Get ready for some of the roots of rap—the true old school—courtesy of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The song is “Whitey on the Moon.” It still rings true today.
Scott-Heron challenges the status quo belief that NASA and its achievements are beneficial to society as a whole. In reality, the song can be applied to almost any program of the government.
For who? For what?
Yes, it’s great to send a man to the moon, but is it right to do it by taking money from people who are struggling to get by (or anyone for that matter)? And even if the poor aren’t being taxed directly through their income, they still pay for goods and services whose prices have been inflated by taxes imposed by the government. They employ a monetary policy that has a strategy to print and print and print. This weakens the value of the dollar, destroying the purchasing power of that dollar, and causes the most harm to the people with the least amount of dollars.
I can’t pay no doctor bill, but Whitey’s on the moon.
Sure, the government has created social programs to help the poor, but they are simply an attempt to fix the problem exacerbated by the government’s previous action. What is the response when the safety net programs are insufficient? They end up taxing more and printing additional money, driving prices up and purchasing power down. It is a bad cycle.
The next time you find yourself or someone you know in a pinch financially, just remember: Whitey’s on the moon.
If, even in a voluntary association of community members, 51% vote to use collective funds to hire Bob to work as a security guard, the 49% still have the will of the majority imposed upon them. I’m definitely not into democracy as we know it today, but I also appreciate the value of collective security against, say, a large chimpanzee.
My cousin told me that he agreed the present system wasn’t great then challenged me to produce a better model. So far I don’t know that I have. I certainly don’t want a system where those with the biggest guns rule, nor do I want a system where 4 secretly aligned voters can overpower the unaligned 3 remaining.
Its easy to point out problems, that was my environmental studies class.
Most certainly I don’t want to pay your doctor’s bill, I don’t care about rovers on Mars, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to finance Nazi regimes in the Ukraine or mortar rounds for attacks in Donetsk.
I want to find a better way.
Why do you see a voluntary system just as bad as a one that forces participation? Voluntary means that you can withdrawal participation. If it is no better than compulsive system, then would it matter if the state took control of the food supply?
You also seem to believe the power of violence is stronger than the power of economics. If voluntary exchange is more productive than threatening with bigger guns, why would businesses in a free market use their bigger guns?
Not saying that a voluntary system is “as bad” but instead that they’re different. Every system has issues, and what I was trying to say was that the system of 51% ruling over the 49% has issues too.
We are bystanders currently to a family run business. They are employing a hybrid system of hierarchical and adversarial models leaving the dissenting opinion repeatedly over ruled. Needless to say, the one voice which is constantly over run is unmotivated, ready to quit, and doing the absolute minimum possible at every turn. The silent revolution involves standing at the water cooler for an extra 15 minutes each day, finding reasons to do anything except work, and wearing down the corporation through tactics of attrition.
Ideally everyone would be interested to see the wellness of the machine as beneficial to their interest, however, when one minority voice is routinely over ruled by the defacto majority, they necessarily find ways to destroy the collective. Seems just a natural progression of human behaviour.