As per the title.
Why does the word socialism in the US cause frothing at the mouth? Not comming from the US I don't understand this, I can see socialism and capitalism both have positive points as well as negative ones, but it seems crazy to me that when Obama talked of changing the healthcare system there were all these people protesting saying "Government hands off my health" and such.
After watching "Sicko" on TV the other night I think the average US person has little knowledge on socialism. I live in Australia with what would be called a "socialist" healthcare system and I think its great but we are not a socialist country.
So, without getting political, why is the culture of the United States of America so fixated on capitalism?
Markets spring up wherever people start trading. If you want an example of a market created solely by individuals, all you need to do is head to your nearest farmer's market. Farmer's markets are an excellent choice for an example of spontaneous free markets because they are organized by private organizations, and are made up of purely voluntary participants, both buyers and sellers.
Is the weed in Florida that good? I'm movin'.
The Founding Fathers, inspired by Enlightenmight scholars, determined the following: * Humans are imperfect * No agency, when directly controlled by a human agency, can hope to be objective or just, due to the flaws of menThe free market and the United States Constitution are in essence "blind" agents. They do not suffer from subjective bias. The market allows for dynamic valuation of goods, while the Constitution cannot judge its subjects. To Americans, aware of their origins in Enlightenment thought, the free market and the Constitution represent the determining forces of economy and government, respectively.That is the simplest, most concise explanation I can provide, for now.
Note: Had to delete the second reply on this page which was breaking people's ability to post on the thread, apologies for any inconvenience.
No, you're obviously right. Socialism is a dirty word. But take away the abstraction and ask whether Americans want, say, the federal government to guarantee health care for all Americans, and the response is somewhat different.
Except that, of course, ideal markets and constitutions don't exist.
Those that do are reliant upon human interaction, interpretation, etc.
You are correct when you say that the coalition of individuals we call "the state" is the only entity in society that is seen as having a legitimate user of force over its claimed territory. To be sure, 'rights' are just words when men with guns come stomping down the street. Still, does not the state force you to pay homage to its image? You are threatened with expulsion, imprisonment or even death should you resist. So, let's look at it in childrens terms.
In the film A Bug's Life, an ant colony makes a deal with grass hoppers to protect them from big evil bugs, before we know it the grasshoppers ARE the big evil bugs. The argument that all statists put forward then is that "We need a state to protect us from other states". Okay fine. But how can we be assured of the quality of the states' products and services? We can't. Voting doesn't guarantee quality, certainly not for the minority.
Also, Thomas Hobbes argued your position, that people are evil and need divine intervention from a noble elite.
I don't care what people are trying to achieve, I care that they are using adequate means to achieve what they want. The government cannot guarantee healthcare even if it were desirable. People seem to think this is a post scarcity world. Think again.
If you want specifics why it cannot, I could go into it. Two words: Price calculation.
Your first sentence above is essentially correct (the second one we can debate, but holds a lot of truth as well). It is difficult (if not impossible) for any company to do business where there is no authority to enforce laws of civilization.
However, I have a small bone to pick with the last statement. Not on intent, just on wording. A Nation-state is a specific kind of country. Basically one where all the peoples are from a common Heritage (think France or Germany). A better way to ask it would have been to use a slash - Nation/State.
And as far as the answer, since you are correct in the first place, I cannot think of any real life examples of it for your question.
I'm not arguing for or against government involvement in health care. Mellowe's point was that 'socialism' is politically unpopular. Obviously, that's correct. However, when you distance policy from the socialist label (even if its goals and content don't change), opinion shifts.
I don't really follow you here either. I'm all for interpretations of Hobbes as a proto-liberal exponent of limited government, but surely he's not more of a libertarian than those who completely reject the state.
I could have sworn Thomas Hobbes was a major opponent of human freedom who believed we needed regular lashings from our government overlords to keep us in line.
Thomas Locke.
These are both 'misreadings,' at least according to my own experiences in the academic trenches. Hobbes was maybe "proto-liberal" in the sense of classical liberalism, which is focused on individual liberties and property rights. But he wasn't really either an 'opponent of' or 'advocate for' modern, rights-based political thinking.
The Hobbesian war of all against all is really 'proto-political science' written by a man trying to do for government studies what Newton would for physics by the time Hobbes was an old man. I don't really believe anything is science unless it can be discussed almost entirely via math, but political theory is an important part of intellectual history and Hobbes is a giant in that history.
Basically, Leviathan tries to explain why governments develop. He worked up a version of Aristotle's classic three categories of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Hobbes didn't oppose human freedom, he feared it because his view of the basic human condition was that we're a bunch of brutes who will more or less destroy each other unless a serious force checked our 'normal' misbehavior. That view of the human condition when combined with his tri-part structural analysis of governments left him pretty firmly endorsing monarchy.
I suppose the fact that Leviathan is a basic item on a serious social contract theory reading list could explain why someone would think it "proto-liberal." But when I read it three times in three years, I was undergoing a conversion from philosophical anarchism to representative democracy, so the power dynamics were the most important themes for me. That, and I never did take to Rousseau for some reason.
You probably mean John Locke, at least if you're trying to point out the guy who's often called Father of Liberalism (the social contract, now-called-conservative kind).
I'm confused then. I thought the poster you were recommending him to was the sort of person who would be strongly opposed anything Hobbes believed about the sociology of government. Maybe there's some not-so-subtle irony I'm missing.
As to the correct reading of Hobbes, my own opinion is probably more than a little bit influenced by commentators who emphasize the similarities between his account of human motivations and those of Locke and Kant. Rightly or wrongly, these views bleed over into how I situate his beliefs on government - hence my comment about his being a proto-liberal. You're certainly right that he isn't for or against modern, rights-based liberalism.
And I don't blame you for not liking Rousseau - Hobbes is definitely more rigorous, at least where politics are concerned.
Excellent choice of word, you even put it in italics. You would combine both the establishment, and successive interventions to manipulate that establishment, as one and the same. Establishing rule of law is a basic necessity, rewriting it is intervention. Intervention should be exercised with even greater care than is given to the establishment. The primary, overriding rule being do no harm. The secondary consideration should be to do so without influence towards any involved party. Law must be without favor or it is not just.
Our government practices the exact opposite when doing favors for corporations, and it is only distantly related to the action of establishing rule of law in a just manner. My paraphrasing is a valid criticism of your refusal to separate the two.
As a distantly related aside, why is there not a single sane individual in the court system? Just in the last week we should have enough bribery convictions to wipe out at least two thirds of the congress, along with our dear leader, and yet it's accepted as legitimate activity...
Natural law and such is amusing, but largely irrelevant to me. I prefer practical applications, Adam Smith is my kind of reading, but a distant precursor to the Constitution is less useful than the writings of those directly involved. I'm a little lost as to why you'd think Hobbes though, you keep calling me an anarchist. Out of the prominent natural law philosophers, he should be the least in line with me from what I know.
It's less that they like socialism when separated from the word, and more that they're just too dumb to think their way out of a wet paper bag.
Ask them whether they're entitled to someone elses time and property. If they say yes, strip them of theirs and see if they complain. You'll have a 100% rejection rate, including all the self professed communists out there living in staffed mansions. Perhaps when the mind numbingly stupid idiots grasp that health care isn't free, and the only way to get it without paying for it is to steal from someone else, they'll be less inclined.
Public hospitals are required by law to give health care regardless of the ability to pay anyway, the mind numbingly stupid idiots could at least grasp that they're already being stolen from to pay for someone elses bills in the first place.
Except Adam Smith was a socialist.
Can you back this up somehow? I believe Adam Smith had a line about us receiving our dinner not from the generosity of the baker, butcher, and brewer, but simply from their own enlightened self-interest. It seems to me that that statement is a pretty clear endorsement of free market operations.
Obviously this is an exxageration but he clearly had some socialist views. The rampant free market everything was certainly not his idea. If you actually read his books, he more than once warns for division of labor(for keeping the workers stupid) and for free enterprises in state affairs as well as poverty.
You're saying he was against businesses messing with the government, and that that was a socialist view? Um, no, most modern proponents of capitalism would say that businesses trying to get favors from the state is a bad idea, not because Adam Smith said it, but because the quickest way to end capitalism is to get government involved with running the markets. Just look at what is happening with all the companies that took bailout money from the government. They took the money, and now Obama owns them, and he is going around making all sorts of rules and regulations they can't say no to because they are owned by the federal government.
Socialists and historical accuracy have never gone together well, although Adam Smith being socialist is definitely a new one...
Smith laid out his reasoning for a minimalist government specifically to guard liberty and maximize productivity. His piece on economics is a defining work for Laissez faire capitalism without even using the term. Socialism is a control oriented government that goes far beyond the minor interventionism needed to make the guy roll over in his grave.
On a related note, Alexander Hamilton is the father of the modern fuckup that is the system of subsidization we have today. Unfortunately, he didn't like the hands off approach laid out in TWON. Oh for Jefferson and Madison to have won that argument...
Attacking free enterprise based on the writings of Adam Smith is no different than attacking the Theory of Evolution based on the writings of Charles Darwin. Sorry to break it to you, but almost all of Darwin's theories have been thrown away or improved upon ten fold. The same goes with Smith, he has very little to say that has not been elaborated on or refuted by later authors. Socialist/syndicalist/interventionist/mercantilist thinking, however, has been largely the same since day one. You can read Karl Marx, Heinrich Goebbels, Pol Pot, Hamilton, or Keynes and get largely the same picture of fallacies.
If you want a great exponent of capitalism, look no farther than Ludwig von Mises. Ironically, a man who is largely forgotten today. Yet, he predicted the Great Depression, the fall of socialist economies, and demonstrated the fallacy of thinking there might be a 'third way'.
http://mises.org/liberal.asp - Liberalism, a political and economic treatise.
http://mises.org/resources/3250 - Human Action, his magnum opus.
All available for free.
The operative term was "miserable sod," and I was most definitely attempting some brute-force irony.
But I'm a nonrecovering pomo, so I was also 'seriously' ragging on psychoak for how he can so often sound like both an anarchist and a devout (people are fundamentally thugs) Hobbesian. Mostly, I suspect, because he is utterly in denial about the fact that no writing can be read 'literally' and every poem, thesis, novel, and constitution in existence has no true meaning that does not include the minds of both readers and writers. I have some sympathy for that Hobbesian desire to understand society as well as one might understand an algebra problem or a clockwork, but alas, that at best still seems far, far beyond our species' intellectual capacity and could well be impossible.
Where did that bs come from? I'm not the guy trying to claim welfare in the Constitution was referring to entitlement programs...
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