It would have ensured that the citizens were taken care of at least physically. Every country that socialized medicare is damn happy with it, and I tell you that as a Canadian. All this BS about "oh you won't get to choose your doctor" -- you're still going to have world class doctors no matter what, without every person who ever goes to the hospital being in debt as though they had to buy a new or used car.

 

So basically, overtaxing a population is certainly bad for it, but it's even worse when that population is barely seeing any of that money come back to them due to entrenched systems of corruption and greed.

 

To have at least secured that money for the physical well-being of the people would have been one government involvement that even right wingers should see is more than acceptable.

 

It's important to accept facts of a situation, and the US right now seems to just pool its tax dollars and then lets the corporate and industrial tax binge begin before it has fed the society.

 

So again, I think there should be a yin-yang thing there where freedoms reign on one hand, but the government is a nurturing entity to the people. Otherwise it's like open season to use the government as a tool for centralizing industry, and then the industry becomes the mama-bear, but really a wolf.

[Owledge]

Liberal policies are sorta like "fully immersing oneself" in taoist practices, but then refusing to stop masturbating every single day, twice or thrice even, telling oneself that those extra resources wont be missed. Eventually one makes progress outwardly with a rotting shell on the inside because the mechanations that make it all work rely rather fundamentally on those resources. Hopefully the american people are over their hope & change orgasm and are moving on to supporting methods that actually work

This sounds like it's based on the idea of scarcity. Scarcity is man-made - no necessity. Furthermore, mismanagement can exist in every type of system. Anything can be done right or wrong.

Fact is that for decades now very clever people, among them academics, have presented mathematically sound models for systems of managing tax money that many people just refuse to believe will work. Sometimes it's really funny when our current state of wastefulness is ignored. For example, in Germany everybody could receive a basic monthly income, whether they have work or not. Then critics say this can't work, there wouldn't be enough money, it would be unproductive. But they're ignoring the irony that a system like that is already in progress in a different way, because the social system already pays a basic income for many people. The difference is not the amount spent, but that in the current system, people still have existential fears because they're tyrannized all the time. But that doesn't help them find work if there is none.

So I repeat what I usually say: Fix the root causes, the underlying issues, and talking about systems and concepts and details won't be necessary - it'll all develop easily. But if people cannot even start with the simplest and most basic first steps - electing sincere politicians - how can they expect things to improve?! And this change has to start in every person, not the politics. In order to make the right elective decisions, YOU have to change. But many people don't want to change. In a way they're very lazy. In a society like that, politicians aren't elected as servants, but as champions.

 

Another time I saw in in Arizona when Bush wass till President and he was speaking about Native American practices. He said he thought our country was being run by the biggest criminals on the planet.

Massive chuzpah for him to say something like that, since he's one of them.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Owledge