#publicgoods — Public Fediverse posts

"For the conservative argument to hold any water, there needs to be a reason that free stuff from the government is bad but free stuff from individuals is not. Why would that be? When people like Senator Paul rage against free stuff, the concern seems to be the effect it will have on the recipient — that handing out free stuff promotes laziness. Why would a free bus ride turn working-class people into freeloaders but a trust fund make rich kids into innovative entrepreneurs? This makes sense only if you have already decided that poor people are lazy and rich people are inherently better.

Any capitalist who doesn’t want to abolish inheritance rejects the first premise of the first version of the Anti-Socialism Argument. Unless you have either simply presupposed that capitalism is the better system or have assumed that rich people are genetically superior, you have no reason to believe premise one of the revised Anti-Socialism Argument 2.0.

So let’s be clear: The “free stuff” line isn’t an argument. It’s a smoke screen. It’s a way to sneer at programs that help ordinary people while keeping quiet about the much larger freebies that flow to the wealthy every day. Mamdani’s win shows that more and more New Yorkers see through the hypocrisy."

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/mamdani-socialism-capitalism-free-stuff/

#Socialism #PublicWelfare #Conservatism #PublicGoods #Capitalism #Ideology

#NetworkSovereignty #Commons-based/#mutualistic communities built on #interdependency, shared public goods. In #SOAM residence programme we explored collective data stewardship over profit.
#PublicGoods #Blockchain #Governance #Cosmolocal
https://mdpi.com/1999-5903/16/10/361

@lj_writes
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There are going to be bad apples in any bunch. We cannot single out #environmentalists any more than #religiousGroups that believe when people die, that's Gods way. Or #capitalists who believe that the 99% don't work hard enough. Or #slavetrade operators, #rentSeekers and rabid #shareholders who want to suck all the #productiveValue from the masses while paying them a pittance and #evadingTaxes that might help pay for #publicGoods like #healthcare.

The bad exist...(2/4)