Marat

If we were all now to form a conspiracy to empower ourselves as a priesthood, claiming special powers over those we can recruit to 'believe' in our made-up system, so that we could extract from their belief in our message and their obedience to our instructions both social power and income from donations, what would we most fear? We would most fear that we would lose power by people ceasing to believe in this made-up idea, especially because they suddenly started laughing at the false idol we had set up to empower ourselves as its priests. Thus blasphemy would be 'the one unforgivable sin.' But if God were real, why would he care if anyone made fun of his reality, of which he would be certain? Why would he care whether inferior beings disbelieved in his existence because of their inferior minds? These things would likely be of minimal concern to a real God, even though they would necessarily be vital to a made-up God, whose priests would be constantly nervous that people would see through their deception. So these exaggerated concerns over blasphemy seem to point to the unreality of religion.

Unfortunately 'metaphysics' is often confused with 'mysticism,' but nothing could be further from the truth. As understood by modern philosophers, 'metaphysics' is the attempt to bring rational clarification to problems and puzzles generated by empirical science, so it is strictly complementary to science, not contradictory to it. Many modern texts on philosophy of science, for example, examine the implications for causality, time, matter, and space of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and without a Ph.D. in physics few readers could really appreciate all that they are saying. This trend in philosophical thinking, viewing it as developing the conceptual implications of empirical science, can be traced back to the late 18th century and Kant's 'Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,' which defined the 'special metaphysics of nature' as the foundational principles of natural science -- developed not as a priori deductions from some pre-existing, logically intuited, rationally deduced basis of science -- but instead as an effort to organize rationally the foundational implications of the results of empirical science.

Have you ever seen the documentary film, 'Titicut Follies,' which shows patients in a lunatic asylum being force-fed? It actually looks a lot like a rape, so I'm not sure that that type of physical compulsion is worse than rape. But while forcing anyone to do anything physical is illegal as an assault, I think it is only the highly inflated fear value that society puts on sex that causes sexual compulsion to be viewed as so much more serious than other kinds. I would feel less exploited if I had to earn my keep by being paid for sex than if I had to work as a soldier during wartime, a prize fighter, or a construction worker on a skyscraper, yet for some reason the last three professions are legal but not the former. The concern about exploitation is thus obviously based on irrational aesthetic fears about sex rather than about any real harms or dangers it involves. Why is it that women, even those who take a liberal view of most things, are so incensed about pornography while even highly repressed and conservative men are not as concerned about it women are? I think it can be understood in terms of the artificial sex economy (Wilhelm Reich's term). Women enhance their social power by making sex available only in a highly restricted way, preferably at the price of a man having to share his wage for life with them, support their social status, and consent to act in the father role for their children, though often in modern times for the lower cost of flattery, expensive gifts, ego-gratifying gifts of romantic rituals, etc. This artificially enhanced social power that comes from making themselves precious heterosexual sex partners in a completely unnecessary and unnatural situation of a shortage of heterosexual sex partners women have conjured into existence allows women to neglect to develop their personality, their intellect, and their humanity, since they have value as bodies rather than as persons. But if men seek to escape, at least in limited degree, the rigors of the sex economy which enhances women's social power by resorting to pornography, women react vehemently because their power is threatened. That is also why they dislike prostitution, which is another escape valve operating against their monopoly market power over sexual cooperation.

I agree, you're perfectly free in law to express a criticism of established belief in Ireland, it's just that I costs you a knuckle sandwich in practice.

Disproof of the Divine Authority of the Bible in Six Easy Steps, or Why Fussing About the Exact Meaning of the Text Can Offer No Guidance to Thinking 1) I believe in the text X, (which is a set of propositions containing statements a, b, c, ...) on the basis of arational faith in the sacredness of the text X. 2) However, since a, b, c, ... are often mutually contradictory, and occasionally contain assertions which make no sense, I will use rationality to pick and choose among them which I will believe and which I will reject. 3) But since the text X is really only the sum of its elements, each of which casts light on the others, then if you subtract some, preserve others, and emphasize or de-emphasize within that set according to yet further rational criteria of selection or emphasis, then you alter the text X by these changes based on the operation of rationality on the text. 4) So the text X which was originally believed in on arational grounds has now been passed through a filter of rationality, and the reshaped residue which remains is now a different text, X(1). But this text is really thoroughly rationally produced, and not at all generated by faith, since if you pass any raw material through the filter of rationality, and that filter is allowed to change and reshape what is being filtered through it, then the endproduct is really just what rationality demands, not what the original, arational content demands. The situation is just like taking a heap of unstructured empirical data from nature and rationally sifting it to produce Newtonian mechanics. Although each event in nature may appear contingent, that is, arational, after the filtering it is all rational. So too with the Bible after it has been subjected to rational pruning and reshaping. 5) But since the text we now have as the product of the rational reconstruction of the arational material presented by text X has been shown to be based on reason and not on revelation, then why do we still pretend that this rationally refined residue text, X(1), is divinely authorized or sacred, since it is now just the product of human rationality? 6) But if the residue text X(1) is just the product of human rationality, what's the use of making that unnecessary detour through the initial step of 'God gave Moses the first part of this text on Mt. Sinai and Christ validated the second part in his speeches,' since we humans have turned out to be the final arbiters of the content of that text? It is as though Einstein's baby were to babble, 'eemseesquah!' and that jogged Einstein's thinking about his work so that he refined that to e = mc(2) and then everyone were to say that the baby's authority had established that e = mc(2).

'Pascal's Wager' posits that it is rationally better to believe in God since if he does exist, this ensures posthumous admission to heaven, but if he does not, then one has merely wasted a little effort. It would be a gain to believe in any one religion even if there were a thousand different ones, since at least then you would have a 1/1000 chance of going to heaven rather than facing certain damnation for unbelief. But there are two problems with this. First, if you try to make yourself believe in God just for the selfish, utilitarian reason that you are trying to improve your chances of not going to hell for your unbelief, then any serious God would certainly see through that false sort of belief. Kant says that it is necessary for religion that we don't know that God exists, for if we did know, then we would just be selfish in doing good things, since we would be acting just for our own interests in getting into heaven. The same reasoning applies here: If we force ourselves to believe just for our own ends, that insincerity would not impress a significant Deity worth believing in. Also, is it even possible to force yourself sincerely to believe something? The other problem is that it is not cost-free to have faith in God, since this requires the believer to commit intellectual suicide, which can be extremely painful to anyone who truly cares about intellectual honesty. So the costs of faith would have to be weighed against the risks of losing a chance of a posthumous heaven for not believing, and if the odds of the latter seem small, then the costs of faith easily outweigh them.

Not everyone would want an education, even if it were free and they were paid a salary to do it, as many students in Europe now already receive. So there really wouldn't be a danger of everyone signing up for an education so that M.D.-Ph.D.s would be cleaning toilets while grumbling to themselves about the odds of getting e coli from their work. The population would be willing to support additional education for some people since those with extra education could add value to the society by bringing their enhanced skills to bear in serving the needs of other people. This is why the old Soviet Union refused to let Ph.D.s emigrate: since society had paid for their education, they were expected to pay it back to that society by working as a social resource. In the model I'm suggesting the cost of the public accessing professional services would be discounted by the public taxpayers' contribution to the education of those professionals. Education would then cost less, or nothing, or would even have a salary attached to it (Swedish students now receive $20,000 a year from the government for studying), but in return visits to the doctor, lawyer, accountant, architect, etc., would be less costly. The economy would operate more by social solidarity than monetary exchanges. True, the CEO would still have the perk of working in an office rather than cleaning toilets, but wages would be equalized by paying more to people who had unpleasant jobs and less to those with pleasant jobs, since there would be less work stress requiring compensation. The world has historically experienced long periods of no economic growth, such as in the Middle Ages, when the absence of technological innovations and the static forms of life under feudalism prevented people from demanding higher wages to compete with others for additional possessions to confirm their status. Similarly, in a command economy, any increases in growth achieved through technological advance could be equally distributed so that they would not inspire any competition in the population for higher material status. If wealth were essentially equally distributed, people would cease to define themselves, as they do now in a capitalist economy, by the trash and trinkets that they own, and would instead be able to think of themselves in more truly human terms as the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings that they really are. Incidentally, G. W. F. Hegel in his 'Introduction to the Philosophy of Right' deals with some of the themes you discuss with respect to competition for status through differential ownership of goods creating relative poverty.

Although you may get a higher GPA at a middle-level school, when the graduate school looks at your application, they will discount that GPA by their lower opinion of the prestige of your school. Names count, even if they shouldn't. The only real difference I can find between first-rank and second-rank universities is the quality of the students and the level of classroom discussion. I did a bachelors degree at Harvard and then went on to do another bachelors degree in a slighly different subject at the University of Waterloo, and I found Waterloo much more difficult. That may have had something to do with my knowing more and thus demanding more of myself, but my GPA at Waterloo was also about the same as what it was at Harvard, despite the much greater effort at Waterloo. I have since taught at various universities, some good and some not so good, but since I give the same lectures and treat the students the same way whether I am at a prestige institution or a second-rate one, I always wonder why the value of my courses are discounted at the one place and inflated at the other. To confirm your point about presently elite and extremely selective schools once having been extremely open in their admissions policies, I once saw an add in an old journal published in the 1920s by Harvard Medical School, literally begging for applicants. They noted that for those who had not completed high school before entrance, it was possible to make up the missing courses in the summer prior to admission. Interestingly, some of the same people who got their Harvard M.D.s then went on to become professors at elite schools which imposed much more selective criteria on the next generation. A similar process occurred at the end of the 19th century, when most professors at American universities didn't have a graduate degree, since the only place to earn one was abroad. As a result, professors with B.A.s were examining people for Ph.D.s in the 1890s.

Regain an apparently functionally useless 'use' of their legs, as long as they are supremely athletic and in good shape in the rest of their body. Yet another medical 'breakthrough' which may or may not lead to a clinically significant development two to three thousand years from now.

All sorts of public political authorities, judges, administrative panel members, etc. are protected from civil liability for what they do on the legal theory that these are all 'official acts of state' and thus cannot be treated as acts where personal responsibility accrues. If there were not that protection, a state leader who made a political decision to underfund national healthcare might be accused of negligent homicide for letting people die without adequate medical care, or a judge who condemned the wrong man to life imprisonment could be sued for false imprisonment, etc. I think that anyone who becomes the leader of a nation just becomes the sock puppet which fits over the pinnacle of the national ideology, taking on its shape, so he really has very little personal power or control, but just does what the huge, underlying culture below him mutely commands. That's why I warned friends of mine who were packing their bags to go to the U.S. to help elect Obama that they were wasting their time, since however good Obama might be personally, he would essentially just be limited to being a reflection of the kind of country the United States already is. It's obviously an illusion to think that any one person, or even the 500 people who constitute the government in Washington, could command a nation of 330,000,000 to be anything other than it already wanted to be.

But how does that supposed etymology of 'politics' square with the widely-shared notion among the Ancient Greeks, led by Aristotle, that democracy -- usually understood as 'mob rule' -- is the worst form of government, while aristocracy, rule by the best, the 'aristoi,' is the best? I'm sure they wouldn't have wanted to associate Apollo with any corrupt institution.

U.S. constitutional law, because it has such long historical roots, had to adopt the rather artificial move of assuming that freedom of speech does not necessarily protect pornography, which it does treat as a different kind of speech. Still, it often winds up permitting more extreme pornographic manifestations than other countries do, just because of its traditions favoring individual liberty. Canada makes an interesting contrast to the U.S. in several ways on this issue. Prostitution itself is legal, although people's free speech and free association rights relating to prostitution can be restricted. Thus it is a crime to communicate with someone for purposes of prostitution in a public place, so the free speech right is limited in this case even though it is being used for a legal purpose. Ridiculous, I know, but that's what happens when a jurisdiction finds itself stranded between the liberalism of the 1970s and today's political correctness, feminism, communitarianism, etc. Even though prostitution is legal in Canada, pornography is for some reason much more restricted than in the U.S., since the Supreme Court has been largely taken over by radical feminism. Thus even though pornographic expression is in principle covered by the Canadian free speech right, it can be restricted because of the harm it probably causes to women's empowerment throughout society -- even though the court admitted that there was no proof that pornography has this effect (R. v. Butler). So a constitutionally entrenched human right of free expression can be limited to avoid a harm whch can't even be proved!

To avoid democracy being deformed by money having a vote in addition to people, many countries have adopted restrictions on political campaign financing. Some allocate money to political parties based on their performance in the previous election, which unfairly entrenches the existing political power structure. Others allow private contributions only up to a certain amount, but this limit is always higher than the average voter can afford to spare, thus favoring the rich in what is supposed to be an equal democratic process. The ultimate goal of all reform efforts has to be to make campaign financing reflect the voter equality which is essential to democracy. One way to do this would be to assign every registered voter a certain amount of money in a national election expenditures 'bank' every year which could be devoted to political purposes. All political activity could be paid for only through checks drawn on the account of each voter. Voters, in turn, could direct the bank to disburse the funds in their own account to any person registering as a candidate or to any organization registering as a political party. These funds could only be spent on political activity, and the bank could monitor this by its control over disbursement of money. Thus in the United States, for example, in the 2008 federal election there were about 150,000,000 registered voters and about $6 billion was spent on the campaigns. Allowing for further spending for state and local campaigns, say the national campaign funding bank could assign each registered voter $20 of political expenditures every year. People would be free to save this money and accumulate it for national elections, or could assign any portion of it to any candidates they wished for state, local, or federal elections. If they did not want to support any candidates or felt the political process was illegitimate, they could refuse to allocate the money and it would be returned to the federal treasury. People could not buy political influence with this money since the allocations of funds to candidates by the election bank would be anonymous and the $20 limit would not give any one individual much influence. If constitutional, this seems a much fairer, more democratic system than any of those now in place in any Western democracy.

I agree with the etymology of 'politics' as derived from 'polis,' or the Ancient Greek word for 'city.' Aristotle calls people 'zoon politikoi,' meaning 'political animals,' so that must be the derivation. But taking politics seriously as the type of life that develops from the interaction of people in a community, where the naturally opposing interests of each individual have to be reconciled with each other, politics has to be recognized as a universal, necessary, and unavoidable epiphenomenon of civilized existence. So whether it is the root of all evil or not, it is simply unavoidable.

The word 'exploitation' often recurs in this discussion, but it is a loaded term which seeks illegitimately to decide the issue without arguing for it. You could just as easily ask whether serious poets are exploited by having to write greeting card rhymes for Hallmark when they would rather write Petrarchian sonnets, or university lecturers are exploited when they have to earn a living by lecturing to students who don't return their efforts by paying serious attention to the course, etc. What the special force of 'exploitation' conceals in all discussions about sexuality where it occurs is the basic, irrational, social disapproval of sex which cannot be explained and so has to be dramatized by characterizing every form of negotiation, transaction, and communication involving sex as 'exploitation.' The issue can be clarified if we just generalize about what sex is so we can elevate to a sufficiently abstract level that it no longer sets off the socially-conditioned alarms associated with it. Thus sex is a basic physical need of humans, just like eating food. So just as ads about food do not shock the public conscience if publicly displayed, nor do shops selling food from one stranger to another outrage public decency, nor does selling food to minors incite police crackdowns, etc., so too there is no transcultural, objective, natural reasons for being in such a panic all the time about the social satisfaction of another basic human need like sex. We could create a social system in which it would be regarded as a matter of public scandal if people ever shared a meal together without being in love, or if people actually dared to exchange food for money, or even worse, do so in public, or in front of children!, but it is easy to see how such a system would just create unnecessary frustrations, restrictions, rituals, police actions, moralizing, criminalizations, and social disruptions. So why do we so automatically assume that all this trouble has to be created over the fulfillment of sexual needs? And even worse, why do we suppress even the possibility of a rational discussion of the costs and benefits of the universal sexual repression system which we now so expensively impose on our society?

Since there are countless ancient books of wisdom around, all purporting to reveal the mysteries of the ethical order of the universe (the Tibetan Book of the Dead; the Egyptican Book of the Dead, the Old and New Testaments, etc.), how do you decide which of these texts to struggle with interpreting to find out what you should do? Obviously you need some initial, rational criteria for making this selection, but since that selection is itself guided by rational principles, why bother with the book at all -- whose doctrinal force only comes from its having satisfied your rational criteria for accepting it as a source of wisdom? The actual contents of the book seem like an unnecessary addendum; since it was only their satisfaction of your rational criteria for selecting a belief-book that validated them, why not just stay within your rational criteria in deciding what is the ultimate moral truth and order of the universe and forget about the book? If all the available sacred texts contain contradictory or irrational elements, why not just use your criteria for sorting out the valuable from the valueless sacred text aspects as your guide to making your own theology, since it is obviously superior to the sacred text itself, given that it generates a rule for which elements of it to exclude or include. If faith is supposed to be our guide, it obviously has to be faith in some defined focal point of insight, otherwise what our faith generates could just be nonsense, self-serving desires, or the 'whispers of an evil spirit' arising from the subconscious. But then we are back to relying entirely on our own rationality to determine our religious orientation, since we have to make an initial, rational decision about what defined focal point (e.g., the God of the Old or New Testament) to use as the orientation for our faith, and this makes the focal point for faith itself just the product of rational reflection, not faith.

Why assume at the outset that there has to be a wage differential? First you need a theory of what would be a fair wage. Perhaps people whose jobs give them a sense of power and prestige, allow them to work more creatively with their minds, get to make decisions for other people, require them to spend more of their life enjoying the pleasures of an education prior to starting work, actually receive so many intangible perks by all these factors that they should receive less rather than more income than those who have to scrub the toilets. If those with the former type of job also have to endure more stress from the responsibilities they have, perhaps this balances out their perks, so that the CEO of the company and the toilet cleaners should all get the same wage. My point in this exercise is just to suggest that assumptions about the reasons for paying some people more and others less have to be examined first before we initially construct our model with this inequality-generator built into it. Since all people are legally and morally stipulated to be equal, since the basic human needs of all people are equal, and since doubts can be raised about the traditional reasons for assigning people greater or lesser wages, perhaps the solution should be that all people receive the same wage unless there are special negativities of the work that require compensation, such as the dangers and dirtiness of working in a coal mine.

This is typical of so much utterly useless, tour de force medical innovation nowadays, which results from the utter stagnation of genuine medical progress forcing researchers to attempt even more contrived experiments to get something, anything, that looks like an advancement, even though it will be utterly useless on an epidemiological level in improving the fate of patients. Here we have a profoundly risky, carcinogenetic stem cell transplant, using someone with a ludicrously rare genetic mutation to provide bone marrow, which is extremely difficult to match under the best of conditions, involving the extreme risk of native bone marrow destruction, all just to overcome a disease which is now at least controllable by more ordinary interventions. It reminds me of the fantastically stupid hoopla a while ago over the Edmonton protocol for 'curing' diabetes by islet cell transplants which did not work very well in controlling blood glucose, involved extremely toxic immunosuppression, and could only treat fewer than 1% of all type 1 diabetics because of the limited number of donor organs. All this 'innovation' really accomplished was to demonstrate that by some highly elaborate scientific ingenuity it would be possible to overcome to a highly limited degree the biochemical measures of a medical problem, yet without really making any significant improvement whatsoever in the lives of patients, and certainly not any population-significant improvement in the condition of diabetics. Yet another triumph of modern medical research! -- Oh, and please give us tenure all around for the researchers plus another hundred million dollars for our lab as a reward. The reason for the slow transition of medical science from bench to bedside which everyone is now talking about is that what is going on at the bench is just 10-year-old boys pulling wings off of flies to see what will happen, and little of it is truly patient-centered research. It is truly depressing to think of all the 'Run for a Cure' time, effort, and money being wasted by patients and their supporters in various diseases to sustain this type of time-wasting, let's see if we can graft one dog's head on another dog's neck and keep it alive for an hour, tour de force research.

Will someone please lead me out of the darkness? We have a text which -- because of all the contingent historical factors we know distorted any possible link with a divine rather than arbitrary empirical sources -- has as much claim to be treated as authoritative as a fortuitously coherent text typed over a million years by a thousand monkeys, and yet everyone sweats and frets over the EXACT interpretation of each randomnly generated line to discover its 'true' meaning. Why? Has the world gone mad?

Hey, go easy on poor old General Eisenhower! He was the first to identify, expose, and criticize the Military-Industrial-Complex, so he can hardly be blamed for establishing it! He in fact warned the American public against it in his final speech before leaving office. Perhaps you are thinking of the theory of Gore Vidal, that a kind of 'secret government' of the U.S. was established with the founding of the CIA after World War II, so that the elected government is really just for show, and the country is actually ruled by a committee in the background consisting of certain prominent CIA figures, people in the upper ranks of the State Department, and the military. But I think all these 'secret government' theories are too literal and mythological in their attempt to address what is a real problem, which is that even in a democracy the country is run for the benefit of a small elite rather than for the majority of citizens. The question is then naturally, how does this happen? but the answer has to be understood more in terms of the way our ludicrous political process admits of easy manipulation by the elite to serve its own interests. Caplan in his 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' suggests that since each voter knows that his individual vote makes next to no difference in how he will be governed, the temptation is great to vote just to express the voter's emotions rather than his rational choice, since a purely emotive vote costs him almost nothing in practical terms, yet can bring enormous emotional satisfaction. The elite can then win elections by manipulating voters' emotions rather than by appealing to their rational interests, which are inconsistent with those of the elite, so the governments elected serve elite interests and at the end of the process the voters are mystified as to how this happened. They are then tempted to explain this by positing a 'secret government,' but the real secret is their own stupidity.

It is important to keep in mind that the higher the demand for money to borrow the higher the interest rates that those with surplus cash to lend can charge, so the general indebtedness of society helps the rich. When the government pursues policies which lead to the stagnation of middle-class wages at the same time as the wealth of the richest Americans increases so as to set the perceived 'normal' standard of living higher and higher, the middle-class demand for loans to buy more consumer goods will increase, making the rich even richer. When government reduces its support for higher education, again more loans have to be taken out for individuals to pay for it, and again those with cash to loan out benefit. There is a double gain to the wealthy when government decides to keep taxes low on the rich and to finance government expenditures by loans instead, since then not only do the rich have more cash to loan, but they also enjoy higher interest levels as a result of the ballooning government deficit. Finally, when the government refuses to fund potentially huge, non-optional requirements for consumer spending on healthcare, this again boosts the demand for loans and helps the rich. The fact that 2/3 of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are the result of medical expenses, so a family desperately struggling with a child dying of cancer also has to endure the profound disruption of being evicted from its home and having its car repossessed, is evidently regarded by the government as an insignificant price to pay for inflating the demand for loans this way.

While believing that God endows people with certain liberties could be used as a mythological argument to oppose the oppression of individuals in a state which relied on majority opinion as the justification for its tyranny, God seems to be an ultimately weak support for individual freedom, since it is itself an opaque, metaphysical concept which can be filled with a variety of notions justifying tyranny. Thus in the Islamic world, adulterers can be stoned to death because the mysterious notion of God, presupposed to be endowed with all power and justice whatever predicates might be packed into its opacity, can be cited to authorize this abuse. But in contrast, if we oppose government tyranny not by attempting to sustain human autonomy by reference to God endorsing it, but instead insist that human autonomy is in itself already a foundational value requiring no further external or mythological support to validate it, then we have a more secure basis for liberty, since our foundation is only in liberty -- a transparent concept that can be rationally explicated -- rather than in God, an mythological concept which might turn out to contain unexpected contents like a justification for Sharia law.

Christians use a variety of inconsistent approaches to defend their belief and dodge from one approach to the next according to the arguments presented against them. Thus if you complain that their god seems too anthropomorphic, they explain that it is only metaphorically so, in order to appeal to the literalism of the original audience to whom the message was first presented. But then if you complain about other sections of their message, such as Christ rising up into heaven postumously, this is not defended as a metaphor for literalist primitives but is instead taken deadly seriously in its most literal meaning as god saving us by dying and tangibly coming out of a physical tomb. But then the question has to be: How do Christians know what in the Bible is to be taken literally and what is just a metaphor? A book full of supernatural assertions contains no key about what it is reasonable to think of as real and what has to be thought of only as symbolic, the way a normal, empirical history text using the phrase, "That was the face that launched a thousand ships," would clearly signal that a face did not really launch any ships, but that that was just a metaphorical turn of phrase.

I think the problem remains that we cannot really achieve the greatest good for the greatest number -- which equal respect for all humans seems to require -- unless we distribute the sum total of social wealth so as to serve more fundamental interests prior to less fundamental interests, which means transferring wealth from the rich to the poor. For example, a multi-millionaire like Jay Leno enjoys cars and motorcycles, and he has a collection of dozens of extremely rare and expensive vehicles, each costing say about $100,000. If he were to have to cash in one of these, his loss of human pleasure at that loss would represent a miniscule fraction of what he actually has the capacity to enjoy, yet with that money two deserving poor children who would otherwise miss the chance of a university education could be educated, developed, and given the possibility of a meaningful career. Obviously this redistribution would multiply the value of the wealth tied up in a single car for someone with dozens of them -- a very small value -- by a huge factor, so the new wealth distribution would represent much greater social respect for the equal entitlement of all people for happiness. All the more so if this money were used to save children from starving to death in Africa. In contrast, if you took the same amount of wealth, $100,000, from a middle-class family to buy the chance of a university education for two poor children who would otherwise not have it, you would create crushing misery for the middle-class family to spare the poor family the total devastation of having two children denied a good education. So the difference between the loss to those from whom the wealth was redistributed and the gain to those to whom it was redistributed would be very much less than in the case of redistribution from the wealthy, so it would not make the best use of the resources available and would simply be irrational, as well as immoral in its failure to respect the equal claim of all people to happiness.

Aside from those very few situations in world history where a civilised, humane nation was struggling to prevent its conquest by a barbaric invader who would have extinguished the culture and large numbers of civilians in the defending country, the justification for most wars is questionable. The magnitude of the human misery caused by a single premature death in war for the victim and the surviving relatives is probably often greater than any human happiness that could be achieved by winning the average war. Bertrand Russell in 1939, to cite one extreme example, said that Britain should just let Germany invade and occupy it, since having a bad government for a while would be less costly than fighting a war to avoid a change of government. A better case can be made for arguing that World War I was utterly meaningless, essentially just a conflict among the European elites for control of markets and colonies, and fought by sacrificing the lives of millions of poor and middle-class men. The United States was even so surreal as to argue that it was joining the war "to make the world safe for democracy" (how?) and "to ensure freedom of the seas" (limited only in the war zones for te duration of the war). President Wilson even offered the nearly psychotic reasoning that the U.S. should intervene in the European war to put a stop to the fighting by a neutral armed intervention, which would of course have to land in the only ports available, which were all in the hands of the Allies, so, ah, ... well, I guess it would have to be a neutral, armed intervention to stop the fighting in cooperation with the Allied belligerants only, since otherwise, you see, how we would get their permission to land, and, er, well ... . (Never mind that New York banks were heavily invested in the war loans they had granted Britain and France and would fail if Britain and France were defeated and unable to pay them back.) To think that Americans actually volunteered to fight and die for this palpable nonsense!