“Rather than defend the idea of competition by denying its inherent bloodiness, or suggest it needs to be tempered by government, I prefer to point out the deadly consequences of the alternative to competition: stagnation, poverty and mass starvation.”
The primal motive force behind every person is their pursuit of happiness. Everyone of us wants to be happy, but each of us has different things that make us happy.
Competition comes naturally to men - it’s not something that needs to be promoted.
The desire for freedom is also innate in all of us, and necessary in order to be able to pursue happiness.
If those two things are totally unrestricted, you have the law of the jungle.
When people come together in a “community” they still like to pursue their happiness, but they also want peaceful coexistence - they don’t want a social system where the strong can take advantage of the weak at every turn, or everyone constantly at each other’s throat. The solution to that problem throughout history has been to form “governments’ that have “greater power” than any individual or organization, and they have done that by restricting individual freedom to prevent constant mayhem, while allow sufficient freedom for people to pursue their happiness mostly peacefully.
As the Founders succinctly put it...
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Even in the case of monarchy, the power of the monarch is restricted, and he always has to make sure he keeps the majority of the people reasonably happy, or the mere size of their numbers can separate his head from his body. And that’s happened on many occasions.
Moral of the story - both extremes of too much freedom and too little are bad. 95% of politics is a fight to define the ideal middle ground.
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply.
And I agree with everything go say - in principle.
But we live in a world of mass deceit, and therefore, the principles, while true and undeniable, are not necessarily what rules the conversation.
“Competition comes naturally to men - it’s not something that needs to be promoted.”
Sorry, I just disagree - competition DOES need to be promoted, when the lies of Marxism are so prevalent, and so accepted by the gullible.
“If those two things are totally unrestricted, you have the law of the jungle.”
I must disagree with this as well. Unrestricted liberty has no downside. Unless you think as the communists do, that some elite ruling class can judge what’s best better than individuals.