jboking said:
The difference is empircal evidence that something like this is even achieveable. You said that America was close to the ideal and so was Hong Kong, so what stimulus changed them? Does this theory account for variables? The idea that both of these groups got close but had to move away from it suggests this system does not work.
If there is more to these incidents that you would like to enlighten me on, please do.
It was the same stimulus that powers history--changes in the underlying philosophical premises. The American Founders were operating from a particular philosophical perspective, but the intellectuals (particularly in Europe, which is where pretty much all of Western philosophy has developed--America doesn't have much in the way of an intellectual tradition) were already swinging back into the collectivism advocated by Kant, then later Marx, Hegel, Engels, etc. etc. etc.
It didn't *have* to change--people could have chosen otherwise. But choosing otherwise usually depends on understanding what it is that you're choosing, and individualism never had a proper moral defense. Even the greatest proponents of the individualist system (like John Locke), tried to base their ideas on contradictions and thus wound up falling back into the murky swamps of collectivism. John Locke, near the end of his life, was famously quoted as saying "we are all socialists now".
So, from understanding that people won't accept or practice contradictory or unfounded ideas, the American system *was* pretty much inevitably doomed to fail. It was built on an unstable house of cards that tried to combine opposed elements--religious tradition and secularism, capitalism and government controls, individualism and social responsibility. Trying to combine these elements sets up an impossible dichotomy that most people experience as a split between the moral and the practical. It is moral, the intellectuals taught, to give away unearned wealth--but it's practical to produce.
Most people strive to be moral, and given a choice between the moral and the practical it is the practical that they will choose to abandon . . . mostly. Abandoning the practical entirely means choosing immediate suicide. So most people smuggle some practical elements into their life and then feel guilty about them--they work hard to become wealthy, then feel bad and give large amounts of their hard-earned money away. They struggle to remain chaste, then watch a slutty movie and feel guilty about *that*.
And so, we have the system we have now--the screwed up, unstable, unsustainable mixed economy. If current trends continue, it WILL collapse into utter statism and some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. But it doesn't have to, because there *is* now a *moral* defense of capitalism that reunites the moral and the practical . . . if people are willing to change their minds in time.
If you're *really* interested, I'd advise you to read Ayn Rand's many philosophic works and critically evaluate them for yourself. (You can find pretty much everything you need at aynrand.org) DON'T take my word for it, because that's just setting out to build another house of cards with no foundation again. Do the research. Compare the claims to the evidence. Make up your own mind.
