a message to the leftists

"In the post 1945 era, specifically from the late 1970s, liberalism has been anything but dead. Some have had the temerity to call this a "New Enlightenment". Like the 19th century variant, this modern form of classical liberalism embodies a number of diverse vies. Notable among these are F.A Hayek, the chicago school of economics, whose most avid popularizer is Milton Friedman and a number of individual writers and philosophers like Ayn Rand and Rober Nozick"

Asshat?

conservatives are weird. noodle, wasn't maggie a big nozick fan?

http://badelements.net/locke.jpg

"Don't tell me what I can and can't do, leftists! Why not go out and kill a boar yourselves?!?"

let's say that only 3 people demanded it, they did everything possible, and it DID linger. so please deliver everything possible to fix the problem. i suggest some sort of progressive taxation system.

But if you agree there's a problem with poverty (and I assume you do because you called it that) then isn't that a pretty fucking stupid thing to say, jackass? "Stop teling people what to do. This is what you need to do..... " fuck.

I think the Welfare State model we've got in the UK is problematic too, but for different reasons than John Wayne at the top of the thread there, or Nozick. I get the feeling that there's a kind of tolerance of wasted potential built into the system we've got: 'left-wing' politics have to go beyond trad top-down political structures, because high taxation and a large welfare state have not delivered 'socialism' is very OTM I think.

I would sincerely hope there's irony attached to that.

ps. "Liberal" economies require poor people - How else are you going to drive the cost of labour down? So it sounds like you're suggesting a solution to a problem that you (not I) really don't want solved.

pps Precisely what would you and your neo-con friends deliver to solve the problem of poverty. The usual solutions suggested involve giving already rich people tax breaks...

Hmm yeah I agree but I think there's two senses in which we might talk about the "welfare state": one in the sense you mean, a dumping of money into health and education on the basis that the electorate want it, and one in the sense of an ideologically motivated project for the social "correction" of class stratification caused by market forces (that these two are distinct is demonstrated by your gordon brown example). Australia is a good example of how, while the welfare state as an overall structure is still going strong, the political particularity of its current functioning serves to diminish or even undermine considerably any sense of it being a socio-economic corrective:
e.g.
- more money going into education than ever before, but a lot of that is due to increased funding for private schools ("public schools" in the UK); in real terms the funding of university by Govt has dropped
- health spending massively huge due to new technologies and new drugs, but these technologies/drugs are only available within a reasonable timespan to people with private health insurance, who also receive a large tax rebate for their private health membership out of the Health budget.
- unemployment/disability benefits (i.e. the two areas of Welfare which only benefit people on the bottom rung) progressively cut in terms of both size of payments and tightness of access.

In Australia, the Welfare State structure is effectively maintained as a vote-buying manoeuvre: both sides promise all sorts of very specific benefits attracting the votes of special interest sectors of the population (who then form voting blocs), especially those who make up a proponderance of voters in marginal seats. e.g. As our population ages rapidly, funding for aged care is an increasingly central issue; historically it has been chronically underfunded due to the lack of votes in it (old folks typically being rusted-on voters for one side or the other).

Now what do you suppose would happen next, kingofjason?

You know, maybe I would have faith enough in government to shy away from anarchism if the right didn't keep fucking up every opportunity for the State to prove itself as a useful, helpful entity.

The problem, in America at least, is we now have at least one and maybe two generations who have grown up immersed in an ideology that asserts this Randian individualism and treats all social responsibility as some unwarranted intrusion on personal sovereignty. Producing idiots like the one who started this thread.

xpost: Yeah, that's the other thing, as nabisco notes, we've been through all of this. That's what I always say to the hard-core anti-statists: OK, we abolish government tomorrow. How long until someone decides it might be a good idea to put up stop signs at intersections?

I hate these arguments not because of the obvious boneheadedness but because they're so limited and disconnected from actual-world experience

you could've stopped there. otm! otm!

No, of course the Nation State is no end point, any more than feudalism was an end point. But I think some form of social contract goes back to basic tribal code. Not that you can't impose a social structure on people by force, you obviously can, but even that has its limits. A tribe that fails to provide some degree of security for its members -- food, protection from outside threats, etc. -- is going to erode or implode faster than one that does those things better. The trade-off between individual and collective needs starts as soon as you have two people living in proximity to each other and agreeing not to kill each other.

I agree about arguments disconnected from real-world experience too, but then you've got the problem that there's not a lot of evidence for societies that've developed through the Social Contract/community of interest model. I guess the US would be the closest to that kind of experience but even then - forgive me if my knowledge of American history is inadequate - the Federal government wasn't a completely freely entered association, was it? I mean there were vested interests from the start, landowners/slaveowners versus industrialists, the strongarm tactics used to compel Rhode Island into the Union, stuff like that? I'm sure there are a lot of boneheads parroting "down with big gov'mint" without knowing what they mean but it also seems to me that some of those tensions have existed on a more considered level since the founding of the Union.

"Okay kids, that's enough Dickens for one day. Let's get on with our lesson, right Mr. Hat?"

I don't disagree with much of what you say, but social responsibility is a difficult concept. Responsibility is an individual concept, so social responsibility calls upon individuals to be conscious of society and its weaknesses. But social responsibility has come to mean a government's "responsibility" to its people. Responsibility is defined by individuals, so what may be responsibility to one is not to another. I would argue that the state's responsibility is to protect the individual and his rights.

2) dumbest thing Americans have ever done to government is to begin viewing it as an antagonistic element in society / opposing source of power; government is us, government is our primary tool for collective action. the conservative insistence on minimizing government as a way of empowering individuals is in some senses a trick that actually minimizes the power of most citizens; they are trying to convince you that government is hopeless and does nothing but make your life difficult, trying to turn you against the main opportunity you (collectively) have to exert significant control over your own country. better still for them, this shifts the terms of debate from what can be done to make this tool not-hopeless and into the realm of whether we need it at all -- and even better again for them is a national myth of rugged individualism that convinces everyone that of course they can accomplish everything without collective action at all. (nevermind that their successful conversative models have spent decades fulminating against someone else's control of everything, and urging some sort of -- oops -- collective action that they, despite being overrepresented in business, government, and practically everywhere else, are too oppressed to manage.)

Yeah, obviously. Although China is dealing with a massive corruption and rural insurrection problem right now, and whether they'll be able to stay enough ahead of the curve and make some sort of soft landing into a somewhat more accountable, less exploitative authoritarianism is an open question. (North Korea would be a more troubling example, but nothing about it suggests longterm viability.) And sure, all this is related to but not directly dependent on our current ideas of liberty, human rights, etc. Those are also theoretical constructs, and they also have to contend with complications and contradictions in how societies self-organize. But I'd argue that there is some evidence that -- moral considerations aside -- liberal societies (allowing for a broad range within the definition of "liberal") function better than illiberal ones in terms of balancing individual and collective interests. And that balance is what people like kingjason seem utterly oblivious to.

I would argue that the state's responsibility is to protect the individual and his rights.

Sure. But of course, in order to have a state to protect your rights, you necessarily surrender a certain amount of sovereignty. You agree to obey laws, most obviously.

and nabisco once again otm.

Until then, who the hell gives a shit about poverty.

Hey, I should try the same line on the checkout clerk next time I go to the supermarket, since I'm probably in a higher tax bracket than her, "who are you to demand my money?"

what kind of moron wrote this?

If the problem lingers, I, and the other believers in a liberal economy, will deliver everything possible to fix the problem of poverty.

I guess the question is, why would you and the other fucktards believers in a liberal economy not already be pulling your weight?

We may even accept a welfare state.

Gee, thanks. The tough leftist kids are still going to kick your ass and hang you up in a locker though. Thanks for playing!

The problem, in America at least, is we now have at least one and maybe two generations who have grown up immersed in an ideology that asserts this Randian individualism and treats all social responsibility as some unwarranted intrusion on personal sovereignty. Producing idiots like the one who started this thread.

"Randian individualism" lends this line of argument - and Ayn Rand - the semblance of a credibility that neither have come close to earnign. I think from now on I'm just going to substitute the phrase "shit-on-toast."

The brutally obvious irony is that the personal sovereignty these shit-on-toasters hold so dear is only possible in a post-Enlightenment liberal society, where they can count on the middle classes to go about the business of holding things together while they just go on hoovering snowcaps out of hookers' navels on their yachts off Nantucket.

Actually, I take that back. Those guys know where their bread is buttered and whose expense they're having their laughs at. I respect the cynical self-interest of the ruling classes far more than the absurd rationalia of the middle-class dupes who hang by the side of the table hoping for a crust and fancy themselves philosophes for doing it.

Rand Corporation >>>>>>>>> Ayn Rand

This is at the root of the horrible paradox in Russia right now. It's all well and good to say that you're going to convert from state ownership to private ownership, but if this were ever to be done by distributing state assets proportionately, it would create entropy by eliminating the concentration of wealth/control/decision-making authority that industrial economies require. Instead the state allowed arbitrary consolidation of wealth in the hands of oligarchs, whose wealth was understood to be catalytic, but who were expected to stay out of politics. Fat chance. Wealth=power.

oh shit, low blow.

but i wz arguing agin toynbee and the fabian tradition, which is basically still there in new labour: basically, govt as something that guides the operation of 'the rest of society', 'redistributing' stuff.

this doesn't mean they can't achieve anything; on the other hand, ideas like (dread phrase) industrial democracy, or more broadly the diffusion of power throughout society (and not in the hands of a tiny elite of experts, as per the fabians) are alien to them.

i'm not all that sure about the economics of their stuff either -- but again they view economics not as something underlying all social activity, but as a sort of discrete 'sphere'.

i think it would be fair to say that elitism still characterises fabianism, but not in any way that could still be fairly called anti-democratic, or philistine. they are also resolutely international and socialist - aren't they? which would make it hard to be imperialist in the sense that (many of, not all) the coefficients advocated