What does it mean to 'fail' these days?

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

I remember that when Thatcher was in power she said
" anyone who finds himself over the age of 25 and travelling by bus must consider himself a failure."

Well, let's just say that she was not wild about public transport annd the country is still in a mess as a result. But what is it going to mean for the rest of us if everyone "succeeds"? Seriously, do you ever stop to think how London would cope if everyone - I mean EVERYONE decided to come to work in a car? or even buy a car? Think we could cope? Roads are bursting at the seams as it is.

Back in the 60s, Labour governments had a dream of boosting the number of kids who went to university. they did - shame that there were not enough jobs for people with graduate honours and so many people with degrees in their pockets ended up stacking supermarket shelves.

So, I ask myself, what should a government, or even a society be aiming for? I think it is true that although there was a moral case being made for abolishing slavery back in the days of Queen Victoria, it was really economics that knocked it on the head.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' more or less grabbed the slaveowners by the throat and said "look, mechanisation is cheaper than slavery. Get machines and drop the slaves or lose out" - so the slaveowners did.

For me, the fact that America can elect a black man into the Whitehouse is a sign that something I call 'progress' is actually happening. But for so many Americans, there is no job in the White House, no job anywhere. A more equal society, with more people actually working, and earning a wage that allows them than do more than just live hand to mouth would seem to be a sensible benchmark.

I don't know that we all need to own cars - it makes more sense to commute, providing that public transport is cheap and affordable. Maybe Thatcher should be considered a failure in so far as she never fixed this to happen - ecologically it makes more sense to have more urban busses, more 'park and ride' schemes in city centres and more tube networks in places like London, Liverpool and Manchester.

And, if a society needs to have its bins emptied and its streets cleaned, it should pay those willing to do these essential services. What we don't need in society are people who end up in prison for fraud and other reasons. People who end up in prisons, unable to make any valid contribution to society should be considered failures - and countries that are forced to lock more and more of it's citizens away each year should ask themselves why they (as societies) are failing to incentivise their workforce.

The other question is 'what can we do to make sure more young people succeed?'
To me, university and college are not the only answer. we need to make spaces and make use of the talents of people more suited to working in trades through apprenticeships. And yes, we need to see to it that the bins are emptied too.

A failed state, somewhere where this does not happen , is best exemplified by places like Somalia, and a failed state is not just a tragedy to itself, but to the rest of the world as well. most of the piracy that happens off the east coast of Africa and is spreading slowly into the Indian Ocean is due to the fact that Somalia cannot fix itself and neither can the international community come up with a plan to help the region.

Again, what do we do to put things right? can we, or is it something that people have to do for themselves. i would suggest that nobody really pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps entirely - they make use of the lifelines they see hanging within reach. So getting lines within reach of most people and allowing them to pull themselves up seems to be what we should be aiming to do- whether it's helping kids off of drugs or getting a stable democratic system going in an impoverished and bandit ridden country.

But, that's my own take. what is yours?

Comments

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

No it doesn't. In a nutshell my argument is simply that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I'm extrapolating here that when you say "certainly possible", you don't actually mean, certainly possible, in extremely limited and unlikely circumstances and so unstable and ineffective that it would be either completely useless or otherwise fall apart in months, weeks or even days. Not that it is "certainly possible" in the sense that it is "certainly possible" that (by quantum tunnelling) I could teleport my entire body 5 metres to my left at any time.

Rather, that you mean it is actually practicable for a stable and effective, non-government army to exist for a considerable amount of time in the real world under relatively normal circumstances.

If that is the case, your claim becomes something rather less than obvious and self-evident. In other words, you would need a very good argument to demonstrate that such a thing was feasible.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

And the arguments have been made. Your attempt to dismiss the argument by claiming it has never happened in history reduces to saying that something that has not been done before cannot be done in the future. There are reasonable arguments against it; the one you presented here isn't one of them.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

actually, the nearest thing you have to an ad hoc collection of people who ran their own affairs without a central government were (maybe) the Boer Commandoes.

They fought a guerrilla war against the British in South Africa, and were victorious in the field on many occassions. However, these dutch farmers, who fought in bands with each man supplying his own rifle and his own horse, depending on food for whatever he could shoot or what the nearest farm would give him as he rode past, did not keep up this system.

When they won their independence, the Dutch settlers formed what is now the Union of South Africa. It may be possible for a people, therefore to form what we would call a self armed and self supplied militia - but even these hardy and independent militia men realised that they needed courts, a legislature, and a proper governmental system to safeguard the freedoms they had won.

It would also appear to me that the Founding Fathers of America were similarly independent minded militia men who soon saw that a goverrnment was a good thing - so long as it was run in the interests of the governed people themselves and not some foriegn power.

for them it was "no taxation without representation2 - a fair and just demand that King george and his advisors would have done well to heed.
however, nobody then said "Tax is theft". I think that came later.

best case scenario if the US government was abolished would be that power would devolve to the individual states, which would still mean a viable government. but if power devolved altogether to to small a social unit, I think that people would start to hanker for something bigger.
back in the day, small places all over wanted to join together and become a proper State - like they did in "Oklahoma2 - or maybe the things that happened in the hollywood musicals was not quite correct. You tell me.

I think though , that States became Quite popular in America and you ended up with 50 of them, as well as a national or federal government. Did 500 milloin people get it wrong?

Given that some form of social leadership is essential, what size of governing body do you see as iideal? We have agreed that somalians have to low a level of social cohesiveness, and for some , the level of bureacracy in the UK and USA is too large - how far, in real terms do you propose building or reducing to get an ideal level of government?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

It's complicated.

Also, there are advances in political thought as there are in the scientific realm. Feudalism was the height of political organization at one time, but there have been newer advances. The founding of the USA was an advance, but also not the pinnacle of the possible. Libertarian thought has progressed from there.

I don't advocate for instantaneous changes as those will always produce problems, but sometimes it's required, as the American colonists determined 200+ years ago.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

And the arguments have been made.

Where?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're adequate at using Google.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

You're the one making the bold claims. The burden is clearly on you to provide the arguments to support those claims, not mine. Otherwise you're just pissing in the wind.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Start here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_law)
Continue here (http://www.spiralnature.com/phil/anarchy/toknow.html)