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>We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition You're not thinking broad enough! It s

>We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition You're not thinking broad enough! It seems to me that you view the determination of what can be done as derived purely from economics. I have money so I can do what I want, you don't so you can't, and you view that as natural. But economic determination of our freedom is as unnatural as the world it takes place in. Basically, why? Why should it matter that you have more money when we determine who can eat meat and travel? Check out Walzer's idea of complex equality, there are certain things that just shouldn't be linked to your existing wealth. >unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose. Hmm? The Universe isn't a competition! And there's no reason that some people have to lose. It seems to me that you just assert all these things as true and natural and unmovable and so from that follows this necessary society where many people aren't very free but you are relatively high up the heap and so are pretty free. But those things don't seem true or natural or unmovable to me, they seem completely fluid and it doesn't seem so wrong to take some of the freedom you enjoy away from you and give it to other people who have a lot less.

esotericn 8y ago
It took me a while to interpret this, but I think I see what you're getting at here. You're right that the competition dynamic doesn't have to be the one we choose. So I suppose there's a fourth option which involves some sort of other distribution mechanism. You're still going to have a privileged group though, unless you choose to eliminate experiences (e.g. there's no way of fairly distributing private jets, they're not private any more if you do that).
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  Yes, even if we just switched to pure lottery for traveling, we'll have a privileged class of people who win that lottery and get to travel somewhere they like. However, this inequality is at least independently distributed from other forms of inequality. To me that's already an improvement. There's also lots of other areas where I think competition could be entirely eliminated. Take healthcare, there's basically no need for that to be a competitive system.

esotericn 8y ago

It took me a while to interpret this, but I think I see what you're getting at here. You're right that the competition dynamic doesn't have to be the one we choose. So I suppose there's a fourth option which involves some sort of other distribution mechanism. You're still going to have a privileged group though, unless you choose to eliminate experiences (e.g. there's no way of fairly distributing private jets, they're not private any more if you do that).

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
Yes, even if we just switched to pure lottery for traveling, we'll have a privileged class of people who win that lottery and get to travel somewhere they like. However, this inequality is at least independently distributed from other forms of inequality. To me that's already an improvement. There's also lots of other areas where I think competition could be entirely eliminated. Take healthcare, there's basically no need for that to be a competitive system.