I just don’t get it. Put a few signs with the atheist point of view on a bus, and people everywhere just freak out. Anyway, Toronto secularists are planning to slap some signs on some busses now, so this poll asks the strange question, “Should atheist groups be allowed to buy advertising space on the TTC?”. I should think that the answer to this one ought to be 100% yes — after all, what grounds do they have to discriminate against atheists? — but here’s the current results.
Yes – if religious groups can do it, why not let atheists as well? 57%
Maybe, but it depends on the wording of the advertisement. 15%
No, is it offensive to many people to see such ads in public places. 28%
Re: Watchman(#495)
We were talking about weak possessive pronouns (in this case the conflation of a nominative form with a conjunction).
By trying to be gender-neutral, I substituted “his/her” for “its.” It‘s surely done this in the past, probably with everyone with which it disagrees on any grounds whatsoever. In this sentence, the word “it” is taken to be a nominative weak possessive pronoun, referring to an individual (an absent noun) instead of a “thing.” Because I gave it the contracted form of “it has,” it subsequently lost possession of its absent noun and just seems really weird for it. Had I used “he’s” I’d have not deprived “him” of personhood, not confused the pronoun, and not made the mistake of reassigning possession back to “it” in the sentence.
My habit — in this case, of actually using “it’s” correctly in most cases — messed my example up because I restructured the sentence around the intentional mistake (rendering it not a mistake), though you’re probably now seeing where I was going with it.
There, you got a concession speech. Well done on finding that. My punchline had much less “oomph” because I garbled it. I have the same feeling I get when trying to quickly enunciate a tongue twister. Weird.
Wow, no shit, Walton – you really are on top of things! Holy mother of gob! How could I have overlooked something so obvious?
Way to miss the point. I wasn’t even talking about Libertarianism. I was talking about people, and how they are affected by the choices made by those who DO believe that market force, if unconstrained by silly socialist notions like regulation and taxation, will make social safety nets unnecessary. Whether you personally believe or disbelieve that is moot. I’m not peddling straw, here, my young master Walton. I’m talking about what actually happens out there in the real worl, not in textbooks or in thought experiments.
Hey, kid – are you out of college yet, or still an undergrad? I have trouble remembering.
Heeeey….no fair!
Re: Watchman(#501)
Are you being obtuse out of intention, or by accident? (Don’t take that to be an insult, it’s a rhetorical question, I’m sure its accidental. You’re being civil and deserve civility in kind.)
Of course Libertarians aren’t all IT guys. The common thread of Libertarian thought is the application of lateral thinking to many other kinds of laws, not just drug prohibition. I selected that one because it’s (usually) common ground on which we can relate to one another. My assertion is that “IT guys” are, by the nature of their trade, lateral thinkers. This, by virtue of transition, would make them tend to be more likely to be Libertarian than other groups, would it not?
Lateral thinking helps us to find unforeseen consequences and assign them to their root cause. Here is an example of that logic in play, different from the drug prohibition reference. I’m sure to be called a misogynist by those intentional mis-readers of that, despite copious disclaimers about the nature of the essay.
It’s like trying to decide how to categorize geometric figures. A general classification is a parallelogram which includes all rectangles, squares and rhombuses. The rules for being a square are more narrow than most (all right angles, all equal sides), but that does not make it cease to be a parallelogram, does it?
Ward, thanks for the explanation, although I confess it leaves me even more confused that I was before. Damn you. Damn you to hell.
And guns. Don’t forget they also need guns and plenty of ammo to make this utopian paradise they desire to actually begin to behave properly. Then, once the population is whittled down to that One True Libertariantm they can finally make it come true.
For a few Libertarian giggles give this a try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva
A few people with almost enough money and not much forethought (and not enough guns) and nearly no females gave it a try. More than once.
Maybe they should have tried asking for government subsidies.
I think of it this way: Every discipline needs its clowns. In the world of economics, politics, and social systems the Libertarians are wearing the big floppy shoes and red noses.
Ack! The perils of asynchronous communication! #506 referred to #502.
Re: #505. I was being intentionally obtuse, with the suggestion of a wink, meant to imply that your own generalizations, issued on the heels of your gentle admonition of Bobber’s own generalizations, led to some statements that I think were a bit of a stretch. For example:
“This, by virtue of transition, would make them tend to be more likely to be Libertarian than other groups, would it not?”
Now, however, I’m going to do something rather uncool, which is to bow out of the convo for a time, lest little old software engineer me incurs the wrath of my software engineer manager!
Re: Watchman(#506)
What’s far worse is when my brain has produced multiple lateral lines of logic (yay, alliteration) and I neglect to bring up one or the other. Then, everyone else suffers from not being able to follow me, and I suffer from myopia (sincerely believing I had said it). Sometimes I do state it, but my pitfall can be that I don’t make the case for an alternate line very well. Then there’s disjunction due to the lack of threading mechanism on this blog, which generally tends to make me appear to be even more scatterbrained than I actually am.
It’s a lot like trying to explain how one arrives at making an informed move in chess. Lateral logic must be employed: How are you changing the behavior of your opponent and how do you expect him to respond and how should you respond to his response, and so on? After you’ve already made the decision to move the piece, it would be quite the exercise for the player to explain every nuance of the move.
Worse yet, I knew that specific misunderstanding might occur, so I laced the drug prohibition reference in there as a segue into alternate applications of lateral thinking by Libertarians.
If it’s confusing to you, think how confusing it is for me to explain it? Welcome to my hell. :(
Mr. Denker:
Who is this “us” you refer to? I’m just “me”. : )
Actually, my point was that IT guys have a highly marketable skill. They have their choice of high-paying jobs and, as I found in the Boston area, because they were so prized for their skills, they were allowed certain eccentricities (of dress, language, hours) not given to the regular office drones who worked beside them. They of course believed that everyone could get up and move to any job they wanted if they found their current positions unsatisfying, because *that* was *their* experience. They had no direct knowledge of the experience of other workers, whose skills were less prized, or who were unable, due to any number of outside circumstances, to attain the same freedom of movement as they enjoyed.
Watchman:
I agree with your statement regarding “the bottom line”. While I would agree with many libertarian ideas regarding personal freedom, I believe that such freedom must be tempered by social responsibility. Such responsibility should be addressed by social contracts between members of a society who, while they have individual concerns, must recognize that the greater human good generally comes from cooperation, not competition. (Please not the use of the word “generally” – I know that such statements can get me into trouble around these parts.)
SC:
I refrain from commenting mostly because a great number of the topics addressed in this blog require an expertise which I do not share in order to comment intelligently; that is, my interest in natural history is an amateur’s, and the more technical aspects of evolution and biology go over my head. Likewise with many economic arguments. Now, history – that I can do. : )
Walton:
So I guess you oppose all law, then, since law inherently involves, to some degree, subordinating the right of individual choice to collectively chosen boundaries? And naturally, then, no police or military, since the only mission of those institutions is to defend collectively chosen values and rules?
So I assume that when your neighbor makes the individual choice to take your property from you merely because she desires it (and has bigger guns than you), you will happily acquiesce and proclaim the goodness of this individual choice? Or, to be a bit less extreme, when your other neighbor chooses arbitrarily to ignore his obligations to you under your voluntarily chosen bilateral contractual agreements, it will please you that there exists no community that might defend your rights, or to which you might appeal for justice?
If you reduce that “society” you claim is a meaningless abstraction to a mere collection of bilateral interactions between individuals, then justice depends entirely on the hope that the most powerful individuals will be sufficiently enlightened that they will freely choose to deal justly with those less powerful.
In the real world, however, those with the greatest raw power are too often neither enlightened nor interested in justice. Or have you never visited a schoolyard?
Or to put it more succinctly, You’re livin’ in your own private Idaho!
I understand where you are coming from and for a long time, I rarely commented. But I hope you realize that most of the regulars are friendly sorts. Hell, they put up with me. Plus, there is enough going on that one can freely comment on topics without betraying a lack of biological knowledge. Hell, it is easy enough to learn how to refute creationists. And a lot of fun to play with them.
Bobber,
I completely understand where you’re coming from here. Here’s the disconnect. You think that the “highly marketable skill” is their access to education (probably some variant of “white privilege” or “upper class privilege”). What I contend is that the marketable skill is actually a proclivity toward lateral thinking. It’s not a skill everyone possesses, or no man would ever answer questions like “do I look fat in this?” See — I can be funny and relevant, sometimes. :)
That skill would probably blossom from that individual no matter what level of privilege.
But the flip side of the coin is the tacit admission that people without this skill have no marketable qualities whatsoever. They’re destined to be poor. I contend that this is the flaw in your logic. Aside from a very small number of people (the physically or mentally disabled), everyone has some marketable skill. It doesn’t take lateral thinking or education to learn to swing a hammer, sell a taco at a drive-through, or drive a truck for a living. Those are all fine, honest work, and there’s no shame in it. I have worked several jobs which many with my talents and education would consider to be “below them” in order to make ends meet. All that took was will, no other special skills.
What I absoulutely do consider to be “below me” is to accept welfare and unemployment unsurance. I refuse to be a ward of the state under all circumstances but the direst of need. If I became disabled and could not participate in society in any way, I’d do so, and I have the heart to expect that society should help those people. I even support SCHIP, because children should not be punished due to the shortcomings of their parents. See, a Libertarian supports some welfare, but not all nanny-statism!
What I do not accept is that society should help people, beyond educating them, who are able-bodied and/or intelligent to become achievers. That is misguided because it actually gives them incentive not to achieve. I firmly believe anyone can be taught to fish, but if you keep giving them fish they’ll have absolutely no reason to learn.
Walton, please try to follow an argument. I was saying that a statement like “the deranged left-wing demagogue Evo Morales has risen to power on a wave of populism, and started expropriating (stealing) foreign-owned property for the benefit of the State” is precisely the sort of ridiculous rhetoric that has formed a part of campaigns abetting the overthrow of democratically-elected leftist governments by the right (domestic and in the US and Britain). People like you, who know next to nothing about what has actually been happening in these countries, hear or read it and then when there’s a coup (especially if, like in Chile, the new authoritarian government is amenable to imposing your propertarian policies) simply excuse it as “Well, good riddance – now they’re free of that demagogue and on the path to prosperity and real freedom.” It’s also totally dismissive of people whose ideas about what’s good for them differ from yours. If you can’t understand why they would reject neoliberalism, it must be because they’re ignorant or under the sway of authoritarian demagogues, from whom they need to be “liberated.”
Yikes. Why would you even bring this up? I can assure you that the US government (and right-wing think tanks) have used their experience in conducting such operations to study the best practices or subverting democracy. They’re deploying them in Central and South America right now, and hoping for an opening to go further (they fucking kidnapped Aristide and you barely hear a word about it).
You believe in individual choice? Please. You believe in individual “choice” to starve or work in slave-labor conditions. You believe in individual “choice” within a rigged system that other people have set up and forced on them, even if they don’t want it, but you can’t respect people’s choice to choose, democratically, the system under which they live in the first place, which is the essence of democracy (and can’t simply be reduced to voting in periodic elections). This “tyranny of the majority” stuff is nonsense. First, I was speaking about the movements on the ground in Bolivia and elsewhere of people working to regain control of their own lives and futures from those like you who have imposed their vision of “economic freedom” on them. They have acted in their local communities, and they have passed (it appears) a constitution that recognizes local democracy, political and economic. The election of Morales is merely one aspect of a process that has been driven by movements on the ground, which do not form “a homogenous mass with one guiding will” but a panoply of groups and organizations seeking social justice and human rights.
Which should presumably include through democratic processes and not simply which brand of soap to purchase if you can afford it.
And the people there disagree with your notion of their rights, recognizing from hard experience what the preeminence of the “right” to private property (and “voluntary contracts”) means for those who don’t have any – what it’s meant in the real world, the world of colonialism and corporate capitalism. This has been explained to you numerous times on this thread.
And if you knew anything about the new constitution there (or many other recent constitutions around the world), you would know that they reflect a respect for and expansion of basic rights and freedoms. They put basic human rights – to food, shelter, healthcare, education, a healthy environment and access to natural resources, as workers, and as participants in democratic decision-making – above the sacred corporate “property rights” which are supposed in some utopian future to lead to greater prosperity and freedom. Rights are not abstract, but acquire meaning only in actual practice. In practice, what you really want, as has been pointed out above, is for a small minority to decide their future for them, spitting on their rights and condemning many of them to death in the process.
(Incidentally, since you raised the issue of religion, the new constitution is the first in Bolivia to respect fully the right to religion, or the individual “cosmovision” as it says, and to declare that the government is independent of religion rather than granting a special role to the Catholic Church as all previous have done.)
Here I am saying I refrain from commenting, and I keep commenting…
Thanks, Janine-Of-The-Many-Morphing-Titles (I’ve been reading this blog long enough to see quite a few changes)! I do come from an atheist, leftist perspective – which is what initially drew me to this site in the first place. Hopefully, where I feel I can contribute something worthwhile, I’ll do so; otherwise, I’ll keep doing what I like to do: read the posts of people more educated on certain topics than I am, and with luck learn a bit.
SC: They put basic human rights – to food, shelter, healthcare, education, a healthy environment and access to natural resources…
I don’t recognise those kind of positive “rights”. No one can have a “right” to food, healthcare, shelter or any other material benefit, because such a “right” necessarily entails taking from others via the coercive agency of the state. Rather, I recognise two, and only two, fundamental rights. One is the right to the inviolability of one’s private property, including one’s own body. The other is the right to enter into voluntary contracts, and to have obligations under such contracts enforced.
Rights are not abstract, but acquire meaning only in actual practice. – I agree. Nevertheless, all law rests on a concept of rights – general rights which the law accords to everyone (such as the right to security of the person), and private rights which arise under contract or the ownership of property. The reason we invent this concept of “rights” is to delineate the circumstances under which one person is legitimately allowed to use coercive force against another, since the alternative is lawlessness and violence.
But in any case, you’ve missed my point. We’ve established that you and I adhere to different definitions of what constitutes “rights”. I was merely saying that the fact of democratic approval has no bearing on whether or not something ought to be recognised as a “right”. Otherwise we might as well abandon constitutions and bills of rights entirely, in favour of mob rule.
SC, I realise that you believe me to be either moronically obtuse, insane, or simply cold-hearted and evil. I can offer you nothing but my word that I am none of these things. I’m a youthful idealist – and proud of it – and I don’t pretend to be qualified to govern the world. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not running for election. But I can only say what seems to me to be right; and if you despise me for it, so be it.
Mr. Denker:
I contest this based on my own experience working in both hi-tech corporate and human services environments. “Lateral thinking” is a skill that is applied in many instances, by many individuals, in any number of types of work. The problem-solver is wanted in an IT and a human services environment; the difference is that the free market tends to prize the former (because of its value in regards to immediate profit potential) rather than the latter (because there is no immediate profit return from the investment of time and energy). It is not the skill that is valued, it is the field wherein that skill is applied that determines the relative value placed upon it by a capitalist corporate society. It is *my* contention that this represents a topsy-turvy view of the world, and that our priorities are not conducive to the highest level of human achievement and happiness.
But suppose the lake is owned by someone who charges a fee for fishing rights. Or perhaps the person who taught you to fish wasn’t really that skilled a at it himself, and now you are hampered by your inadequate fishing skills. Perhaps the fish you can catch in the lake near you are healthful, but the fish in the next lake are contaminated – many libertarian and free market ideals begin with the supposition of a level playing field, which denies social history. Economic policy cannot exist in a vacuum if it is to properly address the realities faced by the citizenry.
Bobber,
“But suppose the lake is owned by someone who charges a fee for fishing rights.”
We are beyond the time when land rents are a major source of inequality. Created wealth through increased production is a much different case morally. The general retreat among chomskyites and progressives to land rent and colonial examples show they haven’t come to terms with this.
Africangenesis:
My treatment of the “fishing” and “lake” comment was metaphorical, nothing more.
My treatment of the “fishing” and “lake” comment was metaphorical, nothing more.
Well, I got criticised when I used a metaphorical example involving wood and a chair…
Re: Bobber (#517)
You’re trying to imagine the world as an idealistic place where everyone is exactly equal (this is why your position is actually utopian, and mine is realistic). We’re not equal. Some of us have rare gifts which are prized. These serve humanity by creating wealth, something that raises the standard of living of everyone in the economy, not just the wealthy.
If you do not incentivize someone to apply their gifts (higher pay), they’ll have no reason to be achievers, and all of society suffers that loss. They might as well flip burgers if the pay is the same, and human nature (indeed, all animal nature) is to do the least amount of work necessary to achieve their goals. This is why communism utterly fails, because it’s a rejection of this reality. It cuts the productivity of the highest achievers down to that of the average achievers and, instead of benefiting from the wealth generated by over-achievement, the poor suffer further and die because the economy cannot sustain them. This is why increasing socialism is a prevailing headwind against progress, it strips achievers further and further of their incentive to achieve, and it ultimately harms the people it’s intending to help.
You’re conflating my values with those of far right libertarians. I’m slightly right of center, favoring slightly more individual property ownership over public ownership. I.e. I also support reasonable levels of government land ownership.
I also strongly reject the notion that corporations are “persons” and are due extra legislative protection to shield them from their misdeeds.
It might surprise you that there are left libertarians as well, ones who reject the notion that anyone can own property at all. The further left they are, the wackier they become (to the point of rejecting the notion that people should be permitted to own homes for their own private use). They might be a little off of Democratic ideals on issues like gun control, but you might still call a far-left libertarian a “communist.” Similarly, you’d call a far-right libertarian a “fascist.” The only substantive difference in their philosophies from actual communists and fascists is that they believe that freedom will naturally result in their ideal social order, instead of application of force by a state to get it.
I am a very reasonable person, but the second anyone hears the word “Libertarian” their brains shut down — they instantly presume I’m babbling some kind of nonsense and subsequently put their fingers in their ears and shout invectives. That’s a damned shame.
If you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair.
Janine: If you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair.
Why is it that you and Patricia, and several others, never miss an opportunity to insinuate that I’m suffering from sexual repression? Do you actually find this (a) amusing and (b) an appropriate topic of conversation for a civilised forum? (Or have I misunderstood you?)
Is the inequality due to ability? Education? Social standing? Racial prejudice? I don’t deny that inequality exists. I do not, however, believe that all inequality is a fait accompli, and that where inequality can be remedied, we should do so. To take from Walton’s post above, much depends on what you consider a right. My opinion is closer to SC’s than it is to Walton’s, or, if I may be presumptious, likely yours.
In the case of “lateral thinking”, I again assert that this gift is not as rare as you think, and that it is not its scarcity, but the field in which it is applied, that determines what is prized – i.e., monetarily compensated in a way that may allow for more “freedom” than another.
Unfortunately, this is not substantiated by real-life evidence. Those periods where capitalism was allowed to thrive under the fewest regulations resulted in continuing high levels of human poverty, not only in the western countries of the 19th century, but as seen in the developing economies of the 20th; and a greater divide between the wealthy and the poor. This is not to say that other systems didn’t result in great poverty. Communism is not a model to folow either. But this isn’t just an “either-or” exercise. There are gradations of capitalism-socialism, and a harmonious equilibrium is possible – and where we can find that balance, we will find the greatest potential for social stability, industry, and progress.
Re: Walton,(#523)
This is a reality check: Patricia, especially, isn’t making any particular attempt to support any sides or provide any substance to the conversations. She’s lobbing rocks with precision wit and possesses a dirty mind. If someone shouts out when hit, she’s accomplished her goal. (I, too, find it entertaining, even when I’m the target). It’s because you don’t recognize she’s playing at faux hostility with collateral damage, as opposed to real hostility from others, that is probably entertaining her.
Man the trebuchet, Patricia, but I beg you not to load it with grapeshot when you target me! That stuff hurts!
You misunderstood, my ways are inscrutable.
Let’s rock! 1:38
Bullshit. (And you apparently haven’t followed my link to anarchist writings.) And I don’t know how I or anyone else can make this any more clear: Capitalism entails and has always entailed taking from others, often via the coercive agency of states, sometimes directly.
I know this, and it’s absurd. If you think the so-called right to property is the basis of other rights, then you’re acknowledging that the billions of people on this planet who have no property have no effective rights. And you do not recognize people’s rights to the inviolability of their person (in addition to when this involves a woman’s not being to continue pregnancies). This is what I mean about rights as effective in practice: The right to inviolability of your body is effectively meaningless if you’re starving to death or dying from a treatable condition or from a disease caused by the poisoning of your water or its control by a corporation. There is no inviolability of their persons for people who are compelled to work in coercive and brutal conditions. You are claiming to support the right of people to choose what to do with their lives while ignoring or apologizing for all of the force and fraud that have created extreme constraints on their choices. It’s been pointed out to you that the notion of a right to “freely-chosen” contracts is a cruel joke for workers around the world who have little or no choice in the matter. And then you ignore or dismiss people’s rights to make their human rights real and effective in practice, and put rights for businesses, which are not people, above the rights of human beings. You’re living entirely in your own head.
Don’t presume to lecture me on rights. I’ve spent years studying the history of rights. The recognition of rights has historically been the result of collective action by people seeking practical, effective equality, freedom, and democratic participation. Your anemic notion of rights does not negate their real history.
This has little to do with my definition, but with Bolivians’ definition, and their right to choose democratically to put it into practice.
How bizarre, since I’ve been talking about the new Bolivian constitution. I can’t imagine a much more democratic process than that which went into developing and voting on that constitution, which involved months of participation by and slogging it out among an enormous number of people and groups in the country, including those who have historically had little or no political say. “[D]emocratic approval has no bearing on whether or not something ought to be recognised as a “right”? Please read that sentence again. Constitutions don’t fall from the sky, Walton – they are human products reflecting the values by which people want to live. You’re presenting it as though the existing arrangements, which have favored a small elite, are somehow sacred and can’t be changed even through the most democratic process. You favor private property over democracy. Sorry – lots of new constitutions coming about that don’t reflect your pitiful view of rights.
Are we going to do this dance again? I find some of the things you say detestable, which doesn’t mean I despise you. I simply wish that you would put aside this mistaken belief that abstract ideas are above real events (in the physical or sociopolitical world). If you’re really an idealist, you have a moral responsibility to engage actively with the world and to be open to changing your views if led there by your investigations. I don’t care if you read or agree with everything I say; I just want you to go out and honestly seek answers for yourself in the world and be willing to accept what you find there.
Sven:
OK, I’ll send it to you, too. :)
Walton:
So, then, no right to life, right? Because you don’t recognize any right to the the bare minimums — food and shelter — required to sustain life?
Or maybe you simply believe in the Clash’s version of it:
…i.e., you have the right not to be killed (“the inviolability of … one’s own body”), but no right to actually live? Well, boyo, it has been suggested in some quarters that this is not enough!
Personally, I wonder whether you’ve got it in you to actually survive in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world your “utopia” would inevitably become. I know I don’t… which is part of why I continue working in support of all that socialist twaddle like, y’know, laws ‘n stuff.
Bobber#519,
I understood that you lake rent example was a metaphore, my point is that it is no coincidence that land rent examples are the metaphores that you come up with in your worship of equality. Examples of earned wealth would not be as persuasive a justification for your desire to impose equality by force. Let’s all bow to the equals sign.
It follows, then, that you do not recognize murder as a crime, since there is no extant victim. If that is not where your beliefs inexorably lead, please show me where I have misunderstood the entailments of your position.
Since you, as the murderee, can’t leave your body to your heirs, there’s no one else who’s been deprived of their property rights under your formulation. Since you also do not believe in the existence of society, as you have stated on multiple occasions, there is no society/corporate entity with an overriding interest in seeing that its members don’t commit crimes against each other, up to and including murder. Therefore, in the case of murder, the way you see it, there is no one who has standing to seek recourse, correct?
So, I believe your position can be summarized as “it’s not a crime if you don’t leave any living victims”, am I correct? Stealing your car would be a crime, but I could fix that by murdering you in the process, so that there is no longer any crime victim? And to generalize, as long as I don’t leave any living victims, there is no crime?
If this is not correct, please show me where I have misunderstood you.
Re: (#524)
Nor do I. We should get on well. But, how best to properly legislate without externalities? That’s where it gets really muddy really fast. The Libertarian position is that the externalities can actually be worse than the consequence of doing nothing. Laws can create perverse incentives, horrible unforeseen consequences. Drug prohibition and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act probably do more social harm than they do good, in ways which can be hard to directly quantify (hence all of my talk about lateral thinking).
Missed opportunities are a danger of their own, and risk is generally tied with reward. Most Libertarians of any stripe agree on that point. That twinge of guilt you feel when you realize your tax money is going to bail out auto workers and wall street is your inner Libertarian screaming “hey, they took those horrible risks, why should I have to pay for it?” In reality, you shouldn’t, and part of you knows it. The future should indicate why: Now they have been trained not to fix their problems and to request more socialization of their risk, in the form of future bailouts. Mark my words, they’ll be back in Washington, hat in hand again. They can’t fix their problems even if they wanted to, the UAW is too strong for that. Bankruptcy is their solution because it severs those contracts and allows re-negotiation. Which is more important, that they preserve their cushy over-paid jobs, or they all lose their jobs because they’ve put such a drag on their corporation that it cannot become more lean in tight times?
This is a reason I am no anarchist, social or economic. I recognize that the interests of business may run counter to the interests of society. But, that does not justify protectionism. Protectionism only hurts, it never helps. The only “protectionism” I support is that of citizens, not corporations. Anti-trade laws are important, but they must also be very carefully worded so they cannot be used by government to punish production of companies they simply don’t like. The citizenry, by and large, does this job for us. As information increases and society becomes more socially liberal, our interaction with corporations change. We must work to increase both.
Bobber @ #517 just did my job for me. Well done. Ward, that comment expressed a big chunk of what I was aiming at.
Furthermore, while an aptitude for “lateral thinking” can be an asset in any number of professions, it takes more than that aptitude to make a Libertarian (as opposed to some other beast, for example, a moderate liberal such as myself.) I’m sure you understand this, but you’re trying to get away with saying “We Libertarians are more progressively rational than the rest of you” but I challenge you to demonstrate that, rather than just assert it. You may be right, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that in my 51 years. I know many non-Libertarians who completely (or largely) agree with you on the drug-criminalization point.
Carry on. I’ll just watch for a while.
I don’t feel that twinge. I assure you it’s not because I don’t have the ability to feel guilt. I am the product of an Italian Catholic upbringing, I know all about guilt. The only guilt I would feel is if, by not providing loans to the auto industry or the Wall Streeters (guess which bloc I see as more unethical than the other?), their collapse were to trigger more social instability and misery as a result of lost jobs. Am I happy that the misbehaviors of the owning class may cause the middle and working class to suffer? No, but until I can find a more reasonable alternative that has a chance of being enacted by that self-same owning class (read: politicians), then a policy that may keep the financial status of millions of Americans from denigrating even further than they have over the last thirty years is better than nothing.
As far as protectionism, etc.: I cannot offer an informed opinion, other than to say that any policy that would benefit the most people is one I would support. While that may not necessarily mean that imports should be limited (directly or indirectly through the use of import tariffs), perhaps it is time to consider attaching a value-added tax to imported goods – or, should it be, “real value”: consider adding in a percentage tax on a Chinese toy sold at Wal-Mart, taking into account the difference in monetary terms to a producing (not merely consuming) economy to not have that toy produced domestically, for a decent living wage, by a worker with health care benefits and a pension.
We need to re-examine what we mean by “cost” and “value”.
Re: Watchman(#532)
You’re right in that I recognize that it’s not a master set for all Libertarians. We have our joiners, just like every set does, who come to Libertarianism out of misunderstanding of what we actually support. There’s surely white supremacists who call themselves “Libertarians” (despite their incapacity to see how very unlike the rest of us they really are). There’s believers in New World Order conspiracy theories and all kinds of other nonsense.
By and large, my experience with other Libertarians is that most of us have views similar to mine (pretty moderate with a slight lean to the right). There are some who are more left libertarian (my wife) and more right (myself) but, most of us seem to be just slightly right of the axis when our views are averaged out. This is almost purely on matters of economics, I think because, where risk/reward is factored in vs. the dangers of externalities, a system that models human nature more closely emerges naturally.
I suspect that Milton Friedman, for instance, might object to my particular view. I’d argue that his views of reality are off-course because he fell in love with the logic of it all to the point that it goes down a slippery slope. It’s not that I think he may not have been right about a lot of things, it’s that he’s too utopian about it (or dystopian to a far leftist libertarian). It’s why I end up so near the center, but lean far away from the dangers of excessive statism. The state needs restriction and unlimited power with no accountability (occurring a little at a time, or in leaps and bounds) should not be conferred upon it. A state is not a person either and it has no special abilities which I do not possess (and especially not compassion for others).
Re: Bobber (#533)
Ah, well this gets into a whole separate area of argument altogether. It seems we can both (tentatively) agree that the externality here (and it’s a big one) is that corporations are now incentivized to protect the status quo and come back for further bailouts rather than fix their problems. That is the sure harm of doing something.
Let’s look at the harm of doing nothing. Surely people would lose jobs. That’s a given. But the above is not the only externality. In Keynesian economics, money is taken from productive sources in society and put into unproductive ones. Worse, the money doesn’t ever exist (the actual slippery slope that the logic really did slide down), so it has to be printed (which increases inflation and should be seen as a tax on everyone) or borrowed (costing even more, in interest).
So what we’ve really done is select winners and losers. Society cannot support all of the auto manufacturers it now has. People just aren’t buying cars from some of them, and for very good reasons. But you can’t see “foreign” car companies as actually foreign. They operate plants in America, they employ American workers, and they pay American taxes. For all intents and purposes, they’re every bit as American as any other company. The only real difference is that some of the money at the top goes overseas. They leverage a work force here to produce their product (presumably because workers in their nations don’t want to build cars for a living, or any one of a number of reasons to operate in America). They do this efficiently, and consumers reward them naturally with business.
We’re incentivizing poor production to save jobs and keeping the “foreign” car companies from their deserved market share (and from employing more American workers at their plants instead). Worse, we’re doing it at the behest of everyone, taking productive dollars out of the system.
What we should be looking at is solutions without all of these nasty externalities. The actual solution is to incentivize production. Trying to incentivize employment, whilst simultaneously incentivizing poor production, is thinking emotionally. If we increase production, more employment naturally follows (growth increases jobs). What is killing off our production? Laws, and lots of them.
Take minimum wage laws. They actually run counter to employability and are what is driving companies to exploit foreign labor markets, like China’s. That’s production we willingly sacrifice and lost jobs on top of it. It’s also thinking with our emotions instead of with our heads because we genuinely want people to be paid a fair wage and to be able to make a living. There are labor markets of workers who are both willing to produce at below minimum wage and have an incentive to do so (students, for example). And anyone would take a job over none at all, even if it’s a stepping-stone out of an exploitative shit-hole.
Externalities, man. We are a well-meaning society, but sometimes too well meaning for our own good, and we tend to reject the reality, the consequences, of our actions.
Ward:
Geez, Ward. Strawman alert. Who was complaining about strawman versions of libertarianism? That’s a gross misrepresentation of what Bobber was saying.
Bobber’s point was that the same skillsets have vastly different value depending on economic context. It has NOTHING to do with some utopian vision of equality. The point is that capitalist systems often fail to create equity between the social worth of a venture and the economic value placed, by the free market, on that venture. See: education, human services.
Now, it’s true that your version may be “realistic” in that it represents what IS – but how does that make it a superior in any other way? See: Bobber’s reply to you.
Incidentally, Ward, I was interested to see you mention the distinction between left- and right-Libertarianism. I know the Libertarianism often gets lumped in with the right wing, because of some overlap in some of the philosophical details, but I’ve always thought of it as a third vector, an added dimension, which (at the very least) enriches the American political landscape. Why must we be constrained to “left” or “right” – why not “up”, “down”, “out” or “in”? Life is not one-dimensional, why should politics be so?
Time to go pick up the 4th-grader from school. That’s my utopian ideal of what 5:33 p.m. is all about.
Gah… I’ve fallen way behind the Bobber-Denker convo here. Ah well. G’night all.
You’re running into areas that are farther and farther removed from the main, but this:
needs to be addressed. Consider, as has been reported, that some products manufactured in China are made using slave labor in prisons. Are you suggesting that the only way for the U.S. to compete is to emulate Chinese labor policies?
I would counter that what makes U.S. companies seek foreign labor is because they are not satisfied with profits of 5% when 50% is available, work and social conditions be damned. It is NOT unreasonable for a corporation, run by ethically-minded people, to forgo a higher profit for the benefit of the workers who make ANY profit possible.
Unethical business practices should be regulated. People who work full time, and yet still cannot sustain themselves, is unethical, if a corporation has the wherewithal to pay a living wage. China is a poor example for more developed nations to emulate in this regard, if for no other reason than the cost of living in China is hardly comparable. In addition, the Chinese government also enforces some of the most draconian protectionist policies in its trade; in this, its policies make the opposite argument of what you intend.
Thalarctos: It follows, then, that you do not recognize murder as a crime, since there is no extant victim. If that is not where your beliefs inexorably lead, please show me where I have misunderstood the entailments of your position.
Murder is and should be a crime, like assault, battery and other forms of physical violence, because it entails illegitimate interference with a person’s bodily integrity, and a person’s body is a part of that person’s property.
Therefore, in the case of murder, the way you see it, there is no one who has standing to seek recourse, correct?
We’re talking about criminal law, correct? In which case, in English law (and, so far as I’m aware, other common law jurisdictions), the existence of a living victim is irrelevant. The need for a victim with locus standi to bring an action is an issue in private law, but not in criminal law. Criminal prosecutions are generally brought by the State, though in English law it is perfectly possible to bring a private prosecution (see the infamous case of Whitehouse v Lemon). The victim doesn’t have to be involved in the process, and, indeed, some crimes don’t have identifiable victims at all.
In any case, even if we were talking about private rather than criminal law, the law recognises that, in some senses, a person’s interests survive his or her death. In England and Wales, under the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1934, a cause of action (in private law) which was vested in a person prior to his or her death continues to subsist for the benefit of his or her estate.
So, in short, you’re talking crap, as far as recognised legal concepts are concerned. On a more philosophical level: the reason we punish murder is not because the punishment is of any benefit to the deceased victim, but rather in order to deter persons in general from committing murder.
SC: If you think the so-called right to property is the basis of other rights, then you’re acknowledging that the billions of people on this planet who have no property have no effective rights.
Wrong. Under the principle of self-ownership, a person’s body and mind are part of his or her property. Ergo, there is no human being on Earth who has no property. And, indeed, for most people their person is their most economically valuable asset, since they subsist by selling their labour.
I’ll answer the rest of your points tomorrow. I’m tired.
Re: Watchman(#536)
Perhaps I have erected a straw man, and it was not my intention. If it’s actually not the case, I apologize. This does seem like a fairly black & white issue though. Either one supports the idea that government can enforce wage equality (one has faith that government is good at it), or they don’t (they’re skeptical). Ascribing that power to government and not limiting the extent to which it can be put is dangerous, because it’s exactly the “creeping socialism” that worries Republicans. There aren’t very many hard lines drawn for government, except those in our Constitution, and government largely ignores that document.
Government needs boundaries, in my mind, ones which can never be crossed, even in moments of weakness. How best to provide those boundaries, beyond just holding them accountable to their crimes against the Constitution, is quite the question, isn’t it?
As for the rest, you’re absolutely right, there are multiple dimensions. Here’s my personal political compass. Be aware that, should you take that test, there are questions on it which are clearly designed to elicit a particular response. They’ve put together a FAQ so they they can concentrate all of those concerns in one place and safely ignore them.
The fact that you can recognize the other dimensions is telling. It’s nice to know that someone agrees that differing points of view provide enrichment to the political sphere.
Re: (#538)
Absolutely not. Our laws should expressly forbid profit from slavery, no matter what form it takes. This is a line we should never allow the market to cross.
Ah, but here’s the rub. It costs money to ship things overseas (but not as much for ideas — we exploit India for those). What is it that makes that profit margin so wide that it can overcome a natural barrier, like the Pacific Ocean? Laws. That’s the only explanation. Our country hinders the market, creating something which is certainly less than free. Which is the lesser of two evils: to repeal minimum wage laws, tariffs, and other protectionistic measures in our country and have our workers get those jobs, under the watchful eye of our own government and accountable under our laws, or to allow what happens now to continue unabated, harming our economic productivity, and under corrupt government in China with terrible working conditions with their deplorable human rights record?
Do you think the meager externalized cost of laws like OSHA alone overcomes the natural barrier to trade an expensive trip across an ocean provides?
Re: Bobber (#538)
This is making a fallacious assumption that all businesses must provide full-time jobs with a living wage. That almost eliminates part-time positions except in the case where rare and profitable skills are employed, and not physical labor (which anyone can provide). If you ever wondered why there are so many undocumented workers in construction, that’s your answer. They’re willing to work for under the minimum wage and without the tax burden our country places on workers. Would it not stand to reason that there are Americans who would be willing to work under those conditions, if it was a choice between swinging a hammer for low pay part-time or being unemployed and living beneath an overpass?
Would it not stand to reason that Americans who already don’t make that much at a full-time, “living wage” position might seek to work part-time for less than minimum wage to make ends meet (or even afford to save money instead of living paycheck-to-paycheck)? Not everyone has the skills to work a part-time job at minimum wage, or above it. The minimum wage is actually discriminating against citizens (they go to prison for tax evasion) and encouraging the influx of illegals (at worst, they just get deported).
No one can have a “right” to food, healthcare, shelter or any other material benefit, because such a “right” necessarily entails taking from others via the coercive agency of the state. Rather, I recognise two, and only two, fundamental rights. One is the right to the inviolability of one’s private property, including one’s own body. – Walton
So a person with more than they can possibly need has the right to let others starve in order to increase the price they can get for the food they have hoarded, or just for the fun of it. Yes, that’s cold-hearted and evil alright.
If the only right you recognize is a property right to your own body, as you stated earlier, then where does the locus standi lie if there is no living person with a property interest in the body in question?
This is where I find your assertions confusing–you go back and forth between “there is no society” and “the State has an interest”. Sometimes you seem to argue there is no corporate entity larger than the individual, and sometimes you seem to argue that there is. This inconsistency is why I cannot get a handle on your arguments.
If the only interest in the body is a property one, and you cannot inherit a body as property, then where does the benefit to the estate lie?
You say “crap”; I say “reductio ad absurdum”. Potato, po-TAH-to.
Who is “we” in this case, Walton–society? But you argue that there is no such thing. So who is the “we” who benefits from deterrence, and in the absence of a property right to the deceased’s body, on what defensible grounds do “we” do so?
If you do not incentivize someone to apply their gifts (higher pay), they’ll have no reason to be achievers, and all of society suffers that loss. They might as well flip burgers if the pay is the same, and human nature (indeed, all animal nature) is to do the least amount of work necessary to achieve their goals. – Ward S. Denker
What an absurd misunderstanding of human nature. People enjoy using their talents (for that matter, so do many other mammals and birds). Many people even like to cooperate with and help others. There is considerable research in experimental psychology showing that monetray incentives drive out intrinsic motivation.
Re: Knockgoats(#543)
This is just silly. Food is a commodity. It has a value, and there are many providers of it. The market punishes stupid risks like this (people just buy from a competitor instead). It’s not like food has an infinite shelf life and the people who produce food don’t have any other wants or desires. They must sell it before it expires (and there’s an incentive to sell it earlier — people pay more for really fresh food). That’s why we have currency instead of bartering, isn’t it?
Trying to boil this down to a two-party interaction, and insisting that one party has everything (including all the food) and the other party has nothing of value to trade for it is reductio ad absurdum. It’s denying that there is any market at all, that there are competing forces within that market, and there are no market disincentives to cheat.
Knockgoats,
“What an absurd misunderstanding of human nature. People enjoy using their talents (for that matter, so do many other mammals and birds). Many people even like to cooperate with and help others. There is considerable research in experimental psychology showing that monetray incentives drive out intrinsic motivation.”
Except there are imbalances, far more people have a talent for art, and music and sports than have talent for supply chain management. Incentives help even out the imbalance and make the market work a little better. Truck driving and nursury school worker are my talents, but I was incentivized to do other things, because this mean ole society doesn’t recognize the equal value of these professions. Other people must have the same talents because the lines to apply were so long. Whoops, another imbalance. OK central planner what do you have in mind? Hopefully doubling or tripling the number of children and trucks.
Re: Knockgoats(#543)
Wow, what bunk. Tell me why it was that the Soviet Union, the biggest experiment in central planning our world has ever tried, failed miserably? Was all of that starvation simply because they didn’t like the national anthem?
I’ll give you that the caged bird may sometimes sing, but some of them just continue to eat, shit, and drink and glare at you in the process.
It’s the rare example indeed that one finds a talent that cannot be exploited, provided enough money is offered. You’re denying that hierarchy and structure in nature forms on its own. Some animals work co-operatively with others, but most work counter to all others in pursuit of their own goals. Cooperation is emergent. Humans work together to accomplish goals that one human cannot, and if self-interest does not provide that motivation, we create proxies to motivate self-interest (we call this goofy stuff ‘money’). Tit for tat. I have the grain, you’re good at building houses. Build me a barn, I’ll feed you for a year. Because human bonds don’t last forever, we break up work into smaller units and for smaller units of exchange.
A question on Libertarianism principles – are monopolies considered bad? If so, what would prevent them from occurring in a Libertarian society?
This isn’t a trick question. This is all quite new to me and I’m trying (and failing) to keep up.
I didn’t suggest that. I said that a full-time job should provide a living wage. Of course companies are free to hire part-time workers at lesser cost.
You left out the second part of that equation: the employer who is willing to exploit illegal migrants, hire them in contravention of U.S. labor laws, and deny them proper health care and investment in any retirement system, all for pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. The employer is acting illegally and unethically. Again, this is not behavior to emulate.
But that’s not the choice (nor is that a real choice). Allow me to counter: would it not stand to ethical behavior for an employer to offer decent working conditions and a living wage to the employees who are necessary to ensure corporate profit? Why should we allow corporations, created by Americans, initially employing Americans, to go overseas and buy out of the social contract that made their very existence and success possible in the first place? Corporations don’t merely make contracts between themselves and their workers; they also make contracts with the communities that depend on the wages and benefits their workers earn. When a corporation moves overseas to increase their profit margin, they are guilty of destroying whole social systems. They should be held responsible for these things.
Wowbagger,
Since a plurality of libertarians are constitutionalists, and anti-trust laws have been ruled constitutional there may be no problem with monopolies for them. In fact, I know many libertarians oppose the anti-trust exemptions for unions. Part of the reason libertarians are libertarians is because they oppose the monopolies inherent in central planning and state ownership. Most monopolies needed an element of government intervention to create them, emminent domain for utilities, railroads and roads, intellectual “property” such as patents, trademarks and copyrights, etc. It is along the paths of such deviations from libertarian principles that practical libertarian gradualism applies. As the governments role becomes less and less, the number of libertarian fellow travelers becomes fewer and fewer.
I worry about the day I meet a Libertarian that has even a modicum of anthropological knowledge to inform their treatises on human nature. I fear my heart won’t take it and I’ll immediately succumb to thrombosis.
Re: Wowbagger (#549)
Yes, and no. Monopolies which arrive at their position by doing everything right and not unfairly competing in the market (lobbying for laws that protect their position, for example) may actually be alright. Such a company would be the “ideal.” It’s probably not possible that a company would ever reach this ideal without protectionism because people interact with the market in really weird ways. It would be impossible to meet every interest.
My wife and I shop for groceries together. There are three big chain stores relatively close by. One of them she doesn’t like to shop at because she feels the employees are rude (market pressure to hire polite staff) and is very disorganized, another is relatively quick to shop at for small amounts of groceries (self-check-out, a selection pressure for expedience) but somewhat disorganized, and the third is the cheapest but doesn’t have quite the selection the other two have. We tend to do our shopping in a somewhat mixed fashion, depending on circumstance. If we’re being lazy and don’t want to do much shopping, we go to the fastest one. In and out, done. If we are getting a lot of groceries, the cheapest one is favored. The one with rude employees and poor layout… they don’t get much of our business, despite the fact that they carry some products we like the other two do not.
I think a mixed market where competition is protected is the most likely scenario to arise in an emergent fashion. Price is the biggest driver, but other factors do take their toll.
Where inequality comes into play and anti-competitive behavior is being rewarded by the market, government has an obligation to step in. It’s better to avoid falling for tricks though and to avoid passing laws that favor or protect their position.
Bobber,
“You left out the second part of that equation: the employer who is willing to exploit illegal migrants, hire them in contravention of U.S. labor laws, and deny them proper health care and investment in any retirement system, all for pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. The employer is acting illegally and unethically”
Excuse me. Libertarians believe in open immigration, there would be no “illegal immigrants”, except those that might intend harm. Even in this hypocritical legal limbo that the current system keeps them in, these workers create enough surplus over what they view as their needs to send money back to Mexico that is a significant contributer to the Mexican economy. Don’t conflate legality and ethics.
Brownian#552,
“I worry about the day I meet a Libertarian that has even a modicum of anthropological knowledge to inform their treatises on human nature. I fear my heart won’t take it and I’ll immediately succumb to thrombosis.”
You better leave now.
Africangenesis,
Thanks. I suppose my problem isn’t as much monopolies as what is considered acceptable to become and/or remain one. I think of things like what the auto industry did in California (or was it just LA?) by buying up public transport only to remove it so people would buy more cars. I guess, though, that wouldn’t stop someone else from starting up more public transport.
Are these bad things? If so, how else does someone earn money from their ideas?
Re: Bobber(#)
That’s not how the law is written regarding the minimum wage. Few organizations are exempt from it.
Re: Africangenesis (#551)
Yep, I wrote an essay on just this thing rather recently, in fact, that lays it all out from a historical perspective following our growing pains with AT&T.
And now, I must be off, ironically, groceries must be obtained.
How did I know Walton would pluck that one sentence out of context, ignoring its context? Oh, well. Please explain, Walton, how the “right” to bodily property in your sense (which doesn’t even include the right to subsistence – to life itself; so loony I can’t believe I’m actually typing it), alone, forms the basis, as you claimed on the earlier thread, for all of the other rights. The effective basis. In real and not theoretical terms. And not that they’re mutually reinforcing, but that, as you claimed, it is foundational to them, with the others not worthy of your recognition as foundational rights. I’ll make it easy – refer only to the rights, including participation in the political process, identified in the US Constitution (ignoring the Ninth Amendment).
You can try. Oh – another quick question. Can you think of some reasons why the majority of Bolivians, for example, don’t share your vision of rights? (Not do you agree with them, mind you, but can you conceive of some possible reasons for their rejection?)
Ward S. Denker@548,
As usual, you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. As I said, there is empirical evidence that monetary rewards can under some circumstances actually reduce motivation. See for example:
Beyond that, I’m compelled to conclude that you are a sad case indeed, unable to enjoy productive activity for its own sake. I conclude also that you have never watched a crow or seagull performing aerobatics in a strong wind, seen film of otters playing, or kept a dog.
What relevance you think the Soviet Union has is unclear – I suppose it’s just the standard “libertarian” fall-back. Central planning in a dictatorship is not the only alternative to leaving everything to the market. Have you noticed that starvation is not common in Scandinavia, for example? (In fact, life expectancy is greater and infant mortality less than in the USA.)
Africangenesis, try to stop being so stupid. The pretence that the only alternatives are “libertarianism” or a command economy is absurd. Nor am I saying that market mechanisms can never be useful. In the current case I am simply pointing out that Denker’s dogmatic insistence that money is the only motivation for work is contradicted both by everyday experience – many people enjoy their jobs – and by systematic empirical research.
Trying to boil this down to a two-party interaction, and insisting that one party has everything (including all the food) and the other party has nothing of value to trade for it is reductio ad absurdum. – Ward S. Denker
You contemptible ignoramus. The situation I describe is not a reductio ad absurdum, but something that frequently occurs in famines, where food is hoarded to raise the price, and those wanting it have already sold everything they can to stay alive. Walton’s “principles” dictate that in that situation, the hoarder has every right to let others starve. That is indeed heartless and evil – and a natural consequence of “libertarianism”.
Knockgoats,
Seeing as you have taken it upon yourself to misconstrue, exaggerate, make fallacious assertions which you cannot back up, and even downright lie about a position you do not understand, I’m pretty much just going to ignore you.
Straighten up, stop acting like a pushy dickwad, and ask a question or two with an honest desire to understand the answer instead of an underhanded motive to slag on Libertarians and I may change my mind.
Apropos of nothing in particular: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso, 2001.
Wowbanger#556
They can be the basis for monopolies that government makes possible that
wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Huge multinational corporations often
cross license hundreds of related patents, so they aren’t constantly suing each
other court. But while that clears the way for them to do business, all
these patents can represent insurmountable barriers to entry for other
competition. Software is often protected by copyright, and has been the
basis for dominant market power such as Microsoft. Libertarians
recognize that intellectual property is an artificial construct and like
corporations they are subjected to extra scrutiny to justify their existence.
Yes, they make a contribution, copyright protects authors and artists and
publishers; protecting trademarks can reduce fraud and improve the trust in the
market, and patents can increase to returns to and thus incentivize innovation.
All are goals modern societies have found worthwhile. But most
libertarians want some reform at least. Patents have been limited in
length so that eventually the monopoly faces competition. The reform
ideas surround concerns that when too minor of innovations are allowed to be
patented, e.g., obvious or rational increases in the functionality of a product,
that this monopoly gets effectively extended and perhaps can be maintained
indefinitely by gaming the system. Some argue that it has gotten so bad
that we might be better off without patents. More optimal might be somehow
restricting it to major, non-obvious innovations.
Knockgoats,
I haven’t followed the whole context, so I hope you aren’t implying that this
is an argument against libertarianism or market based economics.
Libertarian societies are very tolerant of people motivated by things other than
money. I know you claim to have a society in mind that isn’t based
on central control, yet somehow isn’t libertarian, but must your society be
intolerant of property and markets? Could it exist on communally owned
land within a libertarian fabric. Tolerance is usually where
libertarianism excels in moral evaluations. If people are not motivated by
money, are there enough people to help the disadvantaged, the way you seem to
want to, without robbing Peter to pay Paul? Are such people motivated to
work hard to produce wealth to help others, or are the types that would produce
in the societies you envision, not that motivated to produce material wealth?
To Stalin, it was a feature, not a bug.
Seeing as you have taken it upon yourself to misconstrue, exaggerate, make fallacious assertions which you cannot back up, and even downright lie about a position you do not understand, I’m pretty much just going to ignore you.
Denker, I don’t give a shit whether you ignore me or not, but for the record, in our latest spat I’ve simply been demonstrating the falsity of this crass piece of stupidity:
If you do not incentivize someone to apply their gifts (higher pay), they’ll have no reason to be achievers, and all of society suffers that loss. They might as well flip burgers if the pay is the same, and human nature (indeed, all animal nature) is to do the least amount of work necessary to achieve their goals. – Ward S. Denker
I know all I need to know about the stupidity, callousness and sanctimoniousness of “libertarianism”, and understand it completely: it’s an elaborate justification of “I’m all right Jack”, nothing more.
Africangenesis,
I haven’t followed the whole context, so I hope you aren’t implying that this is an argument against libertarianism or market based economics.
No, I wasn’t claiming that. I was responding to a specific piece of stupidity from Denker.
Libertarian societies are very tolerant of people motivated by things other than money.
You seem to have fooled yourself into believing that such societies exist.
I know you claim to have a society in mind that isn’t based on central control, yet somehow isn’t libertarian, but must your society be intolerant of property and markets? Could it exist on communally owned land within a libertarian fabric.
First, let me reiterate that I am a democrat, advocating direct democracy specifically, so all that follows is advocated on the condition of majority agreement.
It is specifically property in the (major) means of production, distribution and exchange that I believe should be communal – and this might mean, in different cases, worker cooperatives, municipal ownership, or ownership at all levels of democratic organisation up to the global.
I have no problem with privately-owned small businesses or with the use of market mechanisms in general; it is the gross inequalities, and concentration of wealth and power, that capitalism generates and reinforces that are objectionable. Major decisions about capital investment should be taken democratically, not in order to maximise profit for a minority. In that sense, I believe in economic planning, but planning at multiple levels, with decisions taken by popular vote (or delegated to a group of experts by popular vote) after negotiation between all those with a significant stake in the outcome.
Tolerance is usually where libertarianism excels in moral evaluations.
No, it doesn’t. It just insolently claims an exclusive title to a belief in personal freedom and autonomy.
If people are not motivated by money, are there enough people to help the disadvantaged, the way you seem to want to, without robbing Peter to pay Paul? Are such people motivated to work hard to produce wealth to help others, or are the types that would produce in the societies you envision, not that motivated to produce material wealth?
Taxing the rich to support the poor is not “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. Effectively all wealth is socially generated; the absolute property rights assumed by “libertarianism” have no moral justification. That does not mean personal property should be abolished or that material incentives cannot be used; but a society wholly or mainly dependent on such incentives is going to be highly destructive of its environment and in the long run, of itself.
[IANAL!!!]Whether or not those are bad things depends on one’s perspective. If you’re a privately-funded corporation who has gotten a head start on stem cell research because you’ve had no competition from federally funded research institutions, then everybody who wants to exploit your results must pay you a fee, for the number of years that Benjamin Franklin thought would be fair. When we, as the State, collectively invest in multiple, federally funded research institutions which may yield effective results that can be simultaneously exploited by multiple commercial enterprises (rather than serially, or at great additional expense passed on to consumers by paying for patents), better products reach their market sooner, while at the same time, a fresh crop of researchers whose educations said corporations did not have to directly subsidize, from which the corporations with deepest pockets can hire the best and most promising. The corporation that can best exploit the results and the newly trained researchers can get the best products to market most effectively, with less investment than if it had been a private, vertical enterprise, making the cost of the products lower for the investors (American taxpayers), since the competitive private corporations have had to invest less for a wider array of resources than would have been available to them without availing themselves of the commons.
Pardon the run-on sentences, I’m an animator, not an economist. “Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive,” to paraphrase Bruce Sterling. I want my products to get out there to the widest possible audience, and I want to exploit the electronic medium (that I never had to build from scratch out of my pocket) that lets the widest possible audience obtain access to my products. That often means that my products then become exploitable by a wide number of people (say, 3D video game assets including geometry and pixels and motion data and game code, which were produced by me at great expense, but are nearly free for somebody else to exploit, citing fair use). If my work doesn’t get out there, nobody can steal it, but then, nobody can see it and I might as well have never done it either. If I want to create a cartoon-character-based franchise, I want to exploit it until my heirs have outlived me by 75 years before any old hack can exploit my creation, unless I’m Disney, and I’ll want copyright to extend into perpetuity based on the number of years since the debut of Steamboat Willy, plus one year. The creators of Mickey and the Air Pirates and other culture jammers have a different perspective. Why should they, and their pals from Negativland, be prevented from exploring the proposition that copyright violation is your best entertainment value? What’s fair use? What will the courts decide? Why do the lawyers get all the hypothetical money? Is it because they’re libertarians? As Yul Brynner said, “It’s a puzzlement.”
Walton’s “principles” dictate that in that situation, the hoarder has every right to let others starve.
Yes, he does.
I’m not saying he would be morally justified in doing so – the parable of Dives and Lazarus comes to mind – but I don’t believe he should be forcibly deprived of his property, even in order to feed the starving. If I, with my own labour and capital and on my own land, grow food for my own benefit, why should I be required to share it with someone else who has not contributed to it all? One of the foundations of libertarianism is recognising the qualitative difference between the statements “X ought to do this” and “X should be forced to do this by State coercion”.
Walton, fuck bible parables. Parables don’t pay the rent or put food on the table. I’ve been offered crappy parables in lieu of equal pay for equal work in my misspent youth while trying to accrue experience more than once. Once upon a time, at nearly the same instant that I was being presented with a handsome, suitable for framing certificate, entitling me to 7/10s of one percent of the profits from a movie that had had its profits signed away six months earlier in exchange for a completion bond by my Mormon employer, that smarm merchant cited the story of the Little Red Hen in order to urge me and my co-workers all to draw faster for less money.
Look, I can understand where the Little Red Hen was coming from. And I must say, her only slightly-less-entrepeneurial associates thought she was delicious between two slices of freshly baked bread, especially after she tried to tell us that we hadn’t made all the sensible investments she had, and since our work wasn’t worth as much as hers, we were entitled only to crumbs.
The tricky thing about parables is the question of who gets to survive to ponder their moral significance.
Actually, Ken Cope, the parable supports your viewpoint, not mine. (Dives was a rich man who refused to share his food with Lazarus, a beggar, who starved to death. Dives then went to hell after he died.) So I wasn’t trying to justify my own view using parables.
But now you mention it, the Little Red Hen is, indeed, a much better demonstration of the point I was making. A person who invests labour and capital in producing something should be under no obligation to share it with others who haven’t contributed.
How nice for Lazarus that he gets to starve to death imagining that the asshole who could have prevented his death dies fat and rich years later, but goes to an imaginary torture den forever and ever, especially since the social order never changes; rich people will still die fat while beggars starve, but there will be justice by and by. Praise Jeebus!
I’m trying to imagine why people are under any obligation to abstain from eating people who manipulate parables to preserve the social order that makes the rich fat and the poor starve. OK, figuratively. Because, while there may be plenty of good eating on the metaphorically rich, for the most part, I’d rather starve than survive that way.
And since my name is Lazarus, if I starve to death, Jesus will make me rise up again from the dead! What a great con! We can go from town to town, me “dying” and Jesus “resurrecting” me, and the marks will fall all over themselves to feed us! What a grift!
But it would be in keeping with the “principles” on which your dystopia would be based.
(Says someone who’s probably never grown a fucking tomato or picked a single bean in his privileged little life.) Yeah! Fuck you, babies, children, sick people, disabled veterans, elderly,… ya unproductive gits! Fend for yourselves! It’s mine! Mine, mine, mine! This is the new “natural” justice, aka I got mine, now you try to get yours!
I hate to break it to you nitwits, but if this were really how human communities (especially “frontier” communities) had really functioned throughout history, we would not be here.
Stop abstracting! …And read the book by Mike Davis.
KG,
I am interested enough to explore some of the nuances and implications, and the actual differences in practice.
You mention worker cooperatives, but not consumer cooperatives. Is it your intent to grant workers more power to optimize their more local concentrated interests at the expense of more diffusely distributed consumers?
Do you have a sense of what would be the “major” means of production, distribution and exchange in today’s less industrialized society, and what might remain in private hands?
I wonder if you might be under estimating the democratic elements of a market system that in a sense “voted” to give say the Beatles more capital than the Monkeys. Now I don’t imagine that ability to make music is necessarily the best way to choose your managers of capital, but those “votes” perhaps also meant something about granting more “power” perhaps to the social message of the Beatles.
I also wonder if there is any pattern to be seen in contrasting the type of managers of capital and enterprises chosen in the current system with the type of managers chosen perhaps more democratically by labor unions. Do the latter have the right skill set? Do they balance wider societal interests? If their constituency is from workers below, will they serve the consumer and society as well as the current system does? Would it be legal for unions to strike as part of the “negotiations” you mentioned?
One thing I want to think more about is where the concentations of capital end up on your schema. Large enterprises do generally need more capital for long term projects. I’m wonder if that capital will end up in the same or different places. I wonder whether the new mangement system will be as environmentally conscious as the current one, especially if there is more input from the extremely poor of the world.
I wonder if you might be assuming that private concentrations of wealth are less efficient and more socially negative than they would be if the managers are chosen different. What is the social detriment if someone who is good at managing capital to generate high returns, accumulates more capital, much more capital than any one person “deserves”, especially since it was socially generated. Unless that person purchases tremendous amounts of land, there is no way he can personally hope to consume more than a fraction of a fraction of a percent. All that person can really do with that capital is to continue to manage it well, or if he manages it poorly it will erode into the hands of better managers. Is this manager being a parasite on the poor of society by being one of their best managers for a fraction of a fraction of a percent? In a large organization, this person might be managing other peoples money or societies money. But this person might be percieved as getting too high a salary and bonuses. What are the implications of this unequal distribution? If those bonus are more than could ever be consumed, then that money will just be managed, presumably for high returns as well. Resources managed by the best managers does not seem a bad plan. Perhaps a competitive meritocracy would out perform a democratically and hierarchically “negotiated” plan. Perhaps a system responsive to consumer dollars outperforms a system responsive to consumer votes.
SC: (Says someone who’s probably never grown a fucking tomato or picked a single bean in his privileged little life.) Yeah! Fuck you, babies, children, sick people, disabled veterans, elderly,… ya unproductive gits! Fend for yourselves! It’s mine! Mine, mine, mine! This is the new “natural” justice, aka I got mine, now you try to get yours!
SC, you really make me sound like a complete bastard. Your comments remind me of the Facebook group “I’ve never met a poor libertarian. Have you?”
In actual fact, however, this thesis is only sustainable if you don’t know any libertarians. I am not rich, nor am I from an especially privileged background. I went to a state school. Nor do I expect, or intend, to achieve great wealth in my life.
I am not a Randian Objectivist; I don’t reject the moral value of altruism, nor do I argue that each person should live only for his or her own benefit. I do, indeed, think that we owe a moral duty to care for children, the elderly, the disabled, and others who, through no fault of their own, are not economically productive. Ideally this should be done by families and private charities, but if all else fails I am perfectly happy for the State to step in. I’m not on the doctrinaire wing of the libertarian movement, though I have friends who are.
What I do not believe, however, is that those people who can be economically productive, but would rather not be, should be subsidised at the expense of their more productive neighbours.
For example: like I said, I, personally, am never going to be rich. Unlike my peers I don’t intend to go into commercial legal practice, and am hoping instead to become a political commentator or theorist of some description. That’s my choice; I’ve chosen not to be as economically productive as I could be, and in a free market I won’t get rich. Do I have a right, then, to expect to be subsidised by my neighbours who achieve more than I do?
(Indeed, at the risk of pissing off most people in this forum, it’s academics and students who are most guilty in this regard. Taking a step back, one has to question why taxpayers’ money should be spent on subsidising the study of post-structuralist literary critical analysis of Dickens, and the like. I have no problem with people choosing to spend their time in such endeavours, or indeed in anything else that takes their fancy; but I would question whether it’s justified to extract wealth coercively from the productive working population in order to fund it.)
Effectively all wealth is socially generated; the absolute property rights assumed by “libertarianism” have no moral justification.
Absolute fucking bullshit. How can any sane person assert that “all wealth is socially generated”? For a start, “society” is not a discrete entity capable of producing anything. It is an abstract term we use to refer to a particular phenomenon (namely, the mass of human individuals and the complex web of interlocking relationships between them”.
And as I keep trying to point out, if I take raw materials and invest my time and labour making them into something useful – thereby increasing their value – I have created that wealth. If I take wheat, yeast and water worth $2 and make them into a loaf of bread worth $3, I have created $1 worth of wealth. It is not “society” that has created that $1. It is me, through my own investment of skill, effort and time.
Human beings do not exist in isolation, with the sole exception of Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” – and even he had to fabricate a companion to keep even a scrap of his sanity intact.
While many individuals in a society may not have a direct role in a single individual manufacturing something, “society” usually does have an indirect role. For example, I may establish a corporation that manufactures chairs. From where do I obtain my lumber? Nails and screws? The laborers who allow me to expand my production? The buildings that house my equipment? The food that sustains not only myself, but my workers? Who allows for the creation of a corporation in the first place? In whose minds were the legal protections and limitations created? Which town will allow my buildings to be erected? If I am to employ skilled craftspeople, it is to my benefit to have workers who are well-educated – where will that happen, and who will pay for it? And so on, and so forth…
Human societies are intricate webs of relationships and interdependence, not all of it obvious and direct. It is my standard response to libertarians as to why taxes are necessary: you are a member of a civilization, which you may consider a club. You want membership in the club, you pay your club dues. No dues, no club – and you are reduced to barbarism. If civilization was a bad thing, we’d still be stuck with Neolithic technology and social systems.
It’s not individual initiative alone that has produced the modern golden age of wealth and health. It is the social milieux that allows individual initiative to exist – communal action and approval that allows for individuals to contribute (note: not TAKE FROM) society.
Right, because you were born with the knowledge of how to make bread.
MartinM said what I did, in one sentence. : ) Salut!
The question isn’t about the morality of the individual. Individuals can be cruel, wicked people.
The question is about the morality of government. Should government be permitted to murder some of its citizens in order to feed others? I contend that this is wrong. Some of you will object to the strength of the term ‘murder’ but that’s exactly what it is.
In your zeal to paint an individual as evil for not sharing food with his fellow man, you reject what got him there. There’s no such thing as luck. The rich are not lottery winners whose only contribution to society was the dollar that bought the winning ticket. They’re at the pinnacle of the market because they moved mountains to get where they are, and in turn helped the rest of us.
Very few get there by deceit (fraud) and we should expect them to face the consequences of the law for it.
You need to get over your envy for your fellow man. Bill Gates didn’t get rich by sitting around doing nothing. He created a product which builds wealth, and millions of IT workers owe jobs to his work, inside Microsoft and out. His product increases the efficiency of many kinds of business, surely more than he ever imagined would be using it someday, and that additional efficiency fuels their ability to provide you more jobs in your place of business. On top of it all, most of his “wealth” is stock — invested back into the entire system to keep it running, fueling growth in a huge market, and he has vast philanthropic interests to boot.
Some of you simply need to stop viewing the world as if everything in it has been taken from you. Yes, we vaunt a few individuals, but it’s for very good reason. They build wealth for the rest of us.
Given the choice, would you give a proportionate amount of resorces to a majorly stupid populace, or would you invest more resources in a few individuals who know best how to leverage those resources so that we all get more out of them?
Would you give me $100 dollars if you knew that in a month I’d turn it into to $500 dollars, and keep $100 of that for myself (making me very wealthy, having done the same for many people) or would you give $50 to your neighbor and starve together? Ever seeking a utopian idea of “equality” some of you would die over the principle, rather than end up with $400 to split between you and your starving neighbor out of your own charity. You’d be pissed that I kept 1/5 of what I earned off of your investment and elect to die (and kill your neighbor too) on that misguided principle. We are not all equal in our capabilities, and no amount of denial of that on your part will change it.
This is the crux of the matter, this is the entire debate between socialism and capitalism.
If you must persist in this absurd notion that one person is hoarding all of the food, consider this: most of the elemental nitrogen in your body, as you sit there breathing, came from a Bosch/Haber plant. Without that innovation, many of us would be starving, worldwide. We owe our very lives to the innovation of industry.
Bush was elected. His business career was dependent upon political influence. Why should this be a reason not to improve the worlds efficiency by removing government as much as possible from economic decision making?
False.
True, as is the reverse.
Why should this be a reason not to improve the status of the masses by removing economic influence as much as possible from governmental decision making?
Government doesn’t want economic influence removed, it milks business with threats of regulation for as much as it can get. Democrats threaten to regulate, Republicans claim to fight the regulation, the stalemate works to the advantage of both as the campaign contributions poor in.
The strange thing is, before the recent crisis it was Republicans trying to regulate FANNIE and FREDDIE and the Democrats resisting.
Bush was elected.
You really are a troll, aren’t you?
Why should this be a reason not to improve the worlds efficiency by removing government as much as possible from economic decision making?
They aren’t the government, we are the government. That collective bargaining pisses you off just makes it that much more satisfying.
Re: Bobber (#583)
You’re starting to sound like a Libertarian. ;)
How better to limit that incentive than to severely restrict the growth and scope of government? Give them the power to change the social order and tranfer wealth, and where do you think it will end up? Who stands to gain from the massive debt our government is selling right now to prop up the economy? Surely nobody would buy that debt without expecting a return on investment…
It looks like it’s being spent to help the masses, but it’s just taking productive money out of society and funneling it to friends of the elected.
Martin:
Not only that, but Walton no doubt was magically able to obtain the wheat, yeast, and water without recourse to any common public infrastructure (e.g., roads, water distribution systems, electricity or gas for his ovens, etc.), and was able to pay those affordable prices solely due to the entirely voluntary beneficence of his suppliers.
Walton, what you’re missing is how thoroughly interdependent we all are… and dependence on others without some moderating collective structure will lead inevitably to a world full of bilateral relationships based solely on power imbalance. That’s fine, I suppose, if you happen to be one of the strong ones… but by definition, half of everybody is not the strong one in any given bilateral relationship, and most of us will not be “the strong one” in the majority of our relationships.
And I hate to tell you this, but whether (and when) you’re “the strong one” depends on quite a few other things besides personal merit. Your lack of consideration for the weakest among us will bite you in the ass… because there’s every reason to believe that one day, in one way or another, each of us will be “the weakest among us.”
No, but there are such things as flood, drought, disease, war…
…and inheritance.
Re: Wathchman (#588)
And does any of that qualify as the norm? I believe you’re assigning undue weight to statistical outliers.
I won’t have time to post anything substantive, I don’t think, till tonight. Too busy teaching about stupid nonsense like the Tuskegee syphilis study, research ethics (irrelevant to propertarians, of course, since empirical investigation is their kryptonite), or human cultures. Such self-indulgence on all our parts – none of it’s going to help my students to be active participants in democratic society. Oh, well – we can’t all be selfless or noble enough to dedicate ourselves to being oblivious gasbag propagandists for the ruling class. And they pay me the big bucks. Why, my present salary gives me the glorious freedom to choose between heat and health insurance. So many rights, so many options…
Ward:
Perhaps, but you’ve apparently decided that they don’t exist. The claim that there’s not such thing as luck in the context of this discussion is simply false. Many people have been ruined by bad luck. I’m not claiming that these unfortunately consist any kind of statistically significant majority. Nor should I have to: whether or not that’s “the norm” is beside the point. Similarly, there are quite a few rich folk who were “lucky” enough to have been born into extremely favorable circumstances and who haven’t worked all that hard to get where they are. Not that that particularly bothers me. Just sayin’.
Wow, that one’s right out the right-wing conservative phrasebook! Blech. Why does it always come down to the assumption of envy? Why do right-wingers (and, it seems, right-leaning Libertarians) so often assume that people like Bobber and me want something for ourselves? Could it be analogous to the reason why dogmatic theists so often claim that atheists must worship something? Because self-interest amongst the “government is evil” crowd is vaguely analogous to god-belief amongst the religious crowd? Because they can’t imagine selflessness any more than the terminally pious can imagine godlessness?
Say it ain’t so.
You know, I never really caught that. Why is it envy on my part to want people who have more recognize their responsibility to people who have less? Where is this assumption that *I* want what someone else has? Now, I have been accused of being a thief for my views, but that’s in the Robin Hood-mode.
To echo SC: Until recently I was a teacher in a public school. While I thoroughly enjoyed teaching, the wage I was paid enabled me to live just below the poverty line – I was shocked to learn that despite my (more than) full time job (any teacher will tell you that they put in far more than 40 hours of work into a week) with benefits, that my daughter qualified for state health insurance for the poor.
Again: I’ve spent half my working life in the corporate world, the other half in human services and education. No one will convince me that a clerk who wrote 510k submissions for a medical device manufacturing company (which I was) should earn more than a teacher (which I was). Our priorites need to switch from what makes a company money to what enhances human potential. (And don’t for a minute believe that the higher-ups in that medical device company were in the business for humanitarian reasons.)
One of the foundations of libertarianism is recognising the qualitative difference between the statements “X ought to do this” and “X should be forced to do this by State coercion”. – Walton
You really do come across as a halfwit sometimes. I can hardly conceive of anyone who would disagree that there is indeed such a difference, even among Stalinists, fascists or theocrats: where we differ is in what should go in which category.
By your lights, the state should not only not commandeer and distribute the hoarder’s food, but should prevent the starving taking it. We really have come here to the evil at the heart of “libertarianism”; I am thoroughly confirmed in my loathing and contempt for it and its proponents.
Africangenesis@574,
I’ll respond when I’ve more time – possibly later today, possibly tomorrow.
Because I don’t waste my time focusing on insignificant outliers?
Wrong. Most been ruined by taking too much risk and improper planning. Few have been ruined by unpredictable trauma. You’re telling me that you believe that a person comes to harm in a vehicular accident purely by accident? Isn’t that denying that they took a great risk upon themselves the moment they elected to drive one? You’ve surely seen the statistics on accidental vehicular deaths. Logic would make us conclude that nobody should get into those death traps, but the convenience is worth the risk to us nonetheless.
We synthesize that trend into our lives and freak out about terrorists instead, the statistical outlier. Worse yet, we deny that we are doing it when confronted with the inanity of it all.
By focusing on the outliers more than the trend you reveal your motives to be that of envy. By blubbering “but look at Bush, he’s rich through inheritance” you distance yourself from the truth that he is an outlier, not the trend.
You guys have become so saturated by the news that you accept that the news is reality. The news tells you, by definition, about things that almost never happen.
You’ll sell every civil liberty you have for economic equality you’ll never get and you’ll deny to yourself that you are doing it. You’ll deny the cycle that you’re doing it a little at a time rather than all at once — as if allowing yourself to be slowly and inexorably hit in the head with a hammer won’t end up in a pile of mush with any more certainty than if you just took one good whack. You’ll sell out the futures of your grandchildren, endebting them even before conception, making them a slave to a system they did not create, for the promise of a little economic stability now, which you won’t get. You’ll wholeheartedly consent to theft from others, under the delusion that, because the government is doing it, it magically ceases to be theft.
You’ll tell yourself that, because you elect them, government has your best interests at heart, that they could never seek to enrich themselves and their friends to your detriment. You’ve magically sprinkled the dust of nobility onto politicians, assigning to them powers of moral rectitude and an almost deific prescience.
You wonder aloud why your politics are compared to religion, but ignore all of the obvious signs. You go to the polls and punch your “D” like the rest, more often than not. You have undying faith in the efficacy of Keynesian economic policies, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They were taught to you, no doubt, by a public education, one which — on economic and social policy — overwhelmingly looks like Sunday school to outside observers.
You hang on the words of your elected leaders — just as those who punched “R” hang on the words of theirs — when you should be questioning their logic and motives at every step and taking back ground when it’s discovered they are wrong. You perpetually lose ground because you have not the spine to pull on your end of the rope in the tug-of-war over who owns your freedom. Who is it? You, or your government?
Your religion shows up in your ritual, and you cannot deny your rituals and stay honest about it. I fully understand my rituals, the principles to which I am devoted. I see the flaws in them, and permit other solutions where they fail. Did you miss where I said I supported some social welfare?
You, sir, are looking at the mote in my eye while utterly ignoring the beam in yours.
I mean none of this to be taken as offense, and I apologize if that’s the outcome.
Africangenesis@574,
I’ll respond when I’ve more time – possibly later today, possibly tomorrow.
You’re telling me that you believe that a person comes to harm in a vehicular accident purely by accident? Isn’t that denying that they took a great risk upon themselves the moment they elected to drive one? – Ward S. Denker
Good grief what a fucking moron. A large percentage of those killed in such accidents are p-e-d-e-s-t-r-i-a-n-s.
I was talking rather specifically about the risk of getting into a car, not the risk of walking around where cars are at, you disingenuous fuckwit.
2007 Traffic Accident Statistics
The numbers say:
Type, number, % of total
Vehicle, 28,933, 71.8993
Motorcycle, 5,154, 12.8078
Pedestrian, 4,654, 11.5653
Bicyclist, 698, 1.7345
Large Truck, 802, 1.9930
So, 71.9% are vehicular accidents. Only 11.7% involve pedestrians, that’s 88.4% which unequivocally don’t involve pedestrians.
By bringing it up at all you are attempting to lie with statistics, assigning undue weight to the outliers off the trend, just as I said you were doing. I talk about the trend, you talk about the outliers. That was the whole damned point, thanks for proving it for me.
Q.E.D.
Pull your head out of your ass and stop lying to yourself and others you fucking nimrod.
Why do right-wingers (and, it seems, right-leaning Libertarians) so often assume that people like Bobber and me want something for ourselves? Could it be analogous to the reason why dogmatic theists so often claim that atheists must worship something? Because self-interest amongst the “government is evil” crowd is vaguely analogous to god-belief amongst the religious crowd? Because they can’t imagine selflessness any more than the terminally pious can imagine godlessness?
On the contrary. It is we who can imagine selflessness, and who believe that selflessness will occur without state coercion.
And the policies I advocate would not benefit me personally in the slightest. I’m a student. Since I am a British national and attend a British university, my tuition fees are capped by law at £3,000 per annum (whereas the actual cost to the university of providing tuition is closer to £12,000 per annum). I also get an artificially-low-interest government student loan to cover my living expenses.
I believe both these things to be thoroughly unjustifiable. Higher education is not a right; it’s an investment in one’s future. If an individual decides it’s worth making that investment, s/he should be prepared to pay for it, and to borrow money – at commercial interest rates – to do so, rather than being supported at the expense of his peers who choose to go out to work.
I mention this not because I want to have a debate about higher education funding, but because I want to point out that if the policies I advocate were implemented in the UK right now, I would personally suffer economically. Yet I cannot do otherwise than advocate what I believe, objectively, to be morally and economically right.
I was talking rather specifically about the risk of getting into a car, not the risk of walking around where cars are at, you disingenuous fuckwit. Ward S. Denker
In the context of your ludicrous claim that “Few have been ruined by unpredictable trauma.”, and the quite staggeringly, unbelieveably, mindbendingly stupid claim that “There’s no such thing as luck.”, shit-for-brains.
Walton:
Good answer, Walton. You’re right – it will occur. But history has shown, time and time again, that voluntary philanthropy alone has never been up to the task. Ever read any Dickens? Hugo?
More to the point, why do you think certain laws and institutions exist? Why?
Why are their anti-trust laws? Why does the EPA exist? Why is there Social Security? Why do state-funded health care and unemployment insurance agencies exist? Because we’ve already seen what society looks like without them.
Ward: That’s a lot to chew on. Give me a few minutes. ;-)
“But history has shown, time and time again, that voluntary philanthropy alone has never been up to the task.”
Oh, but that only hurts women, children and all those lazy non-white people. Who cares about them? Walton’s money is more important than those silly non-people.
Re: Knockgoats,(#601)
And that was in the context of everyday risk of driving vehicles.
The census bureau estimates the population of the United States to be 301,290,332 in 2007.
You’re claiming that pedestrians didn’t take on any risk of dying in an auto accident (i.e.) unpredictable trauma.
Even if you were making the claim that every one of those cases did not arise out of negligence on the part of the pedestrian (and that’s a shaky assertion because surely some of those died doing something their mother probably would have paddled them for as a child), that still accounts for 0.001545% of the population that died.
I think that qualifies as “few” no matter what fuckwit contorted logic you can apply to it. Why don’t you concede defeat now and save yourself the embarrassment of digging further in on your pit of abject stupidity.
Oh, but that only hurts women, children and all those lazy non-white people. Who cares about them? Walton’s money is more important than those silly non-people.
Please read the remainder of my post at #600. I personally stand to lose, economically, if my ideas were implemented.
Re: Watchman (#602)
Oh come on, you have to realize how silly this is. Where were the huge multi-national charities in Dickens’ time? Where was instant access to information? Where were the instant payment systems which could take money you’ve made and send it around the world in the blink of an eye?
It would have been easy to ignore poverty in Dickens’ time, far easier than today, on the account of lack of information alone.
Re: Knockgoats,(#601)
And, by supporting the notion that there really is such a thing as “luck” you’re basically asserting that all pursuit of science is wrong, dumbass.
Believing in luck is believing that, given enough information, there are things which still cannot be predicted. That is bordering on religious belief.
It’s imminently predictable that if you walk down the street and you don’t pay attention to what’s going on, you could be hit by a car. You don’t even need to have an understanding of quantum theory to figure that out.
Ward: Good points about the multi-national charities and all, I suppose, but I’m not so sure that last claim is true. It’s much easier to ignore now. Back then, it clutched at your ankles as you walked through the streets. Kinda difficult to prove either way, though, I admit. I suggest we not get bogged down in this particular point, unless you think it’s important. It’s my fault that I neglected to mention Upton Sinclair. ;-)
So. You advocate theft in some instances. Which instances are those? Which state-funded social welfare programs do you support, and why? Which can we do without now, here in the modern age?
Re: Watchman(#608)
There are people devoted to caring, whole organizations built on it. There are walks to raise breast cancer awareness, something which never happened in either Dickens’ or Sinclair’s time. We have more access to information now than we’ve ever had in human history, which kind of goes without saying, but it bears mentioning.
I do, a broad definition of theft surely makes it exactly true to someone. SCHIP is one I actually support, because I believe children should not be punished for the incapacity of their parents to provide medical care for them. They’re not capable of joining society by working in the market. I’m also not against society taking care of people who have no ability to work a trade or care for themselves (mental and physical handicaps).
I also believe we have a right to education, but I support methods that promote market alternatives (vouchers) because they increase competition, which can only strengthen the quality of the public education system. This is out of self-interest and out of societal interest at the same time. An ignorant society is not a free society, but one easily subjugated to the will of others (personal, corporate, governmental, religious, or what have you).
KnockGoats is giving us copious examples of the need to improve education. ;)
Hmmm. I wonder if we can use quantum theory to predict, with utter certainty, the location of both electrons in a helium atom?
There is an operational definition of “luck”. Yes, given enough information, one could predict where the ball will fall in the roulette wheel. Sure, the process is deterministic, but who has access to the information required to make an accurate prediction of where that ball will fall? Nobody. Ever. Not everything, in practice, can be predicted.
With that said, it is true that many misfortunes can be avoided (and/or ameliorated) given sufficient foresight and preparation. But not always. There is such a thing as misfortune. Some choose to call it bad luck.
Are these unfortunates the statistical outliers? Perhaps. But so what? Are they less real? Less important? Less worthy of assistance? I’m not sure how it bolsters your point to insist that misfortune does not exist.
Re: Watchman(#610)
Ah, Heisenberg.
I am not asserting that everything is predictable, I’m asserting that the information exists. We know the electrons are there, and we know the probabilities of where they’ll be (Schroedinger and others), but we must not come to the logical conclusion that the electrons do not exist because we cannot predict their locations exactly. The information is there, regardless of our capacity to access it. A notion of “luck” denies that we’d be able to deduce the shape of their orbits, probability of location and nodal surfaces at all. It’s the scientific equivalent of the concesson of defeat.
It doesn’t harm my case either. The point is, a vast majority of the cases we’d all call “economic misfortune” come about from deterministic causes. Education eradicates these by and large, not redistribution of wealth. It’s the non-deterministic cases which I must agree need help. One cannot pick one’s parents, genetics, or capacity to labor for society.
Ward, I think your #609 kinda answered my #610. Perhaps #610 is trying to keep a trivial point alive. I’m falling behind again here, late in the day, as I did yesterday. Apologies. Anyway, re: your #609, it looks as if we have nothing to argue about there. (I’ll stay neutral on your opinion of Mr. Goats; he can surely fend for himself should you two decide to continue to slug it out.)
Re:Watchman (#612)
To be honest, I have asked repeatedly that he stop and that we cease these pointless personal attacks. He persists, and round we go.
I extend that offer, yet again. I’ve had no cause to attack quite a few people, so that should illustrate my good faith on this matter.
I’ve enjoyed these pleasant conversations, so thank you all who have provided them.
Re: Watchman (#608)
Not to belabor the point, but I was considering the historical setting and realized that there is evidence for my case. Historically, if one wanted to avoid the poor, one would create zoning laws and build walls around them (out of sight, out of mind). The poor sections would be ghettos and the nobility would live in their own area of town too, intentionally segregating themselves from the rest of society. Furthermore, one could travel through the seedier sections of town in a coach with the windows shuttered and send underlings to do things like collect the mail or purchase a newspaper.
Some of those zoning laws are still on the books and some of the walls still in place in some areas of the world. Ghettos still exist, but we don’t wall them off like we used to, we just call them “the projects” instead. Finding a way to fight that kind of inequality, one which arises as a tyranny of the majority over the minority (colloquially, “class warfare”) would surely be a goal worth pursuing.
The internet and prevalence of the media today has a reach without a peer in that time and I highly doubt that there are many who would consider their mansion complete without high speed internet access, if not for themselves but at least for their children. The problem posed for the philanthropist, rich or otherwise, is really “to whom should I give?” There are so many choices that it boggles the mind.
Government’s support of the poor may well narrow that field, convincing many that no support is needed. It’s hard to quantify government spending — it’s a huge bureaucracy, and one which seems to be particularly resistant to accounting for dollars spent. Sure, there are public records, but who out there is keeping accurate tabs on how much fraud these programs are subjected to? Ironically, they seem to protect their numbers like they’re state secrets because some of those numbers are state secrets and some numbers are intentionally vague — refuges for fraud, waste and abuse.
These, among many, are reasons I reject big government. Accountability goes down as the size increases. Externalities become unpleasant,and unavoidable, facts of life.
Bobber:
It sounds like you and I share the perspective of having worked both in public education and the white-collar private sector… although I gather you were a teacher more recently (and perhaps for longer) than I. I know you’ll agree, but just to put a finer point on this…
…I’ll go a step further and assert, based on my experience and observations, that teachers typically put in more total hours per calendar year than a salaried, 40 hr/wk white collar office worker in the private sector… even taking into account summer recess and holiday vacations. People discount the amount of work teachers do because so much of it takes place outside teachers’ publicly visible workday (which is to say, the school day). The work teachers do at home, often late into the night and frequently during those so-called vacations, isn’t similar to the “casual” overtime salaried office workers sometimes must do; it’s stuff — curriculum development, lesson planning, lesson prep, grading and student record-keeping, student and parent communication, remediation and extra help — that forms a fundamental, structural, continual part of the job.
Oh, BTW, for those office workers among you who think you might put in as many hours as teachers, let me add another thing: You know how much more challenging and stressful it is to give a presentation than to simply sit at your desk working? Well, imagine if giving presentations (to roomsfull of surly and disaffected 13 year olds, no less!) were pretty much all you did, all day long… and then you had to get all your desk work done anyway, usually at home.
[deep breath][/rant]
Walton:
That’s either incredibly stupid or incredibly disingenuous. The “hit” you might take on tuition if your ideas were implemented would be absolutely trivial in comparison to the huge advantage you would enjoy (and I would share, having been lucky enough to be born into relatively affluent middle-class circumstances) from defending the privileged position of the haves against the inconvenient needs of the have nots.
Or should I say, the huge short-term advantage: Eventually, as the inequity between rich and poor grows more and more severe, and the poor are more and more numerous (and the middle class dwindles), even the wealthiest will no longer be immune to the fundamental disorder and chaos that will ensue. That’s my real problem with laissez faire worldviews: It’s not so much that they’re selfish — though they clearly are — as that they’re shortsighted. Even for the most remorselessly self-interested, egalitarian approaches to living will recommend themselves, if only the depth and scope of your vision of the world is large enough.
What exactly do you mean by this? What evidence are you offering to support your claims?
Watchman:
I confess I haven’t been able to keep up with the flood of words in this thread, so rather than presuming to characterize Ward’s position per se I’ll just note that, in my experience, most people who argue against luck are arguing for the proposition that each and every individual is personally responsible for his or her own misfortune. This is really just a way of excusing one’s selfishness to oneself: If people all make their own “fortune,” then the misfortunate ones don’t deserve my help, because their situation is their own fault… and thus, I need not feel any guilt for not sharing my own good fortune.
Recently, I’ve stopped arguing the point on those grounds. Instead, I insist that, given a properly expansive view of the world, we’re all better off living in a society with fewer poor people and less wealth inequity (or, in another arena, fewer sick people and less healthcare inequity)… regardless of who “deserves” what. IOW, if you can’t be generous because it’s morally correct, be generous because in the long run you’ll benefit.
You don’t have to be a theist to believe in that bit about casting bread upon the waters. I find it odd that the political movements most closely allied with Christian theism seem least interested in that principle.
Bill Dauphin: That’s either incredibly stupid or incredibly disingenuous. The “hit” you might take on tuition if your ideas were implemented would be absolutely trivial in comparison to the huge advantage you would enjoy (and I would share, having been lucky enough to be born into relatively affluent middle-class circumstances) from defending the privileged position of the haves against the inconvenient needs of the have nots.
The reason why, in a free society, there are – and will always be – “haves” and “have-nots” is because some people are simply more successful than others.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not going to make the simplistic and rather silly assertion that “the poor deserve to be poor”. In most cases, they don’t; more often it’s a question of their having made the wrong choices in life, or simply having suffered bad luck. It’s dangerous to generalise, and I have no intention of doing so.
However, I will point out that it is incredibly inefficient – for reasons which hardly need explaining – to subsidise the unsuccessful (regardless of the reason for their lack of success) at the expense of the successful. If someone, using his own capital and labour and taking risks, creates wealth, then that wealth ought to be his to keep. No one else has any claim on it. I realise this is highly contestable on moral grounds; but on practical grounds, redistributing wealth from those who create it to those who don’t establishes, automatically, a disincentive to the creation of wealth.
And as to your allegations against my character; I am extremely unlikely ever to become one of the “haves”. I don’t have any highly marketable skills, and I don’t have the drive and motivation to make lots of money. And that illustrates my point perfectly. It would be, in fact, selfish of me to expect my peers, whose abilities, determination and luck have exceeded mine, to subsidise me, and to use State coercion to force them to do so whether they like it or not.
That, in fact, is the most important point. In my proposed society, if you want to share all your wealth with the poor, and live communally, you have every right to choose to do so. No one’s stopping you. But what right have you got to force those who create wealth to subsidise you, whether they like it or not?
As to your point about teachers: I have family members who are teachers, and yes, they do work very hard compared to their counterparts in many other professions. I have never claimed otherwise.
I don’t quite understand, in fact, why you seem to think that libertarians are contemptuous of teachers, social workers and the like. We are not. We merely believe that education, and the efficiency thereof, can be improved if parents, rather than State bureaucrats, are given power over their children’s education – an empowerment which can be achieved through school vouchers and other forms of school choice. Education is a consumer service like any other. While education does have what Milton Friedman calls “neighbourhood effects” – thereby justifying some degree of State subsidy for education – there is no reason why it should be provided through a centralised, bureaucratic governmental framework.
Walton:
My man! :-D
Only in the extreme, Walton. It seems that, once again, your
dogmaformula fails when filled with real-world parameters. If I were to make $200,000 next year, and the government “steals” 50% of it, I still have $100,000. Regardless of how unhappy I may be about that significant tax bite, explain to me how that regrettable state of affairs serves as an incentive for me to go back to grossing $48,000 per year?By ludicrous definitions of “free.”
Bullshit. And with this absurdly facile formulation you’re completely ignoring changes or differences across countries in structures of stratification and inequality – differences in concentrations of wealth or levels of poverty or degrees of mobility.
As C. Wright Mills noted in 1959, in distinguishing between personal troubles and social issues:
http://www.lclark.edu/~goldman/socimagination.html
Good fucking lord, Walton – you’re a white, male, British student at (IIRC) Oxford whose education is being subsidized by the government to the extent that you apparently don’t have to take some shit job to pay for it. Do you have any idea how much of a “have” this makes you? Clearly not. There are people wealthier than you (indeed, I went to a top prep school – on a scholarship – with some of the wealthiest people on the planet…many, but of course not all, of whom were complete bozos and screw-ups, by the way, which has not hurt them in the least). But you are among the most privileged people ever in the history of humanity. That privilege has been gained on the backs of millions of suffering people around the world, and you should never forget it.
You suggest that if implemented your proposals would actually hurt you. Well, first, no one’s forcing you to take advantage of subsidies to which you morally object. You can always go out and work for your tuition and living expenses. Second, you know as well as anyone that your stupid proposals will not be implemented anytime soon enough to affect your prospects (hopefully never, as the value in every sense to a society of providing education to its young people has been demonstrated over and over, as Bill notes). This doesn’t make you more moral or consistent. It makes you a hypocrite.
SC: But you are among the most privileged people ever in the history of humanity.
Absolutely true. As are you. We are very lucky to be enjoying, due to the wealth creation and technological advancement over the past few centuries, a standard of living much greater than that of any of our forebears. And, guess what? That wealth creation and advancement was generated by consumer capitalism.
That privilege has been gained on the backs of millions of suffering people around the world, and you should never forget it.
Bullshit. Wealth is not a zero-sum game, and it has not been gained “on the backs” of anyone. Rather, it has been gained through a spectacular rate of innovation and technical and economic progress over the last few centuries.
I don’t understand why leftists assume that, if one person is acquiring wealth, another person somewhere must be being exploited. Look at another hypothetical. If X owns a factory making consumer goods, and through his or her own efforts he or she develops a new, more efficient industrial process allowing the goods to be made faster and more efficiently, thereby undercutting his or her competitors and getting rich, who exactly has been “exploited”? No one. X has made him- or herself rich, and has also provided cheaper consumer goods to his or her customers, thereby increasing everyone’s standard of living.
Walton:
Nobody’s arguing that there won’t always be haves and have nots, nor that some of the have nots aren’t accountable for their own misfortune. I am arguing, however, that a society (ooh, that word!) that works collectively to reduce poverty and socioeconomic inequity will be broadly better for all its members than one that embraces the every-person-for-him/herself philosophy you espouse.
I don’t assert that you intend to be meanspirited… but the real-world effects of your approach would be indistinguishable from those of intentional meanspiritedness.
You say…
…but your characterization of your opponents’ position…
…belies that claim. Despite your parenthetical disclaimer, you are inherently holding all of the “unsuccessful” accountable for their own lack of success by implying that any investment in promoting their success would be wasteful. Far from being “incredibly inefficient,” subsidizing those whose lack of success is not of their own making — i.e., those who possess the personal qualities required for success, but who have been thwarted by some obstacle outside their own control — might well represent a very favorable return on investment.
But I deny what appears to be your basic premise: That raising the socioeconomic level of the least advantaged class provides no benefit to those more fortunate. I assert, OTOH, that the poverty of our neighbors harms all of us, and that sharp inequities between the poorest and the richest in a society create broad dysfunctions that ultimately harm the whole society. If I’m right (and I know you disavow the very premise of my argument… to wit, that there’s any such thing as society), then using a modest, tolerable amount of the excess wealth possessed by the very richest among us to put a socioeconomic floor under the very poorest is probably the most “efficient” way to address social dysfunctions.
Bushwah! The notion that the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets of the world would suddenly stop caring about making money (and thereby, presumably, creating jobs and broader social wealth) if they were taxed a modestly larger amount flies in the face not only of common sense, but of their own statements.
I make no allegation against your character. Even if I suggest that a particular argument might be disingenuous, I don’t think you’re fundamentally dishonest. On the contrary, you seem earnest and curious, but (IMHO) completely unaware of your place in the socioeconomic context. Case in point:
Based on your posts here, I think I understand (and please correct me if I’m mistaken) that you are a middle-class Briton with access to a university education? And not part of any historically disadvantaged ethnic or demographic group? If so, that makes you vastly wealthier than the overwhelming majority of your fellow humans… and wealthier, I suspect, than a large fraction of your fellow Britons. Certainly you are better off than tens of millions of Americans, counting only the fact that you have access to healthcare and they do not.
I deny your assertion that you are “extremely unlikely ever to become one of the ‘haves'”; rather, I think you’re incapable of realizing that you already are one.
My comments about teachers weren’t addressed to you, nor was I addressing libertarianism per se; I was replying narrowly (and supportively) to Bobber’s comments. However, since you bring it up, in practice Libertarians end up in bed with other sorts of anti-government right-wingers (even when their underlying philosophies aren’t especially compatible), and slagging public education is a hallmark of the right wing. In particular, the assertion that public employees in general, and public school teachers in particular, are lazy and overpaid is the exclusive province of the right. Sorry if that misrepresents your position, but it’s as true in political discussion as in any other aspect of life that you’re likely to be judged by your bedfellows.
But even in purely philosophical terms, libertarianism (or any purely market-based POV) is antithetical to the very concept of public education, since it’s impossible to generate profit from the education of the masses. Even private schools are almost all not-for-profit, and even so most cannot cover their operating expenses by charging “market rates” of tuition. Most must resort to direct fundraising (aka begging) and charity to stay solvent. It seems clear to me that the only way schools could survive or profit based solely on “the market” would be to strictly target only the wealthy elites as customers; I don’t see any hope of market-based for-profit schools being able to educate the middle class, let alone the poor. So you can claim to support education all you want; the logical implication of your philosophy is that only the “haves” will be educated, and knowledge will be added to the list of things the “have nots” don’t have.
So say you. I, OTOH, say that education is an essential aspect of the social infrastructure of any democracy.
EPIC FAIL X 2!
First, the notion that public-sector efforts are necessarily “centralised” and “bureaucratic” — and the embedded implication that “bureaucratic” is automatically a pejorative — is a completely unsupported assertion. Throwing those scare words around is like the ads for “natural” products that use the number of syllables it their competitors’ ingredients to scare consumers, without demonstrating in any way that substances with polysyllabic chemical names are unhealthy.
Second, I don’t know how public-sector schools are operated in the UK, but here in the U.S. they are about the least “centralised” public institution there is: While they’re subject to federal and state standards, the actual governance of public schools is almost always at the local level, by a locally elected Board of Education. Board of Education, BTW, is one of the most accessible of all elected offices, especially in relatively small towns such as the one where I live. The idea that public education is some sort of archetypal Soviet-style central planning nightmare is just an ideological hallucination of the right.
Of course I am. I never denied it. And I recognize and appreciate it rather than attributing it to some false sense of personal superiority.
Any improved standard of living is based upon empirical science (oh, I forgot – that’s not really of interest to you). The discoveries and inventions that have increased human well-being are the result of the scientific method, collaboration amongst scientists (sometimes transnationally, often in the context of war; and importantly across generations, each of which benefitted from the labor of others to allow it to pursue basic research), and government funding. The effect of capitalism has been to push research in directions that are most profitable regardless of their social value, to create a focus on selling products to the wealthy (that, in the case of, say, drugs, are tested unethically on poor people who won’t likely see any benefits from them even if they prove effective) and creating consumer “needs,” and to create a global system in which conditions and diseases for which we’ve long had solutions continue to kill, maim, blind,… millions who can’t afford treatment or adequate conditions. (For an example, study the history of the science of public health and pharmaceutical development. I could give you several references, but I won’t bother since you haven’t shown that you genuinely have a desire to learn.)
Technical progress and its application in key social arenas, again, are not synonymous with capitalism, despite what its apologists repeatedly claim, and despite your rhetorical linking of “technical and economic” progress. Read the fucking book by Mike Davis. You live in a country with few natural resources whose wealth was built on fucking empire, shithead. (If you don’t want to read Davis, read Imperial Reckoning about the British in Kenya. Anything. Get a sense of history.) Stop talking about the abstract “wealth” and start talking about people in the past and present of the world-capitalist system.
I’m not assuming anything. I’m speaking from a position of knowledge about history. And no, I’m not going to “look at” any more fucking hypotheticals, and you need to stop speaking in hypotheticals. Ever wondered why your arguments overwhelmingly tend to be abstract? I’m not responding to any more unless you’re willing to undertake the historical and social-scientific research necessary to support the claims you’re making, or at least engage meaningfully with that which has been provided to you.
(And you haven’t responded to my ealrier posts.)
One of many, Bill. One of many.
Excellent post, BTW.
SC and Bill: I want to apologise for the unnecessarily snarky tone of my earlier posts. Looking back, I have not been as civil as I should have been today.
I’ll address your substantive points later.
Bill Dauphin:
I’m a little late back to this party, but yes – I do agree with your characterization of work as a teacher, and the comparison you drew to white collar office work. I was a teacher until this past summer in NC, a state where much lip service is paid to education, but inadequate funding is the norm; where the “No Child Left Behind” boondoggle has ensured that while students have a wider range of knowledge, this knowledge has no DEPTH – they may learn many more things than I did when I was their age, but they don’t know why the facts are what they are, they don’t know how to apply that knowledge beyond tests, and the worst aspects of human laziness – “Just show me where the answer is” – are accepted by administrators who just want to survive without a lawsuit from a disgruntled parent.
Some comments:
I agree completely with SC’s giving credit to Western progress to the advancement of science. Again, I’m a history guy – it’s my passion and (until recently) my profession – and the history of humanity’s upward climb is due almost entirely to advances in human knowledge, not as a result of any economic theory or practice. Before there was market capitalism, there was progress; it can be argued that in some instances, unfettered capitalism retards progress (consider the muscle power of multinational oil companies, and how their money and influence have practically limited full-scale innovations in the areas of alternative fuel research, as just one example).
I will also agree with Bill Dauphin (okay, no surprise there) regarding the Libertarian antipathy to public education, which any social scientist can show without a doubt has been a public – including economic – good. Consider the positive effects of the GI Bill after World War II, which represented a huge investment by a central government in the future of individual citizens in order to reap the collective rewards that would come years down the road – more people with better educations prepared to adapt to work in a new and changing economy.
Nor will I ever agree to the thinking behind this:
“The reason why, in a free society, there are – and will always be – “haves” and “have-nots” is because some people are simply more successful than others.”
As SC suggested, what is the definition of “free”? All too often, freedom is a matter of economics. In my time in Guatemala, I saw entire villages where people were more or less “free” – but their grinding poverty so severely limited their choices that freedom was a word used by the wealthy elite to generate the illusion of autonomy, which only they themselves enjoyed. Or, what good is freedom to a woman who has nothing more than an elementary education, whose husband has left her with three children and one more on the way, who is being threatened with eviction from her one-room dirt-floor hovel of a house because she hasn’t paid the absentee landowner any rent for three months? Is she really free? Is she not capable of being “successful” – or were circumstances such that she never had a chance to be successful in the first place?
There may always be “haves and have-nots”, but the measure of a civilization is how it deals with those who have-not, and, in my opinion, how far a society is willing to go to alleviate as many of those factors that cause “have-notism” to exist.
Finally, I recall a story I used to teach to my language arts class. I don’t remember the name, but it was from India. It was written by a young woman who grew up during the last years of the Raj. The woman and her sister, when they were young, were first sent to an Indian school, and then later to a British one. They were shocked during a recess game where a race was held, and a single person was declared a winner; for in their former (Indian) school, the faster children would wait until all the race participants caught up, and they crossed the line together.
I always liked that story.
Commies!
Hee hee!
“Equality of outcomes.” Huzzah!!!!
See, it’s not charity, it’s just courtesy. Or, as Prince Feisal said in “Lawrence of Arabia”:
“With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me it is merely good manners. You may judge which is more reliable.”
Give me the good manners guy every day.
Which, it’s important to mention, would probably not have come about without the struggles of the Bonus Army among others.
(I’m so happy that you’re commenting more, Bobber! :))
Bobber#626,
You are giving a mixed message, criticising libertarian suspicion and antipathy towards state control of education, while simulataneously complaining about what happens to centrally controlled education when someone like GW Bush wins, while praising the GI bill, which probably has important elements of funding education whether competing public or private institutiions are chosen, i.e., the same advantages that it is hoped that vouchers will supply to primary and secondary education.
The Indian behavior you described may have been tribe specific. Jim Thorpe was notable for leaving others behind.
Do you have any specifics on how multinational oil companies have “limited full-scale innovations in the areas of alternative fuel research”. You seem to draw generalizatiions agains capitalism and profit based on some anecdote you have in mind. What are the details?
Posted by: SC, FCTE, OM | February 4, 2009
(I’m so happy that you’re commenting more, Bobber! :))
I will claim part of the credit for encouraging him to comment.
Just going by his stories, it would seem that he is a knowledgeable teacher. ‘Tis a shame that he is no longer one.
SC: You’re far too gracious. ; )
Africangenesis:
I do not believe my message is mixed. I don’t oppose government intervention and support for public education at all. What I oppose is misguided intervention and lack of appropriate support for public education. Government involvement (read: collective investment) is essential. The policy that is enacted is the question, not that action is necessary.
The Indians I referred to were people from India, not North America, just to be clear.
As far as my charge against the oil companies, if you wish, you can say that I pulled it out of my ass; I am too busy cartooning to dig up any details at the moment. (Still having trouble drawing bottles.)
Seconded.
Heh… good one.
(You were joking, right? If not… Hello?)
Janine:
Well, of course you deserve credit (or blame?)! Thanks for the encouragement! : )
Thank you for your comment RE: my teaching abilities. I thought I was a good teacher, and while I worked at an alternative school for kids who had academic or behavior issues, I did quite well. When I was involuntarily transferred to a “regular” school, I ran into a few problems:
(1) a lousy administration that blamed teachers first, if any issue came up with parents or students;
(2) a culture of laziness and general malaise toward education (I’m sorry, no one passes my class unless they READ THE DAMN TEXT – if you can read, you WILL); and
(3) paperwork. Piles and piles of paperwork. Hours spent in afterschool meetings that were a waste of time, but were required by state mandates (which were required by federal mandates).
It’s a shame I wasn’t more inclined to do the other, non-teacher part of the work. I started teaching too late in life; I just don’t have the patience for things I consider a waste of time.
And I miss play-acting out the scenes from history books in my classroom. If only I had costumes… but it sure made the kids pay attention. Well, most of them. (Especially my French Revolution execution bits.)
Bobber,
Can you at least remember the type of mechanism oil companies used to limit innovation. Did they get Congress to make it illegal or something?
Misguided intervention on a broader scale is one of the risks of central control. The usual way for those who think that noone else can manage as well as they, is to go to a single party system and never have real elections again.
Africangenesis:
First, as I’ve said before, all this blather about “state control of education” is just scaremongering. Public schools are subject to basic standards set at the state and federal level, but control is almost always local, and as small-d democratic as just about anything in this country. Plus which, even at the federal level, “the state” isn’t some foreign-born king ruling by force of arms; it’s us.
Second, the fact that radical anti-government ideologues can do real damage when they lie their way into office is not a valid argument against government; rather, it’s an argument for working harder to make sure the people we elect to run the government actually believe in government. If the local soccer team hired a coach who actually hated soccer, and who therefore deliberately ran the team into the ground, would you take that as proof that soccer was worthless? Or would you just think it meant the team should be more careful about the next coach it hired?
Africangenesis:
Sorry, can’t answer that… after all, the Cheney task force on energy meeting minutes aren’t accessible by the public.
Look at those names. Note the dearth of representatives from alternative energy-promoting organizations.
See? Pulled it out of my ass.
Bobber:
Interesting; I feel just the opposite: I got my first teaching job and 24, right out of graduate school and with no “grownup” work experience. I was “young for my age” (a less charitable term would be immature), and my students were hardly any younger than I felt. My impulse was always more to be one of them than to lead them… and the sad part was that I kept forgetting that even when I had been one of the kids, I had never been one of the popular kids. My big deficit as a teacher was in the area of classroom management, and I finally decided to get out of the way and let someone better have my spot in the classroom.
Now that I’ve reached an age where I can no longer imagine myself as a 16 year old, and I’ve had ~25 years of life and work experience as an adult, I think I’d be pretty good in the classroom. In fact, I’m strongly considering taking early retirement in a few years and going back to teaching. After a whole career in the allegedly agile, nonbureaucratic private sector (have any of these people who whinge about the “bureaucracy” of government actually worked in the private sector?), I don’t think there’s any level of paperwork that can frighten me!
Plus which, even at the federal level, “the state” isn’t some foreign-born king ruling by force of arms; it’s us.
That’s the root of my disagreement with left-wing (and, indeed, the majority of right-wing) thinking. What do you mean by “us”? Why is it assumed that my personal liberty, and my personal interests and desires, are subsumed by those of “the community” (read “a majority of the people who happen to live within a certain arbitrarily-defined geographical area”)?
The state is not “us”, because there is no such thing as “us”. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t downplay the importance of community. But, for community to be meaningful – and for there to be any such thing as a “will of the community” or “community interests” – it must be voluntary in character; people who disagree with its purported “will” must be free to opt out and to join a community which better represents their own wishes and desires. Thus, nation-states, local governments and other polities are not “communities” in any legitimising sense; rather, they are collections of people who happen to live in a particular area and who are, whether they like it or not, subjected to the whims of the governing authority of that area.
In a democracy, the State has – in theory, at least – the approval of a majority of its subjects. But there is no moral difference between one person imposing his will on all other people, and a majority imposing their will on a minority. It’s still coercion.
Don’t get me wrong. Democracy is better than dictatorship, as a practical matter, for two reasons: (a) a government responsible to the majority is marginally less likely to get away with corrupt, capricious and evil conduct, though this is certainly not a cast-iron rule; and (b) more importantly, in a democracy, it’s possible to eject one’s leaders without the inconvenience of having to assassinate them. But this doesn’t mean that the mere fact of a government being “democratic” magically gives it some moral authority, or negates the need for a vigorous protection of individual rights.
At its root, all government is simply a sophisticated protection racket. Its power rests on coercive force. “Democratic” government has no more inherent legitimacy than any other form. If a law is morally right, I obey it because it is morally right; if it is not morally right, I obey it because, if I do not, the agents of the State will use coercive force to compel me to do so.
I reject, therefore, the orthodox distinction in political theory between “power” and “authority”. A person pointing a gun at one’s head has “power”, whether he’s a criminal or an agent of the State; the difference between the two, however, is that the latter can use force with impunity, because the majority is trained to accept the myth that the State has some “moral authority” to make decisions on our behalf and to force us to comply. In reality, there is no difference. And so those of us who value freedom have a responsibility to fight back, and to force the State to accept limits on its power.
Again, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t doubt that many politicians, civil servants and other officials of the State are motivated by much higher and more noble purposes than your average protection racketeer; they genuinely desire to improve the lot of “the people”. But this is, in fact, what makes the State such a frightening and inherently dangerous concept. As someone once said: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
And, by supporting the notion that there really is such a thing as “luck” you’re basically asserting that all pursuit of science is wrong, dumbass. – Ward S. Denker
Nonsense. Scientists use statistics, precisely because they have to find ways to filter out the influence of the mass of unpredictable influences on individual cases. Yet each one of us is an individual case, subject to all those factors. As has been pointed out above, if you know enough of the starting conditions, the fall of a roulette ball is predictable. It does not stop anyone – including scientists – talking about someone having “good luck” or “bad luck” in the casino. Or in the inspirational teachers you do (or don’t) meet, the encounter with a person or book that sparks your interest in a particular foreign country, the offhand remark from an adult that turns you toward, or away, from a particular subject, the postal delay that means one university offer appears before another and tips the balance on where you go…
One cannot pick one’s parents, genetics, or capacity to labor for society. – Ward S. Denker
Indeed – something we can agree on. Or the country and class you grow up in, hence the wars, natural disasters and famines that you have to cope with (or don’t), the chance that you will be killed, disabled or just slightly stunted by childhood illness or malnutrition; the educational opportunities you will have. If we are serious about giving everyone a decent chance in life, then charity just doesn’t cut it: serious redistribution is required on both national and international scales.
Africangenesis,
You mention worker cooperatives, but not consumer cooperatives. Is it your intent to grant workers more power to optimize their more local concentrated interests at the expense of more diffusely distributed consumers?
No. I simply didn’t happen to mention consumer coops. With sufficiently large enterprises, I would want interests other than the workers represented on a supervisory board.
First, today’s society is more, not less industrialised; it is global, and on the global scale, there is more industry than ever. The general principle is the democratisation of economic life – and that implies that all those seriously affected by how an enterprise is run should have a voice (of course “seriously” is a matter of degree, and there’s no reason why the decision on where to draw the line should be the same everywhere). This “voice” might be a representative on a supervisory board of management; not running the enterprise day-to-day, but able to set overall goals – which because of the diversity of interests represented, would not be simply to maximise profit, turnover, or market share.
In the case of major transport or energy infrastructure, for example, those seriously affected would be everyone in the area it covers – so it should be municipally/regionally/globally owned. Similarly large banks – we’ve seen how irresponsible they are when privately owned, basically because they do not factor systemic risk into their calculations. In the case of large factories in less general industries, the workers at all levels, the local community, perhaps representatives of related industries.
I wonder if you might be under estimating the democratic elements of a market system that in a sense “voted” to give say the Beatles more capital than the Monkeys.
The problem is, the market gives you votes according to your wealth. This is not important when it comes to Beatles/Monkees; it is vitally so in health care and education; and there are many intermediate cases. One central concern is to avoid self-reinforcing inequalities in wealth and consequently power (the “libertarian” right systematically ignore the fact that wealth is a form of power, and that those with any form of power tend to use it to increase it further, and to make it hereditary).
I also wonder if there is any pattern to be seen in contrasting the type of managers of capital and enterprises chosen in the current system with the type of managers chosen perhaps more democratically by labor unions. Do the latter have the right skill set? Do they balance wider societal interests? If their constituency is from workers below, will they serve the consumer and society as well as the current system does? Would it be legal for unions to strike as part of the “negotiations” you mentioned?
See above – in sufficiently influential enterprises, the workers would not be the only constituency represented. Yes, strikes should be legal.
One thing I want to think more about is where the concentations of capital end up on your schema. Large enterprises do generally need more capital for long term projects. I’m wonder if that capital will end up in the same or different places. I wonder whether the new mangement system will be as environmentally conscious as the current one, especially if there is more input from the extremely poor of the world.
Could hardly be less so: overwhelmingly it has been state action and pressure from environmental organisations that have halted environmentally damaging commercial activity, not management concern. It is of course the extremely poor who suffer most from environmental destruction, as they cannot buy their way out of the effects – which is not to say they can be relied on to make environmentally responsible decisions.
I wonder if you might be assuming that private concentrations of wealth are less efficient and more socially negative than they would be if the managers are chosen different. What is the social detriment if someone who is good at managing capital to generate high returns, accumulates more capital, much more capital than any one person “deserves”, especially since it was socially generated. Unless that person purchases tremendous amounts of land, there is no way he can personally hope to consume more than a fraction of a fraction of a percent. All that person can really do with that capital is to continue to manage it well, or if he manages it poorly it will erode into the hands of better managers.
Generating high returns may well mean exploiting the workforce, smashing unions, trashing the environment, selling health-damaging products and lying about their effects, creating demand through dishonest and/or insecurity-inducing advertising (with the message: “You won’t be sexy/admired/popular/a good mother unless you buy our product”), etc. “Efficient” is a deceptive word. It has a technical meaning in economics which does not correspond well with its meaning in everyday language: an “efficient” market or enterprise can cause immense environmental destruction and human suffering.
One more note: I don’t have a detailed socio-economic blueprint; rather, a concern to avoid various disastrous environmental outcomes, and mitigate the extreme inequality likely if capitalism continues on its merry way; and a desire to both broaden and deepen democratic decision-making, which information technology in particular is making ever more feasible.
But there is no moral difference between one person imposing his will on all other people, and a majority imposing their will on a minority. It’s still coercion. –
Walton
Yet more bilge from Walton. Of course it’s coercion, and of course there is a moral difference between the two cases – which is not to say coercion by the majority is always justifiable. Walton himself, of course, believes some coercion, even state coercion, is justifiable: he thinks the state should protect the sanctity of property. He is, in short, a hypocrite.
Walton:
This is, I’m afraid, a point of irreconcilable difference between us.
Denying its existence doesn’t constitute downplaying its importance? How, pray tell, does that work? You say…
…yet the whole thrust of your argument appears to be that the very notion of community is inherently non-voluntary… because, as near as I can make out your intent, the existence of community places some boundaries on individual freedom of action.
But guess what? The mere existence of other beings on the planet places boundaries on your freedom of action. There is no such thing as unfettered personal liberty. Even in the absence of any government whatsoever, your personal liberty would be at the mercy of whatever other human (or other animal, for that matter) that happened along and possessed more power than you. The notion that your choice is a binary one between liberty and community is entirely fallacious. Other people exist.
That being the case…
Yes, it does. Not “magically,” perhaps — we’re all rationalists on this bus — but democratic government does have moral authority by comparison to other forms of government, or to the rough “government” of the jungle, specifically because…
…democratic government is the best available “vigorous protection of individual rights”; it’s the only form of government (including, IMHO, all the de facto forms that would inevitably fill the void resulting from the absence of formal government) that even attempts to give each individual’s rights equal weight.
But since you insist on viewing any government — no matter how egalitarian and representative it might be — in the third person, I know in advance you won’t accept any of the above.
Bill, I think Walton’s concept of “community” is that of a group that shares common interests, beliefs, and goals, regardless of physical (geographical) location. (I wonder if he’s read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress?)
I accept the concept as valid – a trade union is that sort of community, in contrast to the more conventional such as “everyone who lives in Barney Frank’s congressional district” – but it’s naive to think that the all members of any interest group with more than one member are always going to agree on everything, and I have no doubt that Walton realizes this. So, in Walton’s virtual communities, people are either a) regularly, perhaps even constantly, leaving communities and joining others that better represent their interests (at the moment), or b) occasionally submitting their will to the coercive will of their community, rather than become self-seeking, ideological nomads forever searching for the perfect fit.
Watchman:
Maybe that’s what he was getting at, but I fail to see how it makes a difference to his argument: Regardless of whether it’s defined geopolitically or by some other index of commonality, either a community involves some degree of subordination of personal liberty to the community consensus (which Walton seems to abhor) or it effectively doesn’t exist. Are we to imagine that labor unions go on strike because each individual member happens to personally choose, entirely voluntarily but simultaneously, to withhold labor? Isn’t it more likely that some members would not have chosen to strike, but are constrained by their membership to follow the consensus decision?
I’m not sure Walton does realize this: In the post I replied to, he both denied the existence of “us” (based on the fact that any such collective entity violates individual liberty) yet claimed not to be downplaying the importance of “community.” Since I fail to acknowledge anything that can meaningfully be called “community” yet cannot be called (by its members, at least) “us,” I frankly don’t know what the Hell he’s talking about. His arguments seem self-contradictory. But maybe that’s just me, eh?
No doubt; I’ve rarely met anyone who holds to any version of libertarianism who has not. In fact, though, the book (which I happen to love) gives equal voice and credence to not only libertarians but anarchists, royalists, socialists (IIRC), and Jeffersonian democrats. Heinlein (who was both a socialist and right-winger at various times in his own life) spent a lot of time “playing” with alternative political models in his books (Double Star presents a multi-world parliamentary democracy/constitutional empire; Starship Troopers posits a democracy in which only those who have completed a term of federal service earn the franchise; Stranger in a Strange Land imagines a one-world government evolved from the UN; etc.), yet the right always seems absolutely convinced he was on their side. Go figure, eh?
OOT
I find the politics and economics boring, but it’s still interesting to follow a thread where the participants actually communicate!
I post because, as a teenager, Heinlein was possibly my favourite author and strongly influenced my views – particularly what I perceived as his philosophy of enlightened self-interest – and to this day I’d recommend reading his books. (um. Except maybe the very late fiction ones. I did find Grumbles from the Grave a great read.)
It’s completely perplexing. It’s like he doesn’t recognize the possibility of democracy in practice. I mean, why would anyone approach democracy as a situation in which there are pre-existing and preformed individual wills which, of which, in order for any collective policy to be made, some must abide by the collective will or be coerced. What about the whole process of debate and presenting evidence to convince other people that the plan you advocate is the right one and to develop a consensus? I’ve been in a union that was preparing to take a strike vote, and it wasn’t like some people said “We have to go on strike” and others just had to capitulate. In the case of the Bolivian constitution, the document itself was the result of months of heated debate and discussion, and the referendum was merely the final stage in the long process. Somehow to Walton participatory, democratic decision-making itself seems to appear the essence of coercion and restraint on liberty. No polis, in any context, can (or should) even exist. Very strange.
It is the contrarian Libertarian strain which has always been interesting to me. The individual is seen as the absolute entity – when in doubt, everything must give way before the rights of the individual. But human civilization has never been organized on that basis, nor can it be – it’s as if you’re trying to make a human body out of the trillion or so human cells that are nececessary for it to function, but providing no means for those cells to cohere, or even to communicate with each other. As with organisms, no society can be composed of each of its parts acting in complete autonomy, one from the other.
It is ironic: whereas economic Libertarians are fond of saying “there are winners and losers”, they themselves can’t stand the thought that their own individual desires may not be reflected in society as a whole, and so they make themselves outcasts in order to prove the point. Democracy is, by its very nature, compromising – and Libertarianism is too rigid for that reality.
Wow, I thought this thread had died, but it’s still kicking. Here goes!
SC, FCTE, OM (#616)
That education solves most of the causes of poverty which are deterministic? Common sense. If you end up never having learned how to manage a checkbook, read a contract to see that you’re getting screwed, how to save, how to budget, etc. you’re much more likely to make poor decisions.
Would you give a teenager a credit card with a $15,000 limit on it and not teach said teenager how to use a credit card? Of course you wouldn’t. A lot of details like this simply don’t get taught in public education, and that’s a damned shame. I know that there was not a single class in all of my schooling that talked about any of that.
I worked for a large company which had a head accountant who could not manually figure out why her books wouldn’t balance. I had to find the errors in the computer and fix them. She simply accepted them and wrote them off each month, costing the company thousands per annum. Her private life was a mess too, her finances weren’t in order and she worked two jobs to stay in her home. This is a person who has made statistical mathematics her life and she couldn’t keep it all straight for herself, let alone her company.
The basic kinds of information someone would get calling a credit counseling firm would have been invaluable to young adults just starting out, before they dug themselves into a credit card hole of debt. Credit card companies count on their customers’ ignorance. How can anyone ever save for the future if they’re already in debt and digging? Then when real tragedy hits (illness, etc.) they have no backup plan, no savings, forcing them further into debt with higher and higher interest rates. Wouldn’t a lot of this be avoided if schooling really drove home how it is that this interest is compounded?
Bill Dauphin (#617)
It’s a good thing you didn’t elect yourself my champion in my stead. Had you read what I was talking about, you’d have found that I recognize there are some cases which few enough have the information to avoid. See my bit above on education. Preventative medicine to poverty is better than trying to cure the ills after it has set in.
Bobber (#626)
See #609 by me. The only issue I could see you take there is with vouchers, but it seems we’re very much in a “shit or get off the pot” mode on that in this country. The school system is pretty much a monopoly. Enabling parents to select schools of their choice puts a competitive pressure on the public school system, forcing it to earn its keep (hold on to the students it has). That can only improve education. Throwing gobsmackingly high amounts of money at the problem hasn’t caused it to give. Legislation hasn’t either (No Child Left Behind… what a lie). Why not give the competition tactic a go — seeing as the status quo of “more money” and “more legislation” haven’t put a dent in it? What do we really have to lose?
In 609 I said:
That’s a very Libertarian stance on the issue, why do you believe otherwise?
Bill Dauphin et al., I understand where you’re coming from with regards to community.
However, I would point out that (in a country with full freedom of association) you have the right to leave a trade union, or any other voluntary group or organisation, if you don’t agree with its policies. They do not, ultimately, have the right to hold a gun to your head and force you to comply with the majority’s wishes. The State does. And this is why the subjects of the State can never really be a “community”, whereas a voluntary group can.
When I said that there is no such thing as “us”, I was, perhaps, linguistically imprecise. I should have said that there is no such thing as “we, the people of country X”, in any meaningful sense. (This stance is, I realise, rather heterodox and will piss off left-wingers and patriotic conservatives alike. But in good conscience I can’t lie about my stance on this issue.)
The fact is that, short of actually migrating to another country (which is unlikely to be any less illiberal than the one where I already live), I have no choice about complying with the wishes of the majority. And since the whole of the Earth’s surface is now claimed by one polity or another, I can’t go somewhere and start my own rival nation. Thus, nations are not comparable in character to voluntary groups; and while a voluntary group may well make decisions democratically, the fact is that, in the last resort, a member who becomes thoroughly disaffected with the group’s policies is free to leave and start his own group. That simply isn’t true in the world of nation-states. Rather, the majority effectively has the power to force me to buckle under and bow to their wishes – in the last resort, by holding a gun to my head – whether I like it or not.
(Indeed, Milton Friedman’s argument for localism in government was that it’s a lot easier to move between local government jurisdictions if you don’t like the local government’s policy, than it is to move between nation-states. And I think he was exactly right.)
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not denying that democracy is a better method of selecting public officials than any other which has so far been developed, and that it is in practice less likely to trample individual rights than any other extant form of government. However, I would assert that it is not enough in itself; it needs to be coupled with serious constitutional limitations on the scope of government power, including a rigid constitutional protection of private property rights. (“Eminent domain” is a truly iniquitous practice, and the great failing of most constitutions is that they do not prevent the State from stealing private property in the so-called “public interest”.) These limitations should be enforced by an active and independent judiciary; while the court system leaves much to be desired, I can’t think of any other effective method of protecting the minority’s property rights even against the will of an overwhelming majority.
Let me try this again: What do you mean by deterministic? There are specific ways of defining determinism in the social sciences, and your use of the word doesn’t seem to fit any of them. The rest of your little essay strikes me as irrelevant. (And has it occurred to you that the reason for debt is not that people don’t manage their money well, but that they don’t have enough to begin with? You’re also ignoring the role of debt-driven consumption in contemporary capitalism, but I’ll leave that aside.) Please define “deterministic” as you’re using it in this context, distinguishing it from other explanations for poverty. Then, please provide non-anecdotal (preferably global) evidence to support your argument. Thank you.
Bill D:
Yes, my point exactly!
[Sorry, a partial response will have to do for now!]
SC:
I think you understood me, but to just clarify my potentially ambiguous point…
I meant that union members “are consttrained by the [conditions of] their [presumably voluntary] membership to follow the [deliberative, democratic] consensus decision” (i.e., the experience you report); I did not mean to suggest they were being bullied into acquiescence by their fellow members.
Ward:
Since I was very careful to make it clear that I was responding broadly to typical libertarian argument, and not to your specific comments, I discount your whingeing on that score. This, however…
That can only improve education if you make the a priori assumption that lack of competition is what’s wrong with education. The idea that competitive pressure improves an enterprise rests on the notion that there’s something the enterprise could be doing — and already knows how to do — to improve its performance, but for which there’s insufficient motivation. In my experience, that doesn’t apply to teachers: They’re motivated to do the best jobs they know how not by competition (e.g., for test scores) with the school down the street, nor by their potential monetary rewards (if they were significantly motivated by money, they wouldn’t be teachers in the first place), but by their concern for the wellbeing of their students, and of the community. Voucher-enabled transfers could certainly make public school teachers fear for their jobs… but it’s impossible for me to imagine that fear translating into better teaching; fear and anger are toxic to the delicate dynamics of the classroom.
Throwing gobsmackingly high amounts of money at the problem hasn’t caused it to give.
I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone has done any such throwing. Perhaps your gob is way too easily smacked?
As you can with the “state”: Unlike the old Soviet Union, I know of no current democracy that forbids its citizens from emigrating. Certainly the U.S. does not, and I’m willing to be the UK does not, either.
Every collective entity will have rules that place limits and obligations on its members; as I said before, any so-called “community” that doesn’t involve some level of subordination of individual liberty to the consensus of the group effectively doesn’t exist. If you’re a union member and you fail to pay your dues, or you contravene the proper decisions of the group, you’ll be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including expulsion; if you’re a citizen of the state and you fail to pay your taxes (dues), or you contravene the law (proper decisions of the group), you’ll be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including imprisonment (expulsion from society). In principle, it’s the same either way; the differences in the scope of personal limitations and the potential severity of the disciplinary actions are differences of degree rather than of kind… and they’re arguably proportional to the importance of the rules.
The “gun to your head” character of state discipline only actually arises in the case of criminal law and the exercise of the police power (which in the U.S. is mostly vested in local authorities, BTW), and criminal laws exist primarily to protect individuals’ rights (esp. those property rights you so revere) against the encroachment of others. If your neighbor is bigger and stronger than you, eventually it will require somebody’s gun to her head to prevent her from taking your stuff; would you prefer that gun to be in the hands of random vigilantes, or of cops hired by, and accountable to, a government in which your voice is equal to everyone else’s?
You’re pretty much making my point(s) for me: First, that there’s no place you can go to escape some form of government; second, that liberal democracies such as those in Europe and North America are probably preferable to any available alternative. Where we differ is that I think the former point represents a fundamental fact of the human condition rather than a lamentable (and correctable) failure… and that I think liberal democracies are in principle (though not necessarily in the details of implementation) not only the best available form but the best possible form.
However, if you persist in believing in some yet-untried utopian form of community, let me suggest that you advocate strongly for the development of human spaceflight and offworld colonies. I’m only half joking here: One effect of the establishment of human colonies in the inner Solar System (Moon, Mars, Phobos and Deimos, the asteroid belt, etc.) would be the possibility of creating isolated human populations that could be “laboratories” for alternative social and political structures. I’ll visit you on Ceres, and you can give me a tour of your libertarian oasis…. ;^)
Oops, I horked up my tagging @653:
First, the sentence that begins “Throwing gobsmackingly high amounts…” was Ward’s words, and should’ve been a blockquote.
Second, everything after my two-sentence reply to the above sentence (i.e., ending in “…your gob is way too easily smacked?”) is a reply to Walton, not Ward, and all the blockquotes in the remainder of that comment are Walton’s words.
Sorry for any confusion.
Bill Dauphin said:
You’ve got it right there. Consider how similar the Libertarian philosophy in practice is to the fables told of the settlement of North America by Europeans, or (moreso) the expansion into the western part of the continent by people from the east. These were “rough individualists”, “tough pioneers”, “self-sufficient farmers”. The sociological aspects of American independence are downplayed, the economic ones (Boston Tea Party, tarring-and-feathering tax collectors) are accentuated. Much of the mysticism associated with American history is Libertarian-flavored. Is it any wonder that people still look to these myths? They make every person a hero, standing alone against the elements, the Red Man, the big businessman…
Bill Dauphin: If you’re a union member and you fail to pay your dues, or you contravene the proper decisions of the group, you’ll be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including expulsion; if you’re a citizen of the state and you fail to pay your taxes (dues), or you contravene the law (proper decisions of the group), you’ll be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including imprisonment (expulsion from society). In principle, it’s the same either way; the differences in the scope of personal limitations and the potential severity of the disciplinary actions are differences of degree rather than of kind… and they’re arguably proportional to the importance of the rules.
No, I think you’re comparing two fundamentally different things. Yes, a trade union, or a student society, or any other body can bring disciplinary action against you and can, in the last resort, expel you from its ranks. But it can’t deprive you of your liberty. It cannot lock you up. And you are at any time free to leave.
An example which is often raised on this site, in fact: leaving a church. While some churches (the LDS being particularly notorious in this regard) do everything they can to avoid removing people from their membership rolls, they cannot, in the end, force you to remain a member. And if you choose to leave, all the “disciplinary action” and “tribunals” they want to use against you will have no effect. You can, in the last resort (and people have done this to the LDS church many times) go to court and require them to strike your name from the membership rolls. You can walk out into the bright sunshine and live your life without them being able to exercise any power over you. Ditto for a political party, or a trade union.
With the State, you simply don’t have this option. Yes, I do realise that technically one is free to emigrate; but that isn’t comparable, because you don’t have the option to opt out of the whole “nation-states” business altogether. I am free to refuse to join any trade union, or any church, or any political party if I so choose, and so I do not have to be subject to the jurisdiction of any such organisation. But I can’t choose to opt out of the laws of nations. Even if I choose to renounce my citizenship of any state and surrender my political rights, I still have to pay taxes to whichever jurisdiction I live in, and will be locked up if I don’t.
This is why I point out that there is no material difference between government and a protection racket. Yes, you can choose which gang you want extorting your money. But you don’t have the option to opt out altogether; if you do, they will ultimately use force to compel you to comply.
I realise all of this sounds rather Rothbardian, but I hasten to add that I am not an anarchocapitalist*. I believe in the fundamental sanctity of private property rights – as we used to say over here, “an Englishman’s home is his castle”** – and I dont see any way of defining and protecting such rights without a state and a legal framework. Sure, you could simply have an armed citizenry with the right to defend their own property; but then the strong would prey on the weak, and property disputes would be resolved by physical violence. Such a climate would be so unstable that it would make it impossible to do business, and would also be inefficient, since people would devote more of their efforts to self-defence rather than economic productivity and innovation, thereby reducing everyone’s standard of living.
So I accept the existence of the State as a necessary evil. But, like all necessary evils, it should IMO be kept to the barest possible minimum. Yes, it should protect private property rights and arbitrate disputes; provide a basic level of national defence, police and fire protection and public safety; and make some provision for the welfare of the poorest, which I would justify both on humanitarian and on practical grounds (a society where half the population is on the brink of starvation is inevitably going to have high crime rates, rioting and instability). But where we have a clear choice of having a function performed by agencies of the State or by the private and voluntary sectors, the latter is inherently preferable IMO.
*To SC: I am not endorsing their position by using the word. It’s what they call themselves. So please don’t start on the whole “anarchocapitalists are not anarchists” thing again; I understand and accept your point.
**And yes, I realise I’ll be accused by the PC enforcement brigade of being sexist and racist for using this traditional expression. So, to elaborate my meaning, “the private property of a property-owning person, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or other irrelevant characteristics, is his or her castle.” Happy?
Re: SC, OM (#651)
Alright. I’ll define it as a spectrum of behavior which is preventable. By that definition, non-deterministic causes for poverty would be ones which most people would lack foresight to prevent.
Teenage pregnancy is preventable and it destroys futures. Do you think our country’s abstinence-only education is helping them? Would it not stand to reason that all of the suffering that arises from not having a proper education on basics, like those I mentioned above, could also be prevented?
What I said isn’t irrelevant, but the fact that you have so easily dismissed tells me that you know it’s correct but would rather ignore it because it does not fit your pre-conceived notion of how the world works. By refusing to address it, you’ve put your head just as deeply into the sand as any creationist has about evolution.
I contend that lack of money, in a society with minimum wage laws, is not the cause of poverty. I believe that is another one of those outliers, beyond the trend.
Here’s an anecdote Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?
I’m sure you’ll dismiss it as well, because you won’t read it very carefully or you won’t like that the story appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, or some other trivial self-justified prejudice.
As for non-anecdotal evidence, how about comparing the basic educational resources of third world countries to first world countries? How about comparing the educational resources for higher learning among the struggling third-world countries and those which are emerging?
You and I are bringing about equal evidence to this argument, where’s yours?
Re: Bill Dauphin (#653)
This is silly, I’ve made no such assumption that our public school system knows what it is doing. One need only compare the education gotten from a private school education. You seem to be making an a priori of your own that the only reason private schools do well is because they’re more expensive than public schools.
To you, throwing money at the problem solves it, while that isn’t working for our public school system at all.
National Per Student Public School Spending Nears $9,000 This comes from the Census Bureau. Are you going to argue that at almost $9,000 a head we can’t afford a textbook for each student for every class they take, a chalk board, teachers to lecture classrooms of twenty to thirty of them at a time, and to maintain a building to house it all in (seeing as we have public schools everywhere which are already built)? That spending per student looks pretty darned good to me. If that $9,000 could be obtained by a voucher, how many parents could then afford private schooling?
How do parents select which private school to send their children to, anyway? This should seem obvious, but it bears mentioning: They compare all of the private schools they can afford to determine which has the best education program for their money.
People do this for public schools too, you know? Public schools are paid for by local property taxes. If parents think their children are going to get a shoddy education, they move. They have to, they can’t send their kids to a different public school out of their area. There isn’t even competition between public schools because of how they’re financed. This keeps a lot of kids in a crappy school.
The first bit is just an appeal to emotion, probably because you know good teachers. There are poor teachers as well.
Everyone should fear for his or her job, that’s an incentive to do the job well. Would your employer keep you on staff if they felt you were doing a sub-par job? Of course not. Schools don’t have that luxury, there aren’t so many people who are motivated to become teachers.
I note that neither of you tried to defend the No Child Left Behind Act. A lot of Democrats voted for it too, including our current President. Does that not make our current president every bit as guilty for supporting that abominable piece of education legislation as our former one?
I tire of being on the defensive. It’s your guys’ job now.
What evidence can you give that education doesn’t lift people out of poverty better than redistribution?
Walton:
Interesting. So it’s specifically the police power that you object to in the state, as opposed to all other forms of “community”? And yet… later in your posting, you mention the police power as one of the tiny handful of state functions you actually consider legitimate. [scratches head]
More to the point, you don’t have the option to opt out of the whole living among other people business altogether. Somebody’s always going to have the power to lock you up (if not hang you) for stealing from, beating up, or killing your neighbors; if not the state, then that power will devolve to some other body, whether formal or informal. In the absence of state power, the private sector has historically arrogated to itself precisely the powers you fear. Consider, for instance, the powers exercised by (private sector) ship captains in the age of sail, when ships spent months or years beyond the effective reach of any state. Or, alternatively, the private cops (if not private armies) fielded by Industrial Revolution era corporations against their own workers. The existence of the state doesn’t create these powers; it formalizes them… and by so doing, makes them less capricious and (in the case of a democracy) conditions them on the consent of the governed. Effectively, the existence of a state limits these constraints on personal liberty.
What you’re presenting as a failing of the state, I see as its primary justification… because I don’t believe, as you seem to, that humans can possibly live together without needing some mechanism (potentially extending to forcible deprivation of liberty) to mediate conflicts between competing rights. IMHO, the dissolution of nation-states would leave behind not a paradise of personal liberty, but instead a return to feudalism, if not worse.
Where the performance of a function impacts the entire polis, justice demands that the entire polis have a say in establishing and governing that function… and that becomes the very definition of a state. The notion of a private entity that speaks or acts for the entire public is a contradiction in terms.
Finally, addressing this out of order because it’s something of an aside…
Hmmm… tell it to an FLDS “sister-wife,” whose home and children are held hostage by the church. (I was just listening to a story about this on the This American Life podcast; apparently Warren Jeffs’ FLDS sect literally holds the titles to members’ homes.) She may “technically” have the option of leaving the church, but that possiblity is effectively not really available to her.
Well, that’s a good question. The private school in my neighborhood charges slightly over $25,000 per year for tuition. That’s for 4th grade. The 9th grade tuition is over $30,000. Fees are relatively modest, but for kid active in sports and music (as I was) can easily top $1,200.
The secondary school over in the next town charges $37,000 for boarding tuition. If you commute, you can catch a break: the day tuition is only $31,000.
Obviously, these aren’t average tuitions. The average non-sectarian private school runs about $14K, but the average of all private schools is about $8K.
In any case, the real question about any school is: what do you get for your money?
Re: Watchman(#660)
Then why include them at all? See what I mean about focusing on the outliers? This is confirmation bias.
And look at the spikes on the Census Bureau’s data. New York spends $14,000 per student (there, I threw out an outlier, though the other four on that list are also pretty close). Over the average of all public schools, all private schools actually spend cost $1,000 less for tuition.
I must point out that I’m not entirely convinced yet that tuition costs and spending per student are comparable. The numbers could be apples and oranges, you know?
Good question. Private schools are generally regarded as better as a matter of common knowledge. They face market competition from one another. Is there a reason you don’t think it is causal? Why?
Consider this: Add that $9,000 (on average) spent per student by the government to the $8,000 (on average) per student on tuition by their parents and that comes out to $17,000 — well above the $14,000 for the non-sectarian schools. I see your unsubtle hint that sectarian schools provide a lower quality education than a non-sectarian school, which is probably a myth. Even wonky Catholic schools are generally well-regarded on matters of curriculum. Private Catholic schools teach evolution, a fact which you probably were not aware of. Even if it’s the best non-sectarian school in the country that parents are sending their kids to, they can still fill their heads with religious nonsense in their home or church.
Vouchers would also reduce classroom sizes, giving public school teachers fewer students to teach (and there’s probably a lot of problems stemming from overloaded classrooms).
Bill’s objection was an emotional one (teachers will be fearful and not teach as well), not a logical one. What’s yours?
Ward:
No it’s not, because I included the averages as well. The answer to the $9,000 question was “it depends on the school.” That was the implication. There are plenty of private schools where $9K will buy you… well, nothing. Perhaps the best public schools are a far better deal for the dollar when compared to the best – or shall we say most expensive – private schools. Or perhaps not.
No, you’re off-target on this one, Ward. No hint intended, subtle or otherwise. I was simply reporting numbers. Parochial school tuition tends to be lower, because they often receive subsidies from the churches they represent, which sometimes manifests as a lower tuition cost for parishioners. Presumably, the spending per student is roughly the same as it is for sectarian schools that cost a bit more.
As for quality, again – who knows?
Ward:
Right, and THAT is closer to what I was getting at. How does tuition correlate with spending-per-student,and how does spending-per-student correlate with quality of education? Surely there is there some measure of student performance correlated with spending per student.
But is the “common knowledge” actually correct, on a spending-per-student basis? Public perception doesn’t count. Hey, I know private-school grads who couldn’t hack it at competitive colleges where public-school kids are thriving. Anecdotal, yes, but so are the components of that “common knowledge” in this case – no? That said, I admit I’m speaking from a position of ignorance on the topic, not having seen any studies that would answer this. Why? Because I haven’t looked. ;-)
(Shorter me: I’m frakkin’ lazy today! Well, not really – I’m trying to squeeze in some blog-commenting between builds and debugging… which leads me to raise more questions than I answer. Sorry!)
Bill Dauphin: Interesting. So it’s specifically the police power that you object to in the state, as opposed to all other forms of “community”? And yet… later in your posting, you mention the police power as one of the tiny handful of state functions you actually consider legitimate. [scratches head]
Yes and no. The police power is inherent in the definition of what a state is, and is what makes it different from other forms of community – because, as I’ve said, it has the power ultimately to force compliance.
In the end, all other state functions rest on the police power – because, by and large, they’re funded by taxes, which are coercively extracted from individuals and which you can be locked up for not paying.
The police power is, therefore, a necessary evil; we need it in order to protect the lives and private property rights of individuals. But the problems arise when it goes beyond that, and imposes coercive solutions when a voluntary solution would be possible.
Let’s say you live in a democratic country with a compulsory public education system (no homeschooling, no private schools). Now let’s say that the vast majority of people in said country happen to be devout creationists, and, in response to the will of the people, the elected government mandates that young-earth creationism be taught in all schools. No matter how much you speak, vote and campaign against creationism, you’re always going to be outvoted by the majority. In said society, whether you like it or not, you have to pay taxes for the support of the creationist schools, and send your children to those schools to learn creationism – and, if you refuse to do so, stating that it violates your personal convictions, the State can lock you up. Is that just? Would you be content to accept the will of the majority in that circumstance?
Far better to have an education system in which parents make their own choices about how their children are to be educated. Yes, some will make wrong and stupid choices, and screw up their kids’ lives – but it’s better than allowing a wrongheaded majority to impose their stupid choices on everyone’s kids, and to force, at gunpoint, everyone to pay for it. Hence why I’d scrap public education altogether, and just give every family a grant per capita to educate their children however they pleaes. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better than state coercion.
What you’re presenting as a failing of the state, I see as its primary justification… because I don’t believe, as you seem to, that humans can possibly live together without needing some mechanism (potentially extending to forcible deprivation of liberty) to mediate conflicts between competing rights. IMHO, the dissolution of nation-states would leave behind not a paradise of personal liberty, but instead a return to feudalism, if not worse.
I absolutely agree with you. I think you’ve misunderstood my argument (which is my own fault; I didn’t present it very well). I am emphatically not arguing that there should be no state, or that citizens should, in reality, be free to “opt out” from the state. And I would agree that, in a world of limited space and resources, a political and legal framework will always be needed to arbitrate between the rights and interests of different persons and to define and delineate property.
Rather, I was arguing that, precisely because we do need a monopolistic state and because people can’t, in practice, be free to opt out from its jurisdiction, its functions should be kept to the barest possible minimum. It should arbitrate between private rights and defend lives and private property; and these functions have to be carried out coercively. But, because its nature is inherently coercive, it should avoid – at all costs – extracting people’s money coercively to fund harebrained schemes based on legislators’ idea of the “public interest”.
LOL! You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re flirting with smug condescension, here, Ward. Anyway, to clear away any fog I may have inadvertently created here, please understand that I’m not making any, repeat any, points the depend or reflect on the religious orientation, or lack thereof, of any school or category of schools that come up in our discussion here. Ok? :-)
Vouchers? My primary objection is that taking money out of the system isn’t the best way to improve it. I don’t claim to have a very strong opinion (or corresponding argument) either way, though. Both sides have reasonable arguments for and against. I would, however, contend that taking the (say) $9000 out of the system hurts it more than taking one student out of the classroom improve the immediate classroom situation. That $9000 represents more than eminating one child would save – it also pays for infrastructure and maintenance costs that will not go down even if enrollment dips.
Furthermore, I’m with Bill on the idea that public education isn’t just for everyone, it’s for EVERYONE. Everyone, even those with no children, even those with children in public schools, benefits from living in a society with a literate, educated population. I consider it one of America’s missions to provide the best education possible for even those with the fewest resources. Taking money out of the system will widen a gap that is already wider than it should be.
Yeah, that’s rhetoric, but it’s where I’m at right now.
Re: Watchman (#662)
You and I find ourselves in vehement agreement with one another often enough that I must ask: are you a closet libertarian? ;)
Ah, but this is where it gets interesting. It is my contention that there is a point where this curve probably flattens and the exorbitant tuition costs of the most expensive schools start to look more like a child is participating in a social club as much as getting an education. I am not convinced that an infinite amount of dollars spent equals an infinite educational benefit, if you get my meaning.
I apologize for having misconstrued the meaning of this quote:
I took it to mean that you were hinting that sectarian schools are worse in curriculum by some measurable quantity. I can see how, by it, you meant that there are schools which could not be afforded with $9,000, but the proximity of the last statement to the one about sectarian vs. non-sectarian tuitions led me to conclude that both statements were related. The meaning of an open-ended question can be easily misconstrued.
Sigh. (Haste makes waste?)
FWIW: Edits to my #664:
– “I’m not making any, repeat any, points that depend or reflect …”
– “That $9000 represents more than what eliminating one child would save
Bobber,
“It is ironic: whereas economic Libertarians are fond of saying “there are winners and losers”,”
Hopefully the libertarians you are meeting aren’t make this weak a case. Usually every exchange is viewed as a “win-win” situation, not a “win-lose” situation. Presumably in a free society, people only exchange when they prefer the outcome to their prior state. It is probably the competition that is allowed to occur in a free society, that makes you (or they) think of “win-lose”.
I will need more time to think about Knockgoats posts before responding.
Another correction: “Everyone, even those with no children, even those with children in private schools
Sorry for the sloppiness.
Yup, understandable, nowhere more so than here, where religious institutions of all types are so often under the gun. My writing should have been more precise.
What evidence can you give that education doesn’t lift people out of poverty better than redistribution? – Ward S. Denker
Education is indeed an excellent way of lifting people out of poverty, but it requires redistribution, in the form of taxation, to fund it (whether you have a public system or vouchers). Educating children from poor backgrounds also requires more per student to get the same results, as they will enter school at lower levels of attainment and with poorer general health.
Add that $9,000 (on average) spent per student by the government to the $8,000 (on average) per student on tuition by their parents and that comes out to $17,000 – Ward S. Denker
I may have missed something here, but isn’t that $8,000 what parents who send their children to private schools spend on tuition fees? A large proportion of those who send their children to public schools couldn’t afford that; and I’d think those who are sending their children to private schools are actually spending a good deal more on their education in other ways, both in and out of school (laptops, books, art and sport equipment, outings).
Let’s say you live in a democratic country with a compulsory public education system (no homeschooling, no private schools). – Walton
Can you name one? Or is this another purely hypothetical exercise?
Hence why I’d scrap public education altogether, and just give every family a grant per capita to educate their children however they pleaes. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better than state coercion. – Walton
Er, where would the money come from? And if you don’t have any form of state coercion of parents, what would prevent feckless parents spending it on fags and booze? After all, if they are free to educate their children “however they please”, that must include teaching them to smoke and drink, and nothing else.
Re: Watchman (#664)
Not at all. My statement should be taken to mean that I was surprised to have learned that detail and presumed that many others in present company (atheists) are likely to be equally surprised. I realize that you’re probably giving me the benefit of the doubt by using the term “flirting” instead of a stronger word with less of a fuzzy meaning.
This is where I had expected the conversation to turn, that was why I tried to get you to say it aloud so that I could answer it fairly without guessing at your position.
By your logic, the best school districts would be ones in which more children are being born (or moved into) because the state’s contribution to their education goes up at a higher rate than the population. This is almost certainly not the case. Large classroom sizes increase disruptions by individual students and reduce the amount of personal interaction students have with their teachers. Teachers have been grousing about that problem for years.
I do agree on the subject of the necessity of education, but I disagree that vouchers would widen any gaps, and actually contend that it will narrow them. Children would be getting an education at the expense of the state either way. Some parents would not need to move out of an area to get their kid into a better school, leaving their tax contributions within the locality to contribute to growth. Adults without children aren’t taxed any less because parents with children can obtain vouchers to give their children a private education. If public schools are afraid of losing money more than providing education then this would surely be an incentive improve the education per dollar spent, wouldn’t it? If they can’t adapt to pursue the proper goal (better education) then it’s probably because they’re focusing on an improper goal (more money) and should fail and be replaced by a school with an appropriate orientation.
You’re undervaluing competition — public schools which are failing will have to work on improvement or face an exodus of students to private education. They’ll certainly want to try and emulate better private schools in the area to retain students, which can only improve quality. Parents are not going to be likely to send their children to a local private school which is doing worse than the public school is, so the actual education the children receive won’t be going down as a result. The only thing outcome I can foresee is improvement.
Re: KnockGoats(#670)
I’m not sure how this opinion is arrived at. With programs like SCHIP, don’t all children from these backgrounds have adequate access to medical care regardless of their parents’ ability to pay? By “poorer general health” do you actually mean poorer nutrition? This seems to be reasonably well handled by a lot of charity work — food drives, soup kitchens, food stamps, etc. I hope you’re not implying that poor children are dumber than those from higher-income backgrounds and are harder to teach because of it. I’d disagree with you wholeheartedly if that is what you’re saying. I’ll presume that you’re not.
You have. If they had a $9,000 voucher they’d be able to use it to go to an $8,000 private school.
This may be the case for some public school students as well, what’s the relevance? A laptop isn’t going to teach a child how to factor a polynomial equation, but it might increase the child’s reliance on the computer for answers rather than actually learn what they’re in school to learn.
Most of my mathematics instructors insisted upon learning long-hand, which any math teacher with a chalkboard and some textbooks can teach. Yes, it’s good that schools invest in technology learning, and it’s good that parents invest in it privately for their children, but that is not a substitute for understanding.
I have noticed that your demeanor toward me seems to have changed in recent posts, a more muted tone, if you will. I hope this reflects a commitment to civil discourse. The back-and-forth slag fest was getting pretty tiresome actually, so I hope it’s over. Peace?
Ward (@657 & 661):
To your last point first…
No, not every argument you disagree with is non-logical, nor is every argument about the real-world effects of emotion therefore an “emotional argument.” What my argument actually does is question the validity of your assertion that…
Fear is undoubtedly an incentive… but whether it’s the right kind of incentive in any given situation depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. Will fear make anyone smarter? Or, by itself, convey on anyone training or skills they don’t already possess? Will a teacher’s fear make her students show up better nourished in the morning? Or send them home to unbroken households after school?
What fear clearly can do is shake people up, and make them work harder… which makes it an arguably effective solution when the problem is complacency and/or laziness. Unfortunately for your argument, there’s been no showing that laziness and complacency are “what’s wrong with our schools.” Mind you, I’m sure there are some individually lazy and complacent teachers… just as there are lazy and complacent folks in any job or profession… but I see no reason to suspect that’s the problem, at the system level, with public education.
I observe that the default conservative explanation for most social problems is that somebody somewhere is just not working hard enough… but I have not observed that to actually be the case for many of those problems.
You say that my argument…
No doubt there are poor teachers; in what profession are there no poor performers? But where is your evidence that there are notably large percentages of poor teachers (compared to other professions)? Or that poor performance by individual teachers is the root cause of bad schools? (Note that I’m stipulating our schools “need fixin'” for the sake of argument; I actually think the failings of public education are usually overstated.) Or that poor teachers are failing in ways that are remediable by fear (i.e., that they’re lazy and complacent, rather than poorly trained or not well matched to their profession)? You presume that a simple crack of the whip is all we need, but you haven’t established any of the necessary predicate for that argument.
Now, the part of my argument that is about emotion (once again, about emotion ≠ emotional) is this: Teaching is, at least in part, a communication art. As such, a teacher’s emotional state is directly related to performance. Going in front of a roomful of kids thinking “I’ve got to nail this lesson or I might get fired” is roughly like a batter going to the plate thinking “I’ve got to get a hit right now or I might get sent to the minors”… which is to say, unproductive in almost every case.
You complain that…
…but you shouldn’t expect to hear any such defense from me. Indeed, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard me excoriate NCLB in other threads. NCLB (which, BTW, was an entirely right-wing Republican program as implemented, regardless of how many Dems got tricked into voting for it) is very much of a piece with the vouchers/competition argument, in that it’s designed to punish poor performance, but not to correct it in any positive, affirmative way. The right-wing presumption is always that punishment is correction… but I have not observed it to be that simple in the real world of actual practice.
Now to the math:
You say that you’re…
…and I can assure you they’re not. AFAIK vanishingly few private schools come close to covering their operating budgets through tuition alone (certainly the private school I taught at didn’t, nor did the several I interviewed with). Church parochial schools are subsidized by their sponsoring churches (from both the institutional church and the local parishes/congregations to which schools are attached), and in many cases their teacher labor costs are subsidized by religious orders who supply nuns, brothers, and priests as faculty (yes, I know parochial schools have lay teachers; I’m talking about average faculty costs). Non-parochial schools (i.e., those not connected to local congregations, whether church-sponsored or secular) rely on direct fundraising, private philanthropy, and income-producing endowments to supplement tuition, and charge fees for many sports and extracurriculars that public schools usually provide for “free.”
So, if the average tuition at private schools is $8000/student/year, the average cost is almost certainly higher than the $9000/student/year for public schools. But even when you compare cost to cost, you’re not getting apples to apples: First, public schools must by law provide (and thus pay for) programs and accommodations, and comply with state and federal mandates, that private schools need not worry about. Further, many many private schools are elementary only or K-8, with their students going on to public middle schools and/or high schools… which means that the national-average private school student is almost certainly significantly younger (and thus cheaper to serve) than the national-average public school student. Finally, private schools can expel (or deny admission to) troubled students that public schools must accommodate… which means that their costs for disciplinary programs, student assistance programs, and student safety/security are lower.
Taking all these factors into account and fairly comparing cost to cost, I’m quite sure public schooling is more that competitive with private education.
Finally…
Reduced classroom sizes would certainly improve even already-good schools… but vouchers would not accomplish smaller class sizes: Virtually all public schools receive state and federal funding based on student headcount, and most voucher proposals are funded by diverting funds for vouchers from the existing education budget… so an exodus of voucher students to private schools would have the effect of reducing funding (which is to say, teacher headcount) proportionally. Depending on the exact number and mix of departing students, some classes might get a bit smaller and some might get a bit larger, but in any case, vouchers (as usually proposed) would not improve overall student-teacher ratios meaningfully.
However, vouchers would almost certainly siphon off the brightest students (because that’s who the private schools would actually accept), and those from the families most supportive of education… leaving behind classrooms no smaller on average, but measurably more difficult to teach.
BTW, I think it’s fascinating that you admit “there’s probably a lot of problems stemming from overloaded classrooms.” Does it not occur to you that classroom overcrowding is directly related to funding levels? I hate to tell you, but admitting that classroom overcrowding is a problem directly contradicts your previous contention (and that of most opponents of public education) that “throwing money” at schools won’t fix anything.
.
Not only do I get your meaning, but I am quite sure you are right. It’s not linear… it can’t be.
Am I a closet Libertarian? No, I don’t think so. I did vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate once, though. Joe Clark, I think it was… I was young, idealistic, and disenchanted with the two-party system. I was also drinking regularly, and taking hallucinogens at least twice a month. ;-)
Watchman:
Cool… somebody remembers something I said in other threads!
This is the essential missing part of the argument, of course: Public education isn’t simply a service provided to individual “customers” (i.e., students and their families); rather, it’s part of the social infrastructure of democracy. Which is why we shouldn’t privatize it even if privitization would improve it… which it wouldn’t.
Ward:
You’re kidding, right? First, SCHIP is a bandaid on a chainsaw wound. Second, you do know that it’s only just now passed, after having been delayed for 2 years by W’s veto, right?
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
I think he’s trying to say that kids who don’t have enough to eat, and who don’t have appropriate clothes, and who never see a dentist or doctor, and whose parents (if any) don’t have jobs (or have so many jobs they’re never home), and who don’t have books or computers at home, and who live in fear of crime and gangs, and who may have seen family members or friends killed before their eyes… are harder to teach than happy, healthy middle-class kids from comfortable homes with college-educated parents.
Somehow that seems confusing or debatable to you? Oy!
Re: Bill Dauphin (#673)
I am not a conservative. I observe that you’re falling back on a pre-conceived notion that Libertarians are all far-rightists or just “Republicans who want to smoke pot.” On many positions I am a centrist, and some (like education) many Republicans would surely call me a leftist. I don’t harbor any more love for Republicans than I do Democrats. Authoritarians of all stripes rankle me.
I, too, think many of the “failings” of public education are overstated, but there are things I think education in general can do to break poverty cycles which arise from a lack of understanding how the world works.
That said, if teachers are poorly trained or not matched well to their profession, the system should be ejecting them — for their own good as well as the children they’re not providing adequate education to. Fear isn’t the only motivator for competition, you know? A drive to excel can be spurred on by competition too. If only high school academics were as competitive as high school sports, we’d probably not have very many failings at all.
I know my parents never sat me down to explain a checkbook or a credit card, but they did teach me how to save. Not one of my schools taught anything of the sort. The closest I got was an economics class which was regarded as “difficult” by most of the students, was focused on macroeconomics (hardly useful), and an elective (very few students took the class).
Parents who don’t understand these things aren’t going to be able to impart the knowledge to their children. I do think education should. If you don’t ever talk to your kids about contraceptives they’ve got an increased risk of teenage pregnancy. If you don’t talk to them about handling money, they’ve got an increased risk of making very bad decisions with money. If you don’t teach them about either, the combined risks can lead to dependence on welfare.
Re: Bill Dauphin (#675)
Why is it that you have some notion that I’m a Republican or that I supported anything Bush did? I understand that it’s hard for you to envision any other political views outside of the two-party system we have in America, but please give it a try.
I didn’t vote for him either time, and I didn’t vote for your guy either.
And I feel compelled to point out that you’re wrong on that anyway. Bush vetoed the expansion of the program, not the program itself, which has been on the books and functioning for years.
I’d like to know by which claims you’ll justify claiming it’s a “band-aid on a chainsaw wound,” though.
There are books and computers at every public library I’ve ever been to. The violence issue isn’t one that can be laid at my doorstep either. If you recall, I am all for the repeal of the prohibition of drugs. That’s what is driving the violence and gangs. The same thing happened with alcohol prohibition, but apparently our country never learns. You can blame Republicans (mostly) and Democrats (who also share some blame) for continually upholding those idiotic laws.
I am not sure how “appropriate” clothing enables learning, though and I think the nutrition problem is adequately provided for by society. What makes you think that it isn’t?
Ward:
As I explained to Walton, in practice Libertarians end up “in bed” with right-wingers in American politics, even though their underlying philosophies are often incompatible. Regardless of what you call yourself, the position I identified in the lines you quote is one broadly held by conservatives.
I see this conversation as being about public policy positions; it’s not really all about you.
I don’t know anyone who would call being pro-vouchers a leftist position. Even if you can rationalize your own combination of positions, vouchers are indelibly identified with right-wing politics.
I’d reply to the rest, but honestly, I can’t figure out what your ramblings are getting at. Checkbooks? Contraceptives? Were we talking about any of that?
Anyway, I’ve got to unglue my fingers from this keyboard for a while.
That’ll teach you! Next time, use contraceptives before trying to balance your checkbook!
Re: Bill Dauphin (#678)
You may want to reel in your broad aspersions about Libertarians when you’re directly addressing individuals. It’s unlikely any of us are going to take it that you aren’t meaning us, specifically.
There are left libertarians too.
Only if you are thinking like a partisan. It’s a solution.
*Sigh* I am saying that education does not cover all of the bases it should. There’s a lot to be said for teaching children practical things which can keep them from falling into poverty to begin with and their parents may not be teaching those things.
Ward:
If anything proves you have no clue what goes on in our schools, this does.
BTW, you really think public libraries and food stamps have cured all the ills facing poor children? I just can’t imagine what to say to that. Nobody’s trying to lay the difficulties that come with povery at your personal doorstep, but it sure would help the conversation if you’d admit they exist.
Re: Bill Dauphin (#681)
I’m a product of the public school system, what the hell are you talking about. Are you trying to imply that schools are filled with slutty girls in trampy outfits which are distracting to the boys? Where are those schools?
See, this is the kind of stuff that just pisses me off. Where did mentioning alternates to owning private books and computers turn into “cured all the ills facing poor children?” The only one who said that was you.
And “but it sure would help the conversation if you’d admit they exist” is just you spouting nonsense in support your own confirmation bias about libertarians. Of course they exist, that’s why we’re talking about them! Did the topic shift to unicorns or something and I just missed it?
Ward:
Take a pill, dude! “Slutty girls”? Why on Earth did you go straight to sex with this?
By “appropriate clothes” I only meant clean, well fitting clothes in relatively decent condition — you know, the sort of clothes many poor kids don’t have. I had no idea you were reading something prurient into it.
The point is — and this is why I (gently!) mocked your suggestion that clothing had nothing to do with learning — when kids show up at school in dirty or ill-fitting hand-me-downs, they’re likely to be teased by the other kids, which is likely to lead to fighting, which disrupts the learning environment. Similarly, wealthier kids will mock poorer kids if their clothes are unstylish. It’s no accident that one of the most commonly sought “quick-fix” reforms for troubled schools is mandatory school uniforms; they take clothing disparity out of the equation.
Mind you, this wasn’t an issue in the public school I attended, but then that was in a relatively homogenous middle-class suburb. Inner-city schools are different.
As for the rest, go back and re-read your own words to KnockGoats (@672) and to me (@677). It’s pretty clear you were broadly dismissing the idea that poverty has anything to do with student performance, suggesting that charity, soup kitchens, SCHIP, public libraries, etc., had entirely addressed any material problems that might prevent poor kids from doing well in school. If that’s not what you intended to be saying, you’ve expressed yourself badly; if that is what you meant, I think you’re terribly naive. Either way, if my really very gentle snark about it was sufficient to give you the vapors, you definitely need to get a grip on yourself.
Finally, regarding…
…and…
…and…
…I have no reason to dispute your self-identification as a libertarian leftist, but whatever you call yourself, the ideas you’ve been espousing in this thread — that competitive pressure always improves performance, that “throwing money” at schools won’t fix them, that encouraging families to opt out of public schools through vouchers would be a good thing, and that poverty has no significant role in determining educational outcomes — are mainstream right-wing ideas. I have not been at all interested in arguing with you for the sake of arguing; I have been interested in arguing with those ideas, as they are broadly in play in our political discourse (i.e., not necessarily your personal, idiosyncratic versions of them), because if they were to be implemented, I judge that they would harm my country.
Or in other words…
It.Really.Isn’t.About.You!!
My general take is that individuals should have as much social and economic freedom allowable whilst supporting government intervention