The Pirate Party

Well, my word. I had always known the Happy Tutor headed up a kind of Dumpster Commune, but I had never realized that the man is a  communist. But, I heard him raving naked today on the street, like some cut-rate Diogenes, and I managed to record these choice bits. Beware! This man is crazy. Do not let anyone near him,  lest they fall beneath his spell.  As handsome a man as he is, and as charismatic, his words are like those of Satan, going straight to the heart, but only to deceive and inveigle us to our doom.

"Friends hold all in common," so goes a Greek proverb. The opposite of such a commons is private ownership of not only tangible and personal property, but of intangibles as well, the thoughts, songs, fables, art that we create as a culture and that defines us as human. By joining the Pirate Party and donating generously, you can help reverse our slide into an Ownership Society. Pirates either way, you say. And you would be right. But to restore a gift culture will take more than social ventures and trickle down philanthropy.  Down with patents,  copyrights, and  corporate invasion of our privacy.  Friends hold all in common.  Community is built on love, not mine and thine. Jesus said as much, as did Aristotle: caritas, philia.

Some will think fit to respond that without ownership people will not create. But that is as foolish as to argue that without prostitution people will not procreate. The truly creative create and think not for your filthy lucre, but for the sheer joy of tearing your house down. Those who Think in a Tank will persist in their Folly, but they are not thinkers in any real sense. They are hirelings going about their Master's business. You do that long enough and you become a slave in their Ownership Society.

When you give to a Think Tank, whether of the Right or the Left, you give for the death of the human spirit. Support our Pirates,  and unshackle the holy ghost from this rampant materialism.

Well, unlike Tutor, I am getting somewhere in my career. I heard last week from Dr. Amy Kass at Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society that an essay of mine is to be included in a book on philanthropy that she is editing. Also included are, among others, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. I have always found, Tutor, that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Tell the rich funders what they want to hear and you will do alright. Then maybe Dr. Kass will put you in a book with your pals Jesus, Socrates, Diogenes, Rabelais, Swift, Gay, and Wilde.  Until then, you can sit on your bags of garbage and hold forth. No one listens to a loser.

As for me, I am doing well by doing good with a double bottom line, one for society and one for me. It is a win/win situation. Self-sacrifice for the public weal is for martyrs. Get with the program, Tutor. Get two bottomlines,  and gets your's first.  No one is going to look out for you in the Ownership Society, so you had better look out for yourself.  The Pirate Party is under surveillance as trouble-makers.  Better to go with the flow of human history, extract profit wherever you can, whatever the social cost, and maybe some day you can be a philanthropist too.  God loves a winner.  Adam Smith said so.  This is advanced capitalism, Tutor: Plunder, yes; Piracy, no.  Steal from the poor, but not the rich.

Comments

[ahfukit]

Then maybe Dr. Kass will put you in a book with your pals Jesus, Socrates, Diogenes, Rabelais, Swift, Gay, and Wilde.

This is quite funny. Are you a comedian?

[Phil]

Let us say that between the realms of sanctimonious and scabrous discourse, comedy happens. Whether I, as the nice man at gifthub, am in on the joke is another matter. I take my role seriously as a morals tutor to America's wealthiest families. I see nothing amusing in that. Do you, Sir?