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Thatcher's Defense of the Free Market
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13-12-2008 3:05pm#1
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silverharp wrote: »I wont argue this but in a previous post you seemed unhappy debt based money system and the use of resources in society. I cant see how any of the above will sort out these fudamental flaws in society
You are correct that I am unhappy with the injustice of the situation. The liberal can be accused of not fulfilling his obligation to his ideal liberal principles, so in truth, there is a degree of inconsistency in the liberal approach. The liberal accepts society as a collection of individuals and therefore does not pass judgement on the selfishness of some, but harnesses the productive power of the able for the betterment of all society with a sort of compromise. In this way I feel the liberal is more pragmatic than may political idealisers because even if liberal ideal leans to a universalising principle, she recognises that more good can be achieved by the practical implementation of her principles. I don't believe any system can take the responsibility of justice from us, we must be ever vigilant of the truth that justice can only be pursed by the people, for the people.
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Please forgive my poor spelling..Offalycool wrote: »..justice can only be pursued by the people, for the people.0
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The Corinthian wrote: »The politics of the arms race during the Cold War were not the same thing as those of the Bush administration post-9/11. They concentrated on a policy of containment of the Soviet threat from a multinational perspective. Neoconservationism firstly believed in confrontation rather than containment (Iraq was and Iran is 'contained' after all) and secondly rejected the need for a multinational approach.
Britain's support of the US was in this context; no one advocated armed conflict with the Soviets - after all, the whole point of the arms race was as a deterrent, where neither side would have a military advantage that would tempt them to believe that conflict could be won.
I agree the situations were different because the "enemies" were different. but at the same time if you take the litany of US interfence in South America, it was still a case of stand in the way of perceived US "interests" and we will come after you. Is there much of a differnce in fact between invading Iraq and instigating coups in South America?Offalycool wrote: »You are correct that I am unhappy with the injustice of the situation. The liberal can be accused of not fulfilling his obligation to his ideal liberal principles, so in truth, there is a degree of inconsistency in the liberal approach. The liberal accepts society as a collection of individuals and therefore does not pass judgement on the selfishness of some, but harnesses the productive power of the able for the betterment of all society with a sort of compromise. In this way I feel the liberal is more pragmatic than may political idealisers because even if liberal ideal leans to a universalising principle, she recognises that more good can be achieved by the practical implementation of her principles. I don't believe any system can take the responsibility of justice from us, we must be ever vigilant of the truth that justice can only be pursed by the people, for the people.
you wont agree with the sentiment of this article excerpt:D, but it seems to come down to promise and delivery. you will probably retort that the same applies to Libertarianism:pac:
The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique
[First published in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, 1967.]
The cruelest myth fostered by the liberals is that the Great Society functions as a great boon and benefit to the poor; in reality, when we cut through the frothy appearances to the cold reality underneath, the poor are the major victims of the welfare state. The poor are the ones to be conscripted to fight and die at literally slave wages in the Great Society's imperial wars. The poor are the ones to lose their homes to the bulldozer of urban renewal, that bulldozer that operates for the benefit of real-estate and construction interests to pulverize available low-cost housing.[10]
All this, of course, in the name of "clearing the slums" and helping the aesthetics of housing. The poor are the welfare clientele whose homes are unconstitutionally but regularly invaded by government agents to ferret out sin in the middle of the night. The poor (e.g., Negroes in the South) are the ones disemployed by rising minimum-wage floors, put in for the benefit of employers and unions in higher-wage areas (e.g., the North) to prevent industry from moving to the low-wage areas. The poor are cruelly victimized by an income tax that Left and Right alike misconstrue as an egalitarian program to soak the rich; actually, various tricks and exemptions insure that it is the poor and the middle classes who are hit the hardest.[11]
The poor are victimized too by a welfare state of which the cardinal macroeconomic tenet is perpetual if controlled inflation. The inflation and the heavy government spending favor the businesses of the military-industrial complex, while the poor and the retired, those on fixed pensions or Social Security, are hit the hardest. (Liberals have often scoffed at the anti-inflationists' stress on the "widows and orphans" as major victims of inflation, but these remain major victims nevertheless.) And the burgeoning of compulsory mass public education forces millions of unwilling youth off the labor market for many years, and into schools that serve more as houses of detention than as genuine centers of education.[12]
Farm programs that supposedly aid poor farmers actually serve the large wealthy farmers at the expense of sharecropper and consumer alike; and commissions that regulate industry serve to cartellize it. The mass of workers is forced by governmental measures into trade unions that tame and integrate the labor force into the toils of the accelerating corporate state, there to be subjected to arbitrary wage "guidelines" and ultimate compulsory arbitration.
The role of the liberal intellectual and of liberal rhetoric is even more stark in foreign economic policy. Ostensibly designed to "help the underdeveloped countries," foreign aid has served as a gigantic subsidy by the American taxpayer of American export firms, a similar subsidy to American foreign investment through guarantees and subsidized government loans, an engine of inflation for the recipient country, and a form of massive subsidy to the friends and clients of US imperialism in the recipient country.
The symbiosis between liberal intellectuals and despotic statism at home and abroad is, furthermore, no accident; for at the heart of the welfarist mentality is an enormous desire to "do good to" the mass of other people, and since people don't usually wish to be done good to — since they have their own ideas of what they wish to do — the liberal welfarist inevitably ends by reaching for the big stick with which to push the ungrateful masses around. Hence, the liberal ethos itself provides a powerful stimulant for the intellectuals to seek state power and ally themselves with the other rulers of the corporate state. The liberals thus become what Harry EImer Barnes has aptly termed "totalitarian liberals." Or, as Isabel Paterson put it a generation ago:
The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people … positively do not want to be "done good" by the humanitarian…. Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.[13]
The rhetorical role of welfarism in pushing people around may be seen clearly in the Vietnam War, where American liberal planning for alleged Vietnamese welfare has been particularly prominent, e.g., in the plans and actions of Wolf Ladejinsky, Joseph Buttinger, and the Michigan State group. And the result has been very much of an American-operated "guillotine" for the Vietnamese people, North and South.[14]
And even Fortune magazine invokes the spirit of humanitarian "idealism" as the justification for the United States' falling "heir to the onerous task of policing these shattered colonies" of Western Europe, and exerting its might all over the world. The will to make this exertion to the uttermost, especially in Vietnam and perhaps China, constitutes for Fortune, "the unending test of American idealism."[15] This liberal-welfarist syndrome may also be seen in the very different area of civil rights, in the terribly pained indignation of white liberals at the recent determination of Negroes to take the lead in helping themselves, rather than to keep deferring to the Lords and Ladies Bountiful of white liberalism.
In sum, the most important fact about the Great Society under which we live is the enormous disparity between rhetoric and content. In rhetoric, America is the land of the free and the generous, enjoying the fused blessings of a free market tempered by and joined to accelerating social welfare, bountifully distributing its unstinting largesse to the less fortunate in the world. In actual practice, the free economy is virtually gone, replaced by an imperial corporate-state Leviathan that organizes, commands, exploits the rest of society and, indeed, the rest of the world, for its own power and pelf. We have experienced, as Garet Garrett keenly pointed out over a decade ago, a "revolution within the form."[16] The old limited republic has been replaced by empire, within and without our borders.A belief in gender identity involves a level of faith as there is nothing tangible to prove its existence which, as something divorced from the physical body, is similar to the idea of a soul. - Colette Colfer
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