This article is dedicated to:   
      
   - A man I met, with most of his body heavily burned, simply because he   
   was a Chinese during the 1998 May Riot in Indonesia.   
   - Lots of capitalists that are slaughtered during the cultural   
   evolution.   
   - Ten thousands of peaceful smugglers that are massacred in Banda   
   island by the Dutch for conducting peaceful spice trade and all that   
   are similar to them.   
   - All minority groups and individuals that face discrimination, even   
   genocide, for economically contributing too much for their society.   
   - All customers that have to pay higher products due to protection of   
   tariff and trades.   
   - Productive people that are fined with income tax for the victimless   
   crime of making honest money.   
   - Smart students that are slowed down so not to move too fast.   
   - Industries that do not get subsidy, or even banned to protect   
   unproductive industry and laborers that earn much less due to such   
   restrictions.   
   - Poor starving people that could have been rich had their countries   
   choose to embrace free market.   
   - Women and males that are trapped in unhappy marriage which they have   
   a hard time getting out.   
   - For women and children that have lots of their best choices taken   
   under the pretext of protection.   
   - Immigrants and refuges.   
      
   Is welfare part of capitalism?   
      
   In short, no. In consensually, punishing the productive through income   
   tax to reward parasitic behavior is the biggest affront against the   
   principle of free market. In fact, from many governments intervention   
   in economy, the one that proponents of free market often oppose the   
   most is welfare.   
      
   However, when we look further, capitalism and welfare is not really   
   total opposites. Most importantly, properly done, a straight forward   
   welfare program can cause less market distortion, and hence an   
   efficient replacement to buy votes from losers, than farm subsidies,   
   public schools, minimum wage, trades restrictions, tariffs, and sex   
   laws. If it's done by taxing wealth, rather than income, the amount of   
   market distortion can be minimized further.   
      
   Welfare is also cheap. It'll cost $5000/year to a welfare recipient   
   in USA, for example. However, we need to remember that the   
   recipients' lifestyle worth only $500. The other $4500 goes to   
   implicit welfare due to higher living costs. That implicit welfare   
   includes minimum wage, immigrations laws, and food subsidy, or   
   protections.   
      
   If somehow a straight forward explicit welfare program can replace all   
   relatively more evil governments' interventions, then capitalists are   
   probably better of not opposing welfare so much. Even Milton Friedman   
   supports schemes called guaranteed minimum income, which is like   
   welfare but with much less market distortion.   
      
   That's not where the similarity ends. One of the main creeds of   
   capitalism is that consent and competition should be preferred over   
   force. Without that consent, anyone can simply make us choose to make   
   our self worst of under the pretext that it is for our own good. In   
   fact, most laws against consensual acts can be traced down to   
   protection of some disgruntled competitors often done under the pretext   
   of the consenting parties' own good.   
      
   Anti prostitution and anti polygamy laws, for example, is there to   
   ration females to poor dumb males under the pretext of protecting the   
   consenting women. Of course, all natural resources tend to be rationed   
   somewhat proportional to ones' voting power. And that does explain   
   why democracy and anti polygamy laws go hand in hand too. One man one   
   vote soon leads to one man one wife.   
      
   Well, at least Matt Ridley agrees with me and he's a well known   
   mainstream scientific researchers. I guess that's also why so many   
   uncompetitive people want to ensure that evolution theory is not taught   
   in school. You can also read a famous psikiatrist book, "The road less   
   traveled," you'll see that life long monogamous marriage is just a trap   
   to prevent highly desirable people from being available to those who   
   they want more, and romance is just the lure to that trap.   
      
   On the women side, anti pornography laws is really meant to prevent   
   highly desirable women from advertising her assets and hence protecting   
   less pretty women from the higher industry standard a public display of   
   superior desirability might cause. Countries that embrace porn tend to   
   have prettier women. Where did all the unsexy ones go? They're all   
   shifting out of the gene pool, and hence are doing their best to oppose   
   porn preaching religious doctrines that men should judge women based on   
   any features but beauty, which they can't offer.   
      
   Another issue is consent. Welfare program is not consensual; however,   
   it's relatively more consensual then civil war. In ancient time, when   
   we have different ideological opinions, we end up killing each other to   
   proof who are "right." The Catholic would kill the Gnostic, the   
   Sunni would kill the Shiah. One King would kill the other. A younger   
   prince will argue that the older prince is demon. Might makes right.   
      
   Such differences of opinions are of course solved with war, which is a   
   very cost inefficient way to know who're "right." However it does   
   work in some subjective practical sense. If we look in the past and try   
   to figure out whether the Gnostic or the Catholic is the one that's   
   heretical or "right" respectively, we need only to see who won. The   
   Gnostics are slaughtered, so they must be the heretic, or do they? At   
   least I bet there are way more people in the world that think that way   
   than the other way around, excluding me actually.   
      
   It doesn't matter how many books many institutionalized religions   
   burned, how much restrictions of freedom of speech and irrationality   
   they embraced, how many witnesses they snuffed outs and all other   
   techniques that would not have stand the scrutiny of a peer reviewed   
   scientific journal, or even a reasonable jury in the court of law. Too   
   many people don't believe who are right and reasonable, they believe   
   who are mighty. Right or wrong, the win will always become right   
   anyway.   
      
   Now, under democratic context, we don't kill those who oppose us,   
   rather we try to persuade enough people to join our cause. How do we   
   persuade them? By money of course. Welfare program is then a reasonably   
   cost efficient method to buy votes.   
      
   When too many people are on a side, we will sort of know that going to   
   war will hurt the other side; hence we comply anyway with the whim of   
   majority avoiding the costly alternatives. While not ideal, this is   
   indeed how right and wrong is really decided, proper assessments of   
   each sides' bargaining position and mutually cherished compromised line   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)