"James J. Hughes" wrote:
>
> The comment was made that no capitalist ever forced people into a
> concentration camp.
>
> Perhaps not. They just exploited the labor of the slaves the concentration
> camp owners made available to them. And supported the rise and Reichs of the
> concentration camp creators. And gave money to paramilitary organizations
> that abducted and killed organizers that opposed the concentration camps.
James, you could not be more wrong. I suggest you read Albert Speer's _Inside
the Third Reich_. Hitler refused to follow Speer and Todt's advice to follow the
lead of the allies in recruiting the female population to work to free 1 million
men up for the army. Instead, he ordered Speer and Todt to follow the
recommendations of Bormann and other SS toadies to obtain loborers from the 250
million residents of occupied countries under their control, by force if
necessary, and when they ran out of free laborers, they used concentration camp
prisoners. Speer and the industrialists accepted this in the face of facing
charges of defeatism. Any facilities that used prisoner or slave laborers, the
SS guards were in charge of the welfare of the prisoners, and Speer frequently
drew the ire of the SS when he demanded improvements of the living and working
conditions of the prisoners, which was the main reason why he drew the lightest
sentence of all of the top echelon of the Reich at the Nuremburg trials.
Speer documents how Goering and Bormann would extort kickbacks from
industrialists to the detriment of the war effort, requisitioning industrial
equipment and funds for their own use, and taking state lands for their own game
preserves.
> Capitalism has no ethics, and has no necessary relationship to liberal
> democracy. Capitalists will exploit repression as easily democracy. Under
> some circumstances capitalists have backed dictators, and under other
> circumstances "democrats." All they care about is their ability to generate
> and keep profit. Thats fine in its place, i.e. a strong liberal and social
> democracy.
Only if you are too blind to understand the significant differences between
mercantilism, oligopolism, and capitalism.
>
> It appears from the debate on this list that there are a growing number of
> transhumanists hip to the fact that the defense of liberal democracy, which
> all members of the list benefit from, requires more than obeisance to some
> fantasy model of anarcho-capitalism. If we are to avoid profound social
> conflict in the coming decades there must be a vision of transhuman liberal
> and social democracy, one that can allow and protect the co-existence of
> humans 1.0 and post-humans. The hegemony of anacho-capitalism in transhuman
> circles just makes more likely that the coming changes will exacerbate gaps
> between rich and poor, and generate conflicts between the forces of reaction
> and those of progress.
What we are 'hip' to is that socialists will continuously try to re-invent
themselves, repaint their horse, change their names, invent new catch phrases,
and deny that the con they are selling today has anything to do with the con
they were shoving down people's throats yesterday at gun point. What we are
'hip' to is that anarcho-capitalist free markets are quite as capable of
maximizing freedom for the most people possible as any other system, and far
better than most, including socialism. A social democracy is not a liberal
democracy, no matter how much you try to insist it is so. One decrys the
individual, the other celebrates it.
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