In songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake presents disturbing images of children caught up in the throes of the industrial revolution. While the churches argued that we should take care of the poor, in actual practice it was often the case that they didn't. Churches, like other institutions, require money, and to serve those who haven't got any is not a good way to increase prosperity. Read the poems (they are very simple but only in one sense), and then I have a brief follow-up.
The Chimney Sweeper
William Blake
Source: Songs of Innocence,1789 and Songs of Experience;
1794 http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.htm;
HTML: for marxists.org in April, 2002.
The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence), 1789
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd llke a lamb's back, was shav'd: so I said
"Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river. and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark.
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Experience), 1794
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother! say!
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
Blake's poems were written at about the same time as the French Revolution. One also situates them at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution is turning England into the world's first superpower. England had become a capitalist giant, but in many English writers (not just Blake, but on through Dickens, and Orwell) there is an attempt to criticize those who benefited by focusing on those who didn't.
In some cases this has been an attack on capitalism itself as having given rise to these conditions. (there are many other questions in the poem -- such as whether the parents were selling their kids into slavery, and how often this happened, but let's stick with the simpler questions for now).
Ludwig von Mises, one of the kingpins of the Austrian School of Economics (pro-capitalist) argues that the beginning of capitalism was a monstrous period precisely because of the conditions that feudalism had created.
"The famous old story, repeated hundreds of times, that the factories employed women and children and that these women and children, before they were working in factories, had lived under satisfactory conditions, is one of the greatest falsehoods of history... And all the talk about the so-called unspeakable horror of early capitalism can be refuted by a single statistic: precisely in these years in which British capitalism developed, precisely in the age called the Industrial Revolution in England, in the years from 1760 to 1830, precisely in those years the population of England doubled, which means that hundreds of thousands of children -- who would have died in preceding times -- survived and grew to become men and women.
There is no doubt that the conditions of the preceding times were very unsatisfactory. It was capitalist business that improved them. ...Again and again, the early historians of capitalism have -- one can hardly use a milder word -- falsified history... (Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, pp. 6-8).
"When the manufacturers in Great Britain first began to produce cotton goods, they paid their workers more than they had earned before. Of course, a great percentage of these new workers had earned nothing at all before that and were prepared to take anything they were offered. But after a short time -- when more and more capital was accumulated and more and more capital was accumulated and more and more new enterprises were developed -- wage rates went up, and the result was the unprecedented increase in British population which I spoke of earlier...
If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way" (12-13).
Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006 -- based upon a series of lectures given by von Mises in Argentina in 1959).
Communism is the attempt to blame capitalism and to argue that it has ruined the working classes. Von Mises argues that capitalism has raised the situation of the working classes. (There is another secondary implication that communism is the RETURN of the feudal system in which the population works for its new feudal lords: the communist party, but it's not one that he's yet developed in the text -- but I'm not very far in.)
This is more or less the situation in most communist countries today: think of Kim Jong-Il and his palaces throughout North Korea. It is the situation in Zimbabwe under Mugabe. Or the situation in Myanmar, or in Communist China today (China is getting wealthier for those in the party but its people are still poorer than 100+ of the 191 countries in the world). The communist party represents the return of feudalism in which the high-minded freaks of Marxist theory impoverish the rabble who would have been better off under capitalism. It's the return of a new elite, which in fact turns out to be the same old elite, with a new story as to why they should continue to lord it over the unwashed masses.
151 comments:
Kirby,
I'm struck by von Mieses observation that the population of England doubled from 1760 to 1830. Of course, I checked it, and it checks out, cf Wiki: Demography of England. Moreover, it seems reasonably fair to me in looking at the data to say that there was a qualitative change in population dynamics that occurred right around 1750.
This called to mind the first chapter from T. W. Körner's "The Pleasures of Counting," which dealt with the London cholera outbreak of 1854, and how the source of the outbreak was determined. The point here is that the critical enabler of the population increase post 1750 was almost certainly improvements in sewage and water handling that made potable water much more generally available in the cities, and so greatly reduced the incidence of cholera, typhoid fever, and similar water-borne, fecally transmitted diseases.
It's hard for us to appreciate today how severe these epidemics could be, but in doing genealogical research on my own family, I discovered two cases, one cholera, one typhoid, where an epidemic essentially wiped out an entire family, leaving a single survivor (in both cases, someone who'd previously married and moved out of their childhood home).
We can look back on the past and interpret it through all kinds of political lenses. The lens that "capitalism is good" certainly appeals to you, and not without some justification. Given my political commitments, I'll note that installing sanitary sewers and water supplies is typically a governmental investment in infrastructure, which can be a significant enabler of economic growth, and in this case, population growth.
As it is, I think it is naive to deny the suffering of the lower classes during the early industrial revolution, and to argue that population growth in and of itself was indicative of good times. Everyone dies once, and if you remove cholera and typhoid from the list of probable causes of death, you necessarily increase deaths by other causes, including diseases of malnutrition and environmental degredation, which might in fact result in far greater suffering to the person affected, albeit later in their life. For example, the rapid increase in rickets (a disease of nutrition and environment) that occurred in early industrial-revolution London is well known, cf., Tiny Tim.
Certainly, Charles Dickson (and later, Upton Sinclair) wrote with great moral purpose, but their work would have had little impact if it was perceived by its contemporaries as mere hyperbole. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that the worlds they described captured important aspects of reality; and that for the common worker, the early industrial revolution was often difficult, dangerous, and even desperate.
My wife and I have a lovely cast iron footstool, inherited from my grandparents, an object of great sentimental value. It was made by my great-great-grandfather, who was an iron caster at the Columbia (Pennsylvania) stove casting works. He did not die of cholera or typhoid. He died of silicosis, an occupational hazard of doing casting using the technology of the early industrial revolution.
And one final point. The cotton culture which you cite, the foundation of British working class prosperity which you credit to capitalism, was itself critically dependent on slave labor in the US. You're analyzing the British industrial revolution as if it was a closed system, drawing the line of its impact around those who benefited from it, and excluding those who were enslaved (hardly a capitalist state) in order to provide it with the raw materials it needed.
Stu, this is a deft piece of maneuvering on your part, and I appreciate it.
I especially liked the cholera and sewerage connection. I was in Baltimore a few years ago with a friend and went into a museum of public works and was stunned to see that they were using wooden plumbing int he 1890s! And the same plumbing that brought in water brought out waste.
I guess that must have seemed like a two-for before the discovery of bacteria.
I've seen some shows on sewerage in London and in Paris and they make for wonderful viewing.
Public works are an amazing phenomenon especially now when it seems they must be voted on (to a degree). Robert Moses ran the parks system in NY state for decades and with it had a monopoly on various kinds of "parkways" -- Robert Caro in the Power Broker argues that Moses sometimes would put a parkway right through someone's estate because he could, and because he wanted to flatten an enemy.
He sometimes also went around a friend's estate, which is why, Caro claims, the Long Island Express is so wiggly often causing snarls in the S-curves of Moses' whims.
the incoming water into NYC from the Croton Reservoir (commemorated in the Central Park fountain and sculpture angel of the waters) is also a fascinating story.
Nothing like clean water and food.
Which does in fact require R & D, and some oversight.
The problem for the communists was always that the government provided the water, and so couldn't do oversight on itself, so depended on citzens piping up (in practice this meant that they were usually sent to Siberia for something like non-citizen-ike behaivor).
It's a lot of conundrums!
At any rate, I'm citing Mises, not myself.
He's giving a relatively simple set of talks in 1959 to a grouip of non-economists in Argentina.
I'm reading his quips on socialism now.
Check the second poem by blake, especially the part about how the kid was born on the heath and was happy, so they threw him into the chimney sweeping set.
Mises argues that this sylvan hypothesis -- that the poor were in rosy circumstances on the heath -- was not accurate.
that the kids were born into new circumstances in the city due to increased longevity, and thrown into nasty work -- buthis argument is that the circumstances were improving after the feudal era -- albeit slowly.
So I think blake is PERHAPS falling into that category of describing rosy circumstances that never existed in order to criticize a foul situation for the chimney sweeps.
(These poems are often cited by Marxists, and as you can see, are found on a Marxist dissemination org online.)
These poems are the Dickens!
I put in the Dick Van Dyke dance from Mary Poppins because Curtis claims that all literature is entertainment! I didn't want to upset him with Blake's drawings of poor chimney sweeps, which, at least to my mind, have little or no entertainment value.
In addition to water, I'd think there'd have to be additional food, too. The food would have to be reasonably healthy and reasonably clean -- also requiring government inspection, but also some system of dissemination, which would mean something like grocery stores, if not an actual Wegman's. I mention these things to knock the tennis ball back and say, capitalism.
At any rate, public works also require capital.
Which means someone was being taxed, and someone was laying in the pipes in order to get votes.
I often regret how little I know about British history.
In France in the 1980s the closest toilet to my tiny walk up apartment (7th floor) was a hole in the floor of a closet. The whole top floor used the same hole, and there were lots of kids in the apartment next door (about sixteen of them, it seemed) and they needed to work on their aim.
I think all that has finally changed, but only in the last twenty-five years.
I've only been to England twice, and liked it. They seemed up to date.
One more note on sewerage. In India, apparently, there are 600 million people there who go on the street and have never used a toilet.
Clean water is still hard to get in many places and you have to hike a mile or more to get it.
I imagine this is still far better than in many places in Africa?
Or in SE Asia?
I don'tknow how well the toilet system works in North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe or other socialist and communist countries that remain. Rural China?
Where the elite doesn't have to fear votes, I fear that not much would get done. Probably the tubing is pretty good as it leaves the dictators' homes though, or else heads would roll.
It would hardly be fair, but North and South Korea would probably be a good place to think about collectivization versus privatization of industry.
Somehow the voting gives the poor a chance to express their trust or distrust of a policy which pure collectivization (in which all power lies in the hands of one person and their yes-men and women) denies.
Democracy is a kind of collectivization then?
Again, we could check the plumbing of Vietnam (which American communists like Ayers wanted to go communist) against say, Japan, which went very much toward capitalism. Which place would have better hygiene in terms of sewerage and clean water and good food?
Democracy is actually a far more robust form of collectivization in that far more people can express their will, via the vote.
This started to speed up after the American Revolution --
Blake and the Romantics still had a royalty to deal with (in England, heads never rolled as they did across the Channel).
Liberal capitalist democracy (without one's own money one is never quite in the driving seat and remains an infantilized passenger in the back seat), is probably again the best at providing for sewerage and clean water.
Also, in democracies the emergence of writers such as Dickens and Upton Sinclair became possible through increased democratization of media and mass literacy, and freedom of speech.
Freedom of entreprenurial behavior is very closely linked to this new kind of power.
Dickens is a great English novelist for a number of reasons, not least because his themes often called attention to social ills attendant to England's Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, as other "industrial age" novelists of the time, Dickens' novels are prone to some exaggeration and hyperbole (particularly in characterisation), as has been pointed out by a number of critics and historians of the period.
I like this, because it points out something that I've long felt to be true - people romanticize the past because they don't accept/acknowledge/Feeel the actual grubbiness and dirtiness of the environment.
What's being argued here is that progress Has been made. And that progress is good, and possible, and that that which came before is not necessarily better than that which comes after. And that capitalism is a Big part of progress.
Capitalism came along and improved a lot of things, but then capitalism, like every other system, needs tweaking and boundaries to create better lives.
Government rules and regulations can protect us from the negatives of unfettered capitalism - this is why life in the latter half of the 20th century was much better than life during the first few decades thereof.
The righties' whole mantra of 'regulation is always bad' and 'government denies us freedom' is popp-e-cock!
Bad regulation is bad, and freedom-denying government programs are freedom-denying - but many regulations are Good, and many government programs Enhance freedom and safety, not detract from it.
And regulations need to change over time. The whole financial mess wasn't caused by simple over or under-regulation, it was caused by both - it was caused by the existence of outdated regulations and systems for assigning value to investments, compounded by the striking of regulations that protected our overall economy from high-risk activities.
Kirby,
In thinking about this a bit more, I'm inclined to believe that von Mises got the causality backwards, i.e., that improvements in sanitation (and transportation) enabled an expansion in the size of cities, and through this the creation of a potential laboring class that early capitalists were able to employ.
Mises argues that this sylvan hypothesis -- that the poor were in rosy circumstances on the heath -- was not accurate.
I believe von Mises gets this wrong. In pre-industrialized rural England, episodes of poor health had high mortality, and this was especially true of children. A reasonably likely health profile for someone in pre-industrial rural England is that they were in excellent health until the week they died. That week, though, might have come at three, or five, or fifteen, or twenty-seven.
It is sustained survival in the face of ill-health that requires access to care, clean water sources, etc. So paradoxically, a longer life expectancy may well be correlated with poorer average lifetime health. Von Mises makes the classical error of correlational analysis in assuming that causes of variation with populations (in this case, health vs. life-expectancy) explain the variation between populations. It's not necessarily so.
Brett, there has to be some regulation. Hygiene in kitchens, for instance. Decent food and water. Wiring in homes. No asbestos. Schools should graduate literate students. Hospitals shouldn't kill patients. Terrible drugs should be outlawed. Murdering people for hire should be outlawed. Smoking in public should be abolished. And of course dogs should only be allowed on the moons of Neptune.
Stu, Mises believes that capitalism provides a clear grid for success that other systems such as socialism don't provide. So, businessmen are trying to provide customers with products that satisfy them. Toilet paper that is soft, smells good, is strong enough to not disintegrate while getting its work done, but not so strong that it removes the skin. No easy feat to come up with Charmin! The Soviets couldn't come up with anything close because there was no profit in it, so no excitement in the chase!
Plumbing has advanced through a similar one upmanship. We'll pay for a better toilet. Even roads. Around here they're experimenting with a very irritating road method which has a layer of oil laid down and then gravel, and cars crunch the gravel down into the oil. This is hard on cars for about three months but then makes very strong roads. I'm curious to see if they will last.
I assume computer science advances through this kind of interplay between a risk, and to see if it plays out. If it does, then there's more profit made. If it doesn't (like the Edsel) it goes off the market, and something else takes its place. It's more like evolution in this way, and thus more natural.
The arts are similar in their evolution, but this is tricky. Many are content with mere entertainment. My kids went ot see the Smurfs with their mom today.
My daughter is meanwhile an actress in a play by Seneca. Seneca is not easy. This play has murder, rape, betrayal, and so on, but it is very hard to follow. Most don't get it, but it's for a small but intense audience. Baudelaire said his poetry wouldn't make an immediate profit, but would make a good lasting profit over a fifty year period.
Bestsellers sell within a week more than most poetry books sell in ten years. But some classic books of poetry do well over a century. Baudelaire still sells! I was walking through the town today (a tiny town) and saw inscribed in the sidewalk "les ailes de neant" -- Baudelaire (wings of nothingness).
I was stupefied. Who did that?
It's hard to compare art with plumbing. They are somehow different, in ways that I think are hard to understand. Van Gogh was not appreciated in his lifetime. Even Baudelaire did not make a lot of money off his poetry. But it's a small market of people (not all people need poetry -- it might be about 1% or less of the population that buys books of poetry). But then almost everyone has read Charles Bukowski, or Billy Collins. They aren't too bad.
They fit into the realm of entertainment.
But we all need improvements. We're all looking for plumbing solutions.
"In the United States you hear of something new, some improvement, almost every week... thousands of business people are trying day and night to find some new product which satisfies the consumer better... And the effect is that you have an increase in the standard of living which is almost miraculous when compared with the conditions existing fifty years ago. But in the Soviet Union, you do not have such a comparable improvement, because the system they have slows down innovation since you first have to go to a planning board, and try to get them to take on a toaster or a television whose innovations may not seem immediately interesting -- any more than new art was interesting to Adolf Hitler..."
(36).
He thinks if there are enough factions competing, with enough innovators, the market will break through with new and exciting products, unless of course the thrill is taken out of it by spoilsports among the taxmen who take away all the rewards.
Blake and the Romantics still had a royalty to deal with (in England, heads never rolled as they did across the Channel)
Charles I might take issue with this claim. Monarchy in England was never quite the same after Charles lost his head. England made a transition to limited or constitutional monarchy a full century before the French began taking the idea seriously.
Kirby,
I agree with von Mises regarding his basic point that capitalism provides opportunity, and that it is especially successful in bringing a diversity of goods and services to the marketplace. I'm no advocate of a planned economy. I'm mostly quibbling around the edges of his argument, places where I think an uncritical "capitalism is good, and the purer the better" mantra have led him into error. This is panglossian BS.
Brett articulated the basic truth well, i.e., that there's a "Laffer curve," or "Goldilocks" phenomenon w.r.t. government participation in the markets. Not too little, not too much, but just right.
Let me tackle a big issue here, and that is the size of the marketplace, and the interaction between the market for good and services, and the market for labor. Unrestricted capitalism initially produces a capitalist class of haves and laboring class of have nots. This, in a fundamental way, limits the productivity of pure capitalist economies, because the laboring class's participation in the market for goods is extremely limited. It is only when capitalism develops to a level that there's significant competition for labor, and so a laboring class that also has disposable resources, that capitalism really starts to take off, first through an expansion of the internal market, and second, because this provides the excess resources that allow ambitious members of the laboring class the opportunity to take a run at becoming capitalists themselves. Indeed, in a mature capitalist economy, there's a blurring of the line between laboring and capitalist classes, and the emergence of a vital middle class.
Looking at this another way, the America you long for isn't the America of the 1890's in which the capitalists had the upper hand, it is the America of the 1950's and 60's, where a laborer could get a job that provided a reasonable standard of living for him and his family. This is very much an America that was shaped by a competitive market for labor, and which made the internal US market the largest in the world. The success of capitalism does not come just from the ideas and initiative of entrepreneurs, but also from way that it can create a large market that magnifies the economic value of their ideas and products.
So what went wrong? I think a big part of this is "the Mexico problem," which took two forms. The first is that Mexico, as of the start of NAFTA, had an immature capitalist system that produced few jobs, and had little competition for labor. This resulted in a tremendous incentive for profit seeking enterprise in the US to relocate labor-intensive parts of their business (like manufacturing) to Mexico. The second problem is simply geographic, and the lack of jobs in Mexico, together with the capitalist's desire to reduce the costs of labor here, has driven illegal immigration and undermined the competitive market for labor in this country, especially in entry-level and unskilled jobs.
Oddly enough, we seem to have reached equilibrium w.r.t. Mexico, in that economic opportunity for laborers entering the job market is no longer greater here than there, and this has reversed the direction of the demographic flow of population from Mexico to the US. In the meantime, revolutions in transportation have enabled the expansion of the markets for both goods and labor to other countries (notably China), where the first Mexico problem is being replayed.
In the end, I expect that the basic strengths of the capitalist system will assert itself in these developing economies, and the long-view, after the fact analysis of these free trade agreements will be that they were successful in expanding capitalism and raising the world's standard of living. But, in the short run, the capitalist class in this country is benefiting from the expansion of markets for labor to the detriment of the laboring class in this country. That's the reality against which calls for shared sacrifice need to be evaluated.
Kirby:
Your thesis is marginally interesting, but you make several glaring errors of interpretation.
First, equating the theoretical propositions of Marx, and other early socialist theorists--both those who proceed him, and those who follow--with the crude expression of those analyses as seen in the birth and development of the Soviet Union and Communist China, is a big mistake. Were/are the Soviet and Chinese "experiments" pure attempts at a full realization--assuming we know what that was--of the socialist dream? Who's to say?
People doubt whether Marx would ever have "approved" of what had been made out of his ideas. In any even, what good does it do to try to see the "failure" of Soviet government and expansion as a pretext for repudiating or revoking every liberalization in the West since 1800? It seems a very naive and circular argument.
The evils of the factory system of early and middle industrialism aren't somehow vindicated by the ambition and greed of capitalism. The progress science made over the half millennium since the Renaissance would undoubtedly have led to modernizations in life and work, despite the excesses of the Victorian Age.
The other peculiar mistake you make is equating the Communist Party leaders with the Feudal lords of the Middle Ages--as if they were the "return" of nobility, rule by divine right, and the rigid class system. They have nothing in common.
The notion that capitalism is okay, because the system it replaced, was not as good as we may like to imagine it was (i.e., rosy pastoral purity), is pretty flimsy too. Portraying this as "improvement" by contrast isn't very convincing. Which would be better: Being an apprentice blacksmith in a small village, or working in a factory in Victorian England? Comparison like this are invidious.
The fact that Soviet bureaucracy failed to provide an adequate infrastructure for its citizens is not an argument "in favor" of fake created "shortages" (and price-fixing), for instance, which drive up prices in capitalist systems. We all pay more for oil, for instance, because cartels and harvesters alike collude set up price "levels" unnaturally high, and keep them there. "Market forces" can be a drastically problematic as "planned" inefficiency.
These arguments over primary causation are futile, because the development of history is the record of incremental facilitations, which were co-dependent and chronological. One thing led to another, but there was no single driving theme which united these piecemeal advances. One thing could not have happened without the other. Was the development of sewage technology "caused" by capitalism, or the growth of cities, or the (scientific) discovery of the connection between bad sewage treatment and disease? Obviously it's a combination of these things, and other things as well.
Kirby, you could include, instead, pictures of Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, whom I like even less than Dick Van Dyke. That would provoke me even more.
"capitalism provides a clear grid for success that other systems such as socialism don't provide. So, businessmen are trying to provide customers with products that satisfy them."
Kirby, this really had me in the aisles.
Capitalism is never about meeting needs. It's about creating needs. Then it's about utilizing the exploitation of product to reinforce that "need" and keep churning it out, usually as a de-facto monopoly, for endless profit. The fulfillment of need, as defined, is usually only a residual consequence of capitalism. That's why corporations fight so hard to protect their rights, because their paradigm is so often based on, or enhanced by exploitation--pollution, and suppression of labor are its hallmarks.
Another aspect of late capitalism is the dumbing down and deterioration of product as a direct result of the "efficiencies" of capitalist enterprise. Everything these days is made cheaper and cheaper, so the actual quality of life declines. We have to keep buying more and more junk, much of which is crummy and doesn't work. Greed doesn't necessarily dictate quality--actually the opposite. Competition actually drives lower quality.
I vote to censure Billy Collins, because he merely entertains his audience. What does he teach us?
No teach, no party.
Collins on the bonfire!
Stu, Is there a kind of wage control in China? That is, does government there artificially fix the price of labor? I assume that this can be discovered, but don't have time to do the research.
I assume if they fix the prices of goods, then they can also fix the price of labor.
I remember reading in a very small article once in the local paper about how a group of chinese in some small town were protesting windtowers (which are illegal now in many townships in this county because citizens think they will spoil the views for which they moved up here from the city).
The Chinese army came and shot 200 of the protesters -- men, women, and children.
I assume if they can do that, then can also fix the price of labor.
What I'm driving at is that -- unless there is a world-wide liberal capitalism, we can be undercut by communist governments that use their population as the equivalent of slaves. They tell the slaves where they can live, what they can say, what they think, where they will live, and what price they will work at.
It's difficult for American workers to undercut such unnaturally harsh conditions, which are naturally conducive to better profits up to a point esp. when selling those goods back to our citizens.
It's a strange set of vectors to understand.
Mises is not 100% against government -- he thinks government is best at eliminating "the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, an dit should defend the country against foreign enemies" but he doesn't think the government should intervene in industry or the economy -- he includes the postal office, railroads, and so on, because he thinks these can be better run by private industry. His reasons are complicated and run on for pages.
But even when the highway supervisor lays in a new road we can fire them by electing another supervisor if they do a bad job, or select a stupid paving material.
So in a sense even with government they are susceptible to pressures from below in a liberal capitalist elective democracy (not true in a socialist dictatorship).
curtis, we are all familiar with the dodge of the Marxists that what passed for Marxism under the Khmer Rouge, under North Korea, under China, Ceausescu, Stalin, (Hitler) etc. etc. is not what they meant. But it's what they got, and they still have to deal with that.
The suspension of voting, the suspension of freedom of speech, the ownership of all capital by the state which is in turn run by a small elite of party officials who will eventually wither away, is a recipe that Marx called for rather exactly. I don't see any excuse to try it again.
Craig, give us some examples of how the British liberalized, where the French didn't?
Kirby,
Stu, Is there a kind of wage control in China? That is, does government there artificially fix the price of labor? I assume that this can be discovered, but don't have time to do the research.
I assume if they fix the prices of goods, then they can also fix the price of labor.
You should have noticed that China has essentially made a transition from centrally planned economies to early capitalism, with all of the varied blessings and curses thereof. This isn't to say that the transition is complete, nor that the central planners have relinquished all control, but it is to note that your understanding the Chinese economy is sadly dated.
And I'm surprised that you haven't internalized the significance of the pay controversies at Foxconn, which were front-page news about a year ago The working conditions at Foxconn were reminiscient of the conditions at the early mills in the US -- Lowell in particular comes to mind. There was a run of suicides at Foxconn, all attributed to the working conditions, and this resulted in terrible publicity to the companies that it supplied, notably Apple. This in turn lead to changes at Foxconn, under customer pressure, including a doubling of the base wage, IIRC.
All in all, I expect that the larger amounts of capital in play today, coupled with existing strong markets elsewhere, will mean that China will go through the early capitalist phase faster than the US did, but they're not out of it yet.
Curtis Faville's assertions about supposedly untried "Platonic" pie-in-the-sky Marxism might be called a form of "late" Marxist apologetics that survive particularly among American hothouse academics afflicted with "logorrhea" and in less pompous and verbose forms among patrons of college-town red bookstores.
Marx himself was a failed revolutionary during the violent 1848 European revolutions and was put to flight from Germany for his role in them, so he seems to have opted for post-exilic excogitations of "theory." Now the test of a "good" "humanist" (and we recall Marxists claims to be "humanists," despite their manifest world-historical levels of inhumanity) theorist often takes the shape of arguing at tedious length for as many counterfactual positions defying common reason as possible. Whence come howlers like
"[c]apitalism is never about meeting needs," but is only "endless profit," "exploitation,"
"pollution," "exploitation of labor," "lower quality," declining "quality of life," "de-facto monopoly," etc., etc. Well, selling a theorist of today a pair of socks that wears into lace at the heels too soon or his witnessing of a little child playing with some made-in-China dollar-store bauble, and "theory" is what you get.
And then there's CF's term "late capitalism," which suggests some Hegelian successor to it that remains as yet mysterious. Perhaps a consultation with the latest Marxist reincarnation of the Cumaean Sybl might yield some or another counterfactual answer to what "late capitalism" may be. Indeed the need for humour cries out for it. . . .
Eesh.
First of all Mises is a real, old-school, no regulation capitalist which means that in his view of capitalism there's no collusion because there's no government protection for such a thing.
Secondly, if you don't think Collins doesn't intend his poetry to educate then you've never read "Introduction to Poetry" or "The History Teacher." Though I don't love Collins' work (and have heard he's not a nice person), these poems are good for what they do and fit my previous definition of art.
Thirdly, our increases in life expectancy are due to scientific discoveries, infrastructure, and greater access to wealth (remember the "chicken in a pot" slogan from a mere 70 years ago? Now it would have to be a lobster in every pot and a Beemer in every driveway to make an impact).
One of these (scientific discoveries) is largely the work of autodidacts, iconoclasts, and other assorted geniuses.
The other two are a result of people working together. In a place where people work together of their own volition you continue to see growth. In a place where people are forced to work together you see stagnation.
There's an article in Politico about how BO chose a famous and possibly important Norman Rockwell painting to put up in the WH.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61677.html
Rockwell could be stunning and I think will eventually be revived. There was a lot of resentment against him at the time because he was not an abstract expressionist. But the regionalists are all being reconsidered (Charles Burchfield is also a stunner!).
Stu, what the Chinese and the pundits say about the Chinese economy probably bears no relationship to what's really going on there. And it also may vary from region to region. I really don't know.
There is almost no information going into or coming out of China that we can really count on. They still lock up writers.
Cuba is another case in point. They claim they have incredible longevity. Who would be allowed to dispute this? Freedom of speech is not a high priority.
Mises states in his book thatsocialist countries clamp entirely down on any and every kind of freedom. He puts the Nazis into this camp because he says that there was no freedom whatsoever within their economy.
"...in Hitler's Germany there was no private enterprise or private initiative. In Hitler's Germany there was a system of socialism which differed from the Russian system only to the extent that the terminology and labels of the free economic system were still retained. There still existed 'private enterprises,' as they were called. but the owner was no longer an entrepreneur, the owner was called a 'shop manager' (Betriebsfuhrer)" (47).
As I read this I wondered if something similar wasn't happening in China. The dogs' leashes were let out a bit, but they were still on leashes.
Occasionally you get an article in the papers about someone having complained in China. But typically this means they were shot down like dogs.
A woman in some shop complained about being raped by her managers. It was investigated. It was decided that the managers didn't rape her, and she was crazy. She disappeared.
What was amazing is that the complaint ever surfaced!
This means it's a somewhat looser society than North Korea.
Some information, and some trade, gets in, and gets out.
Mises believes this kind of topdown control begins with something simple like the price of milk. But then it ends up having to be eggs, too. Then bread. Then gasoline. Then labor price. Then who works where. But unless the whole society is clamped down, there is no control at all, and then what happens is that everything that's produced is garbage because there is no incentive to produce anything of quality and no competition.
So the economy begins to cave in, and chaos results when the government begins to print more money to pay its debts.
He's more or less for the gold standard.
I don't know if JADL would agree but I see socialism as essentially a euphemism for communism. Let's just admit that even in terms of their etymological meaning -- the social and the common -- are identical.
People make a big deal that they are not the same thing. And yet, they are the same thing.
the idea is to turn government into a big brother. Many people have faith in big government. I think it's a terrifying concept.
President Grover Cleveland (a Democrat) vetoed a decision of Congress to help a small community that had been hit by a disaster. Cleveland wrote,
"While it is the duty of the citizens to support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the citizens." (cited in Mises, 66).
we now have a government that supports a huge percentage of the citizens (how many?), and is also paying for military installations around the globe, and is now busy remaking crummy countries all over the Islamic sphere into democracies (with scant lasting success).
I think Mises would flip.
Mises, in fact, is a lot like Ron Paul, only he's better writer.
Ron Paul is the flibbertigibbet version of Mises.
The Chinese regulate down to the small details such as how many children you're permitted to have. I doubt if there's much room for a free economy. Let's see: no to freedom of speech. No to freedom of choice. No to freedom of religion.
Maybe there is some area where they permit a robust libertarian enjoyment such as the ability to march with a permit in Peking.
I wish there was better information. But wherever the left are in control, you have to remember that they always already also control the information.
"Curtis Faville's assertions about supposedly untried "Platonic" pie-in-the-sky Marxism might be called a form of "late" Marxist apologetics that survive particularly among American hothouse academics afflicted with "logorrhea" and in less pompous and verbose forms among patrons of college-town red bookstores."
Let's get one thing clear. I am not a Marxist, have never been one, and have no intention of being one in the future. Are there such beasts out there any more? I doubt it. So please drop the "you're a closet-academic-fellow-traveler-pinko bullshit--it's tiresome.
The reference was to the theoretical writings of Marx. You can read them, or not, as you please. No one anymore thinks of him, or them as "ideal" ("pie-in-the-sky"). We could argue about their validity, but it's a dead argument, don't you think? Kirby keeps bringing him up, as if he were the only alternative to reactionary conservatism. If you're tired of talking about Marx, tell Kirby.
It is useful, however, not to confuse theoretical 19th Century Marxism (in its various flavors), with the complex and evolving socialistic "applications" during the 20th. This does not mean, JA, that one "idealizes" Marx while denigrating Soviet failures. Both are complex things, and shouldn't be conflated or oversimplified for the sake of argument. Lenin and Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev. Trotsky. Jesus, do we really need to go over all that old ground? "Late capitalism"--well, anything that's 250 years old is getting a bit late, no? "It's a new day," darling, but we weren't born yesterday, either. None of this is to be construed as an "apologetics" for Marxism, socialism, Communism or any of the governing bodies which go by any of these names.
Addressing the problems and shortcomings of capitalism doesn't necessarily involve one in a discussion of Communism, or of Marxism--a fact which Kirby chooses to ignore. Parliamentary democracy upon the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism remains an unrealized ideal, badly in need of fine-tuning. One could make the same kind of criticism you make of the Marx-Soviet connection, of Jeffersonian (or Hamiltonian) free-market utopia. We aren't there yet.
"Marx himself was a failed revolutionary during the violent 1848 European revolutions and was put to flight from Germany for his role in them, so he seems to have opted for post-exilic excogitations of "theory."
What has any of this to do with the argument about the connection between Blake and chimney-sweeps? Lest you soil your starched cuffs with needless ink, I think we could all do with a little less pretentiousness of this "post-exilic excogitations" brand, okay? Some of the greatest political tracts have been composed in prison, after all. Persecution is the familiar circumstance of all religious martyrs.
End Part I
Part II
"Now the test of a "good" "humanist" (and we recall Marxists claims to be "humanists," despite their manifest world-historical levels of inhumanity) theorist often takes the shape of arguing at tedious length for as many counterfactual positions defying common reason as possible."
How's that again? In other words, anyone who espouses a social conscience must by definition be a benighted failed "humanist"-commie mouthing unreasonable "counterfactual" (I really like that pathetic jargon!) positions.
"Whence come howlers like "[c]apitalism is never about meeting needs," but is only "endless profit," "exploitation," "pollution," "exploitation of labor," "lower quality," declining "quality of life," "de-facto monopoly," etc., etc."
We might test these theses against the performance of all the major petroleum corporations, and their behavior, since about 1900. Or against the coal mining industry. Or against the copper mining corporations. Or against the wood product corporations. Or against the merchant marine shipping industry. The history of the performance and behavior of such "institutions" of capitalism provides an inexhaustible source of corruption, exploitation, thievery, deception, violence, collusion, etc., etc. If this history were indeed lily-white and innocent of all this, then indeed we might regard criticism as "howlers."
" Well, selling a theorist of today a pair of socks that wears into lace at the heels too soon or his witnessing of a little child playing with some made-in-China dollar-store bauble, and "theory" is what you get."
What you get is American corporations doing the bidding of foreign capital. Who really runs Wal-Mart? Is the tail not in fact wagging the dog? How many manufacturing jobs have been lost in America? Putting short-term profit before domestic welfare produces exactly the kind of unemployment and slipping GDP which you blame on the Democrats.
"And then there's CF's term "late capitalism," which suggests some Hegelian successor to it that remains as yet mysterious. Perhaps a consultation with the latest Marxist reincarnation of the Cumaean Sybl might yield some or another counterfactual answer to what "late capitalism" may be. Indeed the need for humour cries out for it. . . ."
I didn't invent the term late capitalism. You could look it up. Is there a secret agenda to the term? Do you concoct ghosts hiding inside closets "waiting in the wings" to "succeed" in the Hegelian triad of synthetic socialism? Please. . .
"Oh, Dame Liberty," he shrieks, "the bitch is mine!!"
"Late capitalism" from Wikipedia:
"The term "late capitalism" was first used by Werner Sombart in his 1902 magnum opus Der Moderne Kapitalismus; Sombart distinguished between early capitalism, the heyday of capitalism and late capitalism. The term began to be used by socialists in Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many economists believed capitalism was doomed [2] and it was used in the 1960s particularly in Germany and Austria, among others by Western Marxists writing in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Austromarxism."
The term is over a hundred years old, and has many uses, but its initiator, Werner sombart, is a fascinating figure as he was a big wheel in the Third Reich.
His books were published by Princeton UP, among others.
Mises writes of him, "Werner Sombart, a professor of economics, simply says, 'The Fuhrer, our Fuhrer,' he means, of course, Hitler 'gets his orders directly from God, the Fuhrer of the Universe ... Of course Professor Sombart said very modestly: 'We do not know how God communicates with the Fuhrer. But the fact cannot be denied."
So, the term "late capitalism" originates with one of the top proponents of national socialism.
Of course the term was picked up by creeps like Jameson and others who later lynched their students at Duke, but it's hard to know if they knew where the term had been, fashions being what they are.
Kirby,
The Chinese regulate down to the small details such as how many children you're permitted to have. I doubt if there's much room for a free economy.
Spare me. Go read the CIA World Factbook article on China, paying special attention to the section labelled Economy.
Oh, and welcome to the 21st Century. A few things have changed, but hang around, pay attention, and you'll be fine.
Sombart is a figure that probably deserves more attention, along with the phrase he coined. The jury's out on how Nazi he was -- but I thought JADL would enjoy the strange parallels of his work to Heidegger (also quite popular in the new left -- along with Paul Deman -- an actual subscriber to the Nazi ideology -- and for whom Derrida worked as apologist).
One of the fascinating moves of the Austrian school is to show how close the socialism of Stalin and Hitler was to being the same thing. But outside of that school, it's hotly debated. Obviously the left doesn't like much to be linked to the Nazis.
Any more than the Chinese want it known that they harvest organs from political prisoners to give to the aging brass.
"During the Weimar Republic, Sombart moved toward nationalism, and his relation to Nazism is still debated today.
In 1934 he published Deutscher Sozialismus where he claimed a "new spirit" was beginning to "rule mankind". The age of capitalism and proletarian socialism was over and with "German socialism" (National-Socialism) taking over. This German socialism puts the "welfare of the whole above the welfare of the individual".[5] German socialism must effect a "total ordering of life" with a "planned economy in accordance with state regulations".[6] The new legal system will confer on individuals "no rights but only duties" and that "the state should never evaluate individual persons as such, but only the group which represents these persons".[7] German socialism is accompanied by the Volksgeist (national spirit) which is not racial in the biological sense but metaphysical: "the German spirit in a Negro is quite as much within the realm of possibility as the Negro spirit in a German".[8] The antithesis of the German spirit is the Jewish spirit, which is not a matter of being born Jewish or believing in Judaism but is a capitalistic spirit.[9] The English people possess the Jewish spirit and the "chief task" of the German people and National Socialism is to destroy the Jewish spirit.[9]
However, his 1938 anthropology book, Vom Menschen, is clearly anti-Nazi, and was indeed hindered in publication and distribution by the Nazis. In his attitude towards the Nazis, he is often likened to Martin Heidegger as well as his younger friend and colleague Carl Schmitt, but it is clear that, while the latter two tried to be the vanguard thinkers for the Third Reich in their field and only became critical when they were too individualistic and elbowed out from their power positions, Sombart was always much more ambivalent. Sombart had many, indeed more than the typical proportion, of Jewish students, most of whom felt moderately positive about him after the war, although he clearly was no hero nor resistance fighter."
Chinese organ harvesting was in Rolling Stock, Ed Dorn's poetry journal of the 1980s. It's still around. It is mostly done to Christians.
Here's a more recent article. I suppose this is the kind of capitalism that Stu is talking about as having emerged in China recently.
As in "Capital, I say old chap, got some organs?"
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/mar/23/20060323-114842-5680r/
Marxism is of course merely state capitalism.
The good thing about American capitalism is that it posits various factions playing against each other.
In Chinese state capitalism it's the state against everyone, and you'd better run if you go up against the Chinese state!
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/mar/23/20060323-114842-5680r/
The CIA report on China was not terribly clear or impressive, but this sentence jumped out:
"Still, per capita income is below the world average."
This means that individuals are not raking in money. The country is raking in money, and no doubt the party is going full tilt, but individuals outside the party (which is probably where the money is getting invested) are more or less paupers.
This is the case in every communist country.
When there is a stimulus, it goes directly to party members and their state-run businesses (they might be allowed some initiative in terms of how to run it, but the profits are seized and put back into coffers that are controlled by the party elite).
I have heard of wealthy outliers in Shanghai who have gotten ahead quickly, but there is always the fear of their assets being seized. And we don't know exactly who they are.
We do know that imprisonment for Christians is a near certainty, and that even the party approved Christians are frequently rounded up and disappear, with their physical remains never recovered by families. Meanwhile, organs are harvested for the party elite.
It's a vast criminal empire with far better public relations than say North Korea but no less draconian.
Kirby,
I suppose this is the kind of capitalism that Stu is talking about as having emerged in China recently.
I'd like to make two things clear: I'm not an apologist for the Chinese, and I'm not an apologist for your ignorance.
The Chinese are attempting to do something that you simply cannot comprehend, which is to mix a free-market economic system with a totalitarian political system. There are political theorists who will claim that this is an impossibility. I can only suggest that they visit the capitalist police state of Singapore, but I'd remind them not to litter and to flush the toilets.
The challenge to you is that you believe that you've become such an anti-communist caricature of yourself that you've made capitalism the linchpin of your belief system, and you've convinced yourself that everything that is right abour our society flows from it's capitalist economic structure. China, indeed Singapore, provide clear counter-examples. Indeed, so does our own country, whose political revolution preceded its industrial revolution.
And your reaction is simply to deny the counter-example. China is not free, and that I'll grant. Therefore, in your mind, it must be communist. But this then is a prediction, not an observation. And it's a false one, and so represents a falsification of your central econo-political belief.
The CIA report on China was not terribly clear or impressive, but this sentence jumped out:
"Still, per capita income is below the world average."
It's clear. The problem is that it documents something that you believe cannot exist, and conflating confusion with denial. The key word in this sentence isn't "below," it's "still." Moving mountains takes time, and China has a big economic mountain to move. It's clear to those who are paying attention, which you're clearly not, that China is moving up in the world in terms of income, education, etc. Their intention is to pass us, and whether or not they make it, that's the direction they're heading.
I've limited time, so just a quick message.
I know Curtis Faville's claimed not to be a Marxist, and I've accepted his word on that, however much his charges against capitalism echo those of Marxists.
But he must be blind not to acknowledge the existence and influence of Marxist criticism and theory in the humanities. Some of the overt representatives of this kind of thought have been given here again and again, such as Eagleton, Jameson, and Hobsbawm (who to this day excogitates the wing-chair theory that the price of 20 million Russian deaths was easily worth the establishment of the Soviet state). Many could be added to the list.
Communism is a form of socialism--I'm still with Kirby on that. And yes, communism has many forms, depending on the country ravaged by with this theoretical and actual monster. But I'd agree that there are many nuances to Marxist theory and practise, just as there are for forms of fascism as they played out historically.
One reason why I mentioned Marx (and I've read a good deal of him, though, thankfully, not all of "Das Kapital") as a failed revolutionary (and one of my former teachers, Oscar J Hammen wrote "The Red 48ers," detailing his failed efforts at practising revolution) and his retreat to "theory" was to offer a parallel to those Western intellectuals who adopt Marxist "theory" while disavowing any responsibility of Marx's theories for the mass murder, oppression, and brutality committed by Marxist regimes (again, reference Stephane Courtois's scholarly "The Black Book of Communism").
The absurdity of CF's statement that capitalism is never about meeting needs is even too much for CF, since he seems to hedge back a few lines later and admit it might "residually" meet some needs after all. Yes, capitalists create value in supplying their customers' needs, or as CF would probably have it, for their whims, as for food, clothing, housing, transportation, medical care, education, entertainment, etc.
If I've time later to weigh in on this discussion, I'd like to make a few points about capitalism as an economic system as opposed to an all-embracing (totalitarian) theory of societal organisation like Marxism.
Stu, they're getting there through cheap tricks, and by stealing our products, and our money. Obama is facilitating this, whether he's aware of it, or not.
They are also a sponsor of communist terror around the world: they are propping up North Korea, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and they were the ones helping the northern Sudan to cream the southern Sudanese and the Christians in the Darfur.
Yes, they are moving up, but it's not affecting their poorest, because they don't want a middle class.
This is the last and the most dangerous of the Stalinist states, succeeding partially because they are flying under the radar of many. This is the most monstrous state in the world today.
Even North Korea is not as bad because it's global reach is not anything like China's.
China threatens to turn us all into serfs once more.
Again, you have to think about capitalism in two varieties:
1. individual capitalism (which is good)
2. state capitalism (which is bad)
Just thought I'd simplify this for you, because I agree that Communist China is capitalist, and have been saying this for some time that Marxism IS capitalist.
It's just state capitalism. This is the same thing the Nazis and the Stalinists had.
Singapore is a tiny place and of no threat to anyone outside of its borders, so I don't think we need to consider it as the bizarre anomaly that it is, as having worrisome global aspects.
To answer yet again JA's charges regarding the meaning and significance of capitalism, let's try to think of it in two ways--
Capitalism nice.
Capitalism mean.
Nice capitalism in modest forms enables individuals and small groups to run businesses and trades which supply products and services to the general public (or some version of it--like a church, a school, a public park, a national guard) for a "competitive price." Mean capitalism multiplies this formula, growing into huge conglomerations which produce on vast scales and amass enormous amounts of wealth. Small scale capitalization is nice, because it preserves the connection between supplier and supplied, produces modest profits which sustain living, and creates stability and continuity in the community. Large scale capitalization breaks down the bond between producer, product and consumer, and integrates functions vertically and horizontally to create efficiencies of scale which enable mass production and distribution webs.
Capitalism nice is a single family home loan, a single self-employed entrepreneur business loan. Capitalism mean is a developer loan which enables the construction of huge tacts of cookie-cutter "communities."
Limitation of space dictates we summarize--this is a complex subject. We need both kinds of capitalism in the modern world. You can't build automobiles, or computers, efficiently, on a small scale. But you can build better homes and teach college courses, on a smaller scale.
When businesses become so big that the amount of capital they generate is greater by degree than the majority of value owned or controlled by the majority, you begin to have political and social problems as a result. The priorities built into large scale capital expansion create disconformities which usually threaten the well-being or economic security of society as a whole.
As a producer of things people need, capitalism has a miraculous capacity. But large scale economic engines aren't created, and maintained, to enhance the public good--their primary motive force is the generation of profits. To that extent, any favorable effect large scale entities such as corporations may have is purely gratuitous.
The commoditization and branding of everything into the system of artificial desire and "market demand" has been well-documented by later economic theorists, such as Adorno.
I don't think serious thinkers today believe that planned economies are a real alternative to free market ones. Most people are perfectly willing to let capital disport within the context of product development, wide media advertising and consumption of resource. Most communities bend well over backwards to please large scale manufacturing and development, in order to benefit from residual taxes, employment, and the influx of capital.
But globalization is pitting whole national economies against each other, challenging the connection between large scale ("mean") capital, and its putative "consumers" (the citizens of this country). This has resulted in the large scale "betrayals"--big capital gets all the perks and safe-haven protection it needs here, while manipulating discontinuities of scale, which exert great economic pressure in both places. Capital may profit by these discontinuities, but who else does? The economic benefits to be derived by large entity capital begin to resemble a form of international bribery and theft. A petroleum corporate executive views a third world nation with petroleum deposits as kind of whore who can generate large profits, but may be irreparably damaged in the process. It serves the corporation to extract as much booty, with the least amount of fuss, and then make a quick getaway. This is happening around the world. Consumers of oil products all "benefit" from this exploitation, but is it really necessary? Is there no alternative to this model?
"Mean capitalism" is merely state capitalism, which is practiced both in the US and China to varying degrees.
You can call it statism as well.
Craig, give us some examples of how the British liberalized, where the French didn't?
England liberalized by importing their monarchs from Germany and exiling their indigenous monarchs to France.
I agree that there are corporate criminals, and corporate criminality, but don't agree that capitalism on a large-scale cannot serve the customers fairly, or that capitalism on a small scale can't commit crimes.
Milk companies are big, and take milk from many small farmers around the country, and by and large give us a safe and nutritious product.
A small scale heroin dealer in Chicago on the other hand is only providing deaths in exchange for a quick turnover rate.
The manufacture of baseballs in Costa Rica does help the locals in Costa Rica. They provide pretty good balls, at a fraction of the price for which we could manufacture them, since the wages are so much lower (the entire Costa Rican factory payroll comes out to less than the average salary of one MLB player).
China has tried to get this business, too.
Chinese manufacture is sinister insofar as it also bankrolls places like North Korea. In a sense, our purchases of Chinese products pay for North Korea and Myanmar, and the total destruction of Tibet.
I don't know who the giant milk manufacturers are these days in America. I do know a few local dairy farmers (who are very squeezed by the federal limits placed on milk prices). It can put you out of business, those mandated milk prices.
Farming has gotten more complex since Roosevelt because there are so many overarching federal agencies.
Hoover tried to fight them, and to slim down the government with his Hoover Commission, but I don't know how effective it has been.
Government agencies, czars, and other people on the federal payroll continue to proliferate, while businesses continue to have to fork out more and more to do business.
Obamacare is the final straw. If we can't repeal that, we collapse into the status of permanent debtor nation, whose debt is largely owned by the Chinese.
Eventually, they will be our masters, and communism will have won.
I don't know what Obamacare has to do with Blake's Chimneysweeps, but stretches do seem to be a part of your metier. It must be a gift.
""Mean capitalism" is merely state capitalism, which is practiced both in the US and China to varying degrees.
You can call it statism as well."
I strongly disagree with this. In America, corporations haven't had to "become" the government, because they can manipulate it--buy it off--for a fraction of the trouble. There's no doubt that the major petroleum corporations are more powerful than the government in this country. Bottom line: What Chevron wants, Chevron will get--it's that simple.
China is in a state of flux. It's clear that the old party structure can't survive the "infection" of capitalism. I give the Red Chinese another decade and a half--by then it will more nearly resemble France's, or Italy's. Plenty of corruption, but "wide open" economically. Hell, it's damned wide open already. Very enterprising, those Chinese.
what
i don't get to speak
intensely and impassionately about the irish
my irish ancestors were all fenians
did blake ever sympathize with the irish
i wonder
the other thing is
in blakes' time
roman catholicism was all but smothered
no wonder things were so bad
only al pope had the balls
if not the stature
to bad mouth them to their faces
them being
brits
was the irish who dug the trenches to lay the sewers
they were paid in potatoes and beer
you wouldn't have had the beatles had it not been
for liverpool irish
a pool of liver
how quaint
very nice conversation here
very very nice
everyone's being very defererential
i think curtis is even enjoying the challenge
next thing you know he'll be genuflecting to the cross
the british aristocracy has never been anything but a bunch of anglo saxon toadies
inbred blue blood bastards bitches and boors
i must work hard at forgiving them
how did chesterton do it
ah well
soot in my nose
jh
Many on the right point to something called the Cloward Piven Strategy. The idea is to create a tremendous breakdown of the government system by overloading it in any way possible to create conditions of abysmal poverty where the whole thing collapses. I can't figure out what the original authors thought they were doing, but I guess I can rarely understand the depths of the leftist mentality. I probably belong in a lunatic asylum next to Sakharov.
If everyone had a guaranteed income no one would have to do mean jobs such as the chimney sweeps had to do. No one would collect garbage, no one would ever wash the dishes, no one would have to clean windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
And presto, utopia.
I suppose there would be no police officers, no jails, no doctors.
Everybody would be a poet, 24/7.
I strongly disagree with this. In America, corporations haven't had to "become" the government, because they can manipulate it--buy it off--for a fraction of the trouble. There's no doubt that the major petroleum corporations are more powerful than the government in this country. Bottom line: What Chevron wants, Chevron will get--it's that simple.
And you don't call that state capitalism?
If the capitalists are running the state or the state is running the capitalists how can you tell the pigs from the farmers?
"If everyone had a guaranteed income no one would have to do mean jobs such as the chimney sweeps had to do. No one would collect garbage, no one would ever wash the dishes, no one would have to clean windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
And presto, utopia.
I suppose there would be no police officers, no jails, no doctors.
Everybody would be a poet, 24/7."
Huxley asked that question in Brave New World, Kirby. What he came up with was a kind of hybrid funny-farm Blade Runner in which ultimate trips (like dreams) replaced all yearning and effort.
The disappearance of work is a very real question. As automation proceeds apace, what will people do with their time? Capitalism--that old nag--was based on value for labor realized as product. But what if no labor--or less and less--is required? We've used animals, and natural energy sources, to simplify and ease our existence. But how far down that road do we go before we become mere witnesses?
Our bodies were constructed for work--that is, movement and exercise--but technology keeps subtracting the natural incentives for work. This worries people, but conservatives choose to blame 3/4's of the world's population for being lazy and immoral. And then their answer is--have more babies! That will solve the problem!
To be fair, babies are hard work.
This article concerning the nature of work is relevant.
Palmer:
State controlled economies are not at all the same thing as what we now have in America.
The debate over the correct amount of control to be exerted over free trade and exchange goes on.
Keynesian economists advocate a measured approach, in which interventions are limited to crisis points, but otherwise the market is allowed to function in a self-correcting way.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, the completely free market lacks the inherent discipline and functionality which its advocates claim for it. Which is where government comes in. An unregulated mortgage market, and the incestual relationship between banks and investment brokerage houses (which led to the "credit default" problem), produces huge bubbles which threaten the health of the entire economy. Even the Republicans wouldn't want the major banks to fail--which is why there was a bail-out. But the truth is that capital exerts a greater influence over legislation and regulation than the people's representatives do.
Money lines up against the power of the electorate to control it and make it serve higher purposes. It fights regulation, even when it's designed to augment and enhance capital's interests. The financial sector is fighting tooth and nail against new, stricter regulation. Precisely because they want the freedom to manipulate credit instruments and create new Ponzi schemes.
I don't think conservatives want people to have more babies, they just don't think it's fair to kill the ones they do have simply because they forgot to use any other form of birth control.
Peter Singer at Princeton think it's ok to off a child up until the age of three years.
That's batty.
I read GM's work article and I am obviously both -- have been all over the world, but am down with the farmers versus the foragers.
What I think we are really arguing about here is what Christians should do about those who have no work, and no food, and are from lousy countries that can't provide them with much of either.
In Matthew, Jesus is asked:
"what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?
And he said unto him, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
He saith unto him: Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder,thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.
Honour thy father and thy mother: and, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
Mathew 16:19
I think that's good enough for the working of this kingdom. Jesus himself says it's impossible to be good in this kingdom, and only the One outside of it is perfectly good. But we can follow the commandments.
I do think that the crumminess of the kids' lives as chimney sweepers was appalling, as are the lives of kids in India who have to sew rugs fourteen hours a day, or whatever. Perhaps the people employing them should think about what it would be like to be them. We do have labor laws now that forbid kids under 14 (I think) from working in any capacity.
And we're not allowed to kill people with our products.
We can't do false advertising (bearing false witness).
So, I think this IS the basis for restrictions on lousy areas of commercial activity, including visiting prostitutes or working as a prostitute.
It's harder to keep all the commandments if you're superrich. Jesus says it's about as easy as to get through the "eye of a needle" as it is to be a camel and get into the kingdom of God.
He didn't say it was impossible, but that it was quite difficult.
He also says that if you want to be "perfect" you could give all your stuff to the poor, and get treasure in heaven. But even if the guy is perfect, he still won't be good.
Jesus reserves that designation for God.
So, if JH was superrich and is now a mendicant friar, he would be perfect.
Otherwise, none of us belong to this latter category of perfect.
Besides, I think it's now possible to shrink a camel using some kind of DNA, and getting a larger needle, so that it's possible to fit the camel through.
so maybe now it's easier to be rich and get into heaven.
all you need is a bigger needle, and a smaller camel.
Done right, you could have a tiny camel jumping like a flea back and forth through the eye of the needle.
but the main thing is we just have to follow the commandments.
It's probably all that people can achieve. Jesus says as much.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, the completely free market lacks the inherent discipline and functionality which its advocates claim for it.
Where have we seen this?
I have never seen a "completely free market" in my lifetime--where have you?
We have, and have had for a very long time, what is called a "mixed economy" in the US.
As the country and its corporations have gotten larger, they have exerted greater and greater control over the nation, until, at this point, it is impossible to delineate who controls whom.
The difference between this and state socialism is simply semantic at this point--hence my comment regarding the pigs and the farmers. I assume you have read your Orwell, yes? And yes, I know Eric Blair was an avowed Socialist.
i suppose garage sales are a form of giving away ones goods for almost nothing
lots of garage sales around here
the last time i tried to jump through a needle's eye i smacked my head on the edge and the whole needle went like
BOOOOOIIIIIINGG
anybody got a camel?
what kind of cigarettes does obama smoke anyway
i think that's so cool
our president still lights up
george mcgovern states that the times of prosperity in this country were all connected to the govt sponsored public works projects where the govt assumed some responsibility for the public common good this gives a lot of peopel meaningful work and it helps to spread the wealth around it always has and it always will
we need a railroad project in this country
we need people to build a fast efficient safe rail system and give that as a gift to the great grandchildren
again
let us pray for the rich
i mean their souls are in greater danger they stand a far better chance of burning forever in the gaseous sordid rancid fetid steaming dark ethereal ether driven ether zone of dank despondent desperate devilish dour volcanic promethean vulcanized horrific foulsmelling morbid black hell
but that's OK
jesus redeemed hell too
so let 'em burn
once human charity is divorced from budget considerations then the whole system goes into tailspin doesn't it like now whoa
holde on
the spinning has just now begun
can the republicans restore us to the vital america god wants us to be
or will we limp out the 21st century in a mire of 3rd world drudgery
as long as we have good mexican and chinese food i won't mind being very poor
i'd feel better about the next generation if the kids all had to work and make their money like good americans even help support mom and dad i'm all for that get them working at about 12 let them sweat a little everyday instead of watching tv and becoming screen wonks or going to sports they could become like the little rat race employment force
that's it
all the women should go back home
take care of the home get out of the workforce it's too much already
and all the children 12 and older should become slave labour with benefits with one or two weeks a year off for camp where they can learn socialist principles
and the men can have more time to do hunting and gathering go fishing and bet on horses
and write poems
huge gardens every small town should have a huge greenhouse and garden and more music
lots more music
no amplified music
just good homespun live acoustic music
see i've got it figured out
apple pie
church on sunday
and a renewal of child legitimate enslavement
put those pretentious little bastards to work
it could be the very thing to save our fine country
not quite as drastic as wiping out the aboriginals
but equally effective in the long run
it would appear
jh
Palmer, it's unclear whether you're arguing for free markets, or regulated ones.
The evident failure of "free markets" has occurred several times in the last century and a half.
This is history. Do you read history?
We do not have a state-run economy in the U.S. We have a few watch-dog agencies, and financial regulations, most of which were intended to govern the excesses of the free market, not "run" it.
We do not have a state run economy, or a planned economy. Do you pine for one?
The point about capitalism is that it provides incentives and mechanisms. These incentives and mechanisms drive expansion and development. Along the way, a great many people MAY benefit residually, but the incentives and mechanisms don't require this. Indeed, they usually work at cross-purposes to "the public good."
Which is why we have those regulations. Not a planned economy, but a regulated one. Does regulation take some of the incentive out of capitalism? No doubt that it does.
On balance, which would you rather have, an unstable economy in which fortunes and "killings" are made with the same frequency as busts and bankruptcies, or a more even road, in which the pitfalls are moderated through modest adjustments? Let's not get ideological. Totally free markets are the law of the jungle. Do you have hair growing on your back, or on the tops of your feet? Maybe you'd prefer a little wildness in the marketplace, just to shake things up a little.
Me? I'd like to outlaw credit default swaps, which are nothing but crude instruments for the creation of modified Ponzi scehems.
Care to tango?
Curtis,
I'm still not sure why you're arguing we have anything resembling a free market.
Regulation is the law of the land and has been for quite some time (read: as long as businesses have been donating to the government, note certain 19th century SCOTUS decisions).
If we had an actually free market, the limits to starting an airline would be buying a plane or two and finding a place to land.
You could start a school or a dentist office just by hanging a shingle and opening your doors.
We don't, however, have a free market. Now, while we don't have a centrally planned economy, we do have an economy that is built (and has been since the teens) on the idea that the government will prop up the economy in times of real or manufactured trouble.
Because of this, companies (especially big ones) take far greater risks than they would in a free market. Sometimes these risks pay off, sometimes they are a wash, and sometimes they wreck the economy pretty good (because of the implied government backing which ties up a lot of money on economic band-aids).
The difference between a traditionally planned economy and what we have is that in a planned economy the government says: we're paying for what you do, do this.
In our economy the government says: if you do this we'll pay for what you do.
If you can see the difference, then bully for you--to me it looks like meet the new boss same as the old boss.
GM makes some good points here. The other day a child was arrested in DC for operating a lemonade stand without a license.
Perhaps we could be said to have a mixed economy.
True libertarians don't even want the railroads underwritten by the government.
I do think Adam Smith wanted SOME regulation.
How mixed is it, and what direction are we moving in?
If North Korea is on one side, and Somalia on the other, where are we?
yeah like take farm subsidies for instance
where but in good ole USA
would they actually pay farmers for not growning crops
it seems like there's a certain freeforallness in the economy a sort of whateveryoucangetawaywithness
a certain
toomuchisneverenoughness
something of an exagerrated sense of interdependence like why do constricted housing starts in bumphuq county georgia mean anything to me mama
i don't feel anything with stock exchange reports nothing it makes no sense to me at all it is empty signification
but
with a smile
our economy is a form of gambling
they keep cash flowing with lotto and casinos
the metaphysical aspects of our wonderous economy can be explained by the fact that people spend money all the time money that does not in fact exist
i gotta go pray
jh
"The difference between a traditionally planned economy and what we have is that in a planned economy the government says: we're paying for what you do, do this.
In our economy the government says: if you do this we'll pay for what you do."
While thats' an oversimplification of the comparison between our regulated economy and a planned economy, I find it hard to believe that you Don't see the difference.
It's pretty huge.
Now, it's not so huge as to be the difference between a totally free market and a planned one, but, rather, between a planned economy and a regulated one.
It's still a very large difference.
That's like saying there's no difference between having a cake, and then eating it... And eating a cake, and then having it.
Also, if I want to start a business, I can - not as easily as in a totally free market, but it is possible to do so.
So in terms of business you have three categories:
1) In a totally free market you can start one very quickly and easily and without any hurdles.
2) In a regulated economy you can start one, but it takes a lot more legwork and you have to meet certain standards.
3) In a planned economy, you can't start one.
I would say that 2 is more like 1 than it is like 3...
And that whatever the case, 2 and 3 are far, far apart.
Now, if the question is whether or not 1) is more desirable than 2), that's a different beast - but I'd say that 2) is more desirable, though specific regulations may be ill-advised or overreaching.
But I'd rather have some regulation, and have regulations be imperfect, than to be totally without regulation. YMMV
I'm with Brett. If a totally free economy means that someone can make poisonous food out of rat gizzards and sell it as spaghetti, then I'm for regulations.
The problem with regulations is that they tend to proliferate, and they require overseers. Every oversight agency requires a staff.
When the staffing of oversight becomes larger than all the businesses put together, then we've got problems.
I'm not sure what the right percentage would be. I really don't know what it is.
North Korea is 100% oversight and if you say the wrong thing, you're off to prison and no one will ever see you again.
In Somalia, I think it's might is right. There is no other law.
One of the worst things about a totally planned economy is that the government is both the producer and the oversight. It didn't work, but it turned into a monstrous system in which law and grace were mixed together, and each polluted the other.
Proportions of grace to law are almost very important.
It's all in the percentages and the proportions.
I wish I had this worked out.
Palmer:
"The difference between a traditionally planned economy and what we have is that in a planned economy the government says: we're paying for what you do, do this."
Actually, the government doesn't "run" the economy. Your assertion that large companies take "greater" risks under regulation is contradictory on its face. If government provides a platform of protection (FDIC and guaranteed loans in crisis management), how does this "increase the risk"? I don't see it.
Government provides a safe environment, and says, "okay, guys, go to it, but if you get into really big trouble, we'll do our best to bail you out." Our federal government makes it so easy for large capital, that there's virtually NO risk. And if they do fail, it gets worked out in bankruptcy court. People can still sue each other, and we have a litigious society, for sure.
I'm still not clear on your position. Do you dislike our present arrangement? Would you prefer a wide-open economy where there were no protections, no safety-nets, no unions, no incorporation and partnership systems? These things actually help business--they don't hinder it.
One kind of government regulation I could do less with is parking tickets. In parts of our major cities, parking meter rates have risen to a quarter for 2 1/2 minutes of time. That's six dollars an hour. Does anyone carry that kind of change anymore? The new machines use credit card swipes. You can easily end up paying $50 a day on a major city street or in a lot. The revenue goes to pay the salaries of the meter-people, their parking and duty stations, their supervisors, the repair and maintenance of the system, and so forth. And beyond that, it becomes a cash cow for the city. It's gotten completely out of hand.
Most of the merchants hate it, because customers can't get access to downtown shopping, because it's too much hassle, too much expense. Cities want to keep cars out, make "pedestrian friendly" malls and town centers. But this paradigm produces nothing. Our inner cities can't be rejuvenated this way, by trying to make Venice out of Detroit. It doesn't work.
When I was growing up, parking meters still took pennies. And a little town like the one I grew up in, only had one or two meter-people. You might get a $5.00 ticket if you were unlucky, but usually there was a built-in grace period of a half-hour.
This is government overreaching for sure. I say we vote it down in every community!
Kirby, probably everyone here agrees that some government regulation such as banking, investment, and securities oversight is warranted, but certain regulations (like those in the complex and yet ambiguous Dodd-Frank Act) can and have had a crippling effect on our economy in banks' uncertainty about how to comply with them and regulators uncertainty about how to implement them. This act also puts smaller banks at a great disadvantage, and the increased burdens of compliance both raises the cost and reduces the availability of credit to those seeking to expand their businesses. We see this effect now in the reluctance of banks to loan when profits on interest are riskier than the profits banks can make on other investments.
Add to this other side of the problem in the federal government's encouragement of risky investment in the housing market (where huge losses are made up by taxpayers, as with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which should long ago have been fully privatised) as well as so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks (a number of them foreign) that have also been "rescued" by taxpayer bailouts and to this day are concealing large numbers of "toxic" mortgages.
Gretchen Morgenson's short article in the NYT is useful for understanding the latter "cui bono?" problem:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/business/economy/the-feds-rescue-missed-main-street.html?_r=1
I think this is what GM might have been getting at.
JADL, I think GM likes to go to the extreme to make a point, but I am not clear on his point. He did force me to come off the notion that any regulation is always bad. Hayek and Mises don't even go that far, but they do worry that any regulation creates huge bureaucracies that are difficult to fold up.
I liked the NYT article and the notion it floated that there was a lot in the bailout that are suspicious. The Fed is an object of suspicion to Ron Paul. We don't really have an audit of that institution, and that's what he wants.
I like Ron Paul even when he reminds me a bit of Pat Paulsen.
I often worry that the global economy is a game of Monopoly and the money means about as much. I think we will find out all kinds of secrets as freedom of information continues to burrow into the secrets of the bailouts and Obamacare and all the other bills that have been rolled out.
I think that now that Obama's numbers are falling (he's in the high 30s now, according to Gallup) the force shield of protection around him will be repealed by the newspapers and TV stations. It might even become open season.
In that case, we will find out all kinds of secrets. We will find out finally about his past relationships, about his affiliations with Ayers, and all kinds of other stories they've been sitting on.
I think the Democrats are beginning to shift to Hillary. Obama's toast.
I'm very surprised that the NYT would run this story. I see it as a harbinger of things to come. Once the left declares open season, they leave no fact unturned. It will be like a plague of locusts.
Kirby, it seems Morgenson's co-authored book "Reckless Endangerment" is a study of what the WSJ reviewer (Peter Wallison) called the "Government-sponsored meltdown." There is a short 7-minute introduction and interview of Morgenson by Sean Hannity here:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/07/true-origins-of-the-financial-crisis.php
I am for personal responsibility.
If you buy scorpions disguised as spaghetti, then shame on you.
In a world without government regulation the onus is on the consumer to make sure what they are buying is safe--which should make us all safer, as information is generally better than trust.
100% socialism would mean that government owned the means of production and there would be no private ownership, no private entrepreneurial activity. Such was the case in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and under Hitler in Nazi Germany.
In the United States Nevada is the least socialist according to one study I read online. Government spends just 6% of the GDP. In Hawaii, Obama's home state, it's about 20%. Biggest expense is for West Virginia -- about 32%.
http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/moneyinvesting/news/most-socialist-states-america?cm_ven=outbrain&psv=outbrainselectedarticle&obref=obnetwork
Kirby--
That study's wrong.
The fed budget is over 3 trillon dollars.
GDP is about 15 trillion dollars.
So that's 20% just for federal spending, not state and local.
Kirby,
100% socialism would mean that government owned the means of production and there would be no private ownership, no private entrepreneurial activity. Such was the case in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and under Hitler in Nazi Germany.
This shows a deep misunderstanding of Nazi Germany, symptomatic of your characteristic error of equating political totalitarianism with state ownership of the means of production.
A better way to understand this is that communism (in theory, if not in practice) represents a total political victory by labor, i.e., a system in which capital has no political power, and all political power rests with the workers. Fascism is a mirror image of this, which is to say, a political system in which the workers are bereft of political power, which instead lies purely with capital.
Thus, for example, the Nazis did not nationalize industries that we might consider natural candidates for a country engaged in total war, and so companies engaged in critical war production like I. G. Farben, Krupp, Messerschmidt, Focke-wulf, and Daimler remained independent, and indeed the Nazis pursued a policy of privatization, cf., Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany.
Stu, Ludwig von Mises doesn't agree with this. He's a major economist. Maybe he got it wrong. I can't find my copy right now, but he goes on for pages about how the Nazis clamped down on all private industry. Here's this from earlier in the thread:
"...in Hitler's Germany there was no private enterprise or private initiative. In Hitler's Germany there was a system of socialism which differed from the Russian system only to the extent that the terminology and labels of the free economic system were still retained. There still existed 'private enterprises,' as they were called. but the owner was no longer an entrepreneur, the owner was called a 'shop manager' (Betriebsfuhrer)" (47).
Perhaps some of the major corporations were entitled to continue to work, but they were shaken down by the Nazis?
Someone is confuzzled. I'd bet it isn't Mises.
Kirby,
Someone is confuzzled. I'd bet it isn't Mises.
I'll bet it is, and you even more so. I wouldn't discount Mises's observations so much as I would his overgeneralized theoretical conclusions, especially as extended by you.
The first error is to view Nazism as monolithic in time, which is to say, that Nazism in 1935 isn't distinguable from Nazism in 1944. Let me stipulate that throughout their short history the Nazis were driven by pursuit of German racial redemption by any means. But the notion of "by any means" is ultimately constrained by what what the actors themselves can envision and justify, and by 1944 the Nazis were willing to do lots of things that they couldn't have even conceived of in 1935. In part, this reflected the habituation of evil, and in part, the increasingly desperate circumstances they faced.
The apparent contraction between Bel and Mises has much to do with the fact that they're reflecting on different eras. Bel is talking explicitly about the relatively constrained Nazism of the 30's, whereas Mises appears to be describing unconstrained post-Stalingrad Nazism.
I disagree vehemently over Mises equating Russian-style communism with Nazi-style fascism. There was more at stake than just labels. Indeed, the capitalists first gained by having the government as their ally against labor, and only later lost entrepreneurial freedom. And losing entrepreneurial freedom is very different from losing one's wealth and/or life.
If it's the later Nazism that Mises described, this must have been their intention all along -- and it had to wait until they had consolidated their power. So, 100% socialism was the Nazi vision, just as it was the Stalinist vision, and Pol Pot's vision.
Socialism always wants 101% of the action, and kills all its rivals.
Essentially, the Nazis saw the Jews as economic rivals. They thought that once they killed these rivals, they would be richer and richer and the money would even out within the Nazi community.
the Wealth of Nations doesn't work this way.
Nazism, Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge reduced their constituencies to almost nothing beyond the barest subsistence.
Obama would, too, if he could. And all the way down he would sing about how this would only work if first we could get rid of Fox News, then the Republicans, then right-leaning constituencies within the Democratic group (blue dogs to the furnace), and finally the equivalent of Kulaks, and then at that point there's nothing left but rubble, and even still Obama would be certain that this would be the right direction for the country.
Socialism is a pact with Satan.
GM, that study only applies to STATE government expenditures.
Federal expenditures are another ballgame, and as you suggest, should be added in to get another picture.
But the states give to the Fed and they redistribute the funds to some degree, so some states get a bonus in this regard.
Stu brought this up once years ago, and I think he said the northern states bailed out the southern states.
This is one of the big problems in Arizona. The Federal police won't screen the borders, which means the state police should, but OBama has banned that, too. So the Mexicans have come over the border in the thousands per day, and Arizona has to shell out services to those people who don't pay taxes.
I'm not clear on who pays for the mess in all the border states.
Alabama tried to crack down on illegals, but a circuit court judge blocked that, too.
You apparently don't want any border controls, either?
I think Brett and I are on the same page more or less on some things, which I find freaky.
I want law and order, and regulatory commissions. I want legal residents doing legal jobs, and I want outlaws taken out of our midst.
Problem is we have a scofflawyer for a president.
Stu, I found the Mises book. He argues that well before Hitler the Germans had begun to plan the entire economy, and it was this gigantic apparatus that Hitler inherited, and is what made it so easy for him to turn Germany into a totalitarian state. Hayek makes much the same point in his book The Road to Serfdom.
"The Hindenberg Plan meant that the whole German economic system should be controlled by the government: prices, wages, profits... everything. And the bureaucracy immediately began to put this into effect. But before they had finished, the debacle came: the German empire broke down, the entire bureaucratic apparatus disappeared, the revolution brought its bloody results -- things came to an end" (46).
Apparently the system didn't want and inflation went wildly out of control as the government kept printing vast sums of paper money to try to pay its debts, which suddenly went into the trillions.
Hitler stepped in and promised he would change everythng and give everyone hope again. And he introduced new controls on everything and argued that if they could just get rid of the privileged Jews, everything would be fine.
The new czars would fix everything.
"And from this body of ministers with the long name came all the orders to every enterprise: what to produce, in what quantity, where to get the raw materials and what to pay for them, to whom to sell the products and at what prices to sell them. The workers got the order to work in a definite factory, and they received wages which the governemnt decreed. The whole economic system was now regulated in every detail by the government ..."
"The prices were no longer prices, the wages were no longer wages, they were all quantitative terms in a system of socialism" (47).
The Austrian School completely connects Hitler's system as a socialist system. This is forbidden knowledge among the left. They do everything they can to disassociate Hitler and socialism.
But amongst the conservatives, all this stuff is common knowledge.
You just can't tell it to the socialists. It causes too much cognitive dissonance.
I'm not saying that I think Obama is Hitler, only that he's Hitleresque. I think everyone thinks of themselves and their friends as good. Of course, as Jesus says, no one IS good. Everyone is self-centered. It's part of our condition of being fallen to imagine that some other group is responsible for our misery, and that if we could only destroy them, then life would be perfect. Socialists want life to be perfect.
So, they have lists of people that they need to terminate. In Wisconsin, it's Republicans (they won't let any Republicans march in this year's union parade).
Once death has been delivered and the money of the hated group has been redistributed, it has to happen over and over, and each time there is less to go around.
Many think that wealth is a steady state phenomenon, and that there is only so much. But wealth is actually more like poetry. It requires imagination to create new products, and new networks of trade. If a good group of players is offed (as Hitler offed the Jews) then it makes everyone much more poorer.
If we off the rich, we get to redistribute their money, as they did in the French Revolution, or in the Russian Revolution, or under the Khmer Rouge, you also kill the imagination of not only that group, but freeze the imagination of all the others who would have joined them.
There is no recipe for success in terms of creating a product. You need to make an absolutely never seen before move. It's like poetry.
The entrepreneur is the rarest of poets, a poet that can bring to life a whole new product, something previously unforeseen, and that no one else could have predicted.
The communists believe that anybody can make toilet paper, or make a poem, or make a good new movie, or an exciting dance, or a new clothing style. And if they could just off the competition, they would be better able to compete with their lousy stupid imagination and monstrous notions.
The result: the killing fields go on and on, and the dieting!
much more poor -- not poorer. Sorry, I'm typing quick on this little device.
Curtis asked to be taken off the link box, and said he would never venture into this blog space ever again. I think we should give him a round of applause for being the secularist that lasted the longest. What was it -- maybe seven years?
At any rate, that's over.
Now let's get back to interdenominational hatreds!
Also, I think we could use one more Mennonite, but a very liberal one, if they exist, to be GM's counterpart. We have two Catholics of two tendencies, two Lutherans from warring synods, and then a few outliers such as Brett, and GM, without a precise partner.
The idea is to do a kind of quadrille in which there is a lot of merriment in kicking the butt of your partner at the end of the hallway before the dip and turn.
I think what works best is minor disagreements -- stuff like the communion wafer's substantiality warmed the fires of the Renaissance for very long periods.
When women fight on the blog they go for the jugular and this tends to create shooting episodes of blood followed by the silence of one or the other or both women.
Far better would be a couple of hermaphrodites arguing over which one is more male. Well, you guys know what I mean.
I think Curtis was simply too far away from the center of levity here, and thus wantd to respond with gravity, hammering us into thinking more and more like him, which none of us I presume could imagine.
However, I still think we should toast his memory: he provided us with many amazing posts, and incredible insights, but was getting increasingly truculent when he wasn't making converts to his form of secularist moralism, which none of us, least of all I, could even pretend to understand.
We wish him the best, and thank him for his attempts to deal with the rest of us cranks for what is more than a tenth of his life!
Oy vey! And au revoir!
There are very liberal Mennonites--we, however, are Brethren--the Southern Germanic movement.
Anyway, there are liberal Brethren, too--some even love Obama though they are supposed to be avowed pacifists. At any rate, the church keeps almost separating because of the silly warring camps.
Borders--that's a different issue altogether, isn't it?
I mean if a country is going to be a country, it's got to have borders.
Can't have folks dumping chemicals either--but that's a criminal, not a regulatory manner AND the penalty for all corporate crime should be the immediate death (i.e. dissolution with NO sale of stock to the receiver).
Sorry to see Curtis go.
Kirby,
The Austrian School completely connects Hitler's system as a socialist system. This is forbidden knowledge among the left. They do everything they can to disassociate Hitler and socialism.
But amongst the conservatives, all this stuff is common knowledge.
You just can't tell it to the socialists. It causes too much cognitive dissonance.
I can't tell if your just trolling, lying, or so lost in self-deceit as to be inaccessible to truth. I'm not sure it matters.
For the record, leftists accept the notion that the Soviet Russia was a perversion of leftist thinking, and in this, they acknowledge that there is a connection. So the notion that it would cause cognative dissonance to accept some sort of philosophical continuity with a disfunctional totalitarian regime is clearly false. Naturally, we're far happier pointing instead to the Scandinavian countries as models of high-functioning leftist democracies. Perversely, you use the same countries as examples, entirely ignoring both their politics and their economic policies, in order to attribute their successes to Lutheranism.
The ground truth here is that the Nazi regime was very much a mirror of the Soviet state. It was grounded in rightist language, rightist philosophy, and rightist values: the language of racial inequality, the language of nationalism, the language of militarism, the language of law and order, the language of property rights over workers rights. It would be fair and honest to emphasize that it was a perversion of rightist thinking, but it is contemptable and dishonest to deny the connection. It would be fair and honest to argue that irrespective of whether a totalitarian state arises as a perversion of leftist or rightist thinking, it ends up in pretty much the same place. But it is contemptable and dishonest to argue that the Nazi and Soviet states took the same path. In both cases, you've taken the contemptable and dishonest path.
I am disgusted with you, Kirby. And I'm disgusted with your rhetorical allies, who have been perfectly willing to let such a bald-faced lie go uncorrected. I can certainly accept the notion that this is your venue, and as such it is far from a level field. I have enough regard for the truth to believe that it can overcome some fairly sizeable obstacles, and this has given me reason to stay. But I'm not sure that truth has a chance here, which makes me wonder why the hell I bother.
I realize the whale has taken another deep turn (I operate according to where I think I should take the beast at any one time). Yes, the left sees Stalinism as a weird problem that took place, but they always say that that wasn't what Marxism was MEANT to be. It is, oddly, just what it became in every country in which it occurred.
The position of the Austrian School is that the Nazi system was identical to the Soviet System. This knowledge was more or less blocked even in Hayek's famous Road to Serfdom. The University of Chicago press wanted that chapter suppressed, and did manage to make Hayek use more examples from the Soviets and to tone down the Nazi angle.
This was particularly because of our alliance with the Soviet Union (Hayek's book was published in 1944).
To link Hitler and Stalin was too much for the Rooseveltian bureaucracy at the time. But the connection remains coherent in the more arcane writings of Mises and Hayek and the other Austrian economists. This creates an enormous fury on the part of the left.
The Khmer Rouge also worked the racist angle -- we are not used to thinking of Asians as racist -- but naturally they are no different from anyone else. If you had anything but pure Cambodian blood you were dead in the Khmer Revolution.
Similar things are happening in Myanmar to the Christian Karen people.
China has a racist agenda in that they regard the Tibetans as a kind of Chinese, and thus belonging to them. They use race to push this angle.
The Japanese under Hirohito were also doing a race thing.
I don't know if JADL buys this connection. If he doesn't, he's entitled to dispute it.
I think he's been tied up with Curtis -- who's been trying to assign JADL to the nuthouse in the way that the Soviets assigned Sakharov there. That he fought back was way too much for Curtis so he checked out, and severed all his connections.
I appreciate your willingness to stay. I consider you an excellent sparring partner. I hope we can continue.
I don't see the Nazi connection as a low blow. Certainly Hayek and Mises didn't.
I do consider it a very serious charge, and one worth exploring.
Like you, I like the Scandinavian states. Let's talk more about them!
leftists accept the notion that the Soviet Russia was a perversion of leftist thinking,
See, right here is the problem.
Soviet Russia was not a "perversion of leftist thinking." It was the culmination, the natural outcome, the inexorable result of leftist thinking.
Once you realize that inevitability, you can see the inherent flaws in thinking the Devil is your friend.
The Hitler thing has been put on the right by the left until it is almost considered true. But conservatives like Hayek and Mises have always placed the responsibility for this on the left and argue that this is a left-wing phenomenon.
But perhaps it's too controversial to think about shifting the burden of the left's problems on to themselves.
Perhaps instead we should talk about the Swedish and other Lutheran states, since they are a place that most in the left and the right as well agree that there is something working.
Whether it's socialism, Lutheranism, or what it is, is harder to get at though because of the language barrier. Finnish is unbelievably tricky, and the society is almost unknown outside of its parameters.
Most Americans don't even know where it is.
Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland are also difficult to get at -- almost no one knows their languages. Therefore most of us will be left looking at translations. But how many have ever read a Finnish poem in translation, or a Finnish novel in translation?
how many are even familiar with the films of Aki Kaurismaki?
Norway, Sweden and Denmark and Iceland have enormous production of films and books, but they are meant for such tiny populations and outside of those countries almost no one understands them.
And yet people still think they can point to those countries and say something meaningful about the "socialism" inside of them.
Mises does have one sentence about these countries in the book. Here it is:
He is talking about how Great Britain has to rely on an export trade because they have "depend on the importation of food."
To what extent this was true in 1959 is unknown to me. The few times I have been to England it seemed to me there was ample green space, and some farming being done. Is it true that there is enough to support England, or are they getting food from elsewhere. Mises makes the argument that countries that don't grow their own food have to import it.
But he argues that Great Britain's manufacturing sector (in 1959) was almost as tightly regulated as that of the Russians, but then he seemingly contradicts himself, and says that England is far less controlled than the situation in Russia:
"Thus, as far as there is economic freedom left (and there is still substantial freedom in some countries, such as Norway, England, Sweden), it exists because of the necessity to retain export trade."
This is the only reference to the Scandinavian countries in the entire book.
Furthermore, he doesn't explain to any degree where this freedom might pertain.
In Finland, it was possible to make a living collecting bottles after fairs. finns drink a lot of alcohol, and the deposit fee on a bottle might be a dollar. If you pick up a thousand of the bottles after a fair (this might take about an hour) you could make a thousand dollars.
I did this on one occasion and had enough money to fly to Paris for the weekend.
Is this what Mises means? He doesn't explain.
Obviously, literature wasn't censored in any of the three countries he mentions. In Russia at the time, of course, it was.
But what about for manufacturing?
One of the amazing things about the Scandinavian countries is that if they make something, you can count on it being something you can depend on.
Finnish butter is not going to poison you. Finnish yogurt is going to be what they say it is.
Go next door to Russia and you find Finnish products in all their better stores outselling all the Russian products. Russians told me they trusted the Finns to make decent products. You paid twice as much for Finnish products, but you could guarantee your kids wouldn't keel over.
I saw this as the difference between a people that had incorporated the ten commandments and a shifty people that were basically criminals. Russians had to have thirty locks on every door. In Finland, no one locked their doors.
There is no such thing as a Finnish mafia.
Finns would be totally ashamed to be criminals.
Russians on the other hand were shameless.
Buy a Russian car like a Lada and the door falls off if you slam it too hard.
Swedish cars like Volvos last forever.
So there is the issue of trust.
I don't know to what extent foreign investment has made the Nokia company what it is. In Finland, the Nokia company makes telecommunications devices. They are made to last and are very innovative.
Finns can be trusted. So, it is possible to invest in them.
Russians in 1959 -- in what way could you invest?
Part of a country's prosperity has to do with the ability to invest in it, just as you would invest time in friend or a wife. If the person is basically untrustworthy, why would anybody invest in such a person?
Russians nationalized.
India, too, nationalized industry.
In Haiti, the constant revolutions meant that your personnel was unsafe.
Since when have the Finns revolted and killed the manufacturing sector?
Or Swedes?
Or Norwegians?
Or Icelanders?
These are peaceful people whose word is like gold.
Compare a communist bastard who would just as soon kill someone and steal their stuff as look at them? Who's going to invest in Stalin's Russia? Who's going to invest in Hitler's Germany?
You have to think about how trustworthy a country or a person is. Finland has the best corruption index of any country in the world.
Finns just don't cheat or lie, or if they do, they're so good at it that they never get caught.
There's lots to think about and explore on this topic, but I think we can't avoid going back to Lutheranism as the basis for the trustworthiness of the Scandinavian decency that allows the world to trust its people and products.
In russia, the Russians told me they wouldn't put it past the mobsters to sell you food that had been grown in Chernobyl.
Do you want your children to face the potential of dying?
Finnish food, highly regulated, and overseen by honest oversight, and then regulated from within by people who have completely incorporated the ethics of the ten commandments -- is impeccable by comparison.
If it says MADE IN FINLAND on it, you can buy it, and know your children are safe.
I looked up Finnish economics and found a pretty good Wikipedia page that provides a good overall account of the Finnish economy (in English). There is a heavy emphasis on capitalism, although the tax rates are fairly high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_finland
There is also a Stockholm School of Economics (Keynesian in flavor, but arrived at independently).
Not sure if the Finns have any Austrian school economics profs but have put out feelers to several economics types to see what I can gather.
It seemed to me that there was a robust private sector, but that is anecdotal. Let's try to look into this.
GM,
See, right here is the problem.
Soviet Russia was not a "perversion of leftist thinking." It was the culmination, the natural outcome, the inexorable result of leftist thinking.
Evidently, you're so bereft of anything of substance to add to the conversation that you're reduced to throwing feces. I hope you're enjoying yourself.
Kirby,
Marx's critique of capitalism was based on his observations of early industrial revolution capitalism and the dislocations it caused. Neither Marx nor his contemporaries predicted the consequences of high-employment capitalism, in which labor itself becomes a kind of capital. Because of this, he completely missed the significance of the emergence of the middle class, dismissing it as "petit-bourgeois," and thereby misclassifying something new and emergent as something old, and so mispredicting the path that capitalism would take for the next century and a half.
Much of our life has been spent in the regime of high-employment capitalism, and it's worked itself into the way we think, and even the way we justify our utility as educators and scholars to society: getting an education is investing in one's self, i.e., it is a way of increasing the capital represented by one's skills and knowledge. Pay us, listen to us, learn from us, and the world will repay you handsomely for your investment. As long as we've been in a high-employment regime, this contract with our students has held up very nicely.
The principle social problem of today is that we've moving out of the high-employment regime, and none of us (with the possible exception of JADL, who's actively looking for a wannabe king to suck up to) are willing to accept the social consequences of a regression to the social order of Marx's day.
The driver of this regression from high-employment to low-employment is technology.
A first gift of technology has been the transportation revolution (in which I'll include the internet, as a special case of the transportation of information), which not only means that we can get fresh vegetables in February, but also that automotive workers in Changwon compete directly against automotive workers in Detroit, knowledge workers in Bangalore compete directly against knowledge workers in Seattle.
A second gift of technology is increased automation, which has coupled increases in productivity with decreases in the need for labor. From the labor side, this can mean that the personal capital represented by one's skills, knowledge, and experience, can become valueless overnight. As you've noted, a mere forty years ago, a person whose skill set consisted entirely of knowing how to operate a hydraulic wrench could price their labor deer enough to gain a respectable middle-class income. The day they rolled a robotic nut fastener onto the assembly line was the day that skill set became valueless.
The technological genie is not easily put back in its bottle.
And so we're staggering across the threshold to a world in which there's high productivity, but low employment. Looking to the ghosts of the past to guide us in such a world is pointless -- brilliant though they might have been, this isn't their world. If we allocate resources only to the lucky few who can work, or who have inherited wealth, the markets that drive our economy will collapse, and wealth itself will become meaningless. We can see the first parts of this process today, in the way that corporate profits and the stock market are way up, but employment remains down. As Springsteen sang in "My Hometown," "these jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back."
And the plain truth is that none of us have the slightest idea what to do about it. But one thing is certain, and that's that refighting the 1870's and 1940's is easier than dealing with today's problems, and utterly without value in solving them.
Kirby,
I don't know to what extent foreign investment has made the Nokia company what it is. In Finland, the Nokia company makes telecommunications devices. They are made to last and are very innovative.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but Nokia is broken.
Not only is their market share cratering (it dropped from 33.8% to 24.2% year-over-year last July), but what they're left with is the unprofitable bottom-end "feature phone" segment. So they've thrown in the towel, are killing their own Symbian operating system, and are moving to Windows 7 across their product line. This gives them an entree into the profitable smart phone market, while providing market differentiation against Apple, HTC, Samsung, et. al. Unfortunately, Win 7 offers no compelling advantages over iOS or Android, for either user or developer, and so it's stuck in the "too late to the market" penalty box, with few apps, and few users.
Microsoft wants Nokia because it hasn't been able to establish itself in the smart phone OS market; Nokia wants Microsoft to halt its rapid slide into handset irrelevance. This isn't a marriage of opportunity, it's a marriage of desperation. If it doesn't work out, Microsoft has the resources to try again later. Nokia does not.
Finland does have other companies. And I don't have any stock in Nokia. It's just that it was hq'd in Finland (it's now becoming multinational, and has, I think, an American CEO at present).
Finland is considered fourth in the world or something in terms of knowledge capital.
They've got all kinds of things going for them.
Elevators, and high-rise cranes, and shipping, biggest makers of paper in the world (still important) and so on. The best thing they've got is a stable and brilliant work force that is dependable and loyal and non-violent, with a stable government.
Compare Haiti.
Stu,
Your swipe at GM (throwing feces) was I think a little strong.
I let it through but it wasn't even an elbow. It was a head shot.
I think GM won't mind it.
But I wonder about it.
With curtis attacking JADL, I felt Curtis was throwing punches with all his might and JADL was barely responding and yet Curtis was screaming foul. I thought it was hilarious.
I couldn't figure out if he was kidding.
With this, GM did say Satan in terms of the left.
But I think he was kidding.
I can't weight these things. I really thought Curtis was kidding, and then suddenly he huffed out.
Let's try to be productive!
Kirby,
Your swipe at GM (throwing feces) was I think a little strong.
I let it through but it wasn't even an elbow. It was a head shot.
I think GM won't mind it.
But I wonder about it.
This seemed to me to be the most acceptable of a set of frankly lousy alternatives.
I thought about simply retorting that fascism is the culmination of rightist thinking, but there were two compelling arguments against this:
1) It's false, just like GM's parallel "point" was false, and I'm not going to descend into that gutter with him; and
2) It would have lead to a round of name calling, which is what he was trying to bait me into in the absence of any real contribution, and away from a discussion that I still hope might acheive substance.
And I thought about ignoring it, but really, I either have to make a decision to live the the endemic rhetorical rudeness of this venue, to which GM contributes mightily, in which case I'm going to have to put up with even more than I do now, or to call it into account. So I called it to account -- and I could very well have done so a good deal more crudely. You can bet he would have.
While I'm here, I should apologize for and amend the crack about JADL, as "suck" might have been taken in ways other than what I intended. It would have been better to have said, "play Jester to." Please consider it to be so.
With this, GM did say Satan in terms of the left.
But I think he was kidding.
On what evidence? GN takes Satan seriously, and chose to drag Satan into the discussion for the sole purpose of implying that I'm in league with the devil. Evidently this is ok with the ref, but responding to it is not.
So, no. I don't think he was kidding, I think he was being intentionally offensive and rude.
I can't weight these things. I really thought Curtis was kidding, and then suddenly he huffed out.
I think Curtis's departure is a diminishment of our community, and moreover that he was clear and largely correct about the circumstances involved. The difference between Curtis and me in the end is that I feel a call of Christian charity to be here, and not simply to abandon this community to its sin.
How is calling us sinners different from GM saying that you are in league with Satan?
Isn't it pretty close to equivalent?
At any rate, thanks for your emendations wrt JADL.
Play jester to, is nicer than suck up to, although it amounts to the same thing.
Our politics and our economics are not easily able to be separated.
The Christian left sees the Sermon on the Mount as the only real text.
I think the Christian right still sees it as the Ten Commandments.
Which one would lead to a better overall America?
I think this should be our real focus.
The partisan in-fighting and name-calling seems to distract us from this, and doesn't get anyone anywhere.
Persuasion (of which you were already persuaded by Curtis's viewpoint, which is quite similar to your own) was not helped by Curtis.
Probably none of us will ever be persuaded by any of the others here. We are really to the point of ad hominem arguments.
JH is the only one who is probably above it, since he is in the world but not of it.
Many of the left speak in the name of the poor. But most were never poor. Obama wasn't. Ayers wasn't. Kerry isn't. The Kennedy's aren't. Even Marx wasn't.
Many on the right like Lincoln WERE poor at least to begin with, and see the world from a different vantage point. They want fair rules so that merit will out.
They don't want a system that gives an advantage to some at the expense of others.
John edwards spoke the language of the left, was himself an exploiter with a 400 dollar haircut and cared only enough about the poor so that he could screw them all the more completely.
I suppose I grant the left notion that there is a group of superrich. Maybe they're more visible at the U. of Chicago. I never see anyone like that in this county, or at this college.
Many scream that W was superrich, and didn't deserve his place in life. And that he represents a vampiric class that uses the government to protect its interests against any form of taxation while continually screwing the lowest groups.
Maybe.
but I think most Republicans just want a level playing field, and feel the Republicans represent that to them more than do the Democrats, who are mostly demagogues, like Jesse Jackson -- representing a small group at the expense of the whole country.
We ought to think of the whole country.
I think it's better that we use the Ten Commandments as a universal.
theft of property is still theft.
Stealing the insurance industry (an enormous industry) is still theft.
The government should get out of business and only regulate it. It can't do both.
Kirby,
How is calling us sinners different from GM saying that you are in league with Satan?
We're all sinners. We confess this every Sunday. "I confess that I am in bondage to sin, and cannot free myself." But we're not all in league with the devil. We don't confess that, and it is classless to throw around accusations that other folks are, absent evidence a good deal better than any of us will ever have on any of the rest.
Sinners can be saved, but agents of Satan are beyond salvation.
Isn't it pretty close to equivalent?
No.
Play jester to, is nicer than suck up to, although it amounts to the same thing.
Jesters are supposed to be humorous. Sucking is isn't usually funny. But yeah, a sharp elbow's a sharp elbow, but it's nicer if you smile when you throw it, isn't it? I'm sure JADL would prefer to be vizier, although I expect his life expectancy as jester would be longer.
Probably none of us will ever be persuaded by any of the others here. We are really to the point of ad hominem arguments.
I'm much more optimistic. I don't think it's likely that you'll ever adapt my point of view, but I do think it's possible that you'll amend your own. Certainly, my thinking has been affected by remarks made here -- and I'll give a quick call out specifically to jh, but I'll also concede that JADL, GM, you, and others have had influence.
Many of the left speak in the name of the poor. But most were never poor. Obama wasn't. Ayers wasn't. Kerry isn't. The Kennedy's aren't. Even Marx wasn't.
Actually, Obama was. You really need a fact checker.
Poor? by poor I mean indigent. I don't think he was, but I could be wrong.
His Indonesian step father was a prominent businessman.
His grandparents were solidly middle class.
His mother was a flibbertigibbet, but only because she could afford to be. She did finish a Ph.D. I don't think there are very many of the truly poor who ever manage that.
I would say in fact that there are none. Which will get you going on class, but I am happy to concede one thing for a minor and temporary case.
It's very expensive to get a Ph.D. because you are economically inactive for so long. About ten years minimum, if you count the BA.
Some might be able to achieve it in 7.
It's still a very long time to go without support.
It can be done, but it's very tough.
Plus, the people with big bucks get to travel and learn languages, which gives them a leg up in hiring.
People like Martha Nussbaum had all kinds of advantages that most don't have.
In France, many of the so-called postmodernists came from EXTREMELY wealthy families where an ancient Greek tutor at age 5 was the norm.
They won't even speak to the poor people in whose name they speak.
I managed to skate through using temporary secretarial pools as backup and eating potatoes for months (a bag of potatoes and margarine will suffice for an entire month, if necessary).
Still, I was never among the actually indigent, such as the homeless.
I consider the homeless to be the truly poor.
Don't tell me Obama was ever close to homeless.
How are you defining poor, Stu?
Kirby,
I consider the homeless to be the truly poor.
Don't tell me Obama was ever close to homeless.
How are you defining poor, Stu?
Good question.
No, I don't believe Obama was ever homeless. But certainly, he would have been in "reduced circumstances" as the child of a single mother who was working her way through a Ph.D. program. I have no idea how that was financed, but it is likely that grants, loans, and/or teaching assistantships were involved. I remember that Math faculty at the University of Illinois considered the graduate students there in the late-70's to be living in the lap of luxury as compared to their circumstances as graduate students in the 50's and 60's; at the same time my parents were horrified that my annual compensation as a Math TA (which was to support both me and my wife) was identical in dollars to what they'd been making as young married folks 30 years previously.
By most definitions, I think my wife and I would have qualified as "poor" then, as we were content to live on what we made, and not to ask our parents for support. Of course, this meant that we had a safety net that few of the truly indigent don't have, and I won't minimize the difference, even if we didn't use it. Still, I'll note that after two years of a diet that had very little red meat, my hematocrit was so low that the vampires wouldn't accept blood donations any longer. You tell me. Is that poor?
And there were a few single moms living as students in married student housing while we were there. "Just scraping by" hardly begins to cover it. I expect that Obama was poor then by any income-based criteria.
stu, I agree with several of the differences you pointed out between fascism in Germany and communism in the Soviet Union, but stark similarities remain. Sure, the language may be different, but rhetorical differences only superficially mask the one-party dictatorial nature of the two regimes.
Both regimes pursued brutal, militaristic, expansionary policies and practised genocide (race or class extermination), including what is generally known as Soviet genocide with regard to Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Volga Germans, Khazars, etc. Some apologists for Stalin actually tried to defend this odious tyrant by claiming he was above all a Russian nationalist, just as did earlier apologists for the genocidal tyrant Hitler.
I think Hayek and Mises are pretty trustworthy sources on similarities in their economic systems, though I do recognise that there were also social democratic movements on the left in many European countries that only occasionally adopted violence as a tactic and in most cases eschewed a one-party state.
To some degree as well, the rise of fascism in Europe can be credited to the rise of Bolshevism and the post-WWI leftist uprisings in Germany and elsewhere. It represented for many anti-communists a defence that proved disastrous in Germany and Italy, though it survived the war in Spain (after a violent civil war in which there were many atrocities committed by both sides, though naturally I'd have gone with Franco) and Portugal.
I don't equate the communist regimes with the social welfare states in Europe, but there remains the problem of reduced political freedom in the increasing "dirigisme" of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic parasites of the EU.
Here's an example of this view from one of my favourite British commentators (formerly with the BBC), Pat Condell ("Europe needs a [democratic] revolution"--a must see!):
http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=37007
JADL,
Thank you. I've used the metaphor of a circle, rather than a line, to describe the left/right dichotomy. The point is that if you go too far in either direction, you end up at pretty much the same place.
I think there's a pretty broad agreement between what you wrote and what I've written in this thread. I will note that Mises had some guardedly positive things to say about fascism in '27 (these are recounted in the Wiki article). My intent in raising this isn't to diminish Mises (no one has perfect foresight, after all), but rather to confirm your basic characterization of fascism as a reaction to communism and labor unrest.
I do think your swipe about social democratic movements only occasionally adopting violence and/or one party states was pretty tacky, as right wing states have occasionally exhibited the same defects, and are more often successful, because they're usually pursued by their country's military, which confers notable logistical and organizational advantages.
"which confers notable logistical and organizational advantages."
I have to note that this is a masterpiece of understatement. Nicely played.
Stu,
Really?
First of all, we're all soiled when it comes to "rhetorical rudeness." If you're going to get your panties in a wad, don't. Last time I checked, we were all having fun.
Having said that, it was Dr. Johnson who said "the first Whig was the Devil" and it was Carlyle who said
All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary. You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction: a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!”— this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and thought sublime and beneficent by some. So that now hardly any limb of the Devil has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it: — there needs almost superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a Garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very peculiar British Prytaneum of these days! And in fact, THE DEVIL (he, verily, if you will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman; lithe of limb as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any more. And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.
And yes, I'm quoting someone often reviled because, sadly, it turns out his predictions were often right regarding what Parliament's actions (i.e. what would become the Welfare-Nanny state) would do to society.
This is because the heart of leftist-democratic thinking is that "I can solve the state's problem (whether or not I have the power to do so)" while the heart of rightist-monarchic thinking is "the state's problems are not mine (unless someone in power makes them mine)."
The latter the teachings of Christ and Paul in the New Testament. The former does not.
That's why I feel justified in calling out leftism as Satanic.
Now, that doesn't mean you know you are or that you want to be in league with the Devil (and, by the way, I'm not so sure how much I believe in that personage as more than the simple evil within us. . . have to wait till I die to find that one out) BUT it does mean that I'm here, shouting like Jeremiah, hoping you'll hear me and, instead of shitting on what I have to say (also like a leftist, see Cromwell & his soldiers pissing in cathedrals) you might one day listen--and assume I am acting in good faith, as I assume you are.
stu, I'm familiar with the circle metaphor and think it apt to describe how left-right political extremes meet in a number of ways.
But it's true (whether tacky or not) that the European non-communist left has resorted to violence (and occasional bloodshed, mostly during general strikes or by carrying out targeted assassinations of right-wingers, as in Spain and France in the 1930s), just as right-wing groups (like the Iron Guard in Romania) did. The monarchist Action Francaise came near to toppling the corrupt French Republican government in 1934. The German historian Ernst Nolte (in "Three Faces of Fascism") even tried to account (implausibly, in my view) for the rise of fascism in Germany by the example of Charles Maurras's AF in France. But yes, both sides engaged in political violence.
GM,
First of all, we're all soiled when it comes to "rhetorical rudeness." If you're going to get your panties in a wad, don't. Last time I checked, we were all having fun.
I'll concur that pretty much all of us (jh excepted) do a fair bit of mocking and caracaturizing, but I'd make a distinction. There's the stuff that happens in debate, in the context of a argument, what I've characterized as the "sharp elbows" of this venue, and then there's the drive-by crap. In discussion, I'll return elbow for elbow, but the drive by crap that adds nothing deserves to be called out for the crap that it is, and that's exactly what you offered. Drive by crap that added nothing.
This last post at least has content that's worth engaging, and so earns a different kind of response.
This is because the heart of leftist-democratic thinking is that "I can solve the state's problem (whether or not I have the power to do so)"
This, I think, is wrong. First off, it's definitely an American thing (rather than a left or right thing) to believe that we can just wade in and solve problems. I'd point to the US's recent decade long misadventure in Iraq as a case in point. You might point to the Great Society. This is a shared misconception.
I do believe that both sides are trying to deal with core problems of equity. We both want a society that is productive, efficient, etc. But there are disagreements about how to acheive that. In particular, the right believes that the existing distribution of resources represents a market determined optimal allocation, whereas the left believes that the existing allocation sustains certain types of inefficiency.
The latter the teachings of Christ and Paul in the New Testament. The former does not.
I don't believe you can sustain this. I'll concede that in Paul you'll find some support. But I doubt you'll find the same sort of support in the Gospel's, excepting the likelihood of a bad exigesis of the "render unto Caesar" passage (which was not only rhetorically deft, but had the real point of establishing that Jesus's interrogators were not ritually pure). After all, Jesus and Paul had intrinsically different relationships to the state: Paul was a citizen, and indeed one whose hold on the rights of citizenship ultimately cost him his life; whereas Jesus was the citizen of an occupied power, whose resistance to Roman power ultimately cost his life. Both were killed by the state, which is a rather personal way of making the point that the state's problems were theirs, although I don't see this as a left-vs-right defining issue.
And as for the "in the league of the Devil" crap, you basically have two choices here: Either you water it down so far that it's just a metaphor for sin, in which case it applies to us equally; or you raise it to the point of active collaboration with reified Satan, in which case it applies to neither of us. You have no moral or theological advantage here, so drop the pretense.
The Devil's, per Milton, first word is "I."
And I didn't mean an American ideal that we could fix other states--but the erroneous idea that we can fix ours.
Because apart from the "Caesar's" statement that applies to many instances, Christ's example of life and death is one of not fighting the state--you'll notice he didn't speak out against slavery or the subjugation of women and children as property.
One can infer, of course, that he simply meant we are to be beyond all that nattering nonsense (i.e. all children of God).
But if you are to be beyond the nattering nonsense of "what is Caesar's," then you must be beyond it--not embroiled in it.
That's the biggest reason I'm a monarchist first and lean libertarian right if I am involved in an American political discussion.
I would, ideally, wish to be left alone by the state and be able to leave the state alone as much as is possible.
Leftists certainly don't want this, neither do most who refer to themselves as Republican (who are mostly RINOs who like business more than the homeless). Libertarians claim to, so if I have to support someone (and honestly, how often can you say "I'm a monarchist" and have people take you seriously), then I'll go for folks like Paul.
And I really wish you'd stop referring to my posts as crap or at least polish the turd a bit. There's something there for you or I wouldn't post at all--stop being so close-minded to it.
Have fun, be young, drink Pepsi!
maybe the left in general i don't want to be too specific here like kirby who seems to have narrowed things down to obama and ayers being the epitomes of leftists madness in the modern world the heirs of jerry rubin and the symbionese liberation front
( what does symbion mean anyway)
maybe the left views the operations of the state as so potentially monstrous they it requires radical reprimands from the voice of the people
and the right is just maybe so righteous as to think that govt itself is beyond reproach i mean at least they're doing something even if it is misspending all the
hard earned tax money and thus they see it as they're right like many totalitarian regimes have they're right to squash the masses when necessary to spray 'em down with water hoses when they get out of hand to shoot rubber bulletts when the time is right i mean the right really in this country and i think you could trace down along the lines of political theory and see that the conservative right believes in the machinery of govt be it democratic or otherwise and thus the right in power believes in the well lubricated machinery of military
now it may be that the left takes this well made and lock stock and barrell machinery and wields it to destructive ends it may be that the left was reading the little red book while mao was snuffing out millions it may be that the angry pleas for liberation were drawn forth out of a bunch of spoiled brats but i don't think so
it's interesting to speculate upon how the dynamics of violence get played out from a girardian context i mean is it that radically different violence is violence and policies are policies and the police are the police
no matter what this is a great discussion even with curtis out of the loop
i agree with kirby - he lacked a sense of humour
maybe it could be said that in general the left becomes violent rather naively as in the endorsement of the black panthers which what's his name horowitz always talks about that selfrighteous goofball so they get a little daring you know the left started this innocent thing called the rock concert but the right has come forth with business plans and now these pop music festivals are litterrallyy everywhere being used as a means of controlling the masses the left had the intuition the right had the business plan
ideas morph and get spewed out in oppositional rhetoric and that is the curse of a two party plan we need more parties we need a few more umbrellas for when the shit begins to fall
it's hard to hear the voice of the people but i think it was the democrats that started the town meeting thing and the repubs have picked it up with a vengeance in montana they've been warned not to bring their guns to the tea party meetings and that's being discussed as a violation of the 2nd amendment (we should really dismiss that amendment) i think anyone can have a gun but if you have one you shouldn't presume to be protected by anyone or any govt when the gun is sold there should be this explanation that hey you're on your own other people have guns too be careful nobody has a right to a gun but you have one and now life is a little more dangerous
there's something ingenious afoot or ahand with all the modern communication toys i mean i can't even imagine the organization of people anymore most people are going to be absorbed in the iphones and forget to throw stones or molotov cocktails gates and job have routed the masses into cubicles and they're all wasting their time looking at porn or talking on blogs which may be the same thing after awhile i mean i think all the computer world has done is allow us to waste time in a more disciplined fashion it's speeded things up and now the advantage is to the quick thinker and the quick keypad tapper and the rest of us are swirling about in a sea of relative obsolescence
clouds so swift
rain won't lift
gates closed
and railings froze
get your mind of
summertime
you ain't goin' nowhere
i love you guys
i agree and disagree with eveything you say
but i can't help but admire you
for your perseverence
i'm tempted all the time to go the way of curtis
but then i keep in mind that maybe just maybe some really samrt babe the kind they have on tv now the really pretty knowckout candoanything sort of babes i just think that one day one of those is going to catch on here and we're going to go in a completely different direction
we cannot constrain the desire to villify or assassinate either the character or the man
it was the right that took down the leftist kennedy and his brother
the dixiecrats were states rights rightists posing as liberals
i think any govt works best when the workers see themselves as little more than janitorial when elected officials are granted absolutely no social benefit no status it is just a job i don't get my name in the papaer i don't get to be a celebrity i don't get to look good for the camera
the left seems to be a bit parasitic
the right seems to be like an old sturdy castiron machine that inevitably rusts
there's no ending this argument
it seems it's been hashed over here a million times which is remarkable in and of itself at least curtis could acknowledge the pure inanity of and the perseverance of the arguments i mean look back 4 years kirby was putting out the same ole stuff and begging for a fight of course he's kidding and he tends to get honest now after brett wears him down and he has to face up to the impeccable logic of stu then he concedes a little
satan is a semitic word for adversary a word for all seasons
in the 60s the altruistic left were trying to say
don't forget the people and the resistant right seemed to say don't forget the govt the best damn govt in the world despite all its flaws
it was right for the kids to say to the fathers
hey i've had enough of your presumptions about the world no matter how well documented the force of evil no matter the historical tellall of history which is fiction the further we get from the event
mankind and culture is a fallen proposition therefor we have the sacrament of confession and the meal of forgiveness
gm
this summer i attended an ecumenical conference of mennonites and catholics
mennonites looking to be more liturgical and catholics attracted to the peaceful stance of the anabaptists
i came out of it pretty confused but hopeful
at least there's an effort to build the bridge
google bridgefolk
one big question for kirby about ecumenism in lutheran surrealism
and i think stu is generally the best upholder of a wider swath for general hospitality no matter what the rhetoric i mean
do we need to be more open to the vehement agnostic atheists
who woulda ever thunk that a post on the blake poems about london poverty and political rancour could go 100 comments
i think if blake was alive today he'd be interested in the hispanic difficulties
but i dare say he'd be horrified as i am with the state of gender politics that such a concept even occurs is enough to believe that satan has a claw in
anyway
i'm just babbling for a change
i think the whole of govt should be run by women all the men should step down and let the hilarys and the palins fight it out adn teh men should say hey good day for golf good day for fishing i think i'll built a fort in the back yard for guys only and have a barbecue
women and homosexuals should run govt
can we all agree on that
jh
Stu's and GM's and JH's viewpoints all make sense to me. I appreciated the nuanced arguments in each, and I liked the Carlyle passage!
School has started here so all I can do for most of today is pass through the comments, but I am reading them and enjoying them.
I too agree that Curtis lacked a sense of humor. It's a sort of essential to have humor to belong in this group, and also to be a Christian. I find Jesus to be endlessly hilarious. That deal where his guys ask should we pay the tribute, and he says go down to the sea, catch a fish, and in its mouth will be the tribute coin.
That's just the weirdest possible sense of humor. I love it.
GM,
And I didn't mean an American ideal that we could fix other states--but the erroneous idea that we can fix ours.
This remains true of the right, but requires other examples. How about the idea that we can fix the "problem" of low profits in the pharmaceutical industry by establishing an unfunded prescription drug benefit? Or how about the idea that we can fix education by requiring all teachers to teach exactly the same material in exactly the same way, and measure their teaching proficiency by testing the students, absent any other considerations? Or how about the idea that we can reverse secular and skeptical trends in society by mandating a minute of silence and/or prayer? Or how about the idea that we can deal with increasingly uncompetitive performance in science by mandating the teaching of a non-scientific theory (creationism)? Or the idea that we can deal with the problems of unhealthy teenage sexual behaviors and unintended conceptions by teaching abstinence-only sex education? And then ignoring studies that prove that abstinence-only sex education results in long-term increases in unhealthy sexual behaviors and unintended conceptions?
But let me note that there are many problems that government can solve. Framing the question solely in terms of misguided efforts begs the question of whether government interventions can ever have a positive effect. It's not hard to argue that they can, even if limit ourselves to purely domestic considerations. I'd note: sustaining both wild places and places of unique ecological importance and/or beauty through a national park system; effective, scientifically based weather prediction; the basic infrastructure for transportation in roads, airports, air traffic control, and ports; a system of public education that was the envy of the world for many years, and which is still redeemable. These are just a few, and I've gone out of my way to pick out examples that historically enjoyed conservative support, the idiocies of the moment notwithstanding.
And I really wish you'd stop referring to my posts as crap or at least polish the turd a bit. There's something there for you or I wouldn't post at all--stop being so close-minded to it.
If you don't want me calling your posts crap, then don't post crap. I only refer to crap posts as crap. Most of your posts aren't crap, but the one that got this started was crap, and it deserves to be called out for the crap it is. Does this require further explanation?
If you're going to argue "x," it's not sufficient to just say "Woo hoo, look at me, and by the way, x." You have to provide an argument, which is some sort of support that goes beyond a mere affirmation of the thesis "x." And certainly, saying "x, and by the way, damn you" is going to get you an F on any assignment, and likely the next two or three for good measure. If you don't like it, take it to my Chairman or Dean, but don't expect any more sympathy there. It would be different if you at least tried to argue as to why "damn you" was appropriate, as you did subsequently. Those posts were in error, but not crap.
The problem here was not with my grading, it was entirely with your performance.
JADL,
Between you and GM, I'm in a pedantic mood today, and you guys are in the way.
I should not have referred to your earlier note about violence and one-party systems by the social democratic left as "tacky," but rather as "rhetorically incompetent." We're in the midst of an argument where my position takes the form, "X, not Y," and your position takes the form "Y, not X." If you want to argue for "Y, not X," then raising an argument of the form "X causes Z" where "Z" is an agreed upon adverse consequence is rhetorically competent only if you're prepared to argue "Y does not cause Z," or perhaps "Y causes Z to a lesser degree than X causes Z." But you're not, and by framing the question of governmental violence so as to exclude both communist (and by equitable consideration, facist) regimes, you've walked into a trap of your own making, because violence by non-fascist military/police states regimes swamps violence by the non-communist left.
I can just imagine you making this argument to Cato, or Seneca, or Machiavelli, or Bismarck, or any of the other hoary apologists for state violence in support of the established order. They'd be convinced that you were trying out for jester.
There's an article in this month's Smithsonian (september 2011) on "Finland's Remarkable Public Schools."
It reminded me of yet another interesting trait of many of the people who come here: most of us are educators.
The article is by someone named Lynnell Hancock, and has photographs of happy Finns by Stuart conway.
Almost no one visits Finland, and I'm one of the few Americans to have lived there who can contradict their viewpoint.
Almost no Americans can learn their language.
But here is the happy conclusion:
"Kids aren't required to go to school until they're 7. Standardized tests are rare. And yet the Nordic nation's success in education is off the charts."
The article's photos are largely from the Helsinki region (the only place where one is likely to see a black person or an Asian person is in Helsinki).
Hidden inside the article is the the fact that only 4% of Finns are not ethnic Finns.
Finns have aggressively kept out the problematic Islamics who have been dumped in Sweden and Norway and Denmark (and create gigantic problems from the murder of Olof Palme to the attempted assassination of Danish cartoonists).
and yet right in the opening photograph is a Muslim girl with a headscarf, as if she's a normal sight in a Finnish school.
I was the only foreigner to live in the town of 500 I lived in for a year -- EVER.
But Finland is a place that people love to spin. Basically the writer argues that if we give a lot more autonomy to teachers, and pay them like doctors (or pay doctors like teachers), all kids will be happy and successful.
This probably isn't true.
On the other hand, something happened due to the pressures of the Swedes and Russians.
Finns realized they had to bring everyone to the same level so that everyone would feel included in Finland and fight like hell for it. Which they did in 1939, and would do again.
One of the striking things in language classes (I was teaching conversational English) is that I asked the Finns how many would go to the front lines if the Russians invaded. They all raised their hands.
They love their military. On holidays they go and place candles on the graves of soldiers who have died. They realize quite intimately what their country has cost, and they don't have a vicious left that constantly belittles the country.
Of course, they haven't got much of a record of military conquest.
The country is capitalist, but they also spread their wealth. Taxes are high.
So, there is no direction from above. There is help for start up companies, but it is not autocratic.
But there is no homelessness. No one is hungry. Everyone has a house, and everyone has potatoes and beer and a sauna.
Can we achieve this here?
That is the writer's intention.
But the situation is completely different.
Finns are not like Anglophones.
They are a small people that is neither Nordic like the Swedes and Danes and Norwegians (their language is completely unique and almost impossible for outsiders to learn) nor are they like the horrible Russians to the east.
To survive, they need every Finn to get to their maximum level.
It's just a different set of needs that drives them.
they care about each other because they absolutely need every man woman and child to do their best to succeed.
We don't need the poor to survive here. It's optional. Same thing is true in Britain. It's not in my interest necessarily to care what happens in Alabama, or in Hawaii. I might care, but I care about as much about someone in Tanzania.
Which is to say not very much.
In Finland, where you need every man and woman on deck, smart and fit as they can be, it's a need.
This isn't in the article, but it's what I saw in Finland.
They stick together because they are sandwiched between the Swedes (historically the Swedes were very tough), and the Russians (who are about as delicate as Cyclops in terms of gobbling up surrounding peoples).
to survive, they needed cohesion, and to spread the wealth and the knowledge.
Honestly, it is a very peculiar situation.
I don't think it applies to us, but it's fascinating to see how our lefty writers try to make it apply.
Stu--you're noting a lot of things Republicans do that are squarely leftist and wrong.
And, really, it's not professor time--I think when most of us have advanced degrees and work in academia there's little room for that silliness.
Stu has a comment at 4:25 that might get missed -- it's directed to JADL and GM.
JH thanks for weighin' in and including everyone here virtually. Curtis did write and cordially invited me to write on his blog. Which means he hasn't cut all bridges, even though he gets mad at me for saying private stuff.
I think it means he's still madly in love with my viewpoint.
He can't respond so that was fun to write.
My daughter Lola has four more days to play Polyxena and then she'll only be Lola again, Polyxena perhaps in her dreams. Wait, do thespians dream? Do they dream that they are in their roles, or do they dream that they are a real person? Themselves at last?
i love Steam of Conscientiousness or whatever it's called.
No one much discussed Blake.
Who is the Blake of Finland?
they don't really have classes to the same extreme as we do. No one would have thought of a little matchseller in Finland. Someone would have taken the little girl in.
They are just heart breaking those Finns whenever they aren't breaking your teeth.
Which they'd as soon do, especially during the nationalistic holidays like Vappu.
(May 1st: celebrated hard by one and all, even the kids get flopping drunk on Root Beer.)
There are dozens of churches that go by the name Brethren. Some of them do not share the same historical roots according to Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brethren
down toward the bottom is a group called Brethren of the Coast who were Caribbean pirates.
No one is certain who all these people were/are. There are progressives, conservatives, and so on.
I think they are probably progressive in some areas and conservative in others, but from my perspective looking backwards is more enlightened than looking forward to doing something wrong.
Everything is twisted around these days.
I hope this doesn't mean that GM is a pirate. He does live roughly in the area where pirates live.
stu's "examples" (in the form of questions) in his 3:45 PM post are really only partisan-pitched charges against conservative or Republican policies, not open-ended questions like "How can we best raise general standards of education?"--rather than, say, "How can we continue to claim greater 'investment' (i.e., more government spending based on tax hikes) in education that primarily consists of ever-greater payoffs to merit-averse public school teachers' unions and to big-city public school mafias in the interest of precisely-stated goals like 'other considerations'?" And in that those "examples" differ little from "by the way" assertions stu purports to abhor in GM's posts.
As for the question of (in the 4:25 PM post), excluding obviously communist and fascist regimes--of which there were more of the former than the latter in Europe (to which my earlier remarks were confined), it seems stu has to *assume* violent military/police state regimes elsewhere in the world are somehow naturally "rightist" in ways that compare fairly with rightist or conservative views in the West to be convincing. Granted there are a few non-fascist ones in the past (though this classification would be contested by many on the left), Chile or Argentina of earlier decades, but today? Is the current regime in Iran "rightist?" Is Syria? Belarus? Venezuela? Bolivia? Sudan? Zimbabwe? Where are the violent "rightist" regimes of today?
Kirby, thanks for your engaging remarks on Finland. Always good to hear of success stories involving a spirit of national unity as an antidote to the partisan clashes we're often engaging in here. We're a country far too vast and diverse for that kind of social and cultural unity, but it's still good to hear about.
JADL -- FINLAND was ok until it got dragged into the EU through security concerns (they wanted and probably need protection against Mother Russia).
Finland has to pay huge parts of the Portuguese and Greek bailouts. It will be billions.
They are connected to the crummy profligate nations of southern Europe now, which means they have to pay for their excesses.
Finland has turned to the right. They have a True Finn party which doesn't want to pay a dime to the Portuguese bailout. They have other rightist parties that are also much in favor right now.
Finland is 60 billion dollars in debt. They are also about 60 times smaller than we are population-wise so percentage-wise their debt is greater than ours.
And they are sinking under it.
Pensions there are bloated and impossible to sustain. They have been talking for years about cutting back. but until recently the politicians who did that couldn't get elected. Now they are.
The Finns are running toward them.
Of course the left screams that this is racist and classist and sexist. Yes. They have mor or less the same discourse that we have inside their country.
Meanwhile our journalists on the left try to get us to use their example.
But Finns are mostly Finnish ethnically, so they are one big family. Quite literally. They are a physically beautiful people.
There are more and more foreigners movnig in, but it's only 4% now.
At night you have to be careful if you're a foreigner there. Xenophobia kicks in with the alcohol consumption. I had to run for my life while being called an Indian on several occasions (my hair looks jet black to them!).
But the alcohol also protected me becaus eit made the drunks awkward on the ice! I never drink so I had the advantage.
I was afraid to get old and slow of foot in the country just the same.
Finland is an amazing place. No one knows what it's really like there. The left spins it as a paradise.
They should have been there in 1939. If nothing else, it's Mother Russia that unites the Finns.
Finland is almost in the position of Israel. They are a small nation that has to fight off a giant periodically. So they know they had better stick together.
Kirby,
I'm glad you read the Smithsonian article. I did too, and was planning to bring it up, but it's good to have your spontaneous take on it.
I agree with you that Finnish society is strongly integrated, not in the sense that it embraces diversity, which it does not, but in the sense that every Finn feels themselves to be a full participant in Finnish culture, and fully responsible for its continuation. This set of shared assumptions, shared values, and shared myths has to tremendously simplify the task of education. This is certainly a very different cultural context than what we face in the US.
At the same time, the article's hypothesis that giving teachers freedom to teach as seems best to them should not be casually dismissed. I suspect that you and I are very different personalities in the classroom (e.g., I'm manic), and certainly we have different interests. For you to try to teach my class my way would be a disaster, and most likely vice versa, even though I'll lay claim to being a better poet than you are a mathematician. Yet we've both won teaching awards, teaching our material our way.
As I look back at the teachers that have most inspired me, and I've most sought to emulate, the common thread that runs through them is a passion for the material they've taught, and a knowledge that's deeper and more agile than anything that can be written in a book or a lesson plan. They didn't fear student questions, they embraced them and sought them out and adjusted their lectures/discussions on the fly to take advantage of them, and tried to use them to instill the same love of discipline that they have. As do I, and I suspect, as do you.
It seems to me that this passion and professionalism is under attack, and I see in this a race to mediocrity. Sadly, it seems to me that the testing mentality predictably leads to a teaching to the test, and this means that things that aren't easily tested don't get taught. "Alignment with the test" becomes the sole curricular desiderata, crowding out the opportunity for teachers to teach their passions. And this is anything but a partisan attack -- while I think that Bush's "No Child Left Behind" has been a disaster, and the anti-intellectualism of the Tea Party is prima facia evidence of its infantilism, Arne Duncan and his assessment based approach to teaching is no better. What we're seeing here is a truly bipartisan effort to squeeze the life out of education in this country.
JADL,
And in that those "examples" differ little from "by the way" assertions stu purports to abhor in GM's posts.
No, I objected to the lack of content in a single posting. Had there been a constructive "by the way," I'd likely have had a very different reaction to that particular post. In general, I believe that well-chosen examples are an excellent way to argue and instruct.
Regarding current regimes... I think this represents a fundamental change of the question about uses of violence on the left vs. right, which I understood to have a deeper historical perspective, as your earlier examples included 1930's era France and Romania. You do like to move the goal posts. Certainly, it's mightly convenient for you to adjust the question after the fact, because it takes the Latin American military dictatorships off the table, along with apartheid era South Africa and all of the other repressive regimes with colonial roots.
But even so, the search for repressive right-wing states in the present isn't entirely fruitless. Singapore, Burma, Thailand are easy calls. The Ivory Coast is arguable. South Korea has its moments, as does Taiwan. The Islamic states don't seem to project very well onto our left-right political divide, but the monarchical Islamic states seem rightist to me, e.g., Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. They're certainly states that have few qualms about the use of violence to sustain the status quo. I really don't know how to assess the former Soviet states, even Russia itself. They were thugocracies in the Soviet era, they're thugocracies today. But money concentrates in Russia today, and brings political power with it, in a way that it never did during the Soviet era. That has a rightist feel, preconceptions notwithstanding. I'm not proposing to hang Russia on you just yet, but I think it's an interesting test case. How will you exclude it? Its communist past has to be taken at a strong discount after an intervening revolution.
Stu, maybe I'll post some more things on Finland. I love the country, but mostly because I met my wife there.
I think your divvying of countries is interesting. I would definitely put Myanmar and Zimbabwe into the leftist camp.
And I'm putting Nazi Germany there, too.
But it's hard because often a country will attempt to present itself as its opposite. Hence all the nonsense about German DEMOCRATIC Republic. It was just plain nonsense.
Any country that is primarily a kleptocracy that belongs to a small corrupt elite I think we have to put into the right category. But then isn't that Chavez, really? He pretends to be a communist, but is he really?
What Popper points out in Marx is that a new class arises -- the party.
Something along those lines has arisen with race, gender and class. It's a new reverse discrimination that creates a new class. You'd think that Condi Rice would walk away with the prize in this new regime but she refused to accept the paradigm.
It's fascinating how secret new classes form especially within supposedly classless societies. They will always form! It's a given!
I want them to form according to merit, since of course they're going to form.
But then you get places like Nazi Germany where merit was the last thing to rise. Turds and scum rose. And yet, that's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. Or in Myanmar.
To some extent it's true even in America -- the turds and scum are beloved by the press -- Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are turds that have arisen with the papparazzi.
The class with no class.
Our politicians tend to be turds and scum now because almost no one else has a thick enough skin to handle the whole process.
That said, I do think there are people who are running on ideas: Ron Paul (a dweeb, but with interesting ideas). Even Michelle Bachman is running on ideas (I don't know what they are, but I think she has them).
I think Obama has ideas, but nobody really knows what they are. I'm sometimes not sure that he has really thought them through, but I think he has some ideas.
Edwards pretended to have ideas, but was in reality just a turd.
Kirby,
I think your divvying of countries is interesting. I would definitely put Myanmar and Zimbabwe into the leftist camp.
I'd like to hear your defense of Myanmar as a leftist state. I suspect it's the sort of thing that would get you shot over there. It seems to me to be a pretty standard revolutionary military dictatorship, and these are almost always rightist: Mr. Allende, Mr. Pinochet would like to speak with you now.
As for Zimbabwe, I did not characterize it. I suspect you'd characterize it as leftist because of its redistributionist policies. I don't think that's correct, since there was no leveling intent, but rather, a much simpler and atheoretical, "we have the power, and we'll take what we want." In any event, if it counts, so does Rhodesia, but in the other column. We can go down pretty much all of the African former colonies that way.
This is much the same sort of reaction that has me wondering about how to classify Russia today. Revolutions often result in chiral flips, left for right, or right for left.
Gyarr!
Actually, it's the Church of the Brethren which is the largest surviving branch of the Schwartzneau Brethren--a movement started by Alexander Mack (which should make us Mackites, I suppose, but doesn't).
stu, in your casting about for current repressive "rightist" regimes, certainly Burma-Myanmar, ruled by a military junta, is hardly an "easy call" as a "rightist" regime, given their "Burmese Way to Socialism" programme that "combined Soviet-style nationalisation and central planning" (Wiki article).
Myanmar's major trading partner is China (red). They are a Buddhist-Socialist amalgam (you have to be Buddhist to be in the party, which means the Christian Karen people have no representation in their government -- and which is part of their rationale for rebellion). The army is often a significant player in communist countries.
Zimbabwe's main trading partner is also China.
China is propping up sick regimes all over the world.
This is why the failure at Tianamen Square in 1989 has created a world-wide disaster. North Korea, too, is propped up by Red China.
Had China fallen, we would not have all these nightmre states.
I do think there is something to be said for right and left's resemblance as one group seizes all the power. But the communists are far worse because it's far more difficult to get them to give up the power. This is a tremendous problem because they are so thoroughly totalitarian.
In Romania it is said that the Communist totalitarians were far worse than the Iron Guard because their influence reached into every aspect of every life.
This is why we must fight the communists.
I'm not even sure what a far right totalitarianism would look like.
Michelle Bachman doesn't scare me at all.
What's wrong with Singapore?
No violence unless you break the law.
'Zat so bad?
JADL, Kirby,
I'll note that the issue of the moving goal posts remains, and there's been no reply to my questions about the chirality of contemporary Russia.
The dissolution of the British Empire proceeded in all sorts of ways. Consider, e.g., Canada, the United States, India, Rhodesia, Burma. In some cases, the leave-taking was congenial, in others, adversarial. In those cases where there was an adversarial leave-taking, the newly independent states often were sought out for (or sought for themselves) alliances with the UK's enemies of the moment. This is just a working out of the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Hence, for example, the US's alliance with Louis XVI's France, or India's alliance with the Soviet Union, even as it remained a part of the commonwealth system. These alliances had the potential, especially during the post-world war II era, to involve economic investment, trade agreements, etc., and often led to economic identification. So there are some general trends, but each case has to be considered on its own.
Consider, for example, Pakistan. Is Pakistan a leftist state or a rightist state? The considerations of the previous paragraph suggest a default identification of leftist, but deeper analysis suggests otherwise. Just as post-independence India defined itself largely in terms of no longer being a colony of the UK, post-partition Pakistan defined itself largely in terms of no longer being a part of India. And certainly, Pakistan's history of military coups plays into a rightist identification. I didn't raise Pakistan earlier because it too is subject to the Islamic ambiguity, in that it is a backward looking or traditionalist country, but its tradition is not the standard western tradition.
Next, consider Rhodesia. This was an involuntary leave taking, and so you might expect this would give rise to a leftist government. But then, Zimbabwe would then be predicted to be rightist. Contextualizing this in a bit more detail, Rhodesia's independence came as the UK was exiting the colonial system, and in which it had little interest in maintaining it. Thus, the default assumption was that independence efforts would not be resisted, but in fact would be encouraged, if only to retain congenial trade relations. Yet Rhodesia was an adversarial leave-taking because it was not a standard grant of independence to its majority, but instead was a pre-emptive counter-revolution, and the enemy of Rhodesia's enemy was the undeniably right-wing apartheid era South Africa.
And this brings us to Burma. And I'll note that Burma is the official US designation for Burma, and you two should not be playing the role of tools for the dictatorship in parroting the name that it chose, because this tends to affirm its legitimacy. I'll withdraw the claim that Burma is clearly rightist, but note that if understood as a totalitarian, centrally-planned state, it falls under the communist exemption. That said, I'm not altogether happy with this, as it seems like a cop out, and will accept a provisional noncommunist leftist identification, albeit a defective one. Kirby points out that the army is often a significant player in communist countries. Yet there's nothing particularly special about "communist" in this, as indeed the army is almost always a significant player in any country where the state uses violence against its own citizens as central mechanism for sustaining its power, leftist or rightist. But there is a curious bias. In communist states, the military is usually clearly subservient to its party masters. Serving generals don't get to be General Secretary. Except, evidently, in Burma.
The Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma is the name of the government in Myanmar. It's the same group in power that denied Ms. Kyu's right to accession to the presidency after she won 80% of the vote in 1990. This is from Wiki:
"Between 1974 and 1988, Burma was effectively ruled by Ne Win through the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP),[49] which from 1964 until 1988 was the sole political party. During this period, Burma became one of the world's most impoverished countries. The Burmese Way to Socialism[50] combined Soviet-style nationalisation and central planning with the governmental implementation of superstitious beliefs.[citation needed] Criticism was scathing, such as an article published in a February 1974 issue of Newsweek magazine describing the Burmese Way to Socialism as 'an amalgam of Buddhist and Marxist illogic'.[51]"
It's the same group of people in power now, as were in power then. Nothing's changed except a few names here and there.
GM and JADL,
Hmm. I gave some examples of ill-advised Republican "problem solving," to contradict GM's claim that ill-advised problem solving is a purely leftist aberration, in reply to which GM writes,
Stu--you're noting a lot of things Republicans do that are squarely leftist and wrong.
Whereas, JADL writes,
stu's "examples" (in the form of questions) in his 3:45 PM post are really only partisan-pitched charges against conservative or Republican policies.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the examples I cite cannot be simultaneously leftist and conservative, and clearly wrong while clearly right. May I respectfully request that my opponents get their act together, and come back with a coherent position?
Not that I want to solve your joint rhetorical problems for you, but it's JADL's reply that looks off to me, because GM's is the reply of a principled libertarian, whereas JADL's is that of a mere apologist for the Bush administration. This isn't to say that I think that GM's position is correct, but at least it's consistent with his stated philosophical commitments.
GM,
What's wrong with Singapore?
No violence unless you break the law.
'Zat so bad?
Depends on what the law is. From time to time, being a member of the opposition party is against the law.
Zimbabwe's situation is less clear, at least to me. Mugabe's SS is trained in North Korea it says in the Wiki page. He did redistribute all white land to blacks (I think a tiny portion of land still remains in the hands of the original owners). The situation there is so chaotic as to be incredible. Billion percent inflation or something. Whites have gone from 300,000 to about 40,000 (no one knows since a census is not something the government is able to undertake).
Blacks too are pouring over the borders.
The power sharing situation is nominal -- the guy who won the last election has the title of Prime Minister but his power is described as "nebulous."
Mugabe is basically a king.
But that's my point about communism: it's royalty by other means.
Once the party is formed it becomes a new royalty.
The party has its own laws, and doesn't have to obey any other laws, and there's nothing above it. Sounds like the king to me.
(This is the critique of Obama. He doesn't care about the rule of law. He finds the whole notion of law to be highly inconvenient. He would like to simply throw the constitution out the window and substitute his own preferences.)
Obama has some high-handed notions of redistribution -- which means he doesn't believe in private property. He wants to silence his critics and has attempted to do this to Fox News. His Obamacare is not Constitutional. He slammed the secnod bailout through without even letting the people know what was in it. He is operating a shadow government of czars who are not elected and are not answerable to anyone but him. Just this week he tried to schedule a meeting with congress on top of the Republican debate, which was meant to silence that debate, and make key personnel unavailable to listen. He tries people in absentia -- as when he attempted to try Officer Crowley before he had all of the facts.
The guy is completely out of control.
He won't uphold the laws regarding illegal immigration because he wants the votes of Hispanics. but he also won't let the border states do it.
His offices claim that he is bringing people back across the border, but this too is done in secret.
And the Fed is printing vast new quantities of money in secret.
Ron Paul wants an audit.
I don't think we'll ever find out what Obama has been up to until he's probably twenty years out of office. He gives 140 billion to the IMF without any authorization from anyone.
Now the Libyan conquest went through without any oversight or authorization.
The press won't do its job because they love him.
We don't know much of anything about his life: his past girfriends are completely silent, or have been silenced. His friends are silenced. No one really knows who he is, whathe's written, or what he believes.
It's terrifying.
Kirby,
This is the critique of Obama. He doesn't care about the rule of law. He finds the whole notion of law to be highly inconvenient. He would like to simply throw the constitution out the window and substitute his own preferences.
Obama, especially on the issues of health care reform and the budget process, has worked carefully within the law. Let's look at health care specifically, where the Democrats pursued health care reform through regular order, and so were subject to a 60 vote threshold in senate. This had the effect of producing a bill that was much more Republican than Democratic in its overall structure, hence, Romneycare. By way of comparison, the GW Bush-era Republican party passed Medicare Part D under reconciliation, an expedited process that is supposed to be reserved for bills that are revenue neutral or better (which Medicare Part D most certainly was not), and which is not subject to the 60 vote fillibuster override provision.
It seems to me that there are only a couple of places in which the claim could be reasonably sustained that Obama is not meeting his obligations to sustain the law and constitution.
The first is w.r.t. the Libyan intervention, where (as JADL has often noted here), Obama did not seek an approval to use force, whereas Bush did obtain AUMFs for both Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, we're in the regime of the war powers act, and the constitutional provision that only congress can declare war. Of course, history is full of wars fought by the US without congressional approval. Korea (Truman). Grenada (Reagan). Panama (GHW Bush). Somalia, Bosnia (Clinton). Of significant interest is the Tonkin Bay resolution, which per wiki, "gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia," and the conveniently forgotten theaters (the Phillipines, he Horn of Africa) of Operation Enduring Freedom under GWBush, which were not covered by either the Afghanistan or the Iraq AUMFs.
The second is his decision, as you note, not to enforce certain laws that he deems unconstitutional. Here, the best example is arguably DOMA. But this sort of Presidential nullification is nothing new, and indeed, GWBush, via "signing statements," was the all-time Presidential nullifier.
In both cases, Obama is comfortably within the precedent of past Presidential uses of power, and especially comfortably within the ridiculously expanded view of "unitary Presidential power" as articulated and lived out without Republican complaint during the GW Bush administration.
My problem here isn't that I disagree with you in characterizing these cited actions of being legally dubious. My problem is that I strongly object to the histrionic attitude you're taking, as if Obama's actions represent some kind of new and particularly pernicious abuse of the authority of the executive, when in fact these questions go back at least as far as to Washington's use of the militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Indeed, I think it right and proper to point out Lincoln's awkward dance around the legal status of the civil war. Was it a war? Lincoln's answer was always determined in context in which it was being asked. Did he need congressional authority to wage war against the Confederacy? No, it's a rebellion. Is a blockade a legal strategy? Yes, it's a war. Do we need to give military prisoners the rights of enemy combatants? No, it's a domestic insurrection. Can the President suspend habeus corpus? Yes, it's a war. This was a far more dangerous use of Presidential power than anything that's happened since.
In the end, the decision to hold the President accountable to the law rests with Congress, through its power of impeachment, through the electorate, not only in whether they return a President to power, but also in the Representatives and Senators they elect, and less effectively, with the courts.
Stu, I hate to say this (especially the detailed explication of Lincoln's maneuvers) expanded my awareness, but it did. Thanks! I will keep these in mind.
I'll agree with stu that it's often difficult to classify right and left political ideologies outside Europe, where they were spawned.
As for stu's claim I'm "a mere apologist for the Bush administration," that's just patent nonsense. Sure, I supported the to date successful Iraq War (as did several high-profile figures on the left like Christopher Hitchens), but opposed a number of Bush administration positions, e.g., on the TARP bailout issue, the Medicare D drug plan (and especially in its more costly universal application form demanded by Democrats),the lackluster Bush administration enforcement of federal immigration laws (though the Obama administration's record is far worse), etc.
I've always been ambivalent about the NCLB programme, though it's no wonder experimentation in public education policy should be tried considering the generally paltry returns in performance we get for such vast expenditures liberals are pleased to call "investments." I think it would be better to begin a long march towards privitisation of K-12 education, just as the failing and costly US Postal Service has long outlived its constitutionally-granted purpose.
JADL,
As for stu's claim I'm "a mere apologist for the Bush administration," that's just patent nonsense
Well, that's not the claim I made. I made the claim that your reply to my list was that of a mere apologist. Hence my assessment that it was "off," i.e., what you wrote was not consistent with your oft stated libertarian political philosophy.
So you clarify that you're not a mere apologist by stating an opposition to Medicare Part D, and ambivalence about NCLB, whereas in the earlier post, you characterized my raising of these very same Republican policies as "partisan pitched charges against conservative or Republican policies." So am I to assume that that's what these same reservations are when they come out of your mouth?
Or would it be more accurate to characterize your whole argumentative style as being ad hominem, which is to say, your position is that anything that comes out of my mouth is false, and anything that comes out of your mouth is true, even when they're the same thing? That's a mighty plastic notion of truth from a scholar.
I had to look up chiral before I could comment, and was super-busy yesterday with classes, and students in need of advice. Here's Wikipedia:
"In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its mirror image, or, more precisely, if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. For example, a right shoe is different from a left shoe, and clockwise is different from counterclockwise.
A chiral object and its mirror image are said to be enantiomorphs. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (cheir), the hand, the most familiar chiral object; the word enantiomorph stems from the Greek ἐναντίος (enantios) 'opposite' + μορφή (morphe) 'form'. A non-chiral figure is called achiral or amphichiral."
Stu's argument is that left and right regimes are chiral, and tend in many countries to flip flop between left and right in a winner takes all system. That is certainly true in Latin America.
I blame this on Catholicism and its top-down corporate structure.
Many Catholics see power as coming from God, and given to one leader. We see this in the Old Testament with the power given to Moses, and others. Democracy may not even be a Christian formation, some say.
But in the English Revolution the Roundheads argues that every person was born in the image of God, (made in the image of God), and therefore had EQUALITY with all others. The American Revolution and the notions of Democracy that were formed in it came out of that formulation.
The Puritans were therefore egalitarian on a Christian basis.
This is part of what continued to drive the Baptists, and continued to drive Lincoln, to free us from slavery.
I see Obama as coming out of Marxism and out of the idea that power rules, and whoever holds power holds all of it, and though it may have been initially granted by the People, the one in power can do pretty much as they please for the good of the people, even against the people's own will.
Marx held a very different notion of power than the egalitarian levellers of the English revolution. This is why it's important to get past the French and the creeps like Foucault and Derrida, back to the English revolution, and to our own Founding.
While Lincoln led us out of slavery, Obama is very much trying to lead us back into slavery (unwittingly, I would say -- he has no idea what he's doing -- but since he's studied primarily with Marxists and liberation theologists, he doesn't have any other notion of the good).
His main idea now is to try to consolidate all sources of power so that it is he alone who can speak and be heard.
stu, I took your opposition to the Medicare D drug plan as one of funding rather than the benefit itself. As for the NCLB, my ambivalence comes from sceptism about federal involvement in K-12 education that I think is really a matter for states and localities to manage; but I've no objection to standards testing as such as you apparently do. So no, not "the same thing."
And so no, my "whole argumentative style" isn't just ad hominem.
Kirby's praise for the Roundheads is naturally where we part company (for me of course the regicide Roundheads were both wrong and repulsive). The first English Revolution and the Revolution of 1688 are complicated historical questions, but it's not impertinent to note that they resulted in an England with a state-established church and with severe penalties on Roman Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants.
JADL's fascinating comment on the Roundheads brings up a viewpoint quite different to my own, and is in fact a separation of degree that we were unable to explore while we had to close ranks against the secularist, Curtis. Now that he's gone, it would be interesting to bring out some of the subtleties of interdenominational warfare over the last five hundred years.
Let me begin by granting that one of the things that the Catholics have that we don't within Lutheranism is a fairly strict set of agreements -- often imposed by the Papacy and the hierarchy. Lutheranism is weakened by its voting structure.
In the gay priesthood question the laity had a larger voting voice than the priesthood, which meant not so much the roundheads but the blockheads were deciding theological matters.
It would be like letting the children determine elementary school curriculum (recess, then lunch, followed by recess, then lunch).
The sexuality discussions that the laity wanted to discuss in the ELCA were virtually all they wanted to discuss for decades. Once they got their way, there was to be no more discussion of the matter for years (I think it's five).
So there have been ruptures galore -- not only with congregations leaving, but individuals within congregations leaving.
Moses provided strong leadership for the Jews leaving Egypt. He kept them together.
Luther did this.
Under Democracy, the people are supposed to lead.
I like this idea, but I don't think it works so well in a church.
I personally favor the Roundheads and am more or less against the excesses of the British aristocracy, although I love some of their more bizarre poets -- I love Sir John suckling, for instance.
If I could go back in history and have lunch with ONE person, it would definitely be Suckling.
He is said to have invented cribbage.
where you're wrong and you seem not to care and where everyone i suppose even your children find complete exasperation with you kirby is in your presumptions about roman catholicism
as you know very valuable things require protection and it is only the highest trained the most brilliant the genius christians who are prepared to care for the riches of christianity here's where protestantism in general falls flat on its ass or on its face if it could tell the difference no these are not fighting words these are undeniable facts irrefutable
the protestant world smothered the idea of genius and let it loose gasping into the world at large in the catholic world marx would have been an obedient priest as would every other pretentious freefloater
maybe a case could be made for wasted energy
the catholic tradition takes the very very bright and forces them with threats of severe punishment into humbly focussing on the sacraments
in the world assumed and created largely by the protestant impetus the genius is a rambling idiot with the licence of free speech they get to have all the power of thought without any of the humility
without any of the focus on the crucifixion and the resurrection of jesus christ
i swore i wasn't going to get drawn into these defenses of the one true faith the one true approach to truth whereby eveything that stands against it is really in accord with the devil
but here goes
devil may care
my pope is my spiritual director as he is for anyone who wants the truth if you don't want the truth you can flounder around in all kinds of social flotsam and intellectual jetsome and call it what you may but the truth is the game isn't over till the fat lady sings or burps
all the idiocy posing as useful social and cultural information of the last 500 years is subject to one simple critique from me for what else matters and that is secular thought has been a futile effort to fill in the vaccuum left by the cultivation of protestant principles and ethics in organising the supposed free world
the vaccuum which arose by placing the roman catholic church to the side as is if she no longer mattered so much so that tyrany was simply the need for someone to step in and rally the people around lies posing as truth whereas in the history of roman catholicism there has only been high level virtue and humble recognition of the limitations of the intellect and the truth held precious in the liturgy and conducted by the geniuses and most highly capable men as means of quietly and persistently exposing the essence of our faith to those who would be so courageous as to accept it and therefor know the only earthly freedom that means anything everything else is a blundering illusion of deception and fakery and whitewash and well evil OK i said it evil
now the holy catholic one and universal and supreme and all knowing and all forgiving true and exclusive check your doubts at the door roman church is willing to be patient but not for ever
so if you have any hope of getting on the train just know that the train is in the station and the coal is being loaded in the bin
with a pope around all the political pretenders and commentators have no choice but to look inferior if the pope is neglected then the pretenders and commentators and sycophants all rise up in popely pompery and speak with an air of authority when actually it is just air
only the pope can say anything about the truth
i know people will scoff at that but i live by this principle
he is the one we choose to be infallible he's the only man alive who cannot make a mistake when it come s to any kind of truth statement he is even the master of all the other disciplines like science he's the one person to listen to when it comes to science and sociology and psychology it is so sad when people don't listen because then they listen to people like gloria steinem or joseph campell or donald duck or david horowitz who actually is donald duck or kirby or marx or sarah palin these preposterous pretenders to authority cannot hold a candle they speak from the wrong end of their anatomies
full of sound and fury
the holiest things need protection and the disciples of the heretics who shoulda been burned at the stake but somehow they got away these disciples are nothing but enemies of the one true courageous bright all encompassing free from error universal holy roman church which eventually i guess we'll have to shove down every ones throats for being so what shall we say recalcitrant or something
i think we should do away with the whole forgiveness thing for awhile and just focus on wiping clean the slate getting rid of the heretics and paving the way for truth for the succeeding generations we've put up with this nya nya nya from the protesters from the degraders of truth from the pretenders of intellectual life for too long it is time to return to roman justice the inquisition of the 21st century you betcha we'll show the world a thing or two about religious freedom where's the matches hey you torquemada get me some kindling
the evil zeal of protestantism must be crushed
and who better than the knights templar restored in the 21st century to assure such necessary cleansing
come forth good knights
who knows how brilliant the south american world would be had they not been subject to the evils of radical communism which was fostered within a protestant weltanshauung rome would never abide such stupidity but she had to with a shrug of the shoulders how do you stop it once it starts once the upstarts like luther get talking it's like straw and gasoline on a hot summer day
now i don't want to get too adamant here for i'd at least like to leave the basement door open for the repentant when they come grovelling for the truth
united states is in a quandary precisely because there is no real authority it's anyones game anyone can rise up and pretend to call the shots anyone can be president gw bush proved that and he never even graduated from high school let alone read a book i heard in his library there is only one book and it is always upside down it's the book he was reading on 9/11 laura gave it to him i think it is called - the little goat gets his
now with obama we have the closest thing to a pope there can be in the noncatholic world he speaks with authority for he is the author of our impending freedom when he makes the rich squirm everyone feels it when he rankles the tea party repubs and they all are secret tea partiers now by virtue of letting them in the door of superficial christian evangelical madness posing as the one true political party the real americans
if there was a pope around here they'd never get away with that
but now they can abuse the right of free speech and throw it in our faces and call it doctrine and the one true way when in fact it is the shackles we most fear and do not know how to talk about
now we are all slaves to the military industrial complex everyone except myself and the other fortunate roman catholics who acknoweldge the supreme pontiff in all his unique and exclusionary glory
amid all the rankling and blather nobody can heare the truth coming from rome
but be assured
despite the fact that we're all rather perverted
we do have the truth and it will cost you now we used to offer it freely but we're playing the western capitalist game if you want a look at the truth the only place it resides i don't care what the jewish critiques say you're going to have to pay
you can bow to wall street or you can bow to the pope there's no middle way
if you're good at recognizing the precious unbelievable value and beauty held cautiously and gaurded by thousands of knights templar of the 21st century if you have any intuition at all for truth you may be granted access to this but i will have to interview you first and make sure that peter and the other saints are on board and listening to the one true authority on the planet the most holy father in rome joseph ratzinger or benny 16 as he's known on the street in his hood
whore of babylon
antichrist
these are pathetic epithets
upon which we heap scorn and derisive laughter
for we and only we know
i am saying this now
when push comes to shove the pope's will be the voice which matters most
so you can flail around in your presumed certainties your houses built on sand or you can come to the rock and rock the cashpaw
that's it for my apologies today
as jim morrison once said
(good catholic boy)
nobody get's out alive
all roads lead to rome
pity the deluded detractors
amen
jh
Kirby,
Your discussion of the sexuality debate in the ELCA seriously misconstrues the structure of support and opposition to the 2009 vote on the social statement "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust," and the separate action permitting (in certain circumstances) the ordination of gay and lesbian pastors.
You characterize this as a lay vs. clergy vote. It was not. Note that if this had been a "lay usurpation" as you characterize it, then congregations would not have left the ELCA, but pastors would have.
In fact, I've in the past characterized the ELCA as a politically centrist denominatioin, with less mass in the tails than the population as a whole, and this assessment was affirmed by Picklesworth, whose political commitments are very different from mine.
What I think is fairer is to note that individual congregations vary somewhat, and unsurprisingly, more conservative congregations have tended to call more conservative pastors, whereas more liberal congregations have tended to call more liberal pastors. Here, I want to be clear, that the relevant liberal-conservative dimension is theological (i.e., it is highly correlated with the literalist-nonliteralist dimension, and only weakly correlated with the Republican-Democratic dimension). After all, Lutherans don't think it is proper to talk partisan politics within the confines of the church building.
I believe that the relevant axis here was more of a rural/urban axis. I don't know whether homosexuality per se has a strong rural/urban bias, but I'm very confident that publicly acknowledged homosexuality has a very strong urban bias. Thus, most of the people -- clergy and lay -- in urban congregations encounter out homosexuals with some frequency, at work, at school, in our congregations. Familiarity can breed contempt, but it can also breed acceptance, and in this case, it has.
JADL,
There is still a philosophical difference here between you and GM that complicates debate, and I still think that your position is the problematic one. Let's narrow the scope down to just Medicare Part D.
I think you make a good point in calling out the distinction between policy goals and financing, but with the caveat that we can use this as a tool to clarify different positions, but this only brings into sharper relief the inconsistency in the position you're taking.
First, let's deal with the policy question. I.e., Let's suppose that the federal government has the means to fund an expanded prescription drug benefit within the Medicare program, and it can provide this benefit with such efficiency as to constitute a large net social good. Should it? GM here takes the position of a principled libertarian: no, the general benefits notwithstanding. Prescription drugs are ultimately a private benefit, and ought to be provided by private means. And here, I would take the position of a pragmatic liberal: yes, we should. We've dealt with issues of affordability, and the net social good involves an increase in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But you're committing yourself to the position that this is wise conservative policy. The only justification I can see for this would ultimately be an economic one -- that the policy saves the government money. Were that the implementation of Medicare Part D structured in such a way that it did.
Next, the funding issue. Here, the libertarian GM properly blanches. The "funding" for Medicare Part D is nonexistent -- it simply creates an unfunded liability that adds to the deficit, and will ultimately fall due with interest on the general taxpayer. And I'll blanch too, because the enabling legislation expressly prohibits negotiation by the government for lower prices for the pharaceuticals involved (a provision insisted on by the Republicans). In effect, the "right" created is not so much for the individual who receives medication, as it is for the pharma that sells it to be paid list price, rather than market price, for their goods. So from my perspective, this is structured as a wealth transfer from the treasury to pharma, with the drug benefit as camoflage. This kind of "no bid contract" cannot be justified on either a liberal or a conservative basis. The sole justification is partisan whoring for senior votes and pharma contributions. I guess this is what you might call a Republican policy, but it certainly is not a conservative one, and yes, I'll call it out as such. But evidently, you're fine with this part.
And I honestly don't know what you're talking about when you paint the Democrats as having made a good bill bad by insisting on "universal coverage." The eligibility requires are simply that you qualify for part A (hospital coverage) or are enrolled in part B (medical coverage). What else would it be for a Medicare benefit? I think you owe to us to delinate who you'd have thrown overboard to create a benefit plan that met your conservative sensibilities. And how would a less universal plan have met the Republican purpose of whoring for senior votes?
jh,
as you know very valuable things require protection and it is only the highest trained the most brilliant the genius christians who are prepared to care for the riches of christianity here's where protestantism in general falls flat on its ass or on its face if it could tell the difference no these are not fighting words these are undeniable facts irrefutable
I OJBECT!! I am protestant, and I most certainly know the difference between my ass and my face. You wipe the first with toilet paper, and the second with tissue. Different rolls, different roles.
Stu, you know how hard it is for pastors to leave the ELCA -- because in doing so they also have to leave the phynancing structure and not many pastors are willing to be martyrs for the cause especially if they have children and wives to support. It's two kingdoms.
The voting assembly was 66.6% laity.
And they got 66.6% of the vote.
(The numbers aren't quite right, but they're close enough to use that suspicious number, just at least enough to get GM riled up!)
Missouri doesn't allow laity input into theological questions.
This means it has some of the virtues and some of the dubious problems of the Catholic church which it more closely resembles.
If you get a good Pope, then wooly bully, all the Papal Bull is good as gold.
But if you get a bad Pope, you get a lot more Bull, as they had in Luther's day.
Good kings are a rarity.
Good people are probably even more rare, but if you can arrange for a way for them to fight one another in factions, everything kind of works out.
I loved JH's defense of the Papacy.
I understand there has been an attempt at Reform over the Centuries even within the perfumed cloisters, but it still hasn't cleaned out the molesters who found quite a large niche inside the Catholic church, and the evidence reveals that reporting and information in general does not move with lightning rapidity up the line at all.
So the Popes claimed they didn't know what the tail end was wagging, quite.
In that sense, Lutherans have been far better off. We haven't had the same kind of cloistered cover-ups, as they had clear back into the Name of the Rose.
I like your rural/urban split. I don't know if there is a census record about how the congregations voted on a rural/urban basis. We did have a gay member in our congregation before I went there. She is now over at the Presbyterian church (there are two -- they split by class and by politics in about 1908).
All we know otherwise would be merely anecdotal.
We do have lots of gay people in my area of the Catskills. I know newspaper editors, doctors, and colleagues who are gay. In urban areas especially maybe in some more elite cities you'd be likely to find a higher proportion (upper West side of Manhattan, etc.).
I think you are probably also more likely to find a lot of families in rural areas with lots of children (less likely to have these in highly urban areas as there are so many perps and so few places for them to play?).
I would never raise a kid in a city.
You'd have to be nuts!
But people do it. Suburbs and micropolises are more likely to have hordes of tots milling about looking for a snowball fight.
And in urban areas it's probably more likely especially to get gay men? Especially those who want to have anonymous sex with strangers (I rarely see anybody I don't know in the whole county!).
All the questions of authority are interesting.
Kirby,
The voting assembly was 66.6% laity.
And they got 66.6% of the vote.
60% laity, 40% clergy, per ELCA Constitution. But it's jumping to an unwarranted conclusion to assume a strong laity/clergy bias. After all, Lutheran laity will always give a great deal of deference to Lutheran clergy, especially their clergy, and especially on questions where there is a strong theological component. The view that this was a lay usurpation doesn't pass the smell test for anyone who's actually been involved in Lutheran governance.
Missouri doesn't allow laity input into theological questions.
But Luther did. Maybe you've heard of Melanchthon? He led the Lutheran delegation at Augsburg in Luther's absence, and is widely considered to be the principal author of the Augsburg Confession, which for all practical purposes is the defining document of Lutheranism.
If you look at Lutheran history, there is a long tradition of professorial theologizing, both clergy and lay, for which Luther (clergy) and Melanchthon (lay) are archetypes, and a long tradition of collegiality that involved the laity broadly.
Luther himself proposed and argued for the notion of the "priesthood of all believers," which ultimately rests on the belief that the clergy may have been set aside for a particular role, but they are not privileged in their access to God. We don't need a dedicated class of priestly intercessors. For better or worse, Lutherans stand at the judgement with only Jesus Christ beside them.
The LCMS position in this regard is authoritarian, but it sure as heck isn't Lutheran.
Stu, I wouldn't know about the breakdown of rural/urban, conservative/progressive within the laity/priesthood of the ELCA. I doubt if any such records are kept, and I would be willing to guess that all assertions are anecdotal, and based on wishful thinking.
Picklesworth was conservative but unwilling to show his face.
He knew he'd never get a call if he showed his true colors, and would probably have been drummed out of the seminary. The ELCA and its conservatives will be more and more like an emulsion over the next decade. I doubt if anyone who's conservative will remain with the ECLA, or if they do, will keep their heads way down like humanities faculty without tenure.
Melanchton was faculty at a time when most schools were Christian, so it wasn't as if he was an out and out secularist or one out to promote worldly changes and acting as a wolf in sheep's clothing.
There were and still are many wolves in sheep's clothing within the Catholic church. Within the Lutheran church, or at least within the ELCA, there are many as well who want to use the power of the institution to address their pet peeves rather than to serve God.
There are many inside the ELCA who would fit comfortably in a UU church. And that group rose up and seized the day on the Sexuality question. No normal well-rounded people want to spend five years agonizing over that kind of question.
We are busy raising kids, and paying the bills. It had to be single-issue fanatics who accomplished that end, and the only ones who had time to fight them were the retired pastors whose children were gone, and had time for a lonely fight against a foregone conclusion. They would never have given up any more than the North Vietnamese ever intended to sue for peace in Paris.
Any sign of openness was mere strategy, and everyone knew it.
Better for conservatives to just leave, and save their energy to love their families and serve God.
Stu, Authority is one thing. Authoritarian is another!
You wouldn't let your students grade themselves.
I don't think people who haven't been trained by a seminary should be making Biblical decisions any more than Joe the Plumber should decide complicated questions about rocket science.
The ELCA web page said that 37% of pastors were for gay marriage in 2008. How did this get reversed? It had to be the activist laity.
Meanwhile, some 600 congregations have left and many others are still considering it. The budget for the ELCA in 2005 was 88 million dollars. Income in 2009 was down to 48 million.
That's forty million short.
So even within congregations, many thousands are leaving, and donations are dropping by millions of dollars.
If people want to be secular or want to be universalists, those churches already exist.
Here's a bit of data for those of you who aren't following:
"In April 2010, The Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted revisions to ministry policy documents to bring them in line with the August 2009 vote, as well as adding sections on integrity, substance abuse and addiction.[32] The release noted that the revised ministry policies would be posted on the church's website by the end of April, 2010.[32]
Since August 2009, according to the office of the ELCA secretary, over 600 congregations have left the ELCA through January 2011. Due to the decisions in August 2009, income has declined, with a projected income of 48 million in 2011, down from a budgeted 51 million in 2010, and a total budget of 88 million in 2005.[33]"
Obviously, the ELCA is going to end up declining to the point of a nonentity. It's clear in the OT where this kind of sanction will lead.
For those who are completely willing to jettison the OT as an outmoded bunch of junk with no relevance to today, and for whom the Sermon on the Mount supersedes and nullifies Leviticus, and Numbers, and for whom St. Paul is an irritable crank who probably didn't mean to say what he did, and for whom Jesus is one speech, rather than many, the church as liberal sound byte will probably suffice.
There IS a lot to be said for an authority structure like that by which JH and JADL stand. I'd like information to flow freely from top to bottom, and bottom to top, but I don't want all standards to be tossed, either.
stu
i never said i was infallible
(or did i)
i'd better be careful
i stand corrected
maybe we need to find another word to replace protestant
how about
catholically challenged
i know that's two words
but
something tells me
people can handle that
maybe then i wouldn't feel so
outlandishly defensive
i could learn to be more compassionate
and realize at some level well what the heck
i am catholically challenged myself
i'm starting a new denomination
it's called
the church of the bad catholics
i'm seeking papal approval as we speak
we'd better get this right
the parousia can't be far away
parousia
sounds like a name for a new car
the buick parousia
in my guilt i wish to amend just one thing
in actuallity
and perhaps you know this
the pope is only infallible
in matters of doctrine
and there's only been 2 instances in recent times when he's come forth with infallible statements
one had to do with the immaculate conception
and one had to do with the conception of john hanson as the only reliable resource for catholic apologetics
this is being disputed but i tend to think it will hold water
at least until the dam breaks
yadda yadda yadda
we all live in a yellow submarine
jh
stu, you've well clarified several aspects of the Medicare D drug plan, albeit with some added partisan slant. But in truth my view was not that the D's made a good bill bad, but that they made a bad bill worse. And of course both parties can be said uncharitably to "whore" after votes from constituent groups, as the D's have done relentlessly in favouring unions and crony capitalists at every turn.
In general I think the most costly social programmes, e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid et al are not really "trust funds" but essentially welfare entitlements increasingly reliant on generational transfers of wealth that are soon to be unsustainable without reforms. Accordingly I think these programmes should aim to relieve dire suffering and want rather than to ensure a generally higher standard of living.
jh, I liked your rants, even though all of us in one way or another are targets. Perhaps from time to time we should all get to cut loose a bit of "Slay them all, God will know his own!" rhetoric without bothering to dress it up with apologetic reason or professorial litotes.
JH and JADL, there is much to be said for remaining within a true church with true authority. Many of our best have gone to Rome or further east to the Orthodox. I grew up in the Missouri Synod so I am quite content that our congregation shifted over. You know that Father Neuhaus went to the Catholics, and Pelikan went to the Orthodox. Everybody's getting off this sinking ship of the ELCA. Here's a pastor who talks about some of the shenanigans inside the ELCA. It gets funnier around ten minutes in when they start talking about all the goddess worship going on in ECLA churches. It's a gas. They painted a church purple in San Francisco, and they talk about how you should worship the eternal womb rather than the big prick up in the sky.
http://www.exposingtheelca.com/1/post/2011/7/pastor-discusses-elca-homosexuality-decision.html
JADL,
But in truth my view was not that the D's made a good bill bad, but that they made a bad bill worse.
If so, why did you refer to my calling it out as a "partisan pitched charges against conservative or Republican policies." A bad bill's a bad bill. But I notice that you did not address the question of who the Democrats added to the covered population to justify you're claim that they made it worse. The discussion of the legislative history of this bill, Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act mentions no amendments whatsoever, although it does document some rather extreme manipulations of the vote process. I have no reason to believe your claim unless you can back it up.
In general I think the most costly social programmes, e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid et al are not really "trust funds" but essentially welfare entitlements increasingly reliant on generational transfers of wealth that are soon to be unsustainable without reforms.
This is tantamount to a claim that it is impossible for a governmental agency to save money, or indeed for anyone to save money. This is the claim that there is no such thing as debt. It's a pretty damn strange claim for a libertarian to be making. I consider the Republican's efforts to tear down Social Security to be a form of intergenerational theft as well, albeit in the other direction. If a building is built, if a road is laid, if a port is constructed, if a bridge is built, if our country is defended, if our economy prospers, these all convey benefits to succeeding generations. These benefits are paid for in the present, yet it is only fair to ask future generations to pay for them, and that is what is being done through the trust funds. But you would steal these funds, and erase the savings of workers, to so reduce the deficit.
If that's so important, let's consider what it might mean to do so in an equitable way. Clearly, you view tax as tax, and don't think we should distinguish between FICA and ordinary income taxes. If this is so, then the tax code is ludicrously regressive, with the rich paying far less in proportion than the middle class because of the FICA cutoff. Let's restore equitability by simply levying a retrospective tax on ordinary income that was exempted from FICA in the past. Of course, this will some people who hithertofore thought of themselves as rich, but you've already established the precedent by your willingness to steal the sole source of income from many ordinary workers that this sort of consideration isn't important when balanced against the imperative to reduce the deficit. Surely philosophical consistency requires that if you're willing to let some folks starve, you should have no objection to letting others starve too. Our national interest is at stake, after all.
stu, as you probably know, I was referring to the principle of means-testing Republicans generally support in their proposals to save social welfare or entitlement programmes. It seems to me that means-testing (as is applied in programmes like mortgage relief, rent subsidies, and food stamps) for benefits helps to answer your claims about FICA tax cutoff rate levels as supposedly "ludicrously regressive."
Future generations are not expected to enjoy the benefits conferred now on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients in the same way as they realise the benefits of present expenditures on national defence, infra-structure, etc.
And I don't know how my previously-stated support for programmes that "relieve dire suffering and want" can be transmogrified into a supposed "willing[ness] to let some folks starve," but take care lest such silly talk affects judgement on your other claims.
Blake's poems were written the year that Friedrich Steuben died. Without Steuben we'd all be singing God Save The Queen instead of My Country 'Tis Of Thee and without the Pre-Raphaelites Blake would have been just another long forgotten graveyard poet.
The poetic tradition defines the process and the progress of religion in America more articulately and with far greater eloquence than any number of theologians could ever hope to accomplish. Participation in the poetic tradition can be restricted to those with established theological commitments, but that doesn't mean it should be.
My parents came from families that made religion part and parcel of who they were growing up. Their families built churches that evolved out of Evangelical lutheranism into United Methodism. My mother's mother died a United Methodist in 1990. My father's mother would have died Methodist if she had lived ten years longer than she did. When my parents married in 1950 it was a small civil ceremony. The best man was my dad's college roommate, a Japanese fellow who was barely five feet tall and had spent the war years in an internment camp in California. The seminary at the school they attended had established a mission in Japan around 1880 and was recruiting the sons and daughters of samurai warriors for nearly seven decades before the year they graduated.
My dad played quarterback as a freshman in 1944. He took two years off to join the merchant marines in '45 and '46, then returned as a left halfback in '47 when the G.I. bill inundated the school with combat veterans. The G.I.s weren't members of the church. They smoked and drank and liked to dance the jitterbug and the school accommodated them as best they could with harsh restrictions on 'sinful' behavior. The school was utterly transformed by the influx with a vast increase in the size and heterogeneity of a student body that for ninety years had consisted of members of a congregation that ran the school for the purpose of minting ministers with wives capable of teaching school until they were ready to raise children of their own. The Sixties were merely a continuation of a process that was already underway by the time my parents graduated in 1950.
My mother's family were from a long line of lay ministers who were part of the United Brethren, a movement that began with their migration from Pennsylvania to Ohio after the War of 1812 and then into Indiana during the Civil War. My great great great great great great grandfather, George Steele, was a German immigrant who came to America in 1754 at about 20 years of age on a ship called the Friendship with 110 other young German speaking men. He was four years younger than Frederick Steuben, who didn't arrive until 1777.
George Steele fought for the Continental Congress in the American Revolution and served with the 1st Pennsylvania in a company led by a Captain Maclay, who was killed in the Battle of the Crooked Billet by blood thirsty Hessian mercenaries. Maclay's brother eventually became Pennsylvania's first U.S. Senator. The battle took place close to Valley Forge shortly before the Continental army took refuge there for the winter. I would guess that a substantial portion of that regiment spoke German as their first and in many cases only language.
I flew from Seattle back to Manila two days ago after two weeks in Wisconsin and two weeks in Seattle. The ten hour flight from Seattle to Tokyo was just long enough to read most of a new biography of Steuben by a Wright State historian named Paul Lockhart. I hadn't realized that Steuben's godfather was the first King of Prussia and the father of Frederick the Great. Steuben served as a captain in the army of Frederick the Great during a major portion of the Seven Years War, until he was shot in the chest.
Lockhart doesn't reference Carlyle's Frederick the Great in his index, but the fact is there's no better account of the Seven Years War than the story Carlyle provided in the last years of his life while America was fighting the Civil War. Did I mention that my brother-in-law lives in Valley Forge? He just retired after 35 years with Lockheed Martin.
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