Make Love Not War was not emergent

There are those who think the 'Make Love, Not War' movement emerged from nowhere. It seems like a very rational worldview from a generation that grew into childhood and adolescence in a world seemingly always at war somewhere; and bombarded by images suggesting the next war could mean the end of all life on the planet. There had to be some ideology to counter the endless warmongering and brinksmanship in the evening news.

If nothing else, 'Make Love, Not War' was an anti-ideology that borrowed a lot from those who wrapped themselves in anticipation of the next world war. It's been asked often: How would we appreciate life if we did not die? A question that should have been asked in the Garden of Eden when warning Adam and Eve about those trees. Told if they ate from a particular tree they would die, how would the immortal Adam or Eve have understood the term?

Biophiliac and necrophiliac positions are not exclusive. One does not exist without the other. It's what I came to call a dichotomy many years ago: biophiliac-necrophiliac. These dichotomies are how we define relationships with others. We categorize, pigeon-hole, and label but often without realizing we are more defining the opposites of these ideas by applying them judgmentally to others.

People form both types of relationships with others, commonly as a reaction to the perceived position of the other person through another dichotomy: acceptance-rejection of any idea. It's called tribalism or black-n-white thinking or just plain pig headed-ness.

Less common, due to western cultural influences, is acceptance. It's much easier to reject, although the position often is forced to ameliorate. Human relationships do not rationally form Nash equilibria. Our rational mind is too dependent upon propositional logic.

Aristotle suggested an important caveat though: "natural" propositional logic is composed from incomplete syllogisms, or enthymemes.

Milton Freidman on Hong Kong

It's interesting that Milton Freidman is often cited by proponents of free markets. Friedman often conveniently overlooked facts, unfortunately. Here is an excerpt from the Aisan Correspondent about Hong Kong.

>So determined was Friedman to defend his rosy version of Hong Kong’s economy, which he attributed to its 1960s Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite, that just weeks before his death he claimed to be seeing state intervention that it “would no longer be such a shining example of economic freedom”.


At one time 60 percent of the people lived in subsidized housing, mostly rented cheaply from the government, and some in Home Ownership Scheme flats, provided with cheap land and sold to lower-middle-income households. Even now that public housing has low priority and the home ownership scheme has ended, some 50 percent of the people still benefit from this massive intervention in the marketplace.

The intervention also partly accounts for the low apparent ratio of spending to gross domestic product. If the cost of the subsidized housing land were accounted for at market prices in the government budget, the ratio would be significantly higher.

Hong Kong people have also enjoyed almost free medical treatment at government clinics and hospitals. Friedman was against “free” medicine elsewhere but failed to notice it in Hong Kong. Likewise, education, at least up to the secondary level has long been almost entirely funded by the government.

In the days when Friedman was writing his praises for Hong Kong, the territory also had a relatively youthful workforce compared with western countries and thus less need for spending on pensions and help for the aged.

Nor did Hong Kong have to spend anything significant on external security, the responsibility of London and now Beijing.

Friedman could actually have helped Hong Kong if he had criticized rather than ignored the excesses of these interventions in the marketplace. They had originally been spurred by fears of social unrest as the then-colony attempted to absorb waves of migrants from the mainland with nowhere but squatter huts to live.

It was necessary intervention in the marketplace. The government’s lack of ideological commitment to laisser faire was summed up by Cowperthaite’s successor, Philip Haddon-Cave, as “positive non-interventionism.” This bit of semantic gobbledegook essentially meant that it preferred not to intervene but had a paternal duty to do so on occasion.

Hong Kong’s problem now is that policy change has not kept pace with changing economic and social circumstances. It is hooked on high land prices for the private sector as a revenue-raising measure, which leaves a large proportion of the public trapped in the subsidized housing sector.<

Paul