As promised, I produced a writeup detailing my thoughts on what constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number. It seemed too long to post directly here, so I put it on my ‘Book of Keith’ site:
http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/bok/GGGN.html
I would appreciate any feedback you care to provide. It isn’t quite as polished as I had envisioned and I sort of ran out of steam (one of the reasons why it took so long to complete it, I kept hoping I would get ‘steamed up’ if I worked on it the next day). I hope I got my points in the document, but if you think I have skipped something or what I said doesn’t make sense, I can tweak the article.
Essentially, you’ve equated GGGN with fairness. I have zero problems with that. Now, what does one do about that?
Obviously, one should begin by enforcing the rules that say wealthy people and politicians shouldn’t profit by corruption, criminal acts, insider information, and things of that ilk.
On the other hand, it means that things like affirmative action should go away. Affirmative action is merely calculated unfairness (besides which it doesn’t work).
Laws regarding gender, racial, religious, and other forms of discrimination should remain in force, but the laws requiring gender, racial, religious, and other forms of discrimination should go away.
My simple view is that all education should be subsidized by the state and that educators must have their feet held to the fire. Can’t do the job? Out you go.
My further view is that publicly held corporations should be forced to share their profits among all shareholders and all employees.
Taxes should be progressive, more like they were when I was young. Collection should be rigidly enforced, with the greatest attention being given to those who should be making the greatest contributions. Loopholes should be closed and exceptions should be outlawed.
Failures should be allowed to fail and should be subsidized in no way beyond basic subsistence and elementary health care.
Plea bargains should go away. Crimes should be punished with preset penalties in all cases. A number of things which are now crimes should be decriminalized.
Governmental office holders should be held accountable, not judged by their peers. Serious infractions should result in automatic and rapid removal, followed by prosecution and punishment for any crimes involved.
The financial sector and government suppliers should be strongly regulated simply because they are the keepers of public monies.
Small businesses should not be subsidized, but they should not be subject to punitive, silly, and stupid regulations. Any business which indulges in interstate commerce should be subject to the same rules, taxes, etc., as any other business which indulges in interstate commerce, with federal rules superseding state rules.
I could go on….
The ‘funny’ thing is, we have lots of really great laws to enforce fairness, but our oligarchical police state only enforces them against people who lack oligarchical power. Based on your reply I would say we have a huge amount of overlap in our ideals, too bad it is just two old men agreeing with one another.