Maybe this is the trauma from the unhinged, raging, exploitative robber barons talking, but…

I can’t in good conscience support any economic system that ties political power to economic power. One extreme will always do their best to accrue and centralize that power, and will be effective by virtue of the fact that the power creates more opportunities and ways to accrue more power. The other extreme will always be ineffectual because they shun that power, seeing the necessary rejection of certain values as inherently corrupt. The middle will struggle against both to maintain a status quo that always has a stronger pull toward the former group, effectively recreating the political ratchet.

I can’t in good conscience support a system that allows people to effectively own others, regardless of how well they treat the people they own, regardless of how many owners one of the owned has to choose from. The dynamic has a strong tendency in favor of the owners and requires a lot more effort from the owned to fight that.

I can’t in good conscience support a system that allows people to own pstches of the earth, especially beyond those which they occupy or personally use. Yes, I want everyone to have somewhere to live, and have that place be free from unwanted interference by others. No, i won’t support a system that in theory has no hard limits against someone powerful enough buying up all the land and then renting it out to everyone else for a profit.

I can’t in good conscience support a system that allows people to own ideas, and even necessitates them doing so to “earn their keep” (worth as a citizen/right to survive). I feel like I’m in bizzaro world when i think about how there are people oddly comfortable with the fact that people have put patents on living things, or that there are people who can tell you when, where and how you’re allowed to express certain ideas/arts/mechanisms/songs/images/sounds/formulae under threat of being stripped of power you managed to accrue (whether or not it came from aforementioned ideas), imprisonment, and in some cases slavery.

I won’t support any political system that doesn’t give me at least as much power as everyone else. I have enough emapthy to realize that pure democracy is a better compromise than authoritarianism, especially considering most other people either feel the same or just want a system where their needs get met.

But mainly, it’s just plain illogical ti support any given political system as an ends when 1. The world is a constantly changing place, and any rigidly defined system will inevitably fail regardless of how well it fits to the context in which it was created. And 2. I am aware of better alternatives—to paraphrase what some stranger once said to me: idealism is what we aim for, reality is the compromise we make; in other words: if politics is a negotiation, why lead with a compromise?

Hopefully this isn’t too Murrica-brained. When I see news of proto-fascist movements on the rise in the UK, Brazil, Italy and Australia, or extreme class disparity in Singapore, China, and Japan, or ethnic “cleansing” in China, Turkey, Rwanda, and Liberia, or just something as simple as how common scams and fraud are from places like India and Nigeria—indicating a need to resort to intercontinental theft to survive—I feel like my experience of politics and economics isn’t as limited to my geographic region as I’d like to believe.