If you think happiness is irrelevant you have failed to understand even the very basics of running a civilization. Most people are not like you. Your system, to be elegant, has to account for that.
So your hypothesis is that it would turn Finnish people into upper class Americans?
No, people are not featureless interchangeable spheres of uniform density. Taking 2000 from a dude with 1,000,000,000 and giving it to a dude with 10,000 means it will get pumped directly into the retail economy and benefit lots of people in the short term, as opposed to being pumped into the financial product casino, where it might benefit people over the long term but will more likely be chipped away into the pockets of other already rich people and serve primarily to make their net worth dick measuring contest tick over here and there, only occasionally entering the economy in a meaningful way.
If it takes someone years to explain why I should like something, it isn't worth liking. There are more productive uses of that time that are equally enlightening and enriching and don't require me to duck my head into the cesspool of pompous ramblings that is modern music education.
A violent, war-like culture?
Why do you have to bring the USA into everything?
You are just trying to pick a fight so don't be surprised when you get one.
That's what the video did too and they got a fight: the embassies being attacked. To then say that it is wrong and violence isn't the answer is being naive. In the real world, people respond to vocal provocation with physical force.
So it's justified if I'm at a bar and someone talks shit to me, for me to fly to whatever shithole you live in and beat your skull in with a hammer? Sound logic.
Meanwhile the libertarians argue that they can somehow create an economic utopia
That's a straight out lie.
What world line are you tunneling in from? In this one it's totally true.
You realize TNG started in the 80's, right?
In Texas judges are elected.
You're under the delusion that there is a difference between a 'government' and 'the people.'
Government is an emergent property of a system of two or more people. Just like people are an emergent property of the correct configuration of organic molecules.
Tuition is much higher now.
Your forcefields are good, but my teleporting is better.
Unalienable rights are unalienable by religions.
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
You've completely missed the substance of Enlightenment thinking and what the concept of "Creator" meant to most of the people who put this country together. More study needed.
"It's the same God".
Bah. Different holy books preaching different ideologies and virtues in the name of God. The Gods mentioned can hardly be called the same.
So basically, this is like All Star Superman, Red Son Superman, Old School Superman, and new 52 Superman? All the same character, just different canons?
The invisible wizard of Islam is, historically, the invisible wizard of Abraham: the invisible wizards of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are, as a matter of fact, one and the same.
True, but Islam is a pretty nasty fork of the original codebase.
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon
