Why reform won’t work

“Reform” is what you use when the problems of your society are superficial, just on the surface, a temporary thing. When your society is based on good, sound principles, but your society has strayed from those principles into corruption. When you have good institutions but they’re being run badly. Then all you need to do is clean things up, and get things back to normal. Back to the “good old days.”

But that’s not where we are now. In fact, there never were any “good old days.” The USA has been a plutocracy thinly disguised as a democracy, ever since it was “founded” on genocide and slavery. In fact, ever since long before then. Capitalism is only a few hundred years old, but capitalism is just the current manifestation of private property, a cultural wrong turn we took 10,000 years ago. We've become accustomed to it, so it’s hard to see that we made a mistake when we decided not to share with our cousins, not to care about our neighbors. But the mess we’re in now -- with the ecosystem and the economy both falling apart, and a homeless beggar on every street corner, and some loner shooting up a school every few days -- were an inevitable consequences of our system of not caring.

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Those are not just superficial aberrations. No matter how you “reform” capitalism, it will still be based on not sharing, if it is still in any sense capitalism. There is no kinder, gentler capitalism. If you want to ban mean and vicious alligators from the swimming pool, you’ll have to ban ALL the alligators from the swimming pool.
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We have bad institutions, based on bad principles. But a lot of people don’t see that, because they don’t see what the fundamental principles really are. People in the USA believe the country is based on democracy and freedom, but it’s not. It’s based on not sharing. Hardly anyone ever talks about that, because that’s outside the box. Chomsky said "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

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