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Aielyn on 10 December 2013
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MDMAlliance said:


I'm not confusing anything here.  For something to follow a "rule," there needs to be some way to enforce it (whether it is government or not).  Judgement will be made by someone because how "hard" someone works is highly subjective in terms of worth, and benefits to society will not come in the same form everywhere.  It ends up that what you're thinking is that the people determine who deserves what.  You're kind of trying to ask for a completely free market.  That is not at all what would promote economic equality.

I'm going to stop you right there. At no point did I say anything about "a completely free market". Indeed, a completely free market would destroy any vestige of economic equality. No, a properly regulated market is what I'm talking about - one that is set up to make the "rational choice" for each person the same as the best outcome for society. Right now, it works a lot more like the prisoner's dilemma, where the system encourages people to make decisions that are to the detriment of society in the long run.

Indeed, if you notice, I referred to a "general rule". Not a "Rule", as in a requirement, but a "General rule", as in "a rule of thumb" or "a typical result". And this rule wouldn't be imposed, it would be engendered - people would follow it of their own volition.

You seem to have misinterpreted everything I've said, in fact. I didn't say that the 24 hour news cycle is the sole cause of corruption, I said that the result of the 24 hour news cycle's impact on politics is corruption. If I said that spending too much time at the beach results in skin cancer, it wouldn't mean that skin cancer didn't exist prior to people spending time at the beach.

The point of my post was to get clarification as to what the original posted considers "economic equality", with details on how those two concepts differ, and thus why I need the clarification. Economic equality could mean "everyone is treated equally", or it could mean "everyone is on a level playing field with respect to things like family wealth, etc". Note that I never said that there's "a correct way" to set up a democracy. I said that if it's properly set up, then it can be compatible with economic equality (using the "level playing field" version). See, words have meanings - "correct way" is very different from "properly set up". The former implies a specific approach, whereas the latter is more like fine-tuning to make it run correctly. Any democratic system could be set up "properly" to be compatible with economic equality, and for each system, the result would be different. I am simply asserting that it is possible to tweak or change any democracy to work towards the economic equality ideal. Of course, being an ideal, it will never be 100% achieved... but that doesn't mean it can't be compatible.

And I find it fascinating that you have a psychic power sufficient to determine that my system wouldn't work in the real world, when I haven't even described ANY of it to you. In case you didn't know, I'm an applied mathematician. I know all about theory vs practice, and I have incorporated that into my ideas. I've also looked into the various systems currently in play, and I have formulated ideas that address what I perceive as holes in the current systems.