Anti-Science is when you go to jail for doing nothing but testing for the presence of cyanide in the walls of the USSR-reconstructed morgue/air-shelter in Auschwitz.
> Though I suppose rurality could help with drug and alcohol addictions by limiting access, you can't just pick people up and move them like that.
When we are the ones offering to help, then absolutely we can pick people up and move them if they wish to be helped. We are free to set our conditions and they are free to reject them. Right now, for instance, some poor people are tested for drugs in order to qualify for government housing. At some point someone argued, I'm sure, "you can't just pick people up and test them like that", but then someome smarter rebutted "of course we can, we are the ones offering to help, so we get to set the terms". And indeed, that is right. Do I have the right to demand that you help me monetarily in exactly the way I choose to? If so, please start paying my rent and sending me at least $2k monthly. Of course I don't have the right to set the terms of your helping me. One would have to be silly to defend such an idea.
And so, because those doing the help get to set the terms, we should tell poor people that they will be granted a farm and that it will be theirs forever to grow food and live independently on, unless they want to depend on other people by moving into the city and exchanging their skilled labor for the services they need to substitute for the plot they can't till when they're in the city. This is just reality, I'm just explaining it slowly like that because the current welfare state and credit-happy society warps reality so much that people forget that they need to be able to afford the things they want.
Regarding picking up and moving them out, we do that all the time right now. Cops pick people out and move them from places where they might be, for instance, peacefully smoking marijuana, a victimless crime. So we already do this for the silliest reason possible, burning tiny grass and inhaling its smoke. Wow. And you are berating me for wanting to pick people and move them, not because they've burnt tiny grass as is being done currently thousands of times per week, no, not for that, but for, wait for it, wanting to give them a farm! C'mon, you can't be seriously arguing this.
Not to mention, no one will be picked up and transported unless they commit a crime such as trespassing. They can still rely on friends, family and acquantainces to stay over, and when they run out of all options they can still return home to their farmland they own by themselves, out of their own will, without being escorted by police. All they have to do is not trespass (which would include not living on the streets as those would be private property as they are in many cities in the US).
> I can't imagine that a person who is unable to keep a home or job in the city due to mental or physical health issues would be able to sustain themselves on a farm.
The people who can do no work whatsoever in a farm will have to be taken care of by people who care about them. This will encourage everyone to make as many friends as possible and to help each other out as much as possible (helping each other out is the currency of friendships and it can even partially be the currency of communities). Those who can do just a little work can work together with others, or maybe with their friends or acquaintances they make within their farmer neighbors. Farms produce for more than one person so it will not be any problem if a farm needs to sustain more people than people working on it, provided those working on it agree to help the others.
> Regarding your first premise, specifically the poor. If I live in a city, and work, but my work only pays enough for me to be poor, you are saying I should be shipped out to the country and given a farm?
Since we're speaking in terms of Austrian Economics, now is the time to say this whole thing is based on property rights. So the ultimate point of this is, that if you don't have money to pay to live in the city, or if you don't have a friend who will spot you or whatever, then you can't just be in the city and homeless, because you'd be trespassing someone else's property. This is the key idea. You can't be homeless because you'd be a trespasser. So you either have to fund your stay yourself, or get voluntary help (from friends, family, etc) in order to be housed.
> Under Austrian economics, how would your plan pan out? If the city removed all the poor people, who would do the work they were doing? Does Austrian economics believe that suddenly the wealthy, or rather the people who can afford to live in the city will suddenly pay increased wages to people wash dished, clean streets, do people's laundry etc.?
The city is not removing poor people. You are misconstruing what I said. If someone is found trespassing private property, and it is found they are doing so because they are destitute, then they will be asked to go back to their farmland, or face punishment for trespassing (which no one would choose). Austrian Economics says that the market will have to find a way to fund what it needs to do while being able to pay its workforce what they need to live within an acceptable distance of where they need to be to do their work. This will be solve in a myriad of ways, too many to count really - each company will find their own solution and some companies might converge to a locally optimal solution. But it's not up to any planner, you or I, to tell the market how they should solve their problem of funding their human resources. They will know that if they don't pay someone enough, they might not be able to live within the area they need to be around to do their job. So you will get a sort of self-fulfilling maintenance of a wage floor automatically from competition.
> I could see it might work if as you say, its illegal to stay in the city unless you make a certain amount, therefore making it illegal to pay less than a living wage. Is 'minimum wage' covered under Austrian economics? Would it be set higher for more expensive cities? Or would the wealthy just keep the status quo by busing in people from the mandatory farms and still paying them shitty wages?
Close. Indeed it would be illegal to trespass, which would mean you either can pay for where you are living, or you are authorized by the owner who pays for that place, to stay there. With regards to minimum wage, I addressed this above. With regards to busing people in for "shitty wages", any offer a city person makes to a farmer is voluntary and the farmer is not compelled to accept it, seeing that they don't need to accept it for them to be able to have food and shelter.
> Also, do you think that people would be able to learn enough from public libraries to become a 'producer' as you say? Not everyone is an autodidact.
Yes, I believe they would. Long-term prisoners learn the law of their cases when they can't afford a lawyer or when no one will pick their case up. Where there is an incentive there will be a drive.
> Lastly, what would you do about someone like me? I was homeless and jobless in Hawaii for 6 months because of bureaucratic reasons (I am a US citizen who lived abroad for all my life, and when I moved to the US I had no Social Security Number, therefore couldn't work legally until one had been assigned to me) I have been homeless a few times, but I have never once had to claim welfare of any type.
If you have authorization from some property owner to stay at their place, you could do that. Otherwise if you have no money to pay for a place to stay, and you know no one who will provide you with a place to stay, then obviously that means that by force of circumstance you can't stay because you can't afford to.
> Would your system have me picked up by the cops for breaking the law and shipped to 40 acres with a mule to til the earth until I have learned the error of my ways, and good work ethics?
Only if you break the law. You don't have to break the law. If you leave as soon as you lose your job and can tell you're not likely to find another, or as soon as you run out of savings, then you won't be trespassing and therefore will be able to willingly return to your farmland by yourself.
> Or would a system that tried to treat the root causes of poverty instead of symptoms be more effective?
Indeed it would, which is why I am proposing one to replace the current system that treats the symptoms of being poor, since all it does is give men fish (welfare benefits) instead of teaching them how to fish (how to work for themselves and not have to rely on other people's money). The symptom of poverty is not having money, and this is all that the State tries to fix, namely by giving poor people money. That is treating the symptoms. The root cause of poverty is not being able to provide for oneself. This system I am proposing would treat the root cause of poverty by giving poor people a way to provide for themselves, namely by giving them a farm. Do you understand it now?
> Instead of small farms and deportation of the poor how about livable minimum wages?
Instead of gas guzzling cars, how about flying unicorns?
Small farms and transportation (no one said "deportation" but you, right now, sneakily trying to build a straw-man) exist in the real world, they can be defined in detail, I can draw small farms and transportations, and even take pictures of them to prove they exist, whereas whatever "livable minimum wages" is or means, it doesn't enjoy the same benefits - it can't be defined in detail, you can't draw it or take a picture of one to show me what this is, and you can't prove they exist. It's just a rhetorical term. It's not something real, like a farm or a bus.
> Instead of good libraries, how about free university education?
Instead of reading books, how about free live narrations?
Well, that's because you can't find a way to convince narrators to work for free without pointing a gun to their heads. Same goes for free university education, there's no way to get professors to work for free without pointing a gun to their heads. Unless you are suggesting pointing a gun to everyone's heads and extorting everyone to pay for those professors, but if I thought you were suggesting that, I'd have to assume you are some sort of psychopath, what with wanting to exert violent influence over so many people.
Books and libraries exist and they are a solved problem - we know how to put books in libraries and make them available to people. What we don't know is how to force someone to provide a service for free without impinging on their rights, and you just showed it.
> Instead of making producers of every human being, what about addressing the people who benefit off the production of tens of thousands of people, yet give little back to the system that allows them to do this?
The system that allows people to benefit so much without giving back is crony capitalism, which is exactly what I am proposing we eliminate. The Federal Reserve themselves has admitted that they have widened the wealth gap. So now you have a named target to hate: Federal Reserve. Join the club.
> I ask this straight forwardly, as I do not know Austrian economics. But while I wait your reply, I shall look it up online and see what it is all about.
> I have been homeless, it's not something I just say.
I can't verify it, so I can't say "you have been homeless" or I'd be lying about having evidence of something I don't. So I used the reported speech version, "you say you have been homeless". It was not meant as an attack, nor to be ironic, nor anything like that.
> I disagree with your entire post. It's based on this false assumption, "the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment".
Wrong. You could have argued that you disagree with my being against helping the poor and homeless stay in the city, as that was the only part of the post predicated on the premise that cities are wealth-creation centers. Which they de facto have been historically (regardless of intent or word definitions). In other words, all wealth produced has mostly come from cities as opposed to farms. Therefore, cities are wealth-creation centers, de facto.
"in fact, in reality, in actual existence, force, or possession, as a matter of fact"
> Nothing in there mentioned wealth, or welfare. Remove that personal bias/motive from your proposal and your proposal very quickly falls apart.
And yet all the wealth in the world came overwhelmingly from cities, which makes them de facto wealth-creation centers. And it's a premise, not a "proposal". And the premise is correct, and your definitional refutation is a non-sequitur to it. I am arguing about what cities end up effecting in reality, and you're showing me something someone wrote on a website. If you're not going to address my arguments, you shouldn't reply to me, you should post under your own thread branch.
> That is before one would progress to the more offensive part of your argument: That those with money and wealth have more right to live in a city than those without. That those who work in lower paid industries have less of a right than those in higher paid industries.
Offense is in the eye of the beholder, it is not inherent to topics or arguments. If you hadn't brought your ego to this conversation, you would not have been offended. I haven't, and I'm not. I also never mentioned rights, and I have no idea what you mean by it, since you seem to be using that word in a gradual sense ("more right"... "less of a right") when to me it is a binary thing (you either have a right or you don't). But if you want me to rephrase what I said to use the word "rights", I can do it: everyone has the right to live in a city, but no one has the right to demand that others pay for them to do so.
So if you have the skills it takes to live in a city (a place where you can't grow your own food and have to rely on money to use services to provide you with what would otherwise be free in your plot of farmland) and you want to, you can, because you have that right. But if you want to, and you can't afford to because you don't have the skills to substitute for manual labor, then you still have the right to live in the city, but at the moment you are unable to because you can't support yourself, and you don't have the right to demand others to pay for your expenses. Is this clear enough now?
> It seems horribly convenient as a concept, that you could put the poor and homeless on buses and drive them out of your sight.
The point is not to drive them out of my sight. It seems you are mischaracterizing what I am saying to make me look bad. Don't do that, it's not an argument. Even if the farm is next to my house, the point is to give the poor a way to be independent so they don't have to rely on other people's money to survive. The point is not to "drive them out of my sight", it is to teach them to fish, to be self-sufficient, and not to be dependent on others giving them fish.
If you receive a plot of farmland that you can live off of without any other citizen's help, and you don't owe anyone anything for having received that plot of farmland, then are you a serf?
Plus, after living in that farmland for a while, whenever you think you have the skills to be employed in the city, you are free to try again. But it would be illegal to be homeless in the city, so that if it doesn't work out, you'd have to go back to the farmland you own.
Is that serfdom? The answer is no, and contrary to your question, you are not really sorry you asked, you are just doing this coy exaggeration routine that people who aren't interested in engaging in argument but still want to poo-poo it do.
> The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting.
If you think that is insulting, try getting your ideas attacked through a straw-man argument - that's even worse. What most poor people do not understand, however, is that in order for them to live off welfare, somebody else is personally sacrificing their own efforts, labor, life, money that could be saved for their kids, just to pay for some guy who not only has no skills to help society in building wealth, but has a strong enough sense of entitlement to demand that someone help them survive while they get to pick where to live. I want to help all the poor, but being mathematically literate I know this can only work if we put these poor people in a situation where instead of takers, they be producers.
> The point of a city isn't anything like what is suggested. Its a place where a lot of people gathered to live.
You are over-simplifying it to the point of being ahistorical. No, actually cities came about because farmers increasingly wanted to take their chances at being entrepreneurs or employees in an industrial setting. So if you fail at your chance of making it in the city, then you should go back to a farm. Sounds logical to me. That way everyone can keep trying to make it in the city without being a burden on anyone else.
> And 'transporting' folks is what they did to criminals in Britain in the bad old days (usually to Australia).
This reads like an emotional sophism to make me feel bad about giving the poor food and shelter that they can actually pay for themselves. Again, think back to our recent past pre Industrial age (1850 and before). Most people were farmers. That's the default. Living in the city, where you can't produce your own food and have to rely on other people's services (which costs money) is not the default. If everyone in the country can never be poorer than owning a small self-sufficient farm where one can live by oneself without needing money, then can you better point at the part of this plan that makes you be against it? I honestly see no problems here, not even an inkling of disrespect towards the poor.
Forgive me for being a little skeptical but can you show us a screenshot of the "toast shape" done in Adobe Illustrator (showing the guide lines, please)? (I'm changing the challenge a bit because just dragging the top line isn't the same as bestowing the top corners with guides and this challenge now necessitates the guides):
And make sure to tell us how long it took you. In SVG Path Builder the toast shape above took me 10 seconds, and it never gave me grief by trying to curve the sides, while still giving me the guides for each of the relevant corner nodes. Drawing that in Inkscape is just as easy. Same for CorelDraw.
If you can manipulate the guides of your corner nodes and have them affect only the top side, then you've succeeded in making those two top corner nodes cusp. I have never seen anyone online showing cusp nodes in Illustrator.
The way I see it (my background is Austrian economics), the poor and the homeless are people who cannot afford to live in a city. City-living isn't a right, it's for those who can afford it. No one is owed anything for not having enough money to live in a city.
That means in general I am against helping the poor and the homeless stay in the city, since the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment.
You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
That way we solve many problems. 1. the poor are now productive, they produce their own food instead and don't need to drain other people's resources to have food and shelter; 2. they are far from the city, which won't encourage laziness by sending people a message that they can't try and game the system by getting help while still living in the city as a non-producer; 3. it will teach these poor people good work ethics and how work is necessary for everyone to survive, and that they can't just rely on the fact that other people work.
I'd say that besides the farm life, they should have good public libraries nearby in case they want to learn something in order to be able to later join the city life again, this time as a productive member.
Am I being inhumane for trying to make producers out of every human being, and for thinking even the disabled can help pick fruit from bushes or wash them or otherwise contribute in a communal farm setting? Would you be for a program to send the poor and the homeless to farms and basically instate a rule where you can't live in a place you can't afford?
You know what that means? That this tool understands Bezier curves better than Adobe Illustrator. Why? Because Adobe has never heard of the phrase "cusp node".
If you have Illustrator, I challenge you:
- Draw a box with 4 sides
- Try and curve the top line without causing the side lines to curve
Speaking as a self-taught programmer since I was in my early teens: I have nothing against it, some of my coworkers are bootcamp grads and I make sure they know I am available to help them. I also pull them aside to show some tricks or things to pay attention to.
Who is the lifelong programmer that dislikes showing others what they know about their favorite thing? Not me.
First of all, it is initiation of violence since the government has to threaten the bank in order to seize assets which the company had already contracted with the bank to keep safe and the company has not given the bank any power of attorney to transfer the property or otherwise relinquish it.
That is initiation of violence number one.
Second of all, it is theft since the government is appropriating goods it does not own without permission from the owner which in this case is the company that broke environmental regulations.
That is initiation of violence number two.
Now I must ask you, Mike Ash, after all this conversation and your refutations visibly fizzling out (first your silly "I refuse to look up 'violence' in the dictionary' and presently this 'I can't see the violence in threatening banks and stealing from them' grasping-at-straws move, and after having seen my arguments for what I am defending and after your not being able to offer substantive counter-arguments), are you ready to entertain the thought that we should give fully unregulated (-by the government or any other monopoly on violence) industries and private property law a try?
I am ready and willing to help you learn more as I hope to have demonstrated throughout this discussion where I wasn't disrespectful to you and treated your inquiries fairly. I must say though, that judging from your last replies, it might be that you do not possess the intellectual honesty I thought you did when we first started this discussion, because your last two responses have been intellectually dishonest (not looking up in the dictionary, and not being willing to see the violence in state coercion).
Alternatively, why would you not be OK with a system where the rule that everyone must abide by is "do not initiate force"? I wonder what problems you have with it. Is there something you'd like to do, that would be impossible for you to do under that system?
Again, I am for a formalized set of rules, and I am suggesting that the rule be "do not initiate force". You on the other hand, have not suggested any formalized set of rules, as something cannot be a rule if everyone is helpless to keep the biggest offender from breaking it.
> "do not enforce coordination", means cancer
You say things like that, and you think I'm trolling you? Not to mention, the word is "exempt", not "extempt".
> Governments are actors created within the system
This is meaningless when both good and bad are created "from within" according to you. If I pointed to US History and asked you were Central Banks on the good side or was Andrew Jackson on the good side, I'd say Jackson, but you'd still point out the Central Banks "are actors created within the system". So to me this is meaningless. It's better to talk about how much consent the government has. Recent Gallup polls show more than half of Americans fear their government. I'd say fearing and consenting do not go together. So it seems the people are saying they'd like to treat the cancerous government within our country.
> some time ago people agreed they'll let one group monopolize the violence
They did, or do you assume they did? If the people did agree to this, as you said, then please point me to the historical documents, like a social contract being signed by everyone in a given territory. Otherwise, don't make up facts while trolling me and calling me a troll.
Regulation is intimidation by the exhibition of force (the regulatory body's authority is an exhibition of the threat of violence that backs its ability to fine and imprison).
> (also note that we have a name for cells that refuse to coordinate with the rest of the organism and instead decide to grow as much as they like - they're called cancer).
Right, like the government, which is always growing (like cancer) and never dwindling, always passing new laws and regulations but never deprecating any, all the while refusing to coordinate with the rest of the organism since it claims to be exempt from the laws and regulations to which it subjects its cells/people.
Just like all the cells in the body go by one rule (don't grow unchecked), and cancer doesn't (it grows unchecked), so is everyone under government forced by it to go by one rule (do not initiate force) that government doesn't need to (it may initiate force unchecked).
Do you really not see the similarities?
I am not against a formalized set of rules and governance, I am for it. You are the one who seems to be against it since you are for an actor that does not abide by those rules and governance, namely the government. I am for everyone, without exception, abiding by a set of rules and governance, and the first rule is the one we all agree on so much that the government enforces on us, namely, do not initiate force.
Roads in the US were started by cyclists and war veterans:
The problem of schools and police are not as hard (the government of South Africa uses only private police, non-Prussian school models do not require teachers, etc) as that of roads, so I leave them to you as an exercise.
> Maybe the legal system is structured such that all 20 million citizens can band together and sue all 10,000 factories simultaneously.
Yes, this is the scenario that would occur. It's obvious, in retrospect, you've debated this before. ;)
Are you familiar with the concept of DROs? I would need to introduce the concept of Dispute Resolution Organizations and Polycentric Law in order to explain this fully, which I am afraid would take far too long. The gist is that, due to many advantages I will skip over here, people would subscribe to DROs (like they do today for life insurance) which would mediate disputes through negotiation with a view to establishing new contracts that will repair the initial damage that is under scrutiny. People would choose DROs based on the promises and rules that DROs make and abide by when they sign their contracts with those they represent, and based on the process they have for negotiating and establishing new rules, and also their tie-breaking process.
There would be DROs for people in general, DROs for specialized trades (like medical doctors and engineers due to different liabilities), and of course DROs for companies.
If several companies are polluting the air in a given city full of people, and those people want to sue those companies for their smog having caused them bodily harm (under tort law, since your body is your property), then they could notify their DROs of their intent; those DROs already talk to each other on a consistent basis since that is how disputes are solved between people that belong to different DROs, so they already have rules amongst themselves for how to deal with lawsuits that are many-to-many in relationship, as it were. Upon asked to effectuate this plural lawsuit, the DROs representing both plural parties would engage in negotiation amongst themselves on behalf of their clients and would need to find a solution that would make most of their clients happy. Here we have the DROs interests perfectly aligned with the interests of those they represent, because if the DRO makes an unpopular decision, it will lose clients.
> This works, but all you've done is reinvent something identical to modern environmental regulations
Yes, but now without the coercion that is sine-qua-non to regulations. That means a huge decrease in the initiation of violence among people.
> And this is a relatively simple example.
It is, and I hope my sketch-answer above has enough information to inform you that there are very good and well-fleshed-out solutions to this problem as discovered by the philosophers that explore this field. Nozick is particularly good at taking readers through complicated examples of real-life situations that at first seem hard or impossible to solve with a free market.
> How would this deal with, for example, atmospheric mercury pollution that has already caused seafood to be dangerously toxic to children and pregnant women if eaten in large quantities? How would it deal with greenhouse gas pollution which won't cause any catastrophic effects for decades?
I do not know if there are proposed solutions for those issues where there is a large delay between cause and effect. Here I am speaking from my own head and not remembering things I've read as I was above for the DRO answer: I would guess that for the first case, where a present issue was caused by something/someone(s) in a hazy past, that the tortfeasor may be impossible to track down to engage the plaintiffs. If the tortfeasor companies are still around and haven't engaged in this issue before, and proof can be established to link cause and effect to them, I imagine it could be treated as a normal lawsuit from here on (having identified both parties in the suit); their representative DROs will have to negotiate and come up with a solution that is satisfying for all parties involved; if rectification is impossible, then perhaps reparations would be in order. If there is a known method for fish-mercury removal (or the like), then depending on the pressure put on the DROs by their clients, the resolution could include the company having to pay to employ this solution, even though the person who was responsible for the mercury leak (let's suppose) might be long gone.
As for the greenhouse problem where the cause is in the present and the effect is in a hazy future, the DROs would first expect good evidence that there is indeed a cause of something going on, and sufficient evidence that this cause will result in a definable effect. Having established as much, there may be grounds for a lawsuit under threat of violence (threats of violence are considered initiation of violence by most philosophers in this area) since the noxious gases being dispersed now are threatening the lives of children and infant (we can't use "future generations") in the future, just like a threat to kill someone works.
This has been very enjoyable, and I hope you can take something away from this. Most free marketers I meet are well read and reached their conclusions from carefully reading the extremely counter-intuitive stuff that Nozick et alii put forth, or whoever else is their favorite Jew, since most of the best free market philosophers have been Jews for some reason [1] (my guess: high verbal intelligence coupled with propensity towards radicalization and high self-confidence and courage, or as they call it, chutzpah) and I feel like mentioning it because I owe my education largely to them (as an autodidact in economics), even though I am a harsh critic of their version of WW2 history (critiques which are purely based on science (especially chemical analysis) and not on any form of bigotry as many are quick to suggest).
[1] The current best jewish free marketer philosopher is unbeatably Walter Block. You owe it to yourself to listen to some of his arguments; you will undoubtedly catch a glimpse of the whole free market machinery at work through his astoundingly clear explanations. No one comes close. His defense of slander and libel are among my favorites - students that at first disagree with him are left speechless after having their contentions undone by Block.
I'm one of those "some people" you mentioned. It is indeed about morals. Violence, in my view, is definitely a character trait inextricable from genetic makeup and early upbringing (which sets significant epigenetic markers).
That is exactly why people should be armed. There is no reason for violent criminals to be in prison, they should be dead either from their victim defending themselves, or those around the victim defending the victim. As for non-violent crimes, they shouldn't be in prison, they should be fined or made to work to repay their damages.
This is the rational mode. Your mode, being soft-hearted and wanting to find excuses for violence behavior just so that the criminal can't be blamed, is the emotional mode.
And yet it seems resilient enough that European countries are importing low-skilled third-world people without any concern for the frafile framework of mutual trust and playing by the rules you speak of.
Not to mention your argument sounds suspiciously like Intelligent Design believers explaining how the universe was obviously created by god since it is built on a fragile interplay of fine tuned distances and sizes and if only they were slightly different humans wouldn't exist!
EDIT @TeMPOraL: I'm the one that argues that it is all within-the-system, without the need for an external omnipotent actor. You're the one that thinks we must introduce the government as an external (above the rules) omnipotent (law-making) actor to the system of human interaction that is originally solely comprised of people and rules that apply to everyone without exception (but you want to introduce the external actor "government" as an exception to this otherwise global rule).
Hence why I argue that what you said is akin to Intelligence Design arguments. You are saying this delicate societal balance is all thanks to the external actor called government, like ID-folks say the balance of the universe is due to god. Both of you believe systems would collapse without this external omnipotent actor. The similarities are not just superficial.