Why Access Should Not Be The Overarching Moral Question

It is often assumed there are only two sides of an argument, or that only one argument is to be had.

We are beyond actually arguing about the value of central planning and collectivism.

One of the reasons we are beyond this point is that the winners in modernity- the bureaucrats- actually have different morals.

Most of our morals were formed when the primary form of government was basically private. The king owned the realm. He expected to rule over that realm based on the fact he owned it.

As an owner, two questions arise. The question of integrity of the the thing owned- maintenance, care, not letting it be destroyed, invaded, etc... And the question of keeping the thing own- i.e. you don't want anyone stealing your stuff.

Via these two impulses, an understanding of private property is born, and it is one even libertarians can recognize. Believe it or not, libertarianism is a mostly aristocratic mindset that has been rather naively applied to everyone. But we know not everyone is an owner, nor does everyone have the skill set necessary to own. There's been a lot of giving, and a lot of what's given has suffered a collapse of integrity, and the 'disadvantaged' are no better off.

Once the bureaucrats were free of the constraints of ownership however, a different morality began to assert itself. The basis of bureaucrat power is not ownership, but access. In the beginning, the idea is mostly access for themselves- i.e., they want to be able to access your resources in order to do whatever it is they think they should do, but eventually, their policies degrade to access for everyone. The intellectual socialists are long gone, replaced by zombie socialists, who mindlessly pursue what is obviously a terminal state. The cancer cells, can't, apparently, tell that they are killing their host.

Not only does theft become normalized, but integrity of whatever it is we are talking about begins to degrade. Nations, education, healthcare, etc... How many people can distinguish between an insurance product and products one would actually use to keep known recurring costs down?

Hypothetically, one could have administrators who would not lose ownership morality. Of course, ownership morality would have to be taught to them, and then they could run some of these things people seem to want to exist as a collective project. The internal metric of what the institution and/or product/service is supposed to be would keep integrity high. Access would be important, but subject to realities. As of this writing, my state is well over a billion in debt, the politicians are trying to tax us more, and yet they still insist on spending money to send people unfit for college to college. Meanwhile, since they've been sending stupid people to college for years, the colleges are no longer fit to handle the fifteen percent or so of higher IQ people who do actually need a whole different level of stimulus to get where they need to be. And, then most of those with intelligence end up leaving.

We end up bereft of decent education and intelligent leadership thanks to this impulse to make access paramount. It is, perhaps, more dangerous than impulse to centralized planning. Smart people can learn from their mistakes, and from logic, and there are plenty of astute observations as to how decentralization, experimentation, and iteration work.