Hi Jim,
Good questions.
> You wrote: Why? Is it somehow the case
> that the members of what you're calling the "liquidating class"
*deserve*
> to be persecuted? Why is that?
In Shoveling Fuel, I use the word "castigated", and I agree with John
Foster that, in the vernacular at least, "castigation" does not include
violence or vandalism, both of which are more readily connoted by
"persecuted". (Recall again that I never condoned the ELF action but
expressed empathy.) As for why liquidators should be castigated, how
about the fact that they do orders of magnitude more than steady staters
(lower 80 percentile in personal consumption expenditures) to wastefully
liquidate our grandkids' natural capital? I am more concerned about the
grandkids' welfare than the liquidators' motivational retardation. And
then there is the political rationale for starting with the upper one
percentile; this is very important and is indeed covered in Shoveling
Fuel.
>While I appreciate your attempt to
> separate out the merely rich from those who comprise the top one
percent of
> "conspicuous onsumers," why is it the case that conspicuous consumers
*as a
> class deserve to have their houses vandalized?
They don't. Recall again that I never condoned the ELF action but
expressed empathy. I advocate social castigation, not vandalism.
> >I'm leery of any such attempt to generalize about whole classes of
> people without making any distinctions. I worry that such crude
> sociological categorizations are little better than tendentious
stereotypes.
> For example, if we substituted "rich Jews" for your category, "the
> liquidatingclass," think of how offensive that would be.
There is nothing ethnocentric about the steady state revolution. It
doesn't matter if the liquidator is purple, atheist, or left-winging;
they're all clearly jeapordizing our grandkids' future! Social
castigation is the best bet for modifying their posterity-jeapordizing
behavior, based on a Darwinian/Maslowian synthesis. To the extent that
"good" means protecting the grandkids, the liquidators are "bad". That
summarizes the ethics of castigating the liquidating class.
Brian Czech
Arlington, VA
USA
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