{"id":31774,"date":"2017-09-04T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31774"},"modified":"2017-08-24T09:21:11","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T13:21:11","slug":"qotd-even-a-world-of-perfect-abundance-would-not-be-a-crime-free-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/04\/qotd-even-a-world-of-perfect-abundance-would-not-be-a-crime-free-world\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Even a world of perfect abundance would not be a crime-free world"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, when I woke up this morning I woke up thinking of how time is different in different parts of the world, which is what the people (Heinlein and Simak included) who pushed for the UN and thought it was the way of the future didn\u2019t seem to get (to be fair, in Tramp Royale<\/em> it becomes obvious Heinlein got it when he traveled there, and realized it was impossible to bring such a disparate world under one government.)<\/p>\n

A minor side note, while listening to City<\/em>, there is a point at which Simak describes what he might or might not have realized was Marx\u2019s concept of \u201cperfect communism\u201d where the state withers away because there\u2019s no need for it.<\/p>\n

Simak thought this would be brought about by perfect abundance. There are no crimes of property when everyone has too much. There are no crimes of violence either, because he seems to think those come from property. (Hits head gently on desk.)<\/p>\n

This must have seemed profound to me when I first read the book at 12, but right now I just stared at the mp3 player thinking \u201cwhat about people who capture other people as sex slaves?\u201d \u201cWhat about people who covet something someone else made, including the life someone made for themselves? Just because everyone has too much, it doesn\u2019t mean that they don\u2019t covet what someone else made of their too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is why I\u2019m not a believer in either Communism or for that matter big L Libertarianism. I don\u2019t believe that humans are only a sum of their material needs and crime the result of the unequal distribution of property. (There is also the unequal distribution of talent, or simply the unequal distribution of happiness, all of which can lead to crime \u2014 after all Cain didn\u2019t off Abel because he was starving.) And I don\u2019t believe humans are ever going to become so perfect we can get away with no government, because humans will always (being at heart social apes) lust for power, recognition and heck simply control over others (which is subtly different from power.) So we\u2019re stuck with our good servant but bad master.<\/p>\n

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Time Zones”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2015-06-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, when I woke up this morning I woke up thinking of how time is different in different parts of the world, which is what the people (Heinlein and Simak included) who pushed for the UN and thought it was the way of the future didn\u2019t seem to get (to be fair, in Tramp Royale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,53,41],"tags":[343,478,691,315],"class_list":["post-31774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-robertheinlein","tag-unitednations","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8gu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31775,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31774\/revisions\/31775"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}