I have already stated that you can build a society that caters to everybody's differences regardless.
Thus far, all you've given us is your assertion. Why don't you outline your plan?
I see some room here, perhaps your not as locked in as I thought so let's look at you new list step by step. What might be involved in each of these?
Minimal crime: What factors contribute to crime? Two of the largest indicators are education and the economic and educational success of the parents. Education for all is a worthy and reachable goal but how does one adjust for unsuccessful parents? Should only successful people be allowed to parent children? Should we round up all the children and have them raised in groups by successful adults?
Minimal poverty: Define poverty. Is poverty a lack of basic necessities or is it a lack of expendable income? Or are we talking about real goods, money be damned? Or maybe we're talking about leisure time. If everyone had food, shelter, and clothing is there no poverty or is it a relative thing? Is a grass hut in Haiti the equivalent of a floor in a three-flat in Chicago?
Individual independence: How much independence? At what point do we limit personal freedom to protect society? At what point do we limit personal freedom to protect the personal freedom of others? What rules/laws are adequate and what methods of enforcement are the most successful? What side-effects come along with legislative, judicial, and enforcement policies and organizations? Do they create elite classes? Do they energize a criminal black-market? How does one mitigate these side-effects to retain a maximum amount of individual liberty? Should laws have a shelf-life or should they stand in perpetuity?
Healthy food to eat: Doesn't it limit individual independence to restrict people's dietary choices? Should people be allowed to be fat and smoke cigarettes if they so choose? Or are you solely addressing starvation? In that case a full support and investment in industrial farming and GM foods would be a good choice. That or consider methods of population control which puts us back to limiting individual independence.
Clean water. Clean air. Clean environment: We can certainly continue to strive for this however it costs lots of money to keep the environment clean. Added production costs drive up the cost of living, increasing poverty. Personal restrictions limit personal freedom.
No homeless: Part of this can be portioned off to health care. The large majority of homeless in the US, for example, disenfranchised mental patients due to spending cuts. There have been many attempts at providing low-cost housing, most of them either flat-out don't work or become high-crime areas (refer back to successful parents and crime). An alternative is to disperse such housing but that is far more costly (again we're looking at economic repercussions).
Access to high quality health care: Excellent health care is brought about by competition and tremendous resources. So how do you obtain the income necessary to provide these services? (An MRI, for instance, costs several million dollars).
Transportation and communication: These are already phenomenally economical. You could provide more mass transit.
High education: What do you mean by this? Do you want everyone to have degree, or just make it more affordable or free?
True freedom to make your life what you want it to be. -To be far away from the current standard of simply making a living and surviving while the rich get richer.
Well, if you want to become a hermit or a nomad there's nothing really to stop you so I don't see a problem there. The issue with the rich getting richer is that it takes money to make money. So what exactly do we do about that? Get too heavily into wealth redistribution and people no longer have the incentive to strive so hard, then everyone is poor... communism is a dismal failure on anything but a tribal level. The point of working hard is, after all, to gain something from your labor.
You claim that no 2 people think the same. OK what is your point? What are you getting at? What are you proposing?
I thought it was quite clear; no matter what you do there will always be some amount of strife, poverty, crime, etc.
The object of the progressive city is to allow people to be free and be different without persecution for their freedom or oppression.
An entirely different arena. I've no ideas for you here. How are you going to change people so that they think and behave differently?
The design cannot please those that want suffering, distress, oppression, pollution, persecution, etc. on a mass scale.
Seems to me that these are fairly rare already. The problem is that what is a worthy goal to one person is oppression to another. When such incompatible perspectives translate onto a cultural level we get warfare.
In our current world that you treasure so much, people do not have the choices. Choices are made for them by the rich - by those in control.
Please elaborate. Are you referring to corporations or governments? Or do you mean simply the "rich"? How and where exactly are they making choices for the rest of us?
Wrong. People mostly do not get what they want and what they deserve. Only very few people control and consume almost all of the resources.
Yes, they do. For instance, when living under an oppressive government one can either accept it or rebel against it. If working for a dictatorial boss, one can quit. When electing officials one can tote a party line or one can try and break up the vote. Nations do not have to sell their resources to other nations, they can keep them. Trouble is that poorer (typically smaller) countries do not have a surfeit of resources. If they're lucky they have something they can sell to obtain resources they are lacking. I suppose we could try to tear down nationalism and install a global government but you'd still wind up with discrepancies; it'd just be on a different scale. Another option is for people to move to where the opportunities are but that's a bit more complex when you're talking about moving from Somalia to Rome instead of from the farm in Iowa to St. Louis.
Reason? Oppression, persecution, lack of freedom, conformity to an ineffective standard, desperation
Well then kudos to Bush for topping a dictatorial regime and attempting to install a democracy... or what?
all the things you are so desperate to cling on to like any docile slave, all the things I am proposing we find solutions for instead of accepting.
Well then by all means get to it. I'd like to hear something more than your sophomoric pontification.
~Raithere
