Comment: 50 shades of bad

Many of the comments lean towards labeling people good or bad or some accepted compromise. I think we can learn from Dr. Paul on this one. He advocates not labeling people into groups because of the problems that creates.

The reason? IMHO, it stems from there actually being too many gradients between all good and all bad. Even 50 different labels could cause problems as one progresses from one level to the next.

As I see it, all people are inherently good but each person in each situation (billions in a lifetime) weighs the pros and cons of doing good against those of doing bad. There are many reasons we could discuss for going each way but let's just investigate one of them.

Today, we live in a social paradigm where many fall into the "now" world. Television, ads, inflation and pitfalls have all trained these people that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. (I think there's even an old adage that says something like that!) This means that stealing is worth the future possibility of detention because the future is not set in stone. We even teach this to our kids at an early age every time we let them off of a punishment for doing a bad act.

Out of the box thinking...
Instead of labeling them and tracking their activities and trying to teach right from wrong, how about we create an environment where the gains of doing wrong are gone? If we ended scarcity, I think most, if not all, crimes of greed and want would disappear. (Sans the obvious mental health related ones.) If a person lived in a world where things were either free or very cheap (in personal cost) most crimes would vanish.

Unfortunately, there's one more aspect that needs to be addressed. Money and material goods are not all that are to be gained by increasing ones 'assets'. We must also remove the power that comes with the hoarding of assets.

This may sound hard to do but think of what power your local millionaire would hold if suddenly everyone on the block became a millionaire? If we address the inequality issues, I'm convinced that the power inequality issues will proportionally disappear as well.

I leave the details to future discussion because they are intense but this is the overall goal I think we should head towards.