Political Theory

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

onebornfree — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 18:16:38 GMT

Thescout:
I believe in pragmatism. I'm a filthy statist, actually.

"...Dreams, that governments will keep you free,

Dreams, that it ain't just war and slavery,

Dreams, of your enforced equality,

You keep dreaming, of your god democracy,

You keep dreaming, that the enemy is anarchy

In your dreams

There was a time

I believed all the lies,

Now my dreams are gone,

While the whole world

Is dreaming on......"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmwyTMLiomU

Regards, onebornfree

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

NonAntiAnarchist — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 08:05:30 GMT

It's not very clear what you are, besides a troll.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Thescout — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:57:36 GMT

Typical. As plainly as I can put it, you're a coward. You can't answer direct criticism of your viewpoints, and you'll live the rest of your life in that way, clinging onto your beliefs purely out of the need to fit a certain identity. For you, truth is just a pair of clothing you slip on. Don't worry. When you work as a tenured english professor, slipping in your Marxism where you think it will be free from intelligent criticism, they'll be a kid every now and then, one just like me, who will bring up concrete points against your childish ideology and remind you what a man you really aren't. This is just a warning that it will eat at you. Being put in your place by a 20 year old will eat at you, and the anger you feel will only be a product of the fact that you chose to live your life embracing truth as a suite. But truth is not a suite. You can't substitute one outfit for another just because you like the way it feels. Unfortunately for you, the closer you come to realizing this, the more pain it will cause you.

Nice rant, but evidently you have a psychological need for an enemy because I've already made my intentions clear... I am not a Marxist. I'm a moderate; I believe in pragmatism. I'm a filthy statist, actually. But this was all immense fun, I assure you.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

NonAntiAnarchist — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:14:17 GMT

I'm practicing for my English PHD.

Typical. As plainly as I can put it, you're a coward. You can't answer direct criticism of your viewpoints, and you'll live the rest of your life in that way, clinging onto your beliefs purely out of the need to fit a certain identity. For you, truth is just a pair of clothing you slip on. Don't worry. When you work as a tenured english professor, slipping in your Marxism where you think it will be free from intelligent criticism, they'll be a kid every now and then, one just like me, who will bring up concrete points against your childish ideology and remind you what a man you really aren't. This is just a warning that it will eat at you. Being put in your place by a 20 year old will eat at you, and the anger you feel will only be a product of the fact that you chose to live your life embracing truth as a suite. But truth is not a suite. You can't substitute one outfit for another just because you like the way it feels. Unfortunately for you, the closer you come to realizing this, the more pain it will cause you.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

myhumangetsme — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:39:25 GMT

Perhaps the funniest thing I've read in this thread:

"I'm just going to flat-out, and in the briefest fashion that I can..."

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

shackleford — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:25:35 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--o45pEwRkY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q6S1LjU92Y

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

gotlucky — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:13:19 GMT

@Clayton

I would think that it is useful to respond to him for the sake of lurkers, but I am truly astonished at how much he can say without actually saying anything.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

shackleford — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:01:36 GMT

Clayton:

I'm practicing for my English PHD.

Ah, the English departments... the perennial haven of impenitent Marxists who - confronted with their inability to actually prove their case in the technical discipline of economics - retreated into the squishy realm of prolifically dense verbiage that through sheer immensity and impenetrability seeks to lend some kind of de facto credibility to ill-formed ideas and arguments.

*snore*

Clayton -

It certainly dissuaded me from sifting through it.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Clayton — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:00:05 GMT

@GL: Agreed. With this level of trolling, the only point in responding is to, perhaps, address any aspects of his posts that might be superficially plausible to lurkers or appear to present genuine problems for Austrian social theory. Otherwise, he's not worth the time of day.

Clayton -

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

gotlucky — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 05:56:33 GMT

gotlucky:

Are we being trolled?

Thescout:

Perhaps your lack of response thus far is due to the fact that my radical rejection of the concept of earning a living, and my aspheterism (the view that private ownership is a phantasm that only seems real because so many of us are culturally conditioned to buy into it; i.e., that the right to private property is a veritable canard, an egoistic convention masquerading as a right) is too radical for right-wing folks to wrap their minds around and mount an intellectual attack against? Well, perhaps time will tell.

Neodoxy:

Why are you here?

Thescout:

To troll the foolish ancaps. Why else?

So not only is Thescout here to troll, he is also a liar. What makes this fool think he is even capable of debating any of us?

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Clayton — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 05:56:17 GMT

I'm practicing for my English PHD.

Ah, the English departments... the perennial haven of impenitent Marxists who - confronted with their inability to actually prove their case in the technical discipline of economics - retreated into the squishy realm of prolifically dense verbiage that through sheer immensity and impenetrability seeks to lend some kind of de facto credibility to ill-formed ideas and arguments.

*snore*

Clayton -

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Clayton — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 05:46:28 GMT

Godwin's Law. Abort Thread.

However, for the benefit of lurkers, I will proceed to respond to this Godwin'd thread.

Thescout:
I'm just going to flat-out, and in the briefest fashion that I can, state a few critical observations about your precious capitalist system. Firstly let me observe that in the laboratory of history and real-life experience capitalism has revealed itself to be every bit as much of a failed experiment as the pseudosocialism of the now defunct Soviet system.

Given that you include the President of the United States in the word "capitalist", I agree with you. Let us extend "capitalist" to include the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least the upper house of Congress, and many in the lower house, probably all the US governors, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the cabinets of this and almost all prior administrations at least back to Wilson, the SCOTUS and really the entire government court system down to the municipal level, the Federal regulatory agencies - SEC, FTA, FAA, FCC, etc. etc. - as well as the usual suspects in private industry - most of the big-shot CEO's and the incestuous traveling circuses of pampered corporate board members, and the VPs and upper management seeking to book-lick and brownnose their way to The Top. We should also not forget to mention the crucial enablers of these thugs in the intelligentsia: the CFR, the news media, the university system and the public education indoctrinational pipeline, the think-tanks of all stripes (yes, even including nominally libertarian ones like CATO). And we should take care to note the corresponding permanent Establishment present in other nations - after all, the permanent Establishment is inherently international: the Royal Houses of Europe and Britain, the nobility (yes, they're still there), the clerical elites, etc.

Of course, economists do not use the word "capitalist" to refer to any of these folks... not out of an attempt to whitewash or ignore their crimes but, rather, because they are interested in a technical problem, which is, how is it that the productivity of Britain - and, to an extent, the continent - exploded in and around the 18th century? The answer of economists is: greater investment of private capital in more "producer's goods", that is, goods useful not for direct consumption but, rather, to enable increasingly roundabout methods of production.

In fact, having gone global, having spread exploitation, sweatshops, debt, and financial crises across the entire planet; having produced a plutocracy that now rules most of humanity and makes a hollow fraud of democracy; and having incurred worldwide climatic consequences that will eventually destruct our so-called civilization and return a fractional remnant of survivors to a Palaeolithically hand-to-mouth existence; well, having earned such a rap sheet one can arguably say that capitalism has proven to be a much worse disaster than the counterfeit communism of Messrs. Stalin and Mao.

Well, what you refer to as "capitalism" is merely the identical twin of Stalinesque communism... they are just nominally different methods of implementing the same goal: economic parasitism.

Of course this isn't at all something that you-all are ideologically capable of taking in in an intellectually honest fashion. No, you have your stock free-marketarian sophisms, selective statistics that belie reality, authoritative quotations from von Mises, and dogmatic faith to shield you from the ugly ogre of capitalism's objective truth. But ultimately the truth will out. The cloak of the euphemism "free market" can't really be wrapped all the way around capitalism, can't conceal its actual nature entirely or indefinitely. Can't conceal that capitalism isn't, is absolutely not a human-wellbeing oriented system; can't conceal that it is inherently and irremediably geared to and driven by inhuman economic dynamics, by an addictive need to accumulate capital that strikingly resembles the addiction of a junkie in the way that it completely overtakes every other concern or aspect of life and negates all other values, leaving us with an increasingly socially dysfunctional and anomie-afflicted society bent on moral and ecological self-destruction; can't conceal that it's a system that deprives working and poor individuals of resources while at the same time paradoxically throwing them on their own resources in the struggle for economic survival and solvency, i.e., a system that presents us with a proposition of sink or swim in the choppy waters of an economy recurrently roiled by its perennial business cycle;

The business cycle is indeed a creature of the permanent Establishment - the ruling Elites. Its most aggravated manifestation is total war. You can't get any more "non-equilibrated" than total war.

can't conceal that capitalism's endemic materialism, economism, and consumerism dehumanizes, alienates, and vapidizes us,

Economists would describe the Amish as "free market capitalists" - I guess your criticisms must include Amish as materialists, consumerists, dehumanized, alienated, vapid?

leaving us as individuals and as a civilization in an existentially desperate state, to put it mildly. Nope, calling capitalism the "free market", touting its licence to be greedy as a precious form of liberty;

Well, thieves are no less greedy than businessmen - yet the free market model presupposes that thievery is not permitted or, at least, cannot succeed well enough to perpetuate a system of organized thievery. A State can be modeled as precisely this... an organized and self-perpetuating system of thievery (taxation). So, while the same greed may motivate both the thief and the private businessman, so long as the businessman does not steal what rightly belongs to another, then his private motives are of no concern unless you want to live in a society of pervasive thought-control... and I think humanity has done that to death with nothing to show for it except millions of corpses.

or touting its impressive productivity, its production of unequally distributed wealth hardly compensates for any of its above enumerated shortcomings, and hardly impresses one with the brilliance or humanism of capitalism apologists.

Well, inequality of material circumstance is not solely due to unjust actions, intentions or even unjust structural relations. For example, the congenitally blind man is permanently and irrevocably impoverished by the roulette wheel of fortune. The tall, handsome man is - through no merit of his own - blessed with a permanent and perennial genetic advantage that will pay out in greater economic, social, political, romantic, etc. opportunities throughout his entire life, vis-a-vis an average man of average looks. Of course, this doesn't that unjust, imposed inequality does not exist - thievery exists, taxation exists, monetary devaluation exists - but it does mean that egalitarianism in its most fanatical form is simply unhinged (cf Harrison Bergeron).

The fell futuristic scenario from the film In Time was of course intended to starkly illustrate the ethically intolerable nature of these inequities and iniquities built into capitalism and moralistically rationalized by the concept of "earning". That is, the movie presents a science-fictiony 22nd century society in which average people have to "earn" not merely food and shelter, but life itself; and in which capitalists do in a slightly more direct and deadly fashion what they of course already do in the real world, control our access to the ability to live and enjoy well-being by controlling the means of producing and the distribution of the fruits of technology, and by to a great extent rigging the entire racket that is our economico-political system. Now then, one might think that such a dystopian scenario would perhaps drive home the immorality of the injustice that exists under actually-existing capitalism, and the dangerous potential of the concept of "earning" when it's taken to an extreme. However, judging from the responses that I've received thus far it apparently fails to do this for "libertarians" and capitalism's other true believers. Why is this?

Funny thing, the movie was produced by people you would call capitalists. Why would they publish a movie you hold is deeply critical of their very system?

This, alas, is the case because capitalism's true believers are dyed-in-their-dogmatism Darwinians who in fact believe that the ideal form of society would be one in which only the capitalistically fit, shall we say, are deemed worthy of surviving, thriving, and dominating the rest of us. They actually have no ideological problem with fellow humans being allowed to prematurely perish from poverty, so of course why would they be troubled by a scenario in which poor people are forced to earn "living time" and literally drop dead in their tracks when they fail to do so? In the pro-capitalist's unlovely Darwinian outlook the poor, after all, are the weak, the inferior, and have no right to live or to partake of the same quality of life as alpha capitalists. It's quite horrible to say but this, ideologically and psychologically, is indeed where our dear doctrinaire defenders of capitalism and its "earning"-oriented ethos are coming from. It's not at all overly reductionistic to say that capitalism and the concept of "earning" boil down to social Darwinism; to the primitive and pitiless logic of the caveman, according to which the strong alone are entitled to life, liberty, and power.

This is an strawman - you are exaggerating the fact that we acknowledge the brute fact of individual variation into a worship of genetics - worship, by the way, which is perpetuated by the very permanent Establishment that you and I agree exists and ought to be opposed. If the competition of the marketplace is a form of artificial selection imposed upon some human beings by other human beings (and I agree that, in the system of crony capitalism, it is), then how much more so the competition of war. Young men (and now, women) sent out to the battlefield to literally shoot at each other ... may the fittest survive! Of course, the officers don't die, as a rule - among their ranks hide many members of the permanent Establishment who is running this sick Hunger Games-style system of combat-driven artificial selection... Social Darwinism.

Okay, but this brings us to the question of why free-marketarian conservatives and "libertarians" go in for such Darwinian logic when most of them aren't alpha capitalists. The answer is a really quite simple and short one, vicariously identifying with empowered and dominant individuals, with society's social and economic alphas feels better, is a good deal more appealing to the ego, than identifying with underdogs and victims, with the poor and disenfranchised. And this ego-serving preference for identifying with the rich & powerful rather than empathizing with the dispossessed & disempowered in turn leads them into the ideology and rationalization of capitalism, into the stance of being capitalism's staunch advocates and apologists, praising the wealthy and denying sympathy to their fellow workers.

I largely agree with this in regards to the right-wing though I would say that it also applies to many of those who nominally care about the poor, that is, the political left. But I disagree that it describes most libertarians... I think you are genuinely mistaken in thinking that libertarians are mostly or even primarily "ultra-right-wingers". This is because you mistakenly believe that conservatives are for limited government... a canard foisted by the Republican party onto the American electorate over much of the 20th century.

<snip Godwin's Law portion of post>

Clayton -

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Thescout — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:56:15 GMT

Sigh,

The answer would seem to be in order to look like a fool... And a pretty sad one.

Wow... I actually realized that I legitimately have so much pity for someone who would write pages no one would read in order to "troll" a group of people they disagree with while at the same time talking about community, love, and solidarity... Mother of god...

I'm practicing for my English PHD.

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Neodoxy — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:45:41 GMT

"To troll the foolish ancaps. Why else?"

Sigh,

The answer would seem to be in order to look like a fool... And a pretty sad one.

Wow... I actually realized that I legitimately have so much pity for someone who would write pages no one would read in order to "troll" a group of people they disagree with while at the same time talking about community, love, and solidarity... Mother of god...

Re: It's Not Government. It's Not Capitalism.

Buzz Killington — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:37:13 GMT

Thescout:
To troll

I was going to point out this obvious answer but he's beat me to it. Damn!