Politics

[Polish Leppy 22]

.

Stop putting words in my mouth. If you really believe everything you wrote, you need to balance out the MSNBC watching with some wall street journal and financial times.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Everything's great. Hope and change. Wheeeeeeeeee

US economy shrank at steep 2.9 percent rate in Q1 - Business news - Boston.com

From your own shared article:

Though such a sharp decline would typically stoke fears of another recession, analysts see it as a short-lived result of winter storms that shut factories, disrupted shipping and kept Americans away from shopping malls and auto dealerships. They say the economy is rebounding in the April-June quarter. Many expect growth to reach a robust annual rate of at least 3.5 percent this quarter.

Most analysts also foresee the economy expanding at a healthy rate of around 3 percent in the second half of this year.

Obama can't control the weather. And the economic forecast is actually quite good.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Stop putting words in my mouth. If you really believe everything you wrote, you need to balance out the MSNBC watching with some wall street journal and financial times.

I'm not sure how I put words into your mouth. I tried to respond to your direct quotes with counterpoints (bolded).

 

[Ndaccountant]

From your own shared article:



Obama can't control the weather. And the economic forecast is actually quite good.

I would say better, but not "quite good".

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I would say better, but not "quite good".

As stated in his article, it's expected to expand at a "healthy" rate. Maybe "quite good" is jumping the gun. But it's getting there.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Atlantic's Crispin Sartwell recently published a compelling article titled "The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus:"

Americans are more divided than ever by political ideology, as a recent Pew Research Center study makes clear. About a third of people on each side say of the other that its proponents "are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being." They're both right about that.

My prescription isn't civility or dialogue, which though admirable are boring and in this case evidently impossible. Rather, my approach is “philosophical”: to try to confront both sides with the fact that their positions are incoherent. The left-right divide might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different political ideas.

The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis—progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, communist to fascist, socialist to capitalist, or Democrat to Republican—is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. And any position anywhere along it is infested by contradictions.

Transcending partisanship is going to require what seems beyond the capacities of either side: thinking about the left-right spectrum rather than from it. The terminology arose in revolutionary France in 1789, where it referred to the seating of royalists and anti-royalists in the Assembly. It is plausible to think of the concept (if not the vocabulary) as emerging in pre-revolutionary figures such as Rousseau and Burke. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of “left” and “right” used in the political sense in English is in Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution in 1837, but the idea only crystallized fully with the emergence and under the aegis of Marxism, in the middle of the 19th century. It was not fully current in English-speaking countries until early in the 20th.

Before that, and outside of the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. To take one example, the radical and egalitarian reform movements of the early and mid-19th century in the U.S.—such as abolitionism, feminism, and pacifism—were by and large evangelical Christian, and were radically individualist and anti-statist. I have in mind such figures as Lucretia Mott, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison, who articulated perfectly coherent positions that cannot possibly be characterized as on the left or the right.

The most common way that the left-right spectrum is conceived—and the basic way it is characterized in the Pew survey—is as state against capital.* Democrats insist that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might pit Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand in a cage match of state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let's call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing.

I'd say it's obvious that PHC is true, and that everyone knows it to be true. A white-supremacist polity in which black people were wealthier than white people, for example, would be extremely surprising. It would be no less surprising if regulatory capture were not pervasive. You could keep trying to institute reforms to pull economic and political power apart, but this would be counter-productive, because when you beef up the state to control capital, you only succeed in making capital more monolithic, more concentrated, and more able to exercise a wider variety of powers. (Consider the relation of Goldman Sachs to the Treasury Department over the last several decades, or Halliburton and the Pentagon, or various communications and Internet concerns and NSA. The distinction between "public" and "private" is rather abstract in relation to the on-the-ground overlap.)

State and economy are merged in different permutations in Iran and Egypt, in China and Russia, in the U.S. and the E.U. We might say that the current Chinese state combines the most salient features of Maoism and corporate capitalism: It's all devoted to generating maximum cash and putting it on a barge—destination: the very top of the hierarchy. And yet it also attempts to bestride the earth with the iron boot of collectivist totalitarianism. Now, that appears incoherent if you are trapped in the spectrum. A conventional political scientist associates capitalism with John Locke and Adam Smith and democracy (“liberalism,” I suppose). On the other hand, since socialists reject free enterprise and propose grand redistributionist schemes, they require a big, powerful state. For a long time, people thought of the Chinese system as combining opposed or contradictory elements.

I'd say no one is so sure anymore. We should think instead of the Chinese state as a provisional culmination of both state socialism and corporate capitalism. In ideology, they are opposites. But we don't live in the textbook on political ideologies. We live in a world where corporate capitalism has always completely depended on state power, and the basic practical thrust of left statism has always been annexation of the economy. The Soviet Union was a variety of monopoly capitalism, and the modern American state is a variety of state socialism.

Our mistake was that we believed the account these ideologies gave of themselves. But that scrim was always thin. There are capitalist theoreticians who have fantasized and recommended stateless free markets, and there are communist theorists who have fantasized no markets at all, always glossing over the fact that what they actually meant was the permeation of every aspect of life, including markets, by the state. These were fantasies. What these people wanted appeared to be entirely opposed, but they were each devoted to their own sort of hierarchy, and hierarchies tend to coincide

The familiar notion is that when you reduce the power of the state, you increase the power of capital, and vice versa. To put it mildly, this claim is non-empirical. The rise of capital, its consolidation into a few hands, and the enduring structures of monopoly or gigantism to which it gives rise are inconceivable without the state.

Michel Beaud, in his History of Capitalism, is one of many historians who have found the state connection criterial: "What one in any case should remember is the importance of the state in the birth, the first beginnings of capitalism .... The primary transforming factor is the state. National unity, currency standardization, juridical coherence, military strength and the beginnings of a national economy: all these were created and developed by the state, or with the state as organizing principle."

Capital accumulations on the vast scales we see today are not possible in the absence of pervasive domestic policing and the ability to project military power. The British colonial economy—one capitalist apogee—would have been impossible without a huge state. The American robber-baron period is often held to have been to have led to hyper-concentration of wealth in a few private hands and to have been constrained ultimately by the state. If you look at the actual procedures employed by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, you see that they depended fundamentally on state sponsorship and state violence, which such men were in a position to command in virtue of their wealth. This underwent various adjustments in the so-called Progressive Era, but though specific cartels and fortunes were compromised, the consolidation in the long run continued, as the government became the central bank (more or less merging with J.P. Morgan) and the modern bureaucratic corporation emerged.

Consider by way of comparison the Soviet system. Nationalizing industry and imposing five-year plans didn’t make society more equal; it just made the Communist Party a committee of capitalists. Communist totalitarianism was a particular and particularly extreme form of the merger of state and capital, but that merger is everywhere. If one thought a bit, for example, about the way that government energy policies and private energy concerns are interlocked, one would see less and less sense of distinction. Regulators and corporate lobbyists and congressional staffers are all the same people.

The idea that free markets are historically distinguished from large, powerful states is an ahistorical ideology shared by the capitalist right and the communist left. We might think of the left-right spectrum as a single ideology rather than a taxonomy of opposites. Thus, the left/right or Democrat/Republican split—which turns American politics into a hyper-repetitive, mechanical set of partisan bromides about free markets versus government programs with egalitarian results—depends on a historical mistake.

The left-right spectrum is often characterized in terms of two extreme poles. One way to see that this is incoherent is that these poles can be defined in mutually incompatible ways. It’s awfully strange that Rand Paul and John McCain belong to the same political party and are generally held to be on the same end of the political spectrum. I'd say they each disagree more profoundly and substantially with the other than either disagrees with Barack Obama, for example. Some of the most historically salient “right-wing” movements are monarchism, fascism, fundamentalism, and libertarianism, which have nothing in common except that they all have reasons to oppose Marxist communism, and vice versa. Yet they also all have similar reasons to oppose one another. Toss in David Brooks Burkeans, security-state neocons, and so on, and you have a miscellany of unrelated positions.

The left pole, meanwhile, could be a stateless society of barter and localism; or a world of equality in which people are not subordinated by race, gender, and sexuality; or a pervasive welfare state; or a Khmer Rouge reeducation regime. The Nazi Party, Catholic Church, hereditary aristocracy, Ayn Rand capitalists, and redneck gun enthusiasts are all on the same side of the left-right spectrum. So are hacktivists, food-stamp officials, anti-globalization activists, anarcho-primitivists, and advocates of a world government. It would be hard to come up with a less coherent or less useful way of thinking about politics.

Examining another familiar opposition, between “equality” and “liberty,” produces another cluster of contradictions. The left holds up “equality” as a fundamental value. The means leftists propose to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. The welfare state is more pervasive now than it was a century ago, and we now have institutions like compulsory public education. These are achievements of the left, programs they are still trying enhance, but have they actually resulted in more equal societies? Quite the contrary, I believe: They have led to ever-more-frozen hierarchies. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.

Whatever the right is, it runs aground in contradiction similarly in its treatment of its own sacred concept “liberty,” which is hard to hold in solution with opposing gay marriage or marijuana legalization, or with a thousand dimensions of the contemporary surveillance/security state.

Milton Friedman and Vlad Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Augusto Pinochet: They may well have disagreed about this and that. But they have agreed, or said they did, that the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and vice versa. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position.

This spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power and wealth. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.

Amazing insight. Sartwell articulates a lot of points here that I've been trying (unsuccessfully, apparently) to make in this thread for months. We've got a lot of very intelligent posters on this board, so I'm always saddened when I see blinkered partisanship here. Both major parties seek to increase existing (and largely overlapping) hierarchies that are hostile to liberty and equality. It's time to stop advocating for either of them (and against our own interests). We need to be talking about how to build horizontal arrangements of power and wealth. Distributist economics and Federalist politics are good places to start.

 

[Rack Em]

Obama is the anti Christ

Bush is a nazi

 

[Rack Em]

The Atlantic's Crispin Sartwell recently published a compelling article titled "The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus:"



Amazing insight. Sartwell articulates a lot of points here that I've been trying (unsuccessfully, apparently) to make in this thread for months. We've got a lot of very intelligent posters on this board, so I'm always saddened when I see the blinkered partisanship in this thread. Both major parties seek to increase existing (and largely overlapping) hierarchies that are hostile to liberty and equality. It's time to stop advocating for either of them (and against our own interests). We need to be talking about how to build horizontal arrangements of power and wealth. Distributist economics and Federalist politics are good places to start.

Can you pm me any good info on distributionist economics? As former president of the federalist society I'm very familiar with federalist politics already. If you can't I'll be forced to engage the partisan discussions here for fun.

 

[connor_in]

As stated in his article, it's expected to expand at a "healthy" rate. Maybe "quite good" is jumping the gun. But it's getting there.

Has anyone noticed that whenever the numbers get bad, it is always accompanied in reporting with how "unexpected" the numbers were?

 

[connor_in]

Everything's great. Hope and change. Wheeeeeeeeee

US economy shrank at steep 2.9 percent rate in Q1 - Business news - Boston.com

The scariest part about that is the amount the number was adjusted, 1.9

 

[Emcee77]

The Atlantic's Crispin Sartwell recently published a compelling article titled "The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus:"



Amazing insight. Sartwell articulates a lot of points here that I've been trying (unsuccessfully, apparently) to make in this thread for months. We've got a lot of very intelligent posters on this board, so I'm always saddened when I see the blinkered partisanship in this thread. Both major parties seek to increase existing (and largely overlapping) hierarchies that are hostile to liberty and equality. It's time to stop advocating for either of them (and against our own interests). We need to be talking about how to build horizontal arrangements of power and wealth. Distributist economics and Federalist politics are good places to start.

Wow, amazing stuff. Brilliant.

And a bit depressing, imo. There is no obvious way to eliminate the desire for hierarchy, the urge to dominate. It is so widespread as to seem almost intrinsic. Attempts to suppress it (USSR, PRC) have failed so utterly as to have become unrecognizable as such. But other injustices have been defended as "natural" throughout history, and been overcome. Hopefully the unjust hierarchies that prevail today will be overcome too.

This piece reminded me of the novel "Cloud Atlas," one of my favorite novels of all time (unfortunately they made a shitty movie out of it so no one will ever take it as seriously as it deserves). I feel like I may have recommended it before on this site, but I'd really encourage everyone to read it. I worry sometimes that if we stay on the path we are on, history will become a nightmare, as it does in the novel, according to this reviewer:

History Is a Nightmare- Page 2 - New York Times

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Can you pm me any good info on distributionist economics? As former president of the federalist society I'm very familiar with federalist politics already. If you can't I'll be forced to engage the partisan discussions here for fun.

Here's a comprehensive list of popular books on Distributism. Chesterton and Belloc were its most influential proponents.

I've recently discovered The Distributist Review. The quality of the content is a little uneven, though most of Storck's stuff is very good.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

No it is not great. It sucks. Upon that we agree.

But when you talk about how Obama is ruining America after the double train wreck of the Bush administration and the House of Representatives (specifically, and specifically since 2002), and throw in the Robert's Supreme Court, that is as uninformed, and chauvinistically politically biased as I have ever seen!

But this is just my opinion, as yours is that Obama is anything but Little Moe.

I will never sit here amd defend Bush at every corner like Obama apologists do on here. Ill be the first to say Obama came into a really bad situation. But he walked into a fire and made it worse. To try and argue things are better now is just uninformed or completely enamored in fundamental transformation.

 

[BobD]

Ready any time you are, Bobby. By the way have you taken in any illegal immigrants from the border? And no...much as you might believe, foreign exchange students here on a student visa are NOT illegal immigrants. Hahahahaha

I don't know Obama, therefore I do not hate the man. I hate his policies, his attitude, and the direction in which he's taking this country. I hate fundamental transformation of the greatest nation known to man.

Obama couldn't successfully run a hot dog stand let alone cure cancer.

Ready for? I was born ready.

Are you being Capt Obvious with the immigrant/ exchange student comment ? If you're trying to take my comment about helping others and spin it to a negative or something I didn't mean, then that would be very tea party of you. That's their MO....don't DO anything, just criticize others.

If Obama couldn't run a hotdog stand, how'd he beat your guy ? Twice

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Ready for? I was born ready.

Are you being Capt Obvious with the immigrant/ exchange student comment ? If you're trying to take my comment about helping others and spin it to a negative or something I didn't mean, then that would be very tea party of you. That's their MO....don't DO anything, just criticize others.

If Obama couldn't run a hotdog stand, how'd he beat your guy ? Twice

I encouraged you to provide housing, education and health care for illegal immigrants. You said you host foreign exchange students to do your part, and the student visa makes them legal lol.

The tea party is do nothing? Aside from criticize gov spending and gov acting beyond constitutional limits, they've been winning elections even against RINOs.

Obama won twice because the Repubs put up the two weakest and most moderate candidates in history. They could not clearly articulate conservativism, so the incumbent won. 2008 was a joke. 2012 was ridiculously close.

What else ya got?? You brtter cal for back up or brew a pot of coffee haha

 

[dshans]

So ... what Republican candidates do you feel would have won, Leppy?

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

So ... what Republican candidates do you feel would have won, Leppy?

Ron Paul would've been better than Romney and Herman Cain too had he not slammed every woman he's met. That's why the Dems attacked him first: he was their biggest fear.

 

[dshans]

Ron Paul would've been better than Romney and Herman Cain too had he not slammed every woman he's met. That's why the Dems attacked him first: he was their biggest fear.

Ummm ... OK. Keep that dream alive.

I've been in this game longer than most of you, so trust me when I say that "better" is not at all equivalent to "electable."

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I will never sit here amd defend Bush at every corner like Obama apologists do on here. Ill be the first to say Obama came into a really bad situation. But he walked into a fire and made it worse. To try and argue things are better now is just uninformed or completely enamored in fundamental transformation.

And to try to argue that things are worse now is (in my opinion) to have crazy amnesia as to the conditions in 2008. We were mired in two wars and in the middle of an historic economic collapse. The world was literally on the brink of a depression.

In addition, many of Obama's "fundamental transformation(s)" are policies that were endorsed by republicans in the previous decade.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Ron Paul would've been better than Romney and Herman Cain too had he not slammed every woman he's met. That's why the Dems attacked him first: he was their biggest fear.

Paul is an interesting guy. And he's very consistent in his libertarianism. But as an isolationist, republican hawks attacked him as much or more than democrats did.

And Cain imploded on his own. Uz-becky-becky-becky-stan-stan?

 

[dshans]

... You brtter cal for back up or brew a pot of coffee haha

Would/should that be fair trade coffee?





[free ride given for obvious typos]

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Paul is an interesting guy. And he's very consistent in his libertarianism. But as an isolationist, republican hawks attacked him as much or more than democrats did.

And Cain imploded on his own. Uz-becky-becky-becky-stan-stan?

Paul is the most consistent politician this country has had in a long time. His foreign policy stances hurt him in the GOP primary, but head to head with Obama would've done very well. Economic libertarian. Doctor who opposed obamacare. Wanted the fed gov completely removed from education. Would've been very interesting.

Nothing Cain said caused his demise. Democrats feared the hell out of him because he was a black man that came from nothing and made himself wildly successful. It was all his affairs we didn't know about that was the end.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

And to try to argue that things are worse now is (in my opinion) to have crazy amnesia as to the conditions in 2008. We were mired in two wars and in the middle of an historic economic collapse. The world was literally on the brink of a depression.

In addition, many of Obama's "fundamental transformation(s)" are policies that were endorsed by republicans in the previous decade.

By the time Obama got into office the worst was over. He made it worse with the "stimulus." Not my opinion. Numbers support this.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Please keep this discussion civil, and avoid personal attacks.

 

[Bogtrotter07]

This is the situation we have in this country and this thread :

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qW6dWbbaylo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

No one believes these guys. Not even Fox.

I can't wait until the mini-series comes out. It will look worse.


Those that want to isolate themselves from politics, by isolating themselves from reality, will find themselves totally out of the game. (I hope.)

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

This is the situation we have in this country and this thread :

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qW6dWbbaylo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

4 paychecks of mine go directly to you when Bush and Cheney are indicted for war crimes lol

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Please keep this discussion civil, and avoid personal attacks.

I told BobD that foreign exchange students here on a visa are not illegal immigrants. His response was that I work at Wal Mart. Come on lol

 

[BobD]

I told BobD that foreign exchange students here on a visa are not illegal immigrants. His response was that I work at Wal Mart. Come on lol

Don't disrespect the site or whiskey when he says cool it, then cool it. Rehashing crap isn't cooling it.

 

[MJ12666]

So, MJ, this is little or no concern to you in light of current conditions?

"Florida is a huge plateau, much of it barely above sea level. The highest point in the state is believed to be a hilltop in the panhandle, 345 ft (105 m) above sea level, near the city of Lakewood, in Walton County. No point in the state is more than 70 mi (113 km) from saltwater."

An entire Red State could be lost!!!

I'll welcome family and friends, regardless of their voting proclivity and scientific denial to bunk in with me. The Mississippi, Minnesota, Crow and St. Croix Rivers may be flooding at the moment, but they should reside soon.

Should the sea level rise as feared, Florida may well be reduced to a narrow strip along the Turnpike. No Key West, no Daytona, no Tampa/St. Pete, no St. Augustine or Jacksonville. No DisneyWorld.

Well, maybe no University of Miami, University of Florida, University of South Florida, University of Central Florida or Florida State University might be appealing to some Irish fans, I'm not among them.

I'll not argue the science. There are many more here that are more able than I.

"Err" on the side of caution.

Get our collective asses in gear. Economic adjustments will occur. Money will be made. Some honestly earned, some not. Hey, what the hell, that's (barely) regulated capitalism at its finest!

I am really not sure what you are asking, but the point I was attempting to make was that Old Man Mike is factually incorrect if he believes that NASA is making changes to its operations because of global warming. Now if you are saying that we should spend whatever it takes to save the institutions specifically noted in your post, I am a little skeptical that we have the technological know how to prevent the ocean from swallowing Florida (assuming your assumption that it is in danger is correct) at this time, so why spend the resources on a lost cause?

 

[ab2cmiller]

I am really not sure what you are asking, but the point I was attempting to make was that Old Man Mike is factually incorrect if he believes that NASA is making changes to its operations because of global warming. Now if you are saying that we should spend whatever it takes to save the institutions specifically noted in your post, I am a little skeptical that we have the technological know how to prevent the ocean from swallowing Florida (assuming your assumption that it is in danger is correct) at this time, so why spend the resources on a lost cause?

There is precedent. New Orleans