Vignettes. iv. I got a better idea.

How about we strongly encourage those who exploit to give of themselves to ease the suffering of those they exploit? If they refuse, then we stick a gun in their face (ie, tax them) until they cough up enough dough to get the job done. We should start with the very very few people who have nearly all of the dough and stick the guns in their faces first. This should be a lot easier than it is, though, because there are way more of us than there are of them.

However, we shouldn't for a minute defend the process of sticking the gun in their face, so once we get that rolling, we should start questioning the whole notion of running our society by sticking guns in each other's faces when people do things their own way rather than the way we would like them to do them. Or, even worse, when we stick a gun in someone's face because we want their oil, or gold, or timber, or whatever. Maybe we should start questioning that whole idea, because that's probably where we fucked up to begin with.

But FIRST we make sure that everyone eats. And as many people get access to medicine as they can. And shelter. And shit like that. Then we can get to the real task at hand.

And I'm not intersted in hearing any excuses about why this is bad for the economy. You know what else is bad for the economy? Killing your fucking planet. Or war. Or polluting your water supplies so badly that you die of cancer from drinking the tap water. And so forth.

Yes, that kind of looks like Marxism, but I'm going to avoid Marx' error in two ways:

1. I am not going to suggest that using the state to redistribute wealth is fundamentally a great idea. Because this assumes that things like "the state", "redistributing", and "wealth" are great ideas. I'm not sure that they are.

Not to mention the fact that I'm using violence to impose my will on other people. That kind of sucks. However, I believe that using violence to help the exploited better survive is way better than using violence to exploit them. So, for now, I'll put up with it. I don't have many options here.

2. I don't presume to imagine what the world looks like when we start questioning this use of violence.