[MD] Dynamic Development at all costs?

[Platt Holden]

> Hi dynamic developers
> 
> Not sure where to jump in. I'm not really interested in the politics 
> here, but I guess it's unavoidable to get there eventually.
> 
> My main concern is, and have been for some time, Platt's use of MoQ 
> arguments to back his personal beliefs. You may think they're clear and
> water-tight, but they're not. Take this one for example:
> 
> "The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody 
> richer-by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and 
> stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist 
> economies of the world have done so much better since World War II than the
> major socialist economies." (Lila, 17)
> 
> Here, he's talking about ECONOMY, nothing else. It makes everybody 
> *richer*, i.e. they get more money. He says nothing about other things that
> are important to people such as the long term environmental effects of such
> a market.

Nor does he say the free market is detrimental to other things important to 
some people. 

> If the free market continues to run things, it will probably hit the 
> wall during this century, after which it will be more economically 
> rewarding to take environmental effects into account.

If you're talking about global warming, it's not happening.

> That free market may be dynamic, but it's still just a *social* pattern.
> I.e. it doesn't use any intellectual reasoning. The only goal it has, the
> only *value* in that market, is money. So any intellectual reasoning any
> individual may use is solely used to acquire more money, i.e. to blindly
> follow the incentive of the society.

Money is just a measure of value and medium of exchange. Markets consist
of goods and services. 

> On the other hand, another group of people have used their intellect to look
> into what the free market, if allowed to continue, will bring in the future.
> And this future doesn't look very bright.

Looks brighter than ever to me, except for the constant threat to liberty 
from the left. 
 
> So, in MoQ terms, we have the dynamic social pattern "the free market" on
> one side and we have the intellectual pattern "the environmental movement"
> on the other. And the MoQ clearly states that the intellectual pattern is
> more moral, because a higher level pattern *is* more dynamic than any lower
> level pattern can ever be.

The intellectual pattern of which you speak is phony.

> The culprit of Platt's reasoning is a little strange thing about the MoQ
> when applied to human societies. It's the "personal freedom" vs. "bonds of
> society". The MoQ levels doesn't make it very easy to understand that, and
> Bo's recurring XXX doesn't make it any easier.
> 
> The individual person also includes intellectual patterns, but the 
> society does not. Then how is it moral for a society to constrain a 
> person? Make her pay taxes etc.

You ask a very interesting question.  

> According to Platt, the highest moral is the individual freedom of each
> person. But if that was the case, why did people start building cities in
> the first place? Wouldn't it be most moral if everybody just lived by
> themselves and spent their days exercising their individual freedom?
> 
> People started building cities to protect themselves from gangs of 
> bandits only interested in personal short-term gain (hmm, what does that
> remind me of??). So the cities, legal societies, was in fact a way to gain
> *more* freedom. Freedom to create jewelery and other things attracting
> bandits.
> 
> Granted, societies have changed considerably since then, but I don't 
> believe for a moment that Platt most of all would like to live 
> completely outside it. He wants the legal protection of it like 
> everybody else, so all his claims about the individual freedom being 
> more moral than the bonds of society falls pretty flat right there.

Yes, I want legal protection against biological forces. I'm willing to give
up freedom for that purpose. But, that's all within the principles of the 
freedom in the MOQ.