They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

By Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.” “Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”

“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have turned out differently. And everyone counts on that might.

“Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.” “Yes,” I said.

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

“You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.” I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

“I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.” “And the judge?”

“Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.” I said nothing.

“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.”

© 1955, 1966, 368 pages | ISBN: 0-226-51192-8

by Drew Terry (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 28 diaries, 125 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Jul 31, 2008 at 6:17:46 PM

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I have read this by Mayer more than once since it was first published, even though I was only 10 the year of the first publication, and agree with many of its messages - this one especially:
"kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us."- except for the use of "we", since there were some who did not do as Mayer's colleague ascribes to everyone.

And then there is this part:

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?"

This points out the absolute necessity for having (and living by) principles that are solidly based in reality.

I am concluding, Terry, by your inclusion of Mayer's article that you agree with what I wrote. And since many may not have read it, I thank you for bringing it forward - a lesson from history, of which many have only a vague knowledge and little understanding. The German people had no examples from history from which to learn. Those in the US now have no such excuse.


**Kitty Antonik Wakfer

MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

by Kitty Antonik Wakfer (26 articles, 27 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 163 comments [15 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Jul 31, 2008 at 7:39:40 PM

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Thanks for your response. I agree with you to the extent that we are now seeing full-blown "corporatism" as Mussolini described when he said, "Fascism should more properly be called 'corporatism' since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

What prompted me to reprint my favorite passages from Mayer's book was the following:

"The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

Where you wrote:

"So, to one writer's inferred question of whether the economic woes, seen now and/or in the past in the US (and elsewhere too), are a natural result of capitalism, the answer is "No". Those woes have occurred as a result of the government - . . ."

I disagree. I believe "government" is the natural result of our system of capitalism which "in order to sustain itself, it was compelled to go all the way" - to corporatism. What we have been taught to believe is "capitalism" is nothing like the Austrian ideal.

In other words, the natural result of our system of capitalism sustaining itself is corporatism, the merging of state and corporate power, in a system compelled to do so for its own sake, no matter how damaging it ultimately is to the system it seeks to preserve.

I have issues with this editor. Sorry for the continued indent.

Cheers! 

by Drew Terry (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 28 diaries, 125 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:08:11 PM

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'I believe "government" is the natural result of our system of capitalism which "in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way" '

First, when 2 individuals voluntarily trade items of their own, each having produced hir own item or having obtained it through previous trade with another individual, that is rudimentary capitalism. Each has put into that item being traded at least the time to forage the wilds for it or trading with another who has done that. If the item was crafted, then the individual also put into its crafting the saved reserves from what was previously hunted, foraged or traded - "capital", even though not "money" in the current form of that term. This trading to mutual benefit can continue without interference, and sometimes did in circumstances where it was very local and did not draw attention of the government of the area. - each entering into the exchange for the purpose of maximizing hir own lifetime happiness, the goal of each individual's life.

Now when the tribal chief, clan elder, lord, baron, governor or other designated leader with the legalized power of force (government) intervenes - virtually always by way of the enforcers of the ruler's (or rulers') edicts - the mutual benefit aspect has been degraded. This is what has happened all over the world in varying ways since the earliest of trade between individuals. Governments - individuals and groups being accepted as the rulers of others in the area - have interfered to tax the exchange and/or dictate the types and degrees of trade permitted. There have also been individuals who have, as I wrote above, "have found that currying favor with politicians can create a special status for their organizations - even to the extent of eliminating the presence of competitors." Without the presence of government though, those who wanted to eliminate competitors would have to offer something better or at a lower price. If they stooped to physically eliminating competition by force themselves, they would open themselves to the retaliation of the "competitors" and/or their supporters, and therefore something that a person in a non-government society is not likely to do.

So, Drew, there is no "compell[ing] to go all the way - to corporatism", this last being what is IMO the current politically correct way of terming "verging on fascism" - ignoring the militarism and imperialism aspects of what currently exists. The presence of government *is* what has created this situation. Government, in its earliest forms and growing all along the way to what exists now (despite the admirable, for its time, US Declaration of Independence), is what has mutated trade to mutual benefit (which must be voluntary by definition) into all the forms of government protected/regulated/defined trade (mercantilism was the one in Europe many early immigrants to North America were fleeing). At this time the situation is verging on what is known as fascism, mainly because of the militarism and imperialism aspects.

"What we have been taught to believe is "capitalism" is nothing like the Austrian ideal.
"In other words, the natural result of our system of capitalism sustaining itself is corporatism, the merging of state and corporate power, in a system compelled to do so for its own sake, no matter how damaging it ultimately is to the system it seeks to preserve."

I agree with you, Drew, that many writers/speakers who describe the present US as capitalism sometimes do at the same time point to the fact that it is not as those in (what has come to be known as) the Austrian School of Economics describe. But that is because what has come to exist in the US (and most other parts of the industrialized world) has deviated markedly from what the earliest writers promoted as laissez-faire capitalism, none of which writers BTW had a complete and consistent foundation for its social practice based on the nature of human beings. However, to continue to refer to what exists in the US as "capitalism" is a total misuse of that word. Call it corporatism if you wish, but it is *not* capitalism - true capitalism (necessarily unfettered by any government) has never existed. I suspect that many of those who insist on labeling the US economic system as capitalistic, are doing so in order to misguide listeners/readers. And then there are those who are simply very ignorant and do not even know what they don't know - at least in regards to philosophy and economics.

I wrote in my article above:

"Despite what those managing companies or merely employed by such managers think, governments are not a necessity for the existence of an orderly society - one where physical harm is the rarity and, in such an occurrence, restitution is used to rectify the harm and social preferencing is used to strongly promote both the completion of restitution and the prevention of similar future actions."

You did not question this, Drew, as to how this could be so. The nature of human beings does not automatically lead to the conclusion that individuals must be ruled by others in order that there be orderly interactions between them. Society, just like any other natural system can be naturally self-regulating by means of interactions between its members, if only humans seeks to discover and are allowed to implement the methods by which such self-regulation can be effective, rather than continuing to embrace social systems that need to be constantly held in an unnatural (and very non-optimal) state of balance by the operations of their rulers and other influencers. Individual self-order without rule by others is the social system whose members are humans, who have become fully adult. Just as people can become physical adults, so can they become social adults - if only they are allowed (and even required in the sense that they will not achieve their desires unless they do) to socially mature sufficiently.

Understanding the social interaction methodology by which more individuals would progress to become fully socially mature adults requires a paradigm shift in thinking about human interactions. I invite - and even challenge - those who seek a society of individuals interacting to mutual benefit (or are maybe only curious at this point) to read "Social Meta-Needs: A New Basis for Optimal Human Interaction" and then review the twin frameworks of the Natural Social Contract and Social Preferencing, both of which flow from that basis.

BTW, the OEN notification system did not notify me of comments here - I just happened across yours, Drew, today Sunday 8/3/2008.


**Kitty Antonik Wakfer

MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

by Kitty Antonik Wakfer (26 articles, 27 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 163 comments [15 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 3, 2008 at 2:03:55 PM

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Regarding your favorite passage from Mayer - "The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."  I add the following comments.

The system that Mayer is writing about is *not* unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism but rather what I described at the beginning of my article as "a mix of capitalism + lots of government involvement". Interference with trade between individuals - the market, had begun ages before in Europe - and before that in the Middle East and Africa. It was there right at the start of the US, during the revolutionary war and under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution - and has grown enormously since that era via regulations of all sorts that require band-aid fixes when the distortions in the market place created by those regulations become yet another political problem because of the real life difficulties that ensue.

Few in the populace either at the time of the founding of the US or ever since have considered the route of removing the regulations and even the agencies that oversee and enforce these mountains of laws. Unfortunately, many people want to be protected against the results of making their own decisions, being truly self-responsible. And since politicians, legislators, and bureaucrats seek continued and more power over the choices/decisions of others, this unstable situation continues to spring leaks with the power-holders applying ever more band-aids - a continuing even more unstable situation with ruin at the end, from this course of action and its underlying philosophical foundation.

**Kitty Antonik Wakfer

MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

by Kitty Antonik Wakfer (26 articles, 27 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 163 comments [15 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 3, 2008 at 5:27:18 PM

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has grown so creating political entrepreneurs as well as market entrepreneurs.  The people need to wake up and compete.

Capatlism as it is currently configured doesn't do risk and therefore the future very well.

by kwalsh (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 275 comments [10 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:20:47 PM

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This comment is very cryptic and I'm at a loss for understanding what point KWalsh is making in the first 2 sentences.
As for the last: "Capatlism(sic) as it is currently configured doesn't do risk and therefore the future very well.", the current system - which is *NOT* unfettered capitalism, *NOT* a free market - does indeed have very little risk analysis associated with it by the majority of individuals acting for themselves or as part of an organization including companies. However, this is chiefly because the government has increasingly in the past almost 100 years come to the rescue of both individuals and companies whose decisions have been poor. Most individuals have very little savings - a protection against the effects of known or possible risk - since numerous government programs exist that create a supposed "safety net". And companies are very often protected and bailed out by government too. All of this is of course done with money taken from tax payers - expropriated in fact. (See "Note Who is Really Paying the Bills".)
As for the government itself doing "risk analysis", there has been little point since taxes could always be raised, more bonds sold (to be repaid via taxes) and/or the currency inflated. Now in more recent years with the advent of the Internet, more people are informed about what is or even just suspected to be taking place in government offices and meetings. So there are occasional usages of terms like "social impact" when it comes to the effects of legislation - maybe someone might consider this a "risk analysis" of sorts...

In addition, the actual calculation of risk - performing the actual analysis - is extremely difficult in an environment where the parameters do not follow any principles of order based in reality, but can be arbitrarily changed at the whim of some bureaucrat. Predicting what a government is or is not going to do is a dangerous guessing game - the penalties can be extreme if one is foolish enough to count on a particular government action like one does the rising and setting of the sun, the force of gravity, or even the weather variations over the seasons (which can be quite different from one year to another but is on average reasonably predictable, at least in the relatively near term). And actually knowing what is or is not going to get one charged with breaking a law is also very much an unknown since these change from one location to another in the same country, over short periods of time and from one government enforcer to another.
For these reasons the future of individuals, companies and other organizations (including labor unions) and society as a whole is very bleak, as long as the present system - impending fascism - continues. And merely applying slightly differently configured band-aids won't solve the many problems that all exist because the system's foundation is as unstable as sand. See the last 2 paragraphs in my first reply to Drew's second comment for the alternative way to think about.

**Kitty Antonik Wakfer

MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

by Kitty Antonik Wakfer (26 articles, 27 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 163 comments [15 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 3, 2008 at 6:13:57 PM

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Government (except arguably in the US which is broke) is where the money is.  Corporations know and understand this and therefore get involved in lobbying.  I have developed a short course on Lobbying to enable individuals and community groups to get involved in lobbying in order to act as a counterweight to corporate bodies.  The average citizen is unaware of the game let alone able to protect themselves.

Second Issue

Our current accounting system rewards a short term approach which punishes good risk management.  This is due to the liquidity focus of balance sheets.  Efforts such as Triple Bottom Line or Balanced Scorecard represent approachs to changing the short term focus of accounting reports but fail as we constantly default to profit as defined with reference to liquidity as the preferred performance measure.

You get the behaviour you reward. 

There is hole in our approach but I'm not giving away my intellectual property.

by kwalsh (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 275 comments [10 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:57:09 PM

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Government (except arguably in the US which is broke) is where the money is.

Yes, government anywhere has, what appears to many, a bottomless pit of money - the taxpayer. However, this situation is not something that can actually continue indefinitely. And the same type results are being seen everywhere in the industrialized world. It's just more pronounced in the US because its economic effect on the world in general is so large. (If you haven't yet read my article "Note Who is Paying the Bills" I hope that you will.)

But on a more fundamental level, the currying of favor by lobbyists to have their particular company or organization receive funding at the tax-money trough (think of pigs..."trough: a large long and usually comparatively shallow open vessel that is often V-shaped in cross section and used especially to hold water or feed for domestic animals"- Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com ( 4 Aug. 2008)) is really a petitioning for and receiving of stolen of goods. The "game" you refer to is methods to persuade governments to give these lobbyists expropriated money that they don't bother to try or can't manage to persuade others to loan/invest voluntarily in whatever cause they are promoting. There are also some pragmatists who would probably say that most voters are in favor of having government tax them and then letting the various lobbying groups fight over the funds like a bunch of piranhas. I doubt that this is so, especially when those same people understand that they would have more money of their own to spend/invest without such a centralized decision bureau; and then there is the fact that most have yet to understand - that such a system is not an inevitable result of human nature. Now that is the really important and fundamental "game" about which most people are totally unaware, and is essential for them to be taught!


Our current accounting system rewards a short term approach which punishes good risk management.

What you appear not to realize is that these current accounting and corporation evaluation methods to which you refer are a *result*, rather than a cause, of the short sighted thinking and acting which government paternalism has engendered into the minds of the vast majority of the populace. This goes back to what I wrote in my previous reply - "Most individuals have very little savings - a protection against the effects of known or possible risk - since numerous government programs exist that create a supposed "safety net". And companies are very often protected and bailed out by government too. All of this is of course done with money taken from tax payers - expropriated in fact."


You get the behaviour you reward.

Most definitely, in most cases these days! A person who is thinking short-term will continue to behave in a manner that gets hirself immediate gratification of immediate discomforts. It is a real challenge to convince most people that short term gratification is often not what will provide maximum lifetime happiness. This is is a paradigm shift for the majority of people, those whose conscious goals are to buy a particular car, have a given level of income, marry a particular individual, live in a certain size house, etc. For much more on this subject and the principles that underlie a society of individuals interacting to mutual benefit, I suggest a studied reading of "Social Meta-Needs: A New Basis for Optimal Human Interaction"

There is hole in our approach but I'm not giving away my intellectual property.

I don't include myself in any of your uses of "our" or "we' since I do not agree with, let alone have had any part the creation of, the societal system in the US or anywhere. I happen to be a USer by birth and I remain so, first because I don't really want to be a citizen of *any* state and second, there is no place that is overall really any better at this time.
The current system of intellectual property is one fraught with problems that result in far less production of value in the world. I and my husband Paul Wakfer have a different way of addressing the providing of information and service. For an explanation see "Trading Value for Value".

**Kitty Antonik Wakfer

MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

by Kitty Antonik Wakfer (26 articles, 27 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 163 comments [15 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 4, 2008 at 9:04:14 PM

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There are always two sides to any issue which came first, selfishness or the system.  I am not a US citizen and am far more of an ant than a grasshopper (In part due to my wife).  Traditionally I have given away my ideas freely but I am very angry with the US so I may help but only if I'm paid.  Of course because I have studied the area I'm most unlikely to be asked for my opinion similar to the situation with Iraq.

My current plan is to wait and pick up the pieces and save a few after the train wreck if I can.

by kwalsh (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 275 comments [10 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Tuesday, Aug 5, 2008 at 5:42:10 PM

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