Beck: Cannibal-Pot Seasonings

Neil McCluskey brings good deductive reasoning (subsuming concretes under a known concept) to "social conflict and division" in the cases of government paying for education and science with stolen money.

No matter how sophisticated one pretends to be with the rhetoric, that's what it is, and this will always tell in the corrosion of civil relations. When everyone is paying for everyone else's science or education under force or its immediate threat, then they cannot afford to leave each other alone to pursue values in peace. When values are up for political grabs at force, it becomes necessary to fight for them because trade becomes impossible, but they must be acquired in any case. Values are in their nature limited. When they are subject to force, production of them ceases, because of the individuality of their nature: only the individual values, and no individual produces anything of value to him under force. When that individual must acquire values from collective claims, he must do so not with an idea of trading something for them, but rather beginning with the basic animosity of a beggar. People will only begin to hate each other under such political arrangements.

This dynamic intensifies with the necessity of the values dispensed by the state. For one thing, coalition politics in democracy -- gang warfare at the polls -- is driven by instinctive understanding that the situation calls for strength in herds, and the individual is impelled to political activity as a value: not to gang -- at some level or other -- is to be left for plunder. As it proceeds, observe that science and education are one sort of thing and somewhat remote from the average individual's field of view. Things like medicine and housing are more intimate, and those fights will always be more fierce.

Keep all this in mind as the pace of this thing picks up.