The Torah, Redistribution of Wealth and the Tao

The Torah supports redistribution of wealth (and food). Though I do support ideas of personal liberty insofar as such does not interfere with the rights and liberties of the perceived other (other ego-identities which we illusorily see as “individuals”), I do not believe in absolute liberty and autonomy unless one wishes to completely disengage and remove themselves from society (assuming they have that ability). This is, of course, a sad reality for purely Libertarian Jews on the right…

My primary critique of Libertarianism, which I have in some ways been very close to, and walked in some of the same circles as (and famously debated against, within Libertarian podcasts and radio shows), is that they do not seem to get is that the REAL WORLD is about FORCE.

You have to ward off force (intercept and neutralize) or mitigate force through yielding (and subsequent neutralization and countering). It’s that simple. EVERYTHING comes down to that: yang or yin.

That means, as we say in the Nei Jia “investing in a loss” when force is superior to your own. That means perhaps giving up space, and neutralizing in the void to avoid your center being taken. Only if neutralizing is extremely high level can one neutralize in place, drawing into the center, rather than away from it, and bring into the void within their gravitational center.

i am still a baby at such skills, but i have done it in controlled environments and felt it from others far better at it than me. Now imagine that in an uncontrolled environment, and with bodies of entire societies rather than forms of meat and blood. That is a whole different level of engagement.

Libertarians live in a world of theory, not a world of heavily armed groups out to take everything unless compromise and yielding is engaged in.

Society itself is structured on coercive force and that means as long as there is ANY government, there will be forced taxation; as long as governments are in touch with reality and realize the maxim of “hungry people don’t stay hungry for long” then there will be taxation to redistribute wealth to some degree.

The ideal is communal, small communities practicing voluntary participatory communalism that some call “Anarcho-Communism.” But this is ideal, and ideals do not always play out as theorized in the real world. As Mike Tyson famously said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

It is based on this understanding that State Communism emerged, even though Marx explained that true Communism must be communal and essentially anarchic, without government. Anything less, he explained, was Socialism, which he saw as worse than Capitalism in a sense, because it delayed the inevitability of a Proletariat Revolution.

But the real world does not play out in black and white. There never was an inevitability of a Proletariat Revolution. In reality, there is a lot of gray. In reality, when powerful people and forces see that profit (real or imagined) can be lost through polarization of Capitalism and Communist Proletariat Revolution, they will implement a Synthesis between this Thesis and Antithesis: Capitalism with Socialist domestic policies.

That is why China is so successful, not because it is true Theoretical Communism but because it successfully yielded and synthesized both Communism and Capitalism, by being a Socialist society. That doesn’t mean I see their approach as ideal, but they have certainly made it work, and if it works, it is difficult to argue that there is no truth in it.

Marx should have understood better that things are not always black and white, this or that… but he was largely a man of theory – ironically not even a man of labor, himself living off of the wealth of others. That is okay, theory is theory. In the real world, he needed time and mental space to write theory. So that required the support of others’ labor. But this is certainly not what the average blue collar worker would see as fair. That’s okay too.

The world is simply not fair. Not this world. It never has been and never will be until there is a new Heaven and Earth (the next cycle of Cosmic Crunch and Big Bang).

But now we’re getting deep and no one is trying to have that deep of a swim first thing in the morning. So i leave you with these thoughts.

Peace and Blessings of Abundant Goodness.