It’s the late Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday. R.I.P., his truth is marching on. From the Nobel laureate’s famous exchange with the original sensitive man, even before Alan Alda.
Donahue: When you see around the globe the mal-distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea to run on?
Friedman: Well, first of all, tell me is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; its only the other fellow who’s greedy.
The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.
Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think – excuse me, if you will pardon me – do you think American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout? Is it really true that political self interest is nobler somehow than economic self interest? You know I think you are taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that.
Einstein had a government job when he (with the help of his wife Mileva, whom some Serbs believe was robbed of proper credit) constructed his theory. As for Henry Ford, he didn’t build that. Actually, that’s true of capitalism as a whole, which has always been implemented, nurtured, protected, and facilitated via industrial policy.
Go for it, CK, although “a” government job is more coincidence than cause re Einstein, and rather a strain in support of “you didn’t build that.”
Which President Obama didn’t say, although he did, but he didn’t mean it, which he did, and which clearly you agree with regardless.
As for Henry Ford, dunno exactly what you mean. What we do know is GM, Obama’s Motors of the Government [OMG] is deeply in the red if not circling the bowl. [Here’s the math. It’s even worse than I thought: Government Motors’ best customer is…tada….the government!]
If Ford Motor Company is circling as well, they at least managed to achieve the same failure without taxpayer dollars.
But I want to give you leeway on this should you want to tease this out. I’m actually much softer on economic issues than your average free-marketer. I like Adam Smith’s argument that the rich should pay a carriage tax, so that the poor could use the roads for free. That’s really cool, a graduated income tax as it were, but without confiscation and redistribution.
That’s the principled part of the Obama argument, but unfortunately, he believes taxing and redistributing is a good thing in its own right. This is a bad thing in its own right, to seize the fruits of one man’s labor and give it to another in the name of “justice,” and worse, in the name of its cannibalistic bastard spawn, “fairness.”
This is a bad thing in its own right, to seize the fruits of one man’s labor and give it to another in the name of “justice,”
As you like to say, our issues are epistemological. I totally agree that it’s wrong to seize the fruits of one man’s labor and give it to another in name of justice. Henry George taught us that the rent of land is no such fruit and belongs equally to the community. Milton Friedman agreed with him, at least so far as to maintain that a tax on the value of land was economically efficient and carried no moral burden. And my take on it is that while it would be unjust to take a man’s property (understood as capital, distinct from land), for that’s no different than taking his wages, I think the moral calculus is more complicated when it comes to the revenue derived from capital. So the epistemological difficulty is determining what counts as “fruits of one’s labor.”
So in my moral schema, which isn’t standard liberal fare (and doesn’t have a g-d thing to do with Obama, so don’t even go there), taxing wages would be forbidden, taxing land would be obligatory, and taxing interest (the return to capital) permissible, depending on purpose. There’s also the whole matter of correcting for externalities with Pigouvian taxes as well.
Rod, pls do continue. Re the Pigouvian bit, some pigs is more equal than others and most of ‘em got their pig heads up their pig asses.
BTW, as a professional headhunter of professionals, I’ll tellya confidentially that anybody who plays their Harvard card is laughed at. It’s an admission they’re losing.
Y’d be surprised how many PhDs email me and say they’re envious I can speak my mind and they aren’t free to, because the professional university academy will destroy their careers if they honestly speak their minds.
And you, Rod, the truck driver?
Say what you have to say, bro. Let’s kick it. We’re the last free men in America. What can they do to us? Kick us off their blog? Expel us from Harvard?
Rod, pls do continue.
Ok…
Re the Pigouvian bit, some pigs is more equal than others and most of ‘em got their pig heads up their pig asses.
Not entirely sure what you’re going on about here, but may I assume you’re referring to the AGW thing? Because I can riff on that if you like. But I won’t presume to start in on that subject if and unless you really want to since it’s your sub-blog and all. But I will say that the link you shot me the last time we had such a discussion has prompted some interesting thoughts on market-based mitigation.
But my take on externalities is fairly simple and straightforward: Do you throw your trash in the street or do you pay to have someone haul if off and dispose of it properly?
BTW, as a professional headhunter of professionals, I’ll tellya confidentially that anybody who plays their Harvard card is laughed at. It’s an admission they’re losing.
Which is why I rarely bring up the fact that I have a degree in engineering, with what amounts to a minor in econ, and some post-grad work toward a M.S. degree. in IT. Which is all sort of awkward given that I’m driving a semi for a living. Like… what happened, dude? It’s complicated and sort of a long, boring, story, but it’s about personality rather than intellect. Put it this way… if I was still occupying a cubicle at AT&T you would probably have seen my picture on the news after a particularly violent incident.
Oh… and then there’s the way we viewed the shave-tail lieutenants that would be assigned to us as division officers in the Navy. The smart ones realized the way to do their job right was to ask the enlisted guys–you know, the ones that actually made things work?–what we should do and then run interference with higher management (Dept. Head, in our case the Engineering Officer).
Y’d be surprised how many PhDs email me and say they’re envious I can speak my mind and they aren’t free to, because the professional university academy will destroy their careers if they honestly speak their minds.
And you, Rod, the truck driver?
Yeah… that’s the interesting part, huh? So I absorbed the standard neo-classical econ curricula–micro, macro, money & banking, plus engineering econ (basically C/B analysis)–and my econ prof wanted me to switch majors. Probably I should have, given how engineering worked out for me. But then I wouldn’t now have the intellectual freedom to seriously consider the heterodox schools. I’d have to pick one of the major or minor league econ teams and be true to my school. Because going off the reservation could cost me and I have to put food on my family and all.
First off, I agree totally with the Michael Hudson piece that CK linked. Hudson’s always been on my “good guy” list. And I enjoyed learning a bit more about Veblen, who I’m ashamed to say I had only heard of but didn’t know much about before today.
In a lot of ways my views on economics are extremely conservative. I stick to the classical framework of Smith and Ricardo, particularly the factors-of-production stuff. In fact, if anything, I would extend the bestiary of land, capital, and labor to include entrepreneurship and credit. Five factors instead of three. With the returns being rent, depreciation, wages, profits, and interest. The neo-classical guys don’t understand the difference between fish and fowl and it totally confuses things.
But I go positively paleo about the dissolution of political economy as a unitary discipline. On the one hand, it’s essential to get the mechanics of economics as rigorous as possible. That means applying principles of the scientific method. But achieving a truly value-free economic theory is as likely to be accomplished as truly objective journalism. At some level at least, economics is a discursive discipline, meaning an economic theory is a kind of story of what happened or what will happen. And it’s simply impossible to completely set aside your political predispositions when telling such a story. The normative pollutes the positive.
As a Thomist, “Just wage” is my bottom line. And if we “mix” our economy with negative income tax and other social programs to get to a Just Wage, that works for me. [Touching on the minimum wage and Wal-mart controversies.]
Quite so, about pretensions to “value-free” social sciences. I reject the very thought, even ’twere it possible!
The morality of the ant hill. Feh.
In fact, if anything, I would extend the bestiary of land, capital, and labor to include entrepreneurship and credit. Five factors instead of three. With the returns being rent, depreciation, wages, profits, and interest.
This starts to go over my head, but again, I caution drawing distinctions between “good” and “bad” money, fungibility being the only just reason for having it in the first place. It sounds like you’re dealing this caution into your equation, and I appreciate that.
But there are wild cards, pressure release valves as the last bastions of liberty: black markets. Cayman accounts, if the Swiss are no longer safe. “Bad” money always finds a way to escape. To be free, if you will. 😉
As a Thomist, “Just wage” is my bottom line. And if we “mix” our economy with negative income tax and other social programs to get to a Just Wage, that works for me. [Touching on the minimum wage and Wal-mart controversies.]
A Thomist, huh? Really? Because I’m FB friends with a prominent one (a theologian in Texas, FWIW) and the one’s I know wouldn’t give the time of day to M.F. much less write a glowing eulogy. They pretty much consider libertarians to be in league with the devil and don’t have much good to say about modern capitalism in general.
I realize there’s something of an internal fight going on in the Church over social theology but they make a pretty good case that the Tom Woods and Acton Institute crowd are Doing it Wrong.
In any case, I don’t see how making up the difference for crap wages via welfare satisfies the demands of Just Wage theory in accord with the subsidiarity principle. If that’s the way you interpret it then I don’t see how you can possibly object to universal health care.
This starts to go over my head, but again, I caution drawing distinctions between “good” and “bad” money, fungibility being the only just reason for having it in the first place. It sounds like you’re dealing this caution into your equation, and I appreciate that.
It was necessarily a sketch that I didn’t flesh out much. Basically, a good FOP theory gives you the basis for sussing out in a rigorous way what “you didn’t build that” actually amounts to. At a minimum you didn’t build the land; God did that, right? I mean… I may be an atheist now, but I was raised in a good Calvinist church and I remember a few things like the first chapter of Genesis. So laying claim to a piece of ground and then demanding payment for it’s use seems to me to combine blasphemy with sloth. Taxing land also has the advantage that land can’t flee, so that takes care of the Cayman Islands thing.
On the other hand, wages are definitely in the category of “you built that” and entrepreneurship is really just another form of labor and so profits are really wages of a sort.
But capital/depreciation and credit/interest are interesting cases. The latter particularly in a fiat-money economy. With money on a gold standard interest is more akin to ground rent than anything else. But fiat money is the direct creation of government (at least the monetary base is) and so vis-a-vis tax policy should be treated the same anyway. (As an aside, if you still insist on calling yourself a Thomist you should be opposed to the charging of money interest. It’s called usury you know. I can dig up the encyclical if you insist.)
In contemporary economic theory capital yield is said to derive from monetary interest via opportunity cost. But then the prevailing interest rate is just determined by the average capital yield. More than a little bit circular. So I just abandon the concept of capital yield as an artifact of money interest and focus on the replacement cost of physical capital. In a global sense it just disappears since it’s really then just the output of some other entrepreneurial process. X cancels out of both sides of the equation.
Rod, natural law is also demonstrated—it’s not all a priori.
Man is best when he is free, this we know because we’ve seen it; it also makes rational sense because excellence is only possible where there is liberty.
The Acton guys are right, because Adam Smith was right about self-interest. The smallest unit of subsidiarity is the family, not the individual. A man will work harder for his family than he will for himself!
And the usury problem is solved via opportunity cost; Thomas didn’t find that one, perhaps because there wasn’t an infinity of opportunities for that money as there is now. Regardless, it’s been demonstrated in reality that lending money at interest has good results, just as free markets do. Natural law must account for reality—in fact natural law by definition is reality, both an is and an ought.
That the atheist libertarian Murray Rothbard was a Thomist gives me a tremendous kick. Academic types try to pigeonhole everybody and get upset when the person doesn’t fit in the box. Hell, I’m a Thomist AND a Straussian except I can’t be a Straussian because he rejects natural law.
Call me pisher.
So I just abandon the concept of capital yield as an artifact of money interest and focus on the replacement cost of physical capital.
That works, if I follow correctly. Why gas stations hike prices immediately instead of waiting to empty their tanks. They base the price on the cost of the next load, not the one already in the ground.
You also touch on [Locke’s?] Labor Theory of Value, but that one was a big failure in reality. Aquinas’ mentor Albert the Great figured out way back in the 1300s that the value of something is the price somebody will pay.
And once we get to quasi-Christian schemes to redistribute land and wealth, it takes coercion if not force to enforce them. I’m all for theology, but taking the rich man’s stuff for the poor has no Biblical ground.
The Acton guys are good. I’m acquainted a bit with Jordan Bailor. Good man.
http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2012/07/18/it-takes-village-raise-business
I just don’t think you actually know what Thomism actually is, Tom. Your formulation of crap wages + welfare as satisfying Just Wage Theory is just bizarre. Your understanding of subsidiarity is shallow and trite. Similarly, your dismissal of the usury issue misapprehends contemporary Thomist thinking on the subject.
I just get the distinct impression that you claim to be a Thomist because you’ve heard it’s something something natural law something something and you like to appeal to natural law to support your positions because it’s an appeal to authority without having to be terribly specific about who or what that authority actually is.
So I just abandon the concept of capital yield as an artifact of money interest and focus on the replacement cost of physical capital.
That works, if I follow correctly. Why gas stations hike prices immediately instead of waiting to empty their tanks. They base the price on the cost of the next load, not the one already in the ground.
Not really. What I’m actually doing is drawing a theory of the Firm as an elaboration on Smith’s classical factorial model. If you recall Smith’s model, he essentially broke down the production process into the activities of three actors; the Capitalist, the Laborer, and the Landlord. My elaboration is to further break the Capitalist apart into three more roles; the Entrepreneur, the Financier, and, for lack of a better term, the Capitalist, whose function is more restricted and redefined here.
At the center of the model is the Entrepreneur who has a Plan and who gathers together and organizes the other factors to produce a product (which can be a service, it makes no difference). The Capitalist in this model is actually just another Entrepreneur or, more accurately, Firm whose function is to provide physical capital. For instance, if the Firm is a farm and the Entrepreneur is the farmer then the Capitalist in this model is the equipment dealer.
The Financier can be thought of as bringing the money to the table, but it’s a bit more subtle than that. What the Financier does is allow the Entrepreneur to manage the temporal aspect of production–the fact that production is a physical process that takes time to complete. What the Financier actually deals in is Credit which, in a monetized economy, takes the form of lending Money, but it has to be stressed that Money and Credit are not the same thing.
Credit is about trust. It’s what allows transactions to be completed over a period of time, rather than instantaneously and contemporaneously as in a retail purchase, for example. But Credit doesn’t necessarily, and usually doesn’t, entail a formal promissory agreement. If you sit down in a restaurant and order a meal, the proprietor, as a courtesy, extends you credit by allowing you to consume your repast before settling the bill. He has extended you credit by trusting that you will pay for the meal. Contrast that with the procedure at a fast-food establishment. Similarly, I don’t get paid until next Tuesday for work I’ve done today. I’m extending my employer credit, trusting that they won’t renege on the payroll.
Anyway, Smith rolled these functions up into one package, conceiving the Capitalist as the guy that brings the money to the table and runs the show. This has, I believe, led to an unwarranted deification of finance as That Which Makes the World Go Round, when in reality finance is just an instrumental factor of production utilized by the Entrepreneur, no different than Labor or Land. His other mistake–understandable given the monetary system of his time–was to think of money as a kind of capital on a par with tools and equipment. In fact, the classical concept of capital is so muddled that almost anything counts, and the neo-classical conception is even worse, to the point that Land is now Capital and we even speak of Human Capital.
But I digress (and how!). Economists typically speak of a return on investment and capital yield and such. But it really just boils down to interest on money which is a payment for credit extended. Physical capital doesn’t earn anything; it can’t because it is inanimate. Only Labor and Land (nature) can produce wealth. Physical capital is just a tool that amplifies the power of labor. And in a competitive economy a better tool gives the Entrepreneur an advantage over competitors but only so long as it takes them to catch up.
You also touch on [Locke’s?] Labor Theory of Value, but that one was a big failure in reality. Aquinas’ mentor Albert the Great figured out way back in the 1300s that the value of something is the price somebody will pay.
Not really. In my model, wages are the cost to the Entrepreneur of employing Labor. Similarly, Depreciation for (physical) Capital, Rent for Land, and Interest for Credit. The Entrepreneurial Profit is just the surplus of the market price for the product over and above his necessary costs. I’m not going Marxist here. Just trying to knock Wall Street off it’s damn pedestal maybe, by putting the Entrepreneur, who is the source of innovation and progress, over the Financier who currently thinks he runs the show and is the source of all that is holy.
And once we get to quasi-Christian schemes to redistribute land and wealth, it takes coercion if not force to enforce them. I’m all for theology, but taking the rich man’s stuff for the poor has no Biblical ground.
Where did I say anything like that? Georgist’s don’t propose to redistribute land. They propose to tax the value of land, as it isn’t produced by anyone–no, not even the owner. And because it isn’t produced, taxes on land carry no deadweight loss. And then, of course, you un-tax labor and production, including entrepreneurship. Bumper sticker: Keep what you make; pay for what you take.
Coercion and force? Bah. Your preferred world is shot full of it, so don’t go all anarchist on me. That’s just bullshit, Tom.
No doubt you’re right, Rod. Cheers.
I think may you might find Michael Hudson’s take on land and rents interesting. In the US, Hudson normally gets a hearing only on the far left, though, as an uncompromising critic of financialization and the preference for bailing out banks over people, he gets heard in Europe, too. This piece puts the Savior of Liberty right in the crosshairs: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/07/veblens-institutionalist-elaboration-of-rent-theory/
Thank-you, C.K. Veblen is someone I’ve been meaning to explore more deeply.
And I’ve noticed that most of the Georgist’s I hob-nob with are libertarians. One in particular has managed a cross between Mise-an Austrian econ with a geo- twist. Dude’s an econ professor in Cali. Weird.
Even assuming for a moment that I was able to take anything published at Newsbusters seriously, TVD, it’s not clear to me why I’m supposed to care about whether GM or Ford is operating profitably. I don’t even consider profit particularly profitable, on balance. Why would I care about whether the government spent $30 B or $50 B or $500 B on GM? It’s just numbers, and I can’t count that high. As investments serving perceived social, economic, and political needs, the auto bailout doesn’t seem on the surface much worse or better than, say, the Defense Budget or oil subsidies. (If I were philosopher-king, I might prefer to phase out automobiles altogether, but I recognize that doing so catastrophically all at once might not be taken particularly well.) From a certain perspective, the whole American and global economy is a vast negative, a loss – which isn’t the same as saying it’s a bad thing or worse than the alternatives. Life itself is a losing proposition and humanity is negation.
A stock analyst once asserted to me that on balance the airline industry has operated at an overall loss since its inception. I was not in a position to check his math, but it was his area of expertise, work he was paid quite handsomely to perform, and he had no reason to lie. He wasn’t putting it forward as his original claim. He was suggesting that it was common knowledge among the informed and educated on the subject. Let’s assume it’s true: The Wright Bros were the founders of an on balance un-profitable industry. Yet people (though not me) still like to travel by air. They like to ship things by air, too (I actually participate in that a lot). They also, especially us, like to bomb and threaten things by air. So, even if it “loses money,” we’ll keep on figuring a way to make it happen. Maybe if we keep at it long enough, we’ll move it into the black.
Rambling to a connected topic: The “Fruits of Your Labor” argument makes little sense in a modern industrial or post-industrial economy when virtually all labor is in principle labor for others, most is “productive” only in a highly abstract sense, and virtually is paid for in money whose exchange value floats on a global market. There is very little that any of us does or can do that has any intrinsic usefulness at all. So, I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I don’t see anything that O said that wasn’t perfectly obvious. I’d of course go much further. It’s all a social-collective enterprise located within an eventually unitary ecological and historical process – not just the money and the work, but the words we use to discuss them, and the very bodies we use to form the words, all entirely social-collective products. In this sense the only real problem with “you didn’t build that” is that you aren’t really you, but that’s a different discussion.
Oh a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park
Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark
Or the Chinese dentist Or the British Queen
They all fit together In the same machine
To the extent the critics have an argument at all, and aren’t just pleased to get video re-played in which PBO looks and sounds like a scary black man with his scary black horde threatening to come after the white man’s sacred money, they seem to be saying that our lives and sacred honor depend on constantly re-assuring entrepreneurs that they’re very, very special and “did it all themselves.” The notion that we all must participate in such a childish fantasy, or be considered traitors, strikes me as clear evidence of the infirmity of rightwing ideology. It ought to be obviously embarrassing. That for someone reason it’s not taken that way by otherwise vaguely functional and politically active grown-ups I would find embarrassing all over again, if I weren’t well past being embarrassed by the state of political discussion.
“Obama didn’t say it, and I agree with him.” That’s what I usually hear, CK, so it’s refreshing you just cop to it.
Central here is the line between the private and the public. You, and Obama, I’d say blur that line. Give us a name for it—it’s not communism, you say it’s not socialism, I charitably call it communitarianism. But some word that delineates it from Friedmanism, free markets, etc., por favor.
That the role of government is soldiers, cops and infrastructure is not at question. [The defense that Obama was being banal to the point of “the sky is blue” re roads and bridges doesn’t wash.] If it’s true that airlines are ultimately unprofitable, we can put that in the roads and bridges column.
But with “industrial policy,” or Government Motors, we have the public sector competing with the private—to the detriment of both. The government’s job is not to take risk, that’s why we reward the private sector for doing so.
So too,
The “Fruits of Your Labor” argument makes little sense in a modern industrial or post-industrial economy when virtually all labor is in principle labor for others, most is “productive” only in a highly abstract sense
Perhaps so, but you must eat, someone built your house. Somebody made the computer you’re reading this on. You may fancy a bucolic agrarian economy, but there’s a reason you can’t keep ’em down on the farm. It sucks, “Green Acres” notwithstanding.
Most all of us would rather man the fry station at McDonalds than get up with the chickens.
And so, we need just reward for hard work, but also for accountability. Few work hard for the sheer joy of it, or even for the benefit of the faceless collective. That’s human nature, and Friedman’s account of man’s economic life corresponds far more closely to reality than “communitarian” schemes that are far more efficient in the abstract and total failures in practice.
And so, Friedman is not just a cure for communism because communism is just one form of collectivism/communitarianism. We are told communism is dead, but communitarianism is alive and well and running for re-election.
I did want to get to the problem of real estate. Looking at the history of it, that Da Man owned it and passed it down to his progeny, it was only the rise of capitalism, money, etc. that made real estate fungible. There was a time when no commoner could buy real estate even if he had the ability to pay [which mostly, he didn’t].
We put up with high finance and arbitrage and all the rest [and pay a high vig for it] for its one virtue—liquidity. Unlike real estate in the olden days, money doesn’t care who owns it. And that was the true gateway to equality and that is “liberty.”
“I believe a man has gotta be king in his own ranch-type-style tract house.”—Jerry Lewis, Who’s Minding the Store
Keep your urbanism and living in the anthill, bro. I grew up in the city, and to me Levittown is another name for heaven.
My dad worked 60 hours a week to get us in there, and it was he who paid for the damn roads and bridges, not the government.
Where did I say that “it” is “not socialism”? First time the last word has appeared on this thread. I generally avoid the word because political usages and mis-usages tend to overwhelm political-philosophical ones. I could tell you, for instance, that in my view the vast majority of existing regimes on Earth could be properly described as “national socialist,” and that’s just the way it is, and, well, imagine what kind of trouble we’d find ourselves in.
I’ve said that the “you didn’t build that” speech was anodyne observation about what is and what is not. I suppose you have some link to some rightwing genius blog that proves, proves!, that PBO wasn’t just coloring the sky correctly, so color me preemptively unimpressed. I’m not convinced by the argument on GM, and I don’t attach any intrinsic moral value to proportions of the economy declared “public” or “private,” but, if the bailouts have entailed some “detriment” to both the public and private interest in some way, I can live with it. It would meet my expectations. No good in the world that doesn’t bring its evils, too, and things were pretty darn detrimented in general in 2009, and they’re still pretty darn detrimentious – no reason to turn oneself into a detrimental case over it.
On real estate, your position is quite reminiscent of the lost reform impetus that Hudson describes in the piece I linked. You ought to read it, even if it’s a little long. I particularly enjoyed this observation relating to Henry George and libertarianism, even though the first sentence is infelicitously phrased:
The perspective Veblen is seen attributing to 19th century ideological libertarian anti-socialists also corresponds to an oft-observed American naivete about power (including esp. power in America), the notion that merely displacing it from the government to the so-called private sector represents some sort of absolute diminution or effectively democratic or more democratic diffusion, when it instead very observably has the tendency to magnify the effective concentrated political power of prime economic actors, who never all start with the same resources and advantages as everyone else. “Politically absent, economically present” is the formulation that has tended to describe American ideology in many ways. It’s also of course a complete lie, since what it really means is “politically present via economic power.” It’s how, or a big part of how, we won the continent and the world – by making sure the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. I think that’s what your to phatasmagorical position on “you didn’t build that” amounts to, too. It’s your anti-social socialism, and it may also be a suicidally anti-national form of nationalism, or anyway make you and your party into the tools of the true political-economic elites, who, incidentally, would squash you like a bug and call it the work of the invisible hand.
I like your honesty about being a socialist, and I like the parts that don’t make my eyes glaze over.
But I can’t do anything with “liberals” who do not speak of liberty. Once you slip into the marxist mode where all is the question of power, there is no common language.
And this is where Milton Friedman had your [socialists’] number, for you speak of theories, not of reality, not of man. And this is where President Obama reveals himself to be one of you, for he does not speak meaningfully of liberty either, only roads, bridges, teachers, and systems.
I prefer just being honest about it. Is there a quasi-socialist component to the modern liberal state in America? Of course. Is there a point where liberty vanishes and statism is all that remains? Oh yeah.
That’s what this election’s about, beyond all the sliming and twisting of the candidates’ words. There are two visions competing here, and what I don’t like is the blurring of the line where one day Barack Obama is John Rawls and the next day he’s Ronald Reagan.
Ibid:
Classical liberalism is, under Ryan’s understanding, associated with earlier liberals such as the already mentioned John Locke and Adam Smith. In addition, he names Alexis de Tocqueville from the nineteenth century, and Friedrich von Hayek from the twentieth, as belonging to the tradition of classical liberalism.
Classical liberalism is often associated with the belief that the state ought to be
minimal, which means that practically everything except armed forces, law enforcement and other „non-excludable goods‟ ought to be left to the free dealings of its citizens, and the organisations they freely choose to establish and take part in. This kind of state is sometimes described as a “night-watchman state‟, as the sole purpose of the minimal state is to uphold the most fundamental aspects of public order.
…
[In contrast], “modern‟ views could be associated with nineteenth-century theorists such as Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill. More recently, John Dewey, William Beveridge, and John Rawls have articulated similar ideas. Modern liberalism could generally be thought of as being situated politically to the left of classical liberalism, because of its willingness to employ the state as an instrument to redistribute wealth and power – in order to create a society deemed to be more decent or equitable (cf. Beveridge 1944; 1945; Rawls 1993).
Friedman, like Reagan and American conservatism generally, works best when battling the Communist Menace.
His criticisms of Soviet style central planning are spot on, and insightful.
Too bad that when the menace of forced collectivism and the gulag disappears, a moderate Truman-esque Democrat, and his health insurance plan written by the Heritage Foundation must be conscripted to stand in its place.
I originally thought the “Heritage Foundation plan” was a telling point, but I have been convinced by others here, wiser in the ways of think takes, that the pieces favoring it were just partisan bullbleep attempting to derail single-payer.
As a corollary, it’s safe to assume that everything you though about right-wing think tanks is truer than you realized: they make the Tobacco Institute look like CERN.
Absolutely. Pay no attention to anything outside the bubble.
Well, you can’t win that argument Tom. Mike’s saying that conservative’s either believe in the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and they’re currently lying about it out of political expediency, or it was a ruse to derail single payer back in the 90’s so they were lying about out of political expediency.
Lying liars.
Of course I won the argument, Stillwater. Unless you call sticking your fingers in your ears and going la-la-la to be winning an argument.
Which come to think of it, many do. So do tell me what sources outside the left-liberal bubble you use to challenge your left-liberal orthodoxies.
[Our problems remain epistemological.]
Tom, in all seriousness here … how can you have won the argument when you presented no evidence or argument to rebut Mike’s claim? I mean, you’re the one going around telling people that our problems are epistemological, yet you failed to provide a single reason to think what Mike said wasn’t true. I’m really starting to think you don’t know what that word means.
Stillwater, in all seriousness, I’m not arguing against the claim—the Heritage health plan has zero to do with this post, and discussion of it. It’s a hijacking of the thread.
I was arguing against the blanket condemnation of “right-wing think tanks.” That is also unhelpful. If one dismisses everything outside the bubble, what’s the point of any of this? Move along, get yrself back to the echo chamber.
Fine. The Hermitage Foundation was perfectly sincere in their endorsement of PPCAC-like plans, and they’re only opposing it now because out of pure partisanship. Feel better?
in all seriousness, I’m not arguing against the claim—the Heritage health plan…
So you’re conceding that Mike’s description of Heritage and their healthcare plan was correct: that it was never intended to be a real alternative to single payer, but only offered as an attempt to derail single payer. So the claim that Heritage and the GOP lies about supporting it is accurate. Good!
Conceding the facts on the ground is the first step in resolving our epistemological crisis.
I’m agnostic on the topic: 1) It’s a thread hijack. 2) It doesn’t speak to the merit of the plan[s]. 3) I didn’t vote for Heritage Foundation and so will not answer for them or ideas they might have floated in the 1990s. Like all think tanks, left or right, I’ll consider what they have to say on their own merits.
What I do know is that if you reject anything outside the bubble of left-wing sources you already agree with, of course you’ll be a lefty. That’s a duh.
Perhaps you’ve heard the one about great minds discussing ideas, smaller minds discuss people. I’m uninterested in the people of Heritage and their alleged political motivations. I’m uninterested in John Lott’s use of an internet sockpuppet. I’m uninterested in Tim Geithner being a tax cheat and Joe Biden being a plagiarist.
It has nothing to do with ideas. When someone attacked John Lott on the other thread for the sockpuppet thing, in my eyes they lost their place at the adult table. At this sub-blog, adult table rules are in force. 😉
Gentlemen please-
Whatever the merits of the Heritage health care plan, put into action by Governor Mitt Romney, surely we can all agree that it is far-left socialism of the highest order!
And of course it’s worth pointing out that Milton Friedman was the architect of the Negative Income Tax, one of the best welfare systems ever designed. Friedman could fit pretty well into some schools of neoliberalism, he gets thought of as a conservative primarily because he got more traction with American conservatives than American liberals.
JamesK, they say Milton Friedman IS neoliberalism, the anti-Keynes.
http://folk.uio.no/daget/What%20is%20Neo-Liberalism%20FINAL.pdf
In fact, it seems that some neoliberals are not liberals in any meaningful sense at all, as Harvey seats anti-liberal autocrats such as Deng Xiaoping and Augusto Pinochet among the political vanguard of neoliberalism
Ibid.: “Classical liberalism has thus much common ground with what we described above as “economic liberalism‟. And it is often the case that classical liberals are, with their tendency to favour laissez-faire economic policies, portrayed as leading proponents of “neoliberalism‟.
Modern liberalism is, on the other hand, characterised by a greater willingness to let
the state become an active participant in the economy. This has often issued in a pronounced tendency to regulate the marketplace, and to have the state supply essential goods and services to everyone.
Modern liberalism is therefore, for all intents and purposes, a profound revision of liberalism, especially of the economic policies traditionally associated with it.
Whereas “classical‟ or “economic‟ liberals favour laissez-faire economic policies because it is thought that they lead to more freedom and real democracy, modern liberals tend to claim that this analysis is inadequate and misleading, and that the state must play a significant role in the economy, if the most basic liberal goals and purposes are to be made into reality.”
This isn’t really an area of focus for me, but this sounds about right. All principled and coherent demurrals are encouraged.
As for the Chicoms going neo-liberal, that would be true if neoliberalism doesn’t refer to political power. For instance, authoritarian Singapore would be “neo-liberal” as well.
The Neoliberal-Developmental State: Singapore as Case Study
Eugene Dili Liow, Master in Social Science
National University of Singapore
Probably one of Murali’s pals. 😉
Modern liberalism is therefore, for all intents and purposes, a profound revisionof liberalism, especially of the economic policies traditionally associated with it.
I would disagree with that characterization. One of the most compelling arguments in favor of “redistributive” subsidies for the poor is libertarian: in order to maximize total actionable liberties, basic necessities required for so acting must be met. That’s not quite the classical liberal take on things, but close enough for blog work.
Modern liberalism devolves from classical liberalism insofar as eliminating institutionalized harms and achieving the set of necessary preconditions for maximizing liberty are entailed by the theory. Modern libertarianism often confuses the two things and concludes that the state is the sole source of liberty-restricting arrangements. But that’s not so. {On the other hand … well, let’s just say there’s another hand and leave it at that.}
The dispute between conservative/libertarian economic policy and liberal’s views on this are determined by what party (small “p”) thinks constitutes a legitimate harm. But the point here is that classical liberalism actual does entail lots (and lots) of state intervention in market activity (as well as other things) depending on what constitutes a harm, and what constitutes a liberty.
I think of M Friedman as being a quintessential economic neoliberal. Don’t know what that means about my understanding of neoliberalism, or where it’s wrong or right. Of course, there was the whole Chicago School/Milton Friedman/Pinochet thingy that muddies up the waters a bit. One way or another.
Hate to disappoint you TVD, but I never said I was a socialist, though I wouldn’t exactly deny it either. Am very unsure it matters in any way at all what political movement I might belong to or be thought to belong to. “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.” Have always felt that way, though that probably also means every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of falsehood, including the prior statement, or this one, or both, or the opposite. I’m too afraid of making your apparently quite sensitive eyes glaze over to go any further here.
Thx, CK. I understand the poli-sci Esperanto they concoct at university, but it doesn’t say as much as it thinks it does, nor does it translate well to the real world.
I’m glad you liked my ideas on real estate [at least I think you did], and I appreciate the link to Michael Hudson, who is able to write in English.
Still, it reads like a term paper or thesis and although Veblen and George are interesting, they’re less history than a footnote to history. More interesting would be why their ideas didn’t take hold, but I’d say the answer is simple: like most or all utopian or “fair” solutions to the human condition, they can only be implemented at the point of a gun.
By contrast, Friedman’s ideas require no coercion and are vitiated by human nature. They rely on—how shall I put this?—Liberty.
Friedman: Well, first of all, tell me is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; its only the other fellow who’s greedy.
The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
“They rely on—how shall I put this?—[access to] Liberty.”
There ya go.
It’s a start. Cheers, mate. 😎
Read him the first time, TVD.
He was a skilled advocate, but he’s just engaging in soft demagogy there, singing a little ditty he could assume his target audience, obviously including people just like your own good self, would find pleasant: “You’re the best, you have the best system, you’re morally superior, you’re very, very special, you built that…”
If you read the Hudson piece, you understand Hudson’s explanation for the facts under close scrutiny: Friedman’s advocacy and his work were the culmination of a long tradition that worked to remove distinctions between productive and non-productive economic activity, and the end result greatly served the interests of finance capital. You can take a social Darwinist position and accept the evidence of success as proof that finance capital was most “fit” for the world, but that leaves little room for discussion. Might was right. End of story.
As for the pseudo-comparison he offers, he is arguing against nothing at all – or against Phil Donahue, which may be even worse: There were few critics among Marxists and socialists who denied that industrial capitalism and bourgeois liberalism represented tremendous progress over what generally came before. They generally shared the same philosophical and moral horizon as the liberals. More important, there was no other history of the last 200 years than the history of the last 200 years: We don’t have some other world to look at in which a species reached the technological level of development reached in the West around the time of the industrial revolution, and chose some other path. Real historical Communism was a variation on the materialist-industrialist theme tried out in backward places, in a state of catch-up, under tremendous encumbrances and against immense opposition – including a major war of which by far the worst parts were fought on its territory. We don’t have a world to look at in which, say, American-style capitalism was tried out in “a place like Russia” and “Soviet Communism” was tried out in “a place like America.” For very real reasons, the counterfactuals are absurd. We’ve had just one world, with one geography, one arrangement of peoples and resources, etc..
Industrial capitalism dominated and bridged two world orders. It could be that a new order is currently emerging at the end of the the neoliberal phase of the American order of the Earth, and we return to a more mixed and multi-polar arrangement of spheres of influence. I’ll presume you’re ready to show approval of whatever proves strongest, assuming it reaches a new equilibrium within our lifetimes, and that the process doesn’t happen to kill us off first.
Thought you signed out, CK, so I closed the circle.
I don’t dispute your premises so much as I think they lack necessary context. You do not speak meaningfully of liberty, which is Friedman’s alpha and omega. Therefore you cannot engage him on his own terms, only shoehorn him into your own, of justice as “fairness,” of liberty as FDR’s Freedom from Want.
to remove distinctions between productive and non-productive economic activity
The difference between “good” money and “evil” money. But the whole point of money, of capital, is that it is fungible. A million dollars gets you a farm, or a nice house or a trophy wife or seat in Congress. Or you start with a Chick-fil-A franchise and hope to parlay it into all the above.
Or you can spend it wisely on fast cars, hookers and blow.
I’ll presume you’re ready to show approval of whatever proves strongest, assuming it reaches a new equilibrium within our lifetimes, and that the process doesn’t happen to kill us off first.
Yes and no. I’m easy on the details about what works—I have no preference whether we tax capital gains the same as labor or we don’t—bad money or good, you’re quite right that I make no distinction.
But I dig liberty. My biggest problem with my friends from the left and their candidate for president is that aside from bedrooms and bongs, they don’t speak of liberty.
In 2008, not enamored of the cranky and possibly crazy old white guy and desirous to make some amends for America’s shameful racial past, I said if Barack Obama spoke meaningfully of liberty, I’d vote for him. I’m still waiting.
Milton Friedman spoke easily of liberty. You call it demagoguery, I call it inspiration. I call it good, I call it necessary. Mind you, I’m with Plato or Algernon Sidney that the philosopher-king would be best, but they are few and far between, so we must gear ourselves to making the best of the far between.
Talk’s cheap. You can find lots of people talking about “liberty” and variations. All by itself it’s an empty form. Dr. Fukuyama’s extensive historical and anthropological investigations led him to approximately the same place as Dr. Strauss and others, why, including our very Foundres: The mixed regime is about the best we can hope for, especially on the level of mass societies, this side of the harmonic convergence, for the sake of liberty as well as for the other ideals that we children of the Revolution hold dear. The mixed regime is a dynamic system producing interaction and some degree of contention between major co-existing value systems. That means the absolute victory of your party – the economic sector and necessarily limited moral horizon it represents – would be the death of your party and the reversal of all of its commitments. That means that the head of government and state, who represents the moment of the system as historical, cultural, and ethical totality, must hold contradictory and apparently conflictual ideas simultaneously, and integrate the plurality in fact. “You didn’t build that” – in context – meant we are all in this together: Each party or faction or belief system contributes, is interdependent with the others, even the most independent Sainted Entrepreneurs and Holy Financiers, who have their Place of Honor in the Firmament of the Whole State, but not the only such Place.
Still you do not speak of liberty. True that liberty is useless without order. But it’s no chimera.
True that liberty is useless if our kids can’t function in the adult world. True that liberty is useless without equal opportunity. True that liberty is useless if you’re hungry and homeless.
And yes we have a mixed economy, charity for the poor, the occasional “Make Work pay” program. As for Fukuyama—who’s still more Kojeve than Strauss—I think he’s right, then I think he’s wrong, because the statist vision cannot sustain. You can’t have half the population live off the other half.
Well, mebbe you can. We’re about to find out.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/94917407/Half-of-the-U-S-A-Lives-in-Households-Getting-Benefits-Phil-Isso-WSJ
You speak of us being interdependent and that’s true. But when the voluntary dimension vanishes, of the shared Americanhood [Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Community,” if you will], then half of us are just slaves for the other half.
Is it really true that political self interest is nobler somehow than economic self interest? You know I think you are taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us? Well, I don’t even trust you to do that.
I’d rather be ruled by Friedman and the capitalist bogeymen than Phil Donahue and the faculty of Harvard. The latter don’t even promise me liberty, they do not know what it means.
“This whole thing with Obama saying the rich don’t pay their taxes is f—ing bulls—,” he said. “First they say to you… ‘The United States of America, you can do anything you want — go for it! So then you go for it and you make it and everyone’s like, ‘[Bleep] you!’”
Jon Lovitz, philosopher, Democrat
I don’t think Friedman fully understands the critique of harsh free-market policies. He’s straw-manning when he says liberals don’t think people have selfish tendencies, or that those tendencies can’t somehow be harnessed for good.
The problem most people have with a radically free-market system is that it often grates on the moral intuitions of the people who function within it. Most people don’t intuit that CEOs are 500 times more deserving of a paycheck than workers. Lockean individualism worked reasonably well when it was tempered by conservatives’ concern for the community, but now that the better-off are sequestering themselves in posh new neighborhoods instead of solidifying into pillars of their old communities, the stabilizing quid pro quo is lost.
TVD, I think you’re stuck in a tight spot: In order for your appeal to liberty to have any force, you need to say that the concept can be defined uncontroversially. But in fact most people have a more expansive definition of liberty than you would, one that would encompass questions of economic fairness. I know you like to bring up Haidt a lot, so I want to try to spin him on you for a bit: I think you, like most economic conservatives, fail to pick up on one of the subtler moral senses.
Robert, modern liberals can’t define liberty at all. They re-define it. Under this whole “you didn’t build it” thing is that truth. See previous remarks.
TVD, what do you think of the possibility that government spending on the poor and other interference with the market is a premium paid by the rich to keep the social order more or less intact, thereby enabling more inequality than would exist if there were no strong central economic authority? Maybe conservatives could get their dream of less government if they were more serious about the private charity or community work that theoretically takes the edge off of Darwinian free-marketism.
Robert, I’m also an FDR Democrat, you know. 😉
Conservatives give a lot more to charity than statists [not just to churches: even blood!], you know, so I think it’s unproductive to go there. Conservatives do walk the walk.
Why? A clue may be found in the 1996 General Social Survey, which asked Americans whether they agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality.” People who “disagreed strongly” with that statement gave 12 times more money to charity per year than those who “agreed strongly” with the statement.
Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/04/conservatives-give-more-to-cha.html#ixzz22eMKH9y8
To assuage guilt, perhaps? Okay, that was cheap I know. But seriously, I’ve never been a particular fan of charity. Nor of the government variety either.
What I’m aiming for is an economic order that’s both moral and efficient and simply doesn’t produce much in the way of poverty beyond the truly helpless. I think it’s possible but it isn’t what Uncle Milty was selling.
“Ordered liberty,” hold the “liberty.”
No, Tom, that’s not it at all. Maybe I’m not being fair to Milton. I can’t say I’ve actually read much of him; just what other folks have said (from both sides, mind you). But don’t make assumptions about me either, OK?
Not directed @ you, Rod. Liberals don’t speak of “liberty” anymore, except mebbe sex & drugs. CK’s been very forthright and in return, I didn’t demagogue him on “national socialism” and the like. It is what it is. I like the honesty.
“I’m going to take your money, but then I’ll give it back to you if you do with it what I tell you to do. Is that a way you have a free society of free, self-reliant individuals who are responsible for themselves?”—Milton Friedman
Tom, those figures are disputable, although I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives bested liberals by a smaller margin.
It’s not just private charity that conservatives need to step up on. You’ll almost never hear conservatives talk about how a facially-neutral economic system can have biased effects due to historical inequalities, and how to mitigate these effects. There will always be strong opposition to the Republican program as long as this is so.
Is this about conservatives suck, Robert? Yr reply is mostly ad hom, that conservatives don’t walk the walk. I give you evidence they do walk the walk, but you dismiss it.
[Our problems remain epistemological.]
Neither is the principle of charity that simple. The principled argument against the welfare state is that it brings ruin to its beneficiaries. FYIGM is caricature, demagoguery. [Just as the argument that Al Gore is an energy pig does not address the global warming question itself.]
As for “historical inequalities,” I detect code for America’s racial history. Am I being unfair?
If not, leaving aside the question of the moral debt the son of Irish immigrants owes to the great-granddaughter of slaves [none?], do race-based reparations like affirmative action even help at this point? This is an unfillable sinkhole in my view.
There will always be strong opposition to the Republican program as long as this is so.
It looks that way in the Democrat bubble. But aside from its ill-gotten gain of a monolithic black vote, [via 1) race-baiting and 2) nominating Obama], the opposition to race-based politics is comfortably in the majority, I think.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/obamas-challenge-keep-the-white-vote-down
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1240/sotomayor-supreme-court-affirmative-action-minority-preferences
I didn’t think of it as an ad hom, TVD. I meant it more like, “conservatives would more likely get what they want if they were better at walking the walk, or if they listened to liberals about improving their form.” I specifically said that I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives were more charitable than liberals. I’ve seen conflicting figures about it, but to be honest your 12-1 ratio is just absurd.
No, I don’t think descendants of poor Irish immigrants should foot the bill for slave reparations. I’ve actually written on this very site about this very problem — I’ll be the first guy to stipulate that these problems are nearly intractable. But I also don’t see conservatives talking about how to correct yawping racial inequalities. Every time y’all sink into the fatalism of “unfillable sinkholes,” you fall a little further from heaven.
All the GOP can offer is colorblindness. The Democratic Party is out of business without racial ressentiment: it stokes it, it feeds it. It hasn’t won the white vote since 1964!
Of course it’s an unfillable sinkhole, both for the GOP because it can never outbid the Dems [“compassionate conservatism” tried], and for the Democrat thesis, that they are the protector of the weak [read: blacks here] and the Democratic Party is all that stands between black America and the return of the Klan.
And that’s no overstatement.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/05/11/house-democrats-get-training-to-play-the-race-card/
The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious.
…
Wiley urged Democrats to appeal to “white swing voters while building support among voters of color.” She explained that Democratic outreach to white voters needs to communicate that “people of color are in pain and it’s the same pain I, as a White person, would or do feel. It’s [about] humanizing people of color.”
That’s where you come in, and discussions like this…
TVD, with respect, that’s an obscene misuse of the word “slave.”
If you’re going to make “liberty” the ultimate criterion, then simply repeating that liberty equals free people doing free things freely for free purposes in a free way – i.e., liberty = liberty – is, as I said before, simply an empty form. When you fill it with obnoxious claims relating to slavery, such that the distribution of “benefits” to ca. 50% of the populace apparently equates with the “enslavement” of the other 50%, you’re just taking the Alice position on language, the words meaning whatever you say they mean. You cheapen your idea of liberty, reduce it to “type of monetary relationship to government.” We all receive “benefits” from our citizenship. If caring for each other makes us slaves to each other, then that’s a good form of enslavement, and the liberty you offer is a sick and crazy twisted little thing. In the meantime, it is a matter of total indifference to my freedom in any respect, freedom-from, freedom-for, degree of “volition” theoretically embodied in my citizenship, status as slave or status as slave-master, what percentage of the populace receives “benefits” of a certain type, as opposed to all of the other types, from programs administered by the federal government.
Speak meaningfully of liberty, CK. As always, I’ve lost the Mexican standoff, and moved first so that the “liberal” position can attack mine instead of make its own affirmative case.
The left-liberal case does not speak of liberty. How you can have “liberal” without liberty I do not know. What you speak of here is communtarianism, collectivism, fascism if you will [and I mean that non-pejoratively]. I have asked you for a word to describe yourself that is fair and non-pejorative, but you have not obliged.
Keep in mind I have many communitarian bones in my own body. I am no libertarian. But if “slave” is an overstatement, then substitute a word that describes half of us living off the other half. And then tell me how that’s ‘fair,” “just,” and sustainable, for that is your task.
[And the Benedict Anderson is apt, I think. Once the feeling of community is gone, government coercion is mere tyranny.]
Have no idea at this point what “liberty” means to you. It’s just three syllables you attach to the discourse of political friends, and refrain from attaching to anyone else’s position.
“Half of us living off the other half” is your construction. Receiving benefits of some unspecified type and at some unspecified level via the federal government, is probably not “living off” – not that I concede it matters, or would say much intrinsically regarding freedom if we all “lived off” the contributions of one and only one man declared the true owner of all of our assets.
Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why whichever half is the slave half. According to Allen West, it would be the receiving half, and it is, indeed, more normal for the slavemaster to handle such matters. Anyway, I’m not going to do your work for you: Why would either position be “slavery,” and why does the negative connotation of “enslavement” survive the transformation? Maybe they’re our love slaves. Maybe we’re slaves of Christ, who know the greatest privilege of all is to serve those in need. Maybe freedom, a more self-contradictory but less negative word than “liberty,” is only ever in the soul, or the will, or the mind.
And why do you need a “word to describe [me]”? To what end or against which danger? Your peculiarly insistent demands for a statement just so on lib-er-ty conflict with my own sense of freedom, but, if you must have a take, I can think of none better or more concise than the one by Mr. Stevens on “The Latest Freed Man”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3TZ-FO48hZMC&lpg=PT227&ots=2h7uJhQ-YF&dq=wallace%20stevens%20the%20latest%20freed%20man&pg=PT227#v=onepage&q=wallace%20stevens%20the%20latest%20freed%20man&f=false
How can liberals not speak of liberty? And going all Thoreau [or Wallace Stevens] is a bit of overturning the table for a wonky academic type who started by citing Veblen.
As to who’s doing whose work, see my previous re the Mexican standoff. Whenever you cop to your affirmative case—communitarian, collectivist, statist, you pick the word—the clarity is a welcome relief from the usual obfuscations.
Now you’re saying it’s Christian charity? Now you have come to poppa. That has been my contention all along.
Onward Kantian Soldiers just doesn’t get the blood boiling.
Don’t know about “liberals,” TVD. Not my issue, whether they speak whichever magic syllables and how. I’ll assert the category of the social and related forms of collective being when someone else attempts to construct the individual, liberty, rights, private property, etc., as though comprehensible strictly on their own terms. Tend to do the opposite if and when I happen to run across someone, anyone, or any-it, who attempts to override the individual as category or essential moment.
Also, FYI, I haven’t set foot on a campus in many, many years; made a since-then oft-regretted decision against seeking an advanced degree; and have no pretensions to wonkery.
We’ll converse in English, then. 😉
You seem to be saying your rhetorical stance is contrarian: Friedman says red, you say blue. I think it’s fine to be contrarian, but unless you use the other guy’s terms as he understands them, it’s Babel.
[“Notes from Babel” was the former name of this sub-blog. I’m beginning to think we should have kept it.]
You write:
Have no idea at this point what “liberty” means to you.
Bold face mine. What “liberty” means to Friedman is what matters, since he’s the subject of the original post. What liberty means to most speakers of English will be fine.
What it means to me [or you] is subjective, if not idiosyncratic. Thumbwrestling in Jello. There is no point.
What Friedman means, what Romney meant in Poland [see elsewhere in the thread], what Obama [and you] pointedly do NOT say, that’s liberty, all right.
How many Straussians does it take to change a light bulb?
—None. The light is conspicuous by its absence.
And BTW, liberty can refer to the family, not the individual, per my previous on subsidiarity. It’s on that distinction that many of our current controversies may hinge. [Libertarianism in particular makes little provision for children and family, only what’s called “radical individualism,” a modern innovation which perhaps both you and I might deny the premises of.]
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-American-Individualism-Barry-Shain/dp/0691029121
*Late Add:
“Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America’s founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding–one based on a reformed Protestant communalism.
In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one’s life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans’ widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.”
Cheers, CK. A little jousting for fun, otherwise it’s solid and principled discussion. A pleasure, sir.
When you and CK argue you rest your end of the dispute on liberty as being most important, but when I’m the combatant you approach saying there’s too much of it. Hmm…
BTW:
Shouldn’t that disqualify Romney too? Or really anybody?
Romney praises Poland for ‘economic liberty’ [AP Headline: July 31]
http://news.yahoo.com/romney-praises-poland-economic-liberty-110454986.html
Mercy. Our problems remain…well, you know.
“Rather than heeding the false promise of a government-dominated economy, Poland sought to stimulate innovation, attract investment, expand trade, and live within its means,” Romney said in a speech in Warsaw. “Your success today is a reminder that the principles of free enterprise can propel an economy and transform a society.”
Obama simply doesn’t give that speech. You may reject what Romney said—and I think you do, I think CK certainly does—you can call it empty rhetoric. Etc. Etc. But that is not my point here. This is Friedman, this is neo-liberalism, and this is not Obama.
[You could have given me a bit of a break and googled “Romney’ and “liberty” yrself, bro.]
“I think CK certainly does”
I don’t reject what Romney said there, I just don’t find it very interesting or substantive. It’s just neo-liberal boilerplate, pure Washington Consensus of the sort that, contrary to your claim, Obama can be found mouthing at virtually any time, just as Romney has been found speaking in the language of interdependence and all-in-it-togetherness when it has suited his occasional purpose whether years ago or weeks ago.
Or maybe you can dig up the speech where Obama spoke up for government domination of the economy, and against stimulating innovation, attracting investment, expanding trade, living within our means, and helping old ladies cross the street.
Um, your turn, CK. Obama’s neo-liberal speech. Let’s see it. When was it?
Obama doesn’t give that speech that Romney did in Poland. It’s not him.
If you look at O’s scary commie speech at Cleveland, esp. the end, page 4 and following, you’ll find him touching the same bases.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-transcript-of-obamas-speech-on-the-economy-in-cleveland-ohio/2012/06/14/gJQAdY10cV_story_4.html
You’ll hardly find a speech he’s ever given on the economy where he doesn’t speak of an authentic but limited role for government, pay tribute to the private sector, reducing the deficit, and so on. He’s just barely to the left of neoliberal dead center, much to the chagrin of his left and further-left supporters.
Never said he’d give the exact same speech Romney would, either in its entirety or in every emphasis or nuance – obviously they wouldn’t.
Romney spouts Friedman. Obama doesn’t. Dig:
“At a moment this big, a moment when so many people are still struggling, I think you deserve a real debate about the economic plans we’re promoting. Governor Romney and the Republicans who run Congress believe that if you simply take away regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, the market will solve all of our problems on its own. If you agree with that, you should vote for them. And I promise you, they will take us in that direction.”
That’s right. Let’s get it out in the open.
“I believe we need a plan for better education and training and for energy independence and for new research and innovation, for rebuilding our infrastructure, for a tax code that creates jobs in America and pays down our debt in a way that’s balanced.”
Blahblahblah government, roads, bridges, etc. etc. Where is the talk of liberating capital and initiative?
No, that’s the other guy. There is a difference. If it doesn’t involve the hand of government, Obama gives it lip service at best, but talking out of both sides of his mouth is what you should reserve your disdain for.
Yes, there is a dime’s worth of difference between them. In fact, several $billion.
I should add though that, in the interest of preparing the populace for necessary decisions, or developing a mandate for them, it’s also a good idea for a president or potential president to speak of a balanced approach and critical exceptions – even if the other side gets crazy about it.
Hey, you provided the “meaningfully” qualifier…
Worth a chuckle. Yes, I consider “radical individualism” as libertarians seem to understand it to be fairly insupportable, but I’m not committed to contrarianism. To the contrary…
…you’ve confided a soft spot for Nietzsche, and you seem proud of your ability to hold seeming opposites in mind simultaneously, so let me try it this way. Both Hegel and Nietzsche (who apparently never read Hegel, so sometimes repeated his insights as though the first to uncover them) envision the truth or the meeting of all minds as a kind of banquet (Nietzsche/Zarathustra) or revel (Hegel). Hegel – who is funnier than he is typically credited for being – goes a little further. The True, for him, is the “Bachannalian revel” at which no attendee is sober, but each collapses upon saying his piece, so (in typically paradoxically Hegelian fashion), the revel may outwardly appear quite calm. Not too far from that passage – from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, which no one has a good excuse not to have read, as it’s neither very long nor very difficult, plus is a laff riot – he also argues that every true philosophical statement is also false, by virtue of being a philosophical statement. Understanding why and how that is so, and may but may not apply to that observation as well, can be very helpful of relieving oneself of unnecessary commitments to political labels.
Such a sensibility did not prevent Hegel from famously drinking a toast to liberty on Bastille Day. They may go together.
If by radical individualism you mean the Objectivist “ME!!! Fish all other life on earth!” crap then I can see quite clearly why you’d see it that way. However, no man being an island doesn’t mean the opposite is true either.
Googling “radical individualism” is worth your while.
I’m not saying that’s what radical individualism is, Tom. I just suspect that’s what CK thinks it is, because for some reason 95% of what people who aren’t libertarians think of when it comes to libertarianism is straight out of Rand.
I’d say he knows. Google it, it’s very relevant here. In fact, it’s where conservatives and liberals have common ground against the far left and the libertarians. ;-P
http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2012/07/radical-individualism-and-the-common-good.html
Now why would you suspect such a horrid thing of me?
I consider the philosophical foundation for individualism, radical or otherwise, as the conception of the human at the basis of “liberalism” and the Enlightenment, to be inadequate. I can make sense of individualism as a component or moment in a conception of the whole, as a position of one of those attendees at Hegel’s revel, but taken on its own terms and made the basis of a political ideology I consider it incomplete, out of balance, and the source of many modern infirmities. When suggested somewhere above that the real problem with “you didn’t build that” was that “you are not you,” I had this critique in mind.
So does society have a claim on a person above that they have towards themself or not? You can’t tell CK the answer is No and tell me the answer is Yes.
Why should CK have all the contrarian fun?
Julie Cohen’s “Configuring the Networked Self” is a must-read for the reflexive individualists here.
I think there is a fundamental problem with greed. The greed that equates to money and power. If one wins the game and losses their humanity nothing is really won.
Virtue is a beautiful thing to live with, and a life without it is a ugly place.
I’m greedy. You’re greedy.
You know who isn’t greedy?
The guy who is offered $20K for 2 hours work– and doesn’t take it.
the guy who gives away ideas like candy.
Zirp zirp zirp.
I haven’t filled “pills with baby flesh” lately, is that what the $20K for 2 hours was for?
No. It was a reevaluation of a realestate transaction.
Raise the list price by 50%, because the house wasn’t selling.
A good appraisal is worth a hell of a lot of cash.