Economics vs. Legalism

In dealing with our fellow humans as we travel along our Heaven Path we will come again and again to the difference between the Laws of God which simply cannot be violated and the Laws of Humans which can and will be violated.

Today we will look at the category of Laws of Humans referred to as prohibitions vs. the category of Laws of God referred to as supply and demand.

Supply and Demand is usually though of as an Economic Law, and this tends to make people think of it as a glorified theory, that can be applied when it suits someones purpose to do so. This is not the case.

Supply and Demand is better thought of as a Law of God because it is the way things are whether anyone likes it or not.

Prohibitions, on the other hand, are a codification for the purpose of coersion of an opinion.

An excellent example is the prohibition of alcohol that existed in the United States during the early 1900s. The majority opinion was that alcohol was bad, and so a codification for the purpose of coersion was passed with the expectation that alcohol would be removed from the equation thereby ending its effect as a 'bad thing.'

The problem with this was that the Human Law violated Law of God, and we have discussed previously, a Law of God cannot be violated.

Alcohol, for all its perception by the majority as a bad thing, was in fact a necessity (in the scientific sense) to about 1/4 of the population. In that it was a necessity to that segment of the population, the demand was sufficiently high that the price those who needed alcohol were willing to pay was high enough that people were willing to violate the codification and risk the coersion to supply it. Beyond that, there was enough of a profit built into the demand that the very people that were charged with the coersion could be paid to look the other way.

Alcohol continued to be available along with all the effects that made the majority believe that it was a bad thing. But we also added the effects of the coersion which was doomed from the outset to have no positive effect on eliminating the bad thing. In other words a bad thing was made worse by ignoring God's Law.

And of course there are the people that were the recipients of the coersion; those who were made to suffer as an example to those who might, and undeniably would, violate the law. How do we classify them?

I like to deify the the principle that says that a Human Law can be valid while being in direct contradiction of a Law of God.

I call the principle the god of ignorance, because one has to ignore God's Law to find validity in a Human Law that contradicts it. In acting on this principle, one serves the god of ignorance.

And those who suffered were merely human sacrifices, made by the priests of the god of ignorance, to the god of ignorance.

Hmmm ... Justice

While traveling along the Heaven Path, there will inevitably arrise circumstances and states of affairs that cause us to ask what our responsibilities are to our fellow beings. This will occasionally come up in terms of whether our own position of advantage relative to others is just, but will more frequently come up in terms of whether other's position of advantage relative to us is just.

Just-ness seems to be an inherently slippery subject with a wide variety of philosophies that support one or another theory of justice.

I would like to address a concept of justice proposed by John Rawls.

Mr. Rawls held that Justice is the state of affairs that each of us would choose if we had to choose from behind a veil of ignorance.

In other words, each of us must describe a theory of justice that would operate in the world without knowing what our own role, status or situation will be in that world.

This is useful for a couple of reasons. One being that it is easy and to some degree natural to adopt a theory of justice that is self-serving but much harder to find one that serves everyone including you equally well, and two, it allows us to look at each of the possibilities while still assigning the chooser the same level of sincerity, dillegence and intelligence that we assign to ourselves in having chosen a particular theory, because it is us that is choosing while assigning different (other people's) sets of circumstances to ourselves while making our choices.

As a hard-working andmoderately successful entrepeneur it is easy to dismiss as ingenuous arguments in favor of the redistributive theories of justice and find validity in arguments against those theories.

On the other hand, being a hard-working but ultimately unsuccessful entrepeneur who is watching ones children wish they had something to eat for the third staight day, it is much easier to see the validity of those arguments that were otherwise dismissed as disingenuous.

And not knowing which of those two situations you will be in makes it much easier to see exactly how much of each theory should be incorporated into a just theory of justice.

The illusion of altruism

It is useful to understand what people mean when they say that they are doing something for someone else's good.

It is tempting to think that the person doing the good is self-less in the sense of putting other people's interests ahead of their own interests.

Unfortunately, this is never the case.

The closest that we ever come to putting our own interests ahead of someone else's is when we are satisfying one of our own interests in a way that makes it appear that our own interests are being considered second.

Here is how that works.

A person may be walking down the street and be approached by a beggar asking for some change.

The beggar looks pathetic, and so the person pulls a few dollars out of their pocket and gives it to the beggar.

The person has created the appearance that they have put the beggar's interest ahead of their own by taking money that they had to work for and that represents value that can be traded for food or some other desirable thing and given that value to someone else out of the goodness of their hearts.

That hasen't actually occurred though.

The person instead asked what their own will demanded of them in the instance and did that. They may have willed that the beggar go out of their sight and determined that it was worth the money they were going to give to have themselves moved into the beggar's category of 'those who I have already gotten some from' so that the beggar would move along.

Or, the person may be one of those who desire to see themselves as someone who gives to the poor, and in doing so receives some measure of reinforcement that they are 'good' people.

Notice that in neither case was the money given self-lessly. In both cases, the money was given because what was being bought by the person giving the money was actually a bargain, and was being bought for themselves, and only incidentally helped the beggar.

In the one case, the person serves their own greater interest in being free of the sight of the beggar, by putting a lesser interest, that of retaining the value represented by the money, after the interest of the beggar, that of obtaining the value represented by the money without having to earn it, and in the other case, the person serves their own greater interest of reinforcing their perception of their own good-ness, by putting a lesser interest after the previously described interest of the beggar.

The above, in both cases, is a relatively benign instance of the illusion of altruism because it is actually a transaction between willing individuals, both of whom received benefit from the transaction and have the option of not participating in the transaction.

However, much injustice is done in the name of altruism, and the only reason that it is possible is that people believe that actions that appear self-less, or are advertised as self-less, actually are self-less.

But altruism is never self-less. It's always an illusion.