[AnarchoChristophe]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door patrickve

Moesten er geen armen zijn, dan zouden we niet beseffen dat we het goed hebben. Armen zijn dus wel degelijk nodig voor het welzijn van de anderen he.

De vraag is gewoon welke de juiste hoeveelheid armen is. Ik zou zeggen: de juiste hoeveelheid armen is gelijk aan de hoeveelheid armen die er werkelijk is.

Dus wat als regeringen niet willen dat armoede beëindigt wordt, omdat het essentieel is om licht en zwaar geprivilegieerde groepen content te stellen met hun positie, en dus mak te houden? Ik quoteer even uit het boek-in-boek The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism van George Orwell.

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door George Orwell, 1984

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being greatly over a period of about 50 years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed an automobile or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged elite. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.