[PLEASUREMAN]

The modern conservative is in many respects the most atomized, self-interested, and insular creature on the political landscape. Where the liberal pursues follies out of reckless and arrogant novelty-seeking, and to enshrine deviant behavior as normative (simply for something to do), the conservative is nothing and does nothing except to preserve his own complacent comfort. He appears to despise community and gladly frees himself from any responsibilities other than those that apply to his immediate desires (the need to curry favor with his boss, for example). Worse, he sneers at those who go farther than he is inclined to go.

Like a gluttonous vulgarian he has become obsessed with two things: his money and his possessions. While he professes to have a moral vision, it is so confused and so haphazardly applied to the world that it is more like a moral kaleidoscope, a toy he stares stupidly through convinced it is showing him something very sublime. If he pretends to be religious, it seems mainly for the chance to point out the shortcomings of others.

He comes by his political beliefs very easily. It is enough to know that a liberal is for something to decide that he is against it. He will claim that nearly anything is an infringement on his dearest freedoms (as here, in a masterpiece of conservative inanity) no matter what bizarre direction this takes him. At the same time, those ideas he is for he is witlessly for. He believes that businessmen will generally do no wrong and that any regulation of their activities is an outrage. While he is routinely paranoid about the actions of some government representative or other, he is serenely unconcerned about the colossal mergers of corporations or their role in shaping the culture. He is extremely preoccupied with the idea that those beneath him not escape what he sees as their obligations, and is proud of never having lifted a finger to aid them. (Being compelled to aid them is one of the things that sends him into a rage--but never doubt his Christian nature.)

It's not clear what, if anything, he is in favor of conserving anymore. Low tax rates? Class prerogatives? His own spiritual inertia? His awareness of tradition is very limited. He has no idea what the real threats to order and happiness are; he is too busy worrying himself about those perfidious LIBERALS. Yet those liberals will always get the better of him--they at least offer some direction, even if it is a wrong one. The pseudo-conservative is directionless.

[faggotron]

So what do you think the conservatives should be conserving then?

[antistoic]

PLEASUREMAN, 29 March 2010 - 11:37 PM:

It's not clear what, if anything, he is in favor of conserving anymore. Low tax rates? Class prerogatives? His own spiritual inertia? His awareness of tradition is very limited. He has no idea what the real threats to order and happiness are; he is too busy worrying himself about those perfidious LIBERALS. Yet those liberals will always get the better of him--they at least offer some direction, even if it is a wrong one. The pseudo-conservative is directionless.

Accurate analysis. This is why I always feel like laughing whenever some dumb Eurofag lectures me on how 'right-wing' America is - yes, by the mysterious political metric common to North America, Americans are on average more conservative than their cousins across the pond. But what does this even mean? I see more 'conserving' done by liberals like Michael Pollan and James Howard Kunstler, people who actually see meaning and fulfillment in community life, than conservative solipsists who seem downright determined to ignore the existence of anyone beyond themselves (and the constraints that others make on them).

[Lookwell!]

Great post Nancyboy but as usual you make a lot of statements or claims that you don't substanciate with examples; rather just letting them stand on their own. It's not that I disagree it's that I love to hear concrete examples of these statements to better understand them (otherwise it's very abstract to me)

PLEASUREMAN, 30 March 2010 - 01:37 AM:

It's not clear what, if anything, he is in favor of conserving anymore. Low tax rates? Class prerogatives? His own spiritual inertia? His awareness of tradition is very limited. He has no idea what the real threats to order and happiness are; he is too busy worrying himself about those perfidious LIBERALS. Yet those liberals will always get the better of him--they at least offer some direction, even if it is a wrong one. The pseudo-conservative is directionless.

Why isn't it clear what the modern (pseduo, as I assume you mean) conservative is conserving any more. Why and how is his concept or awareness of tradition limited? What are the real threats to order and happiness?

[PLEASUREMAN]

Lookwell!, 30 March 2010 - 12:12 PM:

Great post Nancyboy but as usual you make a lot of statements or claims that you don't substanciate with examples; rather just letting them stand on their own. It's not that I disagree it's that I love to hear concrete examples of these statements to better understand them (otherwise it's very abstract to me)

PLEASUREMAN, 30 March 2010 - 01:37 AM:

It's not clear what, if anything, he is in favor of conserving anymore. Low tax rates? Class prerogatives? His own spiritual inertia? His awareness of tradition is very limited. He has no idea what the real threats to order and happiness are; he is too busy worrying himself about those perfidious LIBERALS. Yet those liberals will always get the better of him--they at least offer some direction, even if it is a wrong one. The pseudo-conservative is directionless.

Why isn't it clear what the modern (pseduo, as I assume you mean) conservative is conserving any more. Why and how is his concept or awareness of tradition limited? What are the real threats to order and happiness?

It's true that in this case I wanted to generalize on the subject a bit as an opener to the thread. I'm less interested in what specific mis-representatives of conservatism (NR, Weekly Standard, Coulter, Limbaugh, Beck, the RNC) are doing than in what has become the culture of conservatism--the climate of argument and policy which has so little to recommend it, and which solves none of our pressing problems.

When I talk about the atomization and selfishness of conservatives I am directly addressing their lack of interest in shaping the culture (in truly helpful ways, not by putting more Becks on the air), their tendency to withdraw from public life to selfishly enjoy their own, their concern with defending an oligarchy via free market extremism, and their deliberate poisoning of public debate in order to take advantage of the crowd's ignorance (many examples of this seen with healthcare but the most egregious example being the discussion of "death panels", which was so disingenuous that it really must be called contemptible).

Take for example the conservative's support of free trade and unregulated capitalism--this is the antithesis of conservation, it introduces instability and tumultuous change everywhere. His support (or refusal to oppose) media concentration has led to a sickening, profit-hungry media establishment notorious for its hostility to genuine conservatism (the one media organization that claims to be on his side is among the vanguards of crassness and stupidity).

Some of the problems of the modern conservative are evident in the absence of action. He regards much of the exploitation of the poor and working class with perfect equanimity. He is never very worried about the seedier aspects of capitalism and how they war with the standards of communities he does not happen to live in. If he knew the first thing about tradition he would know that it succumbs easily to entropy, and that vigilance is required to protect it. I see no such organized vigilance.

[Bibles 'n Guns]

One thing I've noticed about tea party and other "ordinary folk" conservatives is that they are trending more towards libertarianism. They object less and less to leftist social dogma over time and focus more on economic issues, an area of focus where it's harder to be pinned as a racist bigot. I think this ties into what you said earlier about conservatives wanting to avoid situations that make them uncomfortable and entail lots of drama and conflict.

[PRCalDude]

PLEASUREMAN, 30 March 2010 - 12:43 PM:

Lookwell!, 30 March 2010 - 12:12 PM:

Great post Nancyboy but as usual you make a lot of statements or claims that you don't substanciate with examples; rather just letting them stand on their own. It's not that I disagree it's that I love to hear concrete examples of these statements to better understand them (otherwise it's very abstract to me)

PLEASUREMAN, 30 March 2010 - 01:37 AM:

It's not clear what, if anything, he is in favor of conserving anymore. Low tax rates? Class prerogatives? His own spiritual inertia? His awareness of tradition is very limited. He has no idea what the real threats to order and happiness are; he is too busy worrying himself about those perfidious LIBERALS. Yet those liberals will always get the better of him--they at least offer some direction, even if it is a wrong one. The pseudo-conservative is directionless.

Why isn't it clear what the modern (pseduo, as I assume you mean) conservative is conserving any more. Why and how is his concept or awareness of tradition limited? What are the real threats to order and happiness?

It's true that in this case I wanted to generalize on the subject a bit as an opener to the thread. I'm less interested in what specific mis-representatives of conservatism (NR, Weekly Standard, Coulter, Limbaugh, Beck, the RNC) are doing than in what has become the culture of conservatism--the climate of argument and policy which has so little to recommend it, and which solves none of our pressing problems.

When I talk about the atomization and selfishness of conservatives I am directly addressing their lack of interest in shaping the culture (in truly helpful ways, not by putting more Becks on the air), their tendency to withdraw from public life to selfishly enjoy their own, their concern with defending an oligarchy via free market extremism, and their deliberate poisoning of public debate in order to take advantage of the crowd's ignorance (many examples of this seen with healthcare but the most egregious example being the discussion of "death panels", which was so disingenuous that it really must be called contemptible).

Take for example the conservative's support of free trade and unregulated capitalism--this is the antithesis of conservation, it introduces instability and tumultuous change everywhere. His support (or refusal to oppose) media concentration has led to a sickening, profit-hungry media establishment notorious for its hostility to genuine conservatism (the one media organization that claims to be on his side is among the vanguards of crassness and stupidity).

Some of the problems of the modern conservative are evident in the absence of action. He regards much of the exploitation of the poor and working class with perfect equanimity. He is never very worried about the seedier aspects of capitalism and how they war with the standards of communities he does not happen to live in. If he knew the first thing about tradition he would know that it succumbs easily to entropy, and that vigilance is required to protect it. I see no such organized vigilance.

Most of this is so obvious as to be beyond dispute. I think I'd reframe what you call "free market" into another concept. For example, big corporations don't leave anything to chance. They pay J street to lobby Kongress to legislate in their favor. This reduces competition and suppresses upstarts.

Even during the time of Jefferson, capitalists were essentially amoral people. Jefferson wanted to embargo the British and Boston traders would make a fortune violating the trade embargo. Perhaps, at that time, Kongresscritters themselves had more moral sense than to allow themselves to be bought off by such people. Perhaps not.

At any rate, I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't really have "free markets" in the US - that's part of the problem. We have fascism, which Mussolini called "corporatism" because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

[PLEASUREMAN]

PRCalDude, 30 March 2010 - 08:27 PM:

At any rate, I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't really have "free markets" in the US - that's part of the problem. We have fascism, which Mussolini called "corporatism" because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Yes, this is more clearly stated than I was doing. It's why I won't work for a large company again. I can't spend day after day with people who perform dehumanizing work (to them and others) and have no idea.

But in any event to have free markets requires government regulation, just as to have safe neighborhoods requires a police force. Somehow pseudo-conservatives can't make the obvious connection.

[PRCalDude]

PLEASUREMAN, 30 March 2010 - 06:59 PM:

PRCalDude, 30 March 2010 - 08:27 PM:

At any rate, I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't really have "free markets" in the US - that's part of the problem. We have fascism, which Mussolini called "corporatism" because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Yes, this is more clearly stated than I was doing. It's why I won't work for a large company again. I can't spend day after day with people who perform dehumanizing work (to them and others) and have no idea.

But in any event to have free markets requires government regulation, just as to have safe neighborhoods requires a police force. Somehow pseudo-conservatives can't make the obvious connection.

The Austrian argument is that monopoly can't exist without government help. The longer I live, the more I agree with this idea. We've seen plenty of evidence of this over the past 3 years with "too big to fail" companies made even bigger with the blessing of the Treasury dept.

The original intent of the 2nd amendment obviated the need for police forces. We were intended to handle crime ourselves or prevent it altogether with our firearms. I think an absence of government "help" in the economy would probably prevent most of the corporatism we see today. Big corporations can only exist in a symbiosis with big government. I'm willing to entertain counterarguments, of course. But this is what I see much of these days. I think it really got out of hand under FDR.

[antistoic]

PRCalDude, 30 March 2010 - 05:27 PM:

At any rate, I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't really have "free markets" in the US - that's part of the problem. We have fascism, which Mussolini called "corporatism" because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

I think a perfectly free market is unattainable in practice. It may make perfect sense on paper, but in the end regulation will always creep back in somewhere. It has to, because it goes against human nature to abandon our protective instincts towards our nation, community, family, ethnicity and class for the sake of economic purity. In any case, I see no indication that a complete liberalization of the market will do much of anything except further empower our current oligarchy. Why should we want 'free markets'? Just because they're 'free'?

And by the way, Mussolini's corporatism has nothing to do with corporations in the business sense. It's a vision of economic cooperation that integrates businesses, workers, and government into a single political organism -- instead of pitting each against the other like a tragedy of the commons writ large, which is essentially what we have now.

This post has been edited by mlad: 31 March 2010 - 02:23 AM

[PLEASUREMAN]

Unfortunately I don't think that integration can work; business and government are already partially integrated in that both are run by the same managerial class with the same values. I don't know how well corporatism fared under Mussolini.

[PRCalDude]

mlad, 31 March 2010 - 12:22 AM:

PRCalDude, 30 March 2010 - 05:27 PM:

At any rate, I think the point I'm trying to make is that we don't really have "free markets" in the US - that's part of the problem. We have fascism, which Mussolini called "corporatism" because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

I think a perfectly free market is unattainable in practice. It may make perfect sense on paper, but in the end regulation will always creep back in somewhere. It has to, because it goes against human nature to abandon our protective instincts towards our nation, community, family, ethnicity and class for the sake of economic purity. In any case, I see no indication that a complete liberalization of the market will do much of anything except further empower our current oligarchy. Why should we want 'free markets'? Just because they're 'free'?

The whole idea behind "free markets" is efficiency and price. The person or group who produces the most efficiently sets the lowest price point and everyone benefits by being able to buy a product cheaper. Of course regulation always creeps in. I'm not against regulation at all. I'm against huge corporations buying our politicians and turning their bits to and fro. Let's not throw out Adam Smith just because we don't like what's going on now. Besides, nothing can eliminate human greed, so the invisible hand will always be there regardless of the social glue that binds us all together.

Quote

And by the way, Mussolini's corporatism has nothing to do with corporations in the business sense. It's a vision of economic cooperation that integrates businesses, workers, and government into a single political organism -- instead of pitting each against the other like a tragedy of the commons writ large, which is essentially what we have now.

So Mussolini's vision and the vision of our elites are essentially the same. It didn't work out right in practice, but they (the government party and big business) want us all working for them in perfect harmony for low wages. What else explains all of the diversity infomercials and mass immigration? They want to have their cake and eat it too.

[PLEASUREMAN]

PRCalDude, 31 March 2010 - 10:22 PM:

The whole idea behind "free markets" is efficiency and price. The person or group who produces the most efficiently sets the lowest price point and everyone benefits by being able to buy a product cheaper. Of course regulation always creeps in. I'm not against regulation at all. I'm against huge corporations buying our politicians and turning their bits to and fro. Let's not throw out Adam Smith just because we don't like what's going on now. Besides, nothing can eliminate human greed, so the invisible hand will always be there regardless of the social glue that binds us all together.

The problem is that capitalism will search for the most "efficient" production and lowest price irrespective of whether it also finds a place for meaningful and fulfilling work--and in fact it seems more and more to be producing dehumanizing work environments and a consumerist society which has no values to speak of. I cannot support a free market system that results in what we have today--and I don't see how any conservative can. The very values that conservatism is supposed to care about are routinely assaulted with no better excuse than that there is money in it.

[antistoic]

PRCalDude, 31 March 2010 - 07:22 PM:

The whole idea behind "free markets" is efficiency and price. The person or group who produces the most efficiently sets the lowest price point and everyone benefits by being able to buy a product cheaper. Of course regulation always creeps in. I'm not against regulation at all. I'm against huge corporations buying our politicians and turning their bits to and fro. Let's not throw out Adam Smith just because we don't like what's going on now. Besides, nothing can eliminate human greed, so the invisible hand will always be there regardless of the social glue that binds us all together.

At some point you have to admit intangible concerns that may amend economic efficiency, insofar as such is defined in terms of production. The concerns I'm alluding to you can probably guess at, but suffice it to say they orient around questions of social ontology. Economic efficiency is necessary in some amount for the basic survival of a nation, but it serves the same purpose in the national organism that eating does for the human organism. It would probably seem bleakly deterministic to explain human existence in terms of our dependence on food, so it should seem no less absurd when we divorce economic efficiency from a holistic understanding of human society, and reduce the latter to a complex web of economic interactions -- which is what Smith and his followers have done.

This view of economic determinism has been appropriated by the right for so long that we ('we' meaning us in the Anglo-American world) rarely stop to think and question it, despite how fundamentally anti-conservative it is. Indeed, the vicissitudes of the free market have done more to empower agents of change than have all the petty communist tyrants and socialist revolutions in history.

Quote

So Mussolini's vision and the vision of our elites are essentially the same. It didn't work out right in practice, but they (the government party and big business) want us all working for them in perfect harmony for low wages. What else explains all of the diversity infomercials and mass immigration? They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Are you kidding? Mussolini would have had our elites executed as state-parasites. Contrary to popular belief, Mussolini's solution was not to simply agglomerate the reigning powers of the political/economic body into an enormous Orwellian apparatus that preys upon 'the little guy'. He wanted to draw the constituent members and institutions of society away from their selfish focus into one functioning body (hence corporatism) that operates on behalf of the national good. Mussolini hated how democracies balanced power by promoting a Malthusian free-for-all, where what could be good for a person could be bad for his business, what could be good for his business could be bad for the country, and what could be good for the country could be bad for its leaders.

The existence of these multitudinous battling factions, Mussolini says, dilutes the competence of the nation to settle and manage its affairs in its own interests. To resolve the dilemma, the theory goes, unite them in a Hegelian totality and set a leader as its head charged with channeling the nation's will into a plan of action. We can argue endlessly about whether this succeeded in practice, but you can probably already see that this is vastly different from the situation America remains in now.

[HopeAndChange44]

My main beef with modern-day economics is something it shares with academia in general and progressive politics in particular - a seemingly limitless hubris. Whether Friedmanites or Keynesians, one thing on which there is unanimous agreement is that anything that cannot be (or just hasn't been) measured and plugged into a spreadsheet is irrelevant and should be ignored. Where a normal person sees massive layoffs, they see increased productivity. They look at children playing in a beautiful field and see an economic wasteland. If it occurs to them that the field might have some value, they might do something asinine like go around and ask people how much they'd pay to keep it. Then they'd report this information to city hall, explaining that the people would clearly be better served by a McDonald's on that land. Ten years down the line, the kids are sitting inside playing video games and their parents are wondering why they're so fat. The concepts of unintended irreversible consequences and deferring to tradition are alien to the modern intellectual. "If it feels good, do it" is their only guiding principle. Don't blame economics - this mindset turns everyone in every station into a wrecking ball.

[PLEASUREMAN]

It's a common problem, and one you would think conservatives would have the motivation to aggressively confront. But read the mainstream conservative periodicals--at best you'll find a few sneers at this sort of thinking. YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND, FREE MARKETS WILL PRODUCE THE OUTCOME THAT PEOPLE REALLY WANT. Where does this belief that social institutions are impervious to harm come from? It sounds like the opposite of conservative to me, and is readily contradicted with a look out the window.

[PRCalDude]

HopeAndChange44, 01 April 2010 - 08:18 AM:

My main beef with modern-day economics is something it shares with academia in general and progressive politics in particular - a seemingly limitless hubris. Whether Friedmanites or Keynesians, one thing on which there is unanimous agreement is that anything that cannot be (or just hasn't been) measured and plugged into a spreadsheet is irrelevant and should be ignored. Where a normal person sees massive layoffs, they see increased productivity. They look at children playing in a beautiful field and see an economic wasteland. If it occurs to them that the field might have some value, they might do something asinine like go around and ask people how much they'd pay to keep it. Then they'd report this information to city hall, explaining that the people would clearly be better served by a McDonald's on that land. Ten years down the line, the kids are sitting inside playing video games and their parents are wondering why they're so fat.

I think much of what we see today in the form of big corporation monopoly is a product of the government/big business collusion. Backing up a step, I think we've gone to a big business model because our laws are now structured to favor such things. In turn, big businesses lobby to keep the legislation going in their favor. It's a positive feedback loop.

On the labor side, workers colluded with Jewish union leader Marxists to give us the union labor environment that is so hostile to productivity and business (see: the American auto industry). This, in turn, lead to big businesses bringing in illegals where American laborers would have otherwise been preferable. In short, there's plenty of blame to go all the way around.

I come from a small business family. My dad and grandad owned a sheet metal manufacturing business in Los Angeles during the 70s and early 80s. Eventually, they decided they needed to either purchase new equipment that required far fewer employees or go out of business. They chose the latter. They never mentioned greed as a reason for wanting less labor as they weren't making any money anyways. They mentioned the problems with workers comp, the whites not wanting to work, the hiring of workers and training them only to have them run off shortly, and the anti-small business laws.

Incidentally, American manufacturing output has only gone up as manufacturing employment has fallen off a cliff in this country.

We can't underestimate the atrocious small business climate in this country as a reason for the big business environment. I deny that "free trade" has much to do with it. As PMAN has frequently stated, managers in this country don't really know what they're doing and outsourcing all of our jobs is almost certain to clobber our productivity in the very near future, thus leading to horrible inefficiencies. On top of all that, American businessmen abhor China and going over to China for business. They simply see it as a necessary evil. No one likes flying 11 hours straight to deal with autistic Chinamen in their wreck of a country. They think it's depressing.

In the mid 90s, Los Angeles was the number 1 manufacturing center in the world. AFter the Rodney King riots, manufacturers said "F-this," decided not to rebuild, and moved most of their operations to China. When all is said and done, arbitrage only provides an advantage to China of about 15%, which we could conceivably level-out due to the fact that lead times are longer in China and you have to pay to ship goods across the entire Pacific ocean. Also, Chinese labor costs are skyrocketing. But American politicians just can't seem to get off their asses to do anything about it.

Quote

The concepts of unintended irreversible consequences and deferring to tradition are alien to the modern intellectual. "If it feels good, do it" is their only guiding principle. Don't blame economics - this mindset turns everyone in every station into a wrecking ball.

:Calvinist: Amen

[PRCalDude]

mlad, 31 March 2010 - 11:28 PM:

PRCalDude, 31 March 2010 - 07:22 PM:

The whole idea behind "free markets" is efficiency and price. The person or group who produces the most efficiently sets the lowest price point and everyone benefits by being able to buy a product cheaper. Of course regulation always creeps in. I'm not against regulation at all. I'm against huge corporations buying our politicians and turning their bits to and fro. Let's not throw out Adam Smith just because we don't like what's going on now. Besides, nothing can eliminate human greed, so the invisible hand will always be there regardless of the social glue that binds us all together.

At some point you have to admit intangible concerns that may amend economic efficiency, insofar as such is defined in terms of production. The concerns I'm alluding to you can probably guess at, but suffice it to say they orient around questions of social ontology. Economic efficiency is necessary in some amount for the basic survival of a nation, but it serves the same purpose in the national organism that eating does for the human organism. It would probably seem bleakly deterministic to explain human existence in terms of our dependence on food, so it should seem no less absurd when we divorce economic efficiency from a holistic understanding of human society, and reduce the latter to a complex web of economic interactions -- which is what Smith and his followers have done.

Can you show me where Adam Smith or I have done this or supported cold economic determinism? Here's where Adam Smith discusses free trade:
http://www.econlib.o...smWN13.html#f49

I find very little with which to disagree there.

Quote

This view of economic determinism has been appropriated by the right for so long that we ('we' meaning us in the Anglo-American world) rarely stop to think and question it, despite how fundamentally anti-conservative it is. Indeed, the vicissitudes of the free market have done more to empower agents of change than have all the petty communist tyrants and socialist revolutions in history.

Again, can you support this idea? Neo-conservatives - who are not conservatives - think globalism is fine. Take it up with them. I likewise deny that Jewish Marxism has had a less deleterious effect on this country than capitalism as Adam Smith describes it.

Quote

So Mussolini's vision and the vision of our elites are essentially the same. It didn't work out right in practice, but they (the government party and big business) want us all working for them in perfect harmony for low wages. What else explains all of the diversity infomercials and mass immigration? They want to have their cake and eat it too.

Are you kidding? Mussolini would have had our elites executed as state-parasites. Contrary to popular belief, Mussolini's solution was not to simply agglomerate the reigning powers of the political/economic body into an enormous Orwellian apparatus that preys upon 'the little guy'. He wanted to draw the constituent members and institutions of society away from their selfish focus into one functioning body (hence corporatism) that operates on behalf of the national good. Mussolini hated how democracies balanced power by promoting a Malthusian free-for-all, where what could be good for a person could be bad for his business, what could be good for his business could be bad for the country, and what could be good for the country could be bad for its leaders.

The existence of these multitudinous battling factions, Mussolini says, dilutes the competence of the nation to settle and manage its affairs in its own interests. To resolve the dilemma, the theory goes, unite them in a Hegelian totality and set a leader as its head charged with channeling the nation's will into a plan of action. We can argue endlessly about whether this succeeded in practice, but you can probably already see that this is vastly different from the situation America remains in now.
[/quote]

Fair enough. Perhaps this is a better term for our form of government:
http://en.wikipedia..../Corporatocracy

[antistoic]

PRCalDude, 01 April 2010 - 06:00 PM:

Can you show me where Adam Smith or I have done this or supported cold economic determinism? Here's where Adam Smith discusses free trade:
http://www.econlib.o...smWN13.html#f49

I find very little with which to disagree there.

. . .

Again, can you support this idea? Neo-conservatives - who are not conservatives - think globalism is fine. Take it up with them. I likewise deny that Jewish Marxism has had a less deleterious effect on this country than capitalism as Adam Smith describes it.

Of course, few economic determinists are as brash as to outright state that they are economic determinists. If you're looking for a definitive statement, such as economics is the measure of society, you won't find it in Smith's corpus. You will find, however, a language of efficiency very similar to that spoken by more recent determinists, whether biological, economic, or technological. As arguably the first popularizer of what Carlyle called the 'dismal science' of economics, Smith triggered a wave of later innovators who would take his dry, mechanistic vocabulary and, with it, adumbrate a mathematical understanding of the world that, to paraphrase Dostoevsky's narrator-protagonist in Notes From Underground, saw life not as life but as 'simply extracting square roots'. One of Smith's contemporaneous followers, John Millar, would later writer a treatise inspired by The Wealth of Nations entitled The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, which attributes economic motives to everything from gender inequality, to marriage, to the formation of political constitutions, and even sexual intercourse! Of Millar, it was said that he was one of Smith's most favored students, and for his part Smith did everything he could to encourage such views on behalf of his younger charge. Smith was also known for his division of history into four 'stages', similar to the historical materialist schemas of Marx and Comte.

You do have a point though. Smith was at most a rather modest reductionist; as Chomsky points out, he even anticipated the thoroughly unlibertarian concept of economic equality, and was quite ready to grant a number of exceptions to the reign of the invisible hand. An oft-quoted passage from Wealth of Nations reads, for instance: All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. Clearly not a phrase that would find itself on the lips of someone like Friedman or Hayek, that's for sure. I think Smith was more culpable in opening the gates for certain later thinkers who advocated extremer variants on his ideas than for anything he personally espoused.

Many of Smith's admirers, for example, borrowed his ideas about the virtues of free and open competition in the marketplace and applied them outside of the economic sphere, where they sought agonistic explanations in biology (Darwin), sociology (Malthus, Spencer), and philosophy (Rand, John Stuart Mill). These thinkers adopted competition as an important mechanism of action in each of their respective disciplines. Evolution was a competition between species for reproductive advantage, republican government was the product of competition in a marketplace of political ideas, demographics the study of competition between social members for resources, and so on. We can find agonistic principles abounding in neo-conservatism as well. Examining an area of distinctive emphasis in neoconservatism, foreign policy, reveals for example a belief in the justness of American hegemony and the need to defend that hegemony with military force predicated, it seems, on nothing else than that America has emerged from the 20th century into a unique position of unilateral power through her historical battles with the threats of communism, fascism, and the rising power of Islamic terrorism -- which, as the Straussians at NR will tell you, has clearly made her stronger.

As for whether laissez-faire or crude Marxist materialism has spelled the greater doom for traditional culture, time won't permit me to present all the evidence that settles the question in favor of the former. I'd like to instead ask you another question -- where in history, if anywhere indeed, do you begin to see the roots of what we might call 'modernity' (and consequently the origins of our current dysfunction)? Does the benchmark precede Marx, or does it post-date him?

Quote

Fair enough. Perhaps this is a better term for our form of government:
http://en.wikipedia..../Corporatocracy

Bourgeois-liberal Apollonian technocratic anarcho-tyranny is more accurate in my opinion, but I confess it doesn't have as nice a ring to it.

This post has been edited by mlad: 03 April 2010 - 01:24 AM

[PLEASUREMAN]

I think I agree somewhat which Smith's way of talking about the marketplace as encouraging a mechanistic or dehumanizing outlook, just as "survival of the fittest" (not coined by Darwin but used by him) has led to the modern sociobiologist (or "human biodiversity" enthusiast) and his way of looking at species and interspecies differences as if we should attach no moral value to any behavior--it is all just a matter of reproductive fitness in a given environment.

This is so like the modern conservative's idea of the free market, and his Panglossian excuses for anything that happens. If an industry begins offshoring a segment of its labor, first deny that this is happening, second deny it is happening very much, third deny it has any ill effects, fourth glibly celebrate "new opportunities" provided by the loss of work, fifth insist that offshoring has benefited us by making things cheaper--perfect for the man who must take a lower paying job. At no point is one to ask whether the loss of a type of work will damage our society, or whether the assumption that people will somehow retrain and find new work at their current standard of living is justifiable. As for the idea that people need to do work consistent with their proclivities, this is not an acknowledgement of universal human needs but an argument for communism or socialism or whatever.

And while the modern conservative castigates the working class for its dissatisfaction and bad habits, it lionizes the obscenely wealthy capitalist whose resource hoarding is plainly a sign of dysfunctional aggression--it is excessive and destructive and does not truly enrich him. Rather, it leaves him a spiritual void, driven only to compete.

I was thinking in this last passage of a line from Mad Men, when Peggy turns to Draper for a raise and is curtly denied--the owners won't have it. "You have everything, and so much of it," she says, and there is an intimation in his look that his path to everything has damaged his psyche, has left him without something essential to happiness, and that Peggy's envy is characteristically misguided. The show is in one sense a profound critique of atomization and the rise of big business, which seems to give the modern conservative fits. The modern conservative knows that business is only to be invoked in aspirational terms, and atomization is really sacred individualism.