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We can't have an equitable world. The only road to equity is within individuals, who are never not victims of Price's Law and the Pareto Distribution, but only do their best to buck them.
That's without the psychopaths in the mix.
No matter which way you turn, it is a lot like a game of Monopoly. Yes, there are some people who tend to win that game more often and some who tend to lose it more often, even with all the chance thrown in, but even if you completely equalize everyone's resources and exposures to chance, it's the same. It carries on until almost everyone has lost.
This is what turns Admiral Janeway's wonderful pronouncements over communities keeping their money for investment and circulation strictly at home. The winners will branch out elsewhere to consolidate their fortunes and/or the winners from elsewhere will come in and come in and take advantage of the population.
It cannot survive.
Even if you educate everyone in a town, and everyone in it sticks strictly to the rules for keeping the local economy flourishing, which could withstand some forays into the halls of local government for a while, there is no way to keep everyone vigilant and the generations interested and educated enough to prevent their thriving local economy from pouring into the coffers of an unscrupulous few.
You'd have to install a permanent Gestapo to mandate graduate degrees in finance and mandatory attendance at all government meetings in order to keep that equitable community equitable, no rat finks who take bribes and no dead beats who can't cut the mustard. If you suck at math, it either gets beaten into you or you learn to fake it well, and one slip up would mean... what? A trip back to MBA school? Or ostracism? Or what?
You are a threat to the thriving of your town. That's a felony. If it isn't, the town ceases to thrive, EVERY time, and I'm not even talking about all the armed militias from outside attacking to take it over. That and psychopaths are also givens.
Monopoly. Too many in jail. Too many not allowed to pass GO or collect their $200. Too few own everything on the board and even those who don't go to jail, get their $200 passing GO and manage to roll their dice such that it lasts them the next trip around the board, gets them nowhere.
This is ALL monetary systems... not just capitalism. This is all human endeavors, first world or third, and throughout history it has been work, work, work until you can't anymore... and then watch how fast the Pareto Distribution distributes you down to dead.
This is what infuriates me about the little fucks smashing people in the face with bicycle locks and screaming for equity. In order to have equity, you have to have either a totalitarian state that is impervious to the inducements of greed, hate and delusion to keep everyone beginning and ending at the same standard, economically and creatively and innovatively or there ceases to be anything approximating equity almost immediately after establishing it.
Why do you think people throughout history have "left the world" to go off and contemplate their navels in monasteries? This. Precisely this. It is suffering from start to finish, with some punctuations of joy and some zombie time entertainments along the way. You wonder why so many don't look up from their phones to avoid walking into moving busses? This is why.
So if you ever wondered why Buddhists take a vow to "save all sentient beings", when that is clearly impossible, the only way it ever ceases to be impossible is when people stop playing Monopoly.
pipe up any time....
