|
Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
Short answer is, anglo-saxon people have a distinction between socialist and social-democrat, others, most notably latin people, don't.
See the social democratic party of Switzerland:
French: Parti socialiste suisse (swiss socialist party)
Italian: Partito Socialista Svizzero (swiss socialist party)
German: Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz (swiss social democratic party)
Romansh: Partida Socialdemocrata de la Svizra (swiss social democratic party)
There's always going to be some conflation between social democracy and socialism - or at least there's always been some. There's even a chance that Bernie mischaracterized himself on purpose to get more people interested in democratic socialism. But in the end you're going to be fine, at this point of history the most important point for these two groups is what they have in common which is an opposition to economic liberalism from the left.
|
On August 12 2018 06:35 Nebuchad wrote:
For the few economic liberals in the thread like Kwark and Intro, what do you think of my impression that economic liberalism might be on the verge of failing worldwide?
I see threats on the left with socialist resurgences and with strong welfare states in Scandinavia and the like, I see threats on the right with "economic nationalism" under Trump and far right parties in Europe, Hungary, Italy, Poland... Both sides appear to be growing in numbers and the liberal side seems like it has to compromise with one or the other to survive (most often the far right as that's more compatible with neoliberalism).
On a more macro level I think the evolution of liberalism from Keynes to Chicago also speaks to that failure to maintain the premise of the system, but my ideology probably colors that at least a little bit.
Strong welfare states in Scandinavia rely on economic liberal policies. The two aren't neccesarily opposites to each other. They may have strong labour market regulations and good employee relationships an egalitarian culture and a strong welfare state, but that doesn't detract from the ease of doing business which is what economic liberalism is. I see no reason why a welfare state and egalitarianism detracts from economic liberalism. Trumpism, which is mercantilist and subsidizing to failing industries, needless interference in the market, tariffs, are the biggest threat to liberalism. Far right parties in Europe as long as they are in favour of the 4 freedoms are fine, though their resurgent nationalism threaten some aspects like the freedom of labour to move to other countries.
To me, the opposite to economic liberalism isn't the welfare state or the government services, but mercantilism, elitism and needless subsidisation. I don't really recognise "neoliberal". It's too mixed a word and seems to simply be a set of policies that favours billionaires to simply pay less taxes and obliterate the "good" regulations that prevent rising inequality.
|
On August 12 2018 06:41 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 06:13 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:+ Show Spoiler +There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... Bit odd for the crux of the article to criticise that the usage of socialism is conflated with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, where those countries themselves use socialism in the exact same manner. It writes that this usage of socialism is not socialism without offering up its own defintion. The most you can say is that it has identified that the meaning of words falls to the wayside in angry rhetoric, but falls to the same sympton itself. Rest of the article suffers from lacks of focus and generally makes random attacks on ideas and people without following thorugh like an angry old man diatribe. Pretty bad opinion piece journalism really if you can even call it that. Do they? I mean we've all seen this. https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sandersSurely Williamson assumes the standard (more or less) definition of socialism. (Something like "the public ownership of the means of production.") I think the title is a little unfortunate because the essay does cover a few things, and being written for conservatives at NR, brings in what he sees as the Right's failings in these matters. That, I think, could make it seem a little disjointed. This part here is key, and he says it very early on: Show nested quote +The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist. I mean if you insist on a different definition of socialism, then yes, the whole thing looks much worse, hardly a surprise.
Well if the Heritage foundation « « « scholars » » » agrees on the nordic model, everyone is happy and we can all vote Bernie. Free education, free healthcare, extremely high taxes, very strong social programs, extremely well regulated economy and the most equalitarian societies on earth. I think I misjudged those people.
Makes me laugh out loud when the american right says « but nordic countries are not socialists! » They are exactly what the GOP calls « socialism », and at one point one will have to come to term with the fact they are an absolute success as a model of society.
And of course they are capitalist economies. If your definition of socialism is 1920 USSR or Chavez Venezuela where the whole economy is state ruled, everyone agrees it’s a shit model. But that’s a totally irrelevant term to politics in the west. The socialist party in France, or Bernie socialism has never had anything to do with the marxist definition of socialism where the workers own the means of production. The whole argument is disingenuous.
|
On August 12 2018 07:06 Dangermousecatdog wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 06:35 Nebuchad wrote:
For the few economic liberals in the thread like Kwark and Intro, what do you think of my impression that economic liberalism might be on the verge of failing worldwide?
I see threats on the left with socialist resurgences and with strong welfare states in Scandinavia and the like, I see threats on the right with "economic nationalism" under Trump and far right parties in Europe, Hungary, Italy, Poland... Both sides appear to be growing in numbers and the liberal side seems like it has to compromise with one or the other to survive (most often the far right as that's more compatible with neoliberalism).
On a more macro level I think the evolution of liberalism from Keynes to Chicago also speaks to that failure to maintain the premise of the system, but my ideology probably colors that at least a little bit. Strong welfare states in Scandinavia rely on economic liberal policies. The two aren't neccesarily opposites to each other. They may have strong labour market regulations and good employee relationships an egalitarian culture and a strong welfare state, but that doesn't detract from the ease of doing business which is what economic liberalism is. I see no reason why a welfare state and egalitarianism detracts from economic liberalism. Trumpism, which is mercantilist and subsidizing to failing industries, needless interference in the market, tariffs, are the biggest threat to liberalism. Far right parties in Europe as long as they are in favour of the 4 freedoms are fine, though their resurgent nationalism threaten some aspects like the freedom of labour to move to other countries. To me, the opposite to economic liberalism isn't the welfare state or the government services, but mercantilism, elitism and needless subsidisation. I don't really recognise "neoliberal". It's too mixed a word and seems to simply be a set of policies that favours billionaires to simply pay less taxes and obliterate the "good" regulations that prevent rising inequality.
I mean it's at least opposed to the theory of economic liberalism; when it comes to that whole welfare state we're going for a government regulated system that is there for the good of the people, not for profit, rather than for an invisible hand directing them to work towards the nation's good while maximizing their own gain. They also have strong unions and a bunch of public spending... And I'm not going into the kinky specific stuff like the way they do oil in Norway =)
|
From the same op-ed linked by Intro
Americans, along with most of the rest of the world, today enjoy a material standard of living that is radically better than what our parents or grandparents enjoyed during the so-called golden age of the postwar era. And it’s not just those shiny gadgets that Mr. Tomasky dismisses with such shallow contempt. We have better food, housing, health care, and — yes — access to education, including higher education, than most people would have dreamt of in the Eisenhower era. (And extreme poverty around the world was cut by half in about 30 years, one of the unappreciated miracles of human history.) These advances are taken for granted, and even held in glib contempt, because the process that creates them (capitalism) is largely invisible to most people, who have very little if any understanding of where material progress comes from and how it happens. By almost any measurable metric (calories and kilowatt-hours consumed, square feet inhabited, etc.) this American life looks pretty good compared to the 1980s, much less the 1950s.
Saying that the process (which unlike most people, he defo understands) that creates available technological advances / material progress is capitalism is the same manner of oversimplification that he accuses Tomasky & co of. How has he quantified capitalism's contribution? All those examples apply to Soviets and other communist dictatorships, having better housing, healthcare, gadgets and especially access to higher education in the 70s & 80s compared to the 50s.
I'm not denying that personal gain is a good motivator but surely having a large amount of people exchange ideas over time has something to do with it, rather than being purely down to the economic system. Let's try the following thought experiment: the entire world falls under a shitty communist dictatorship with central planning and state determination of needs, except New Zealand which continues to be liberal but walled off. The two don't cooperate or fight with eachother. Which society has made more 'material progress' after 50 years? If Williamson's condescendingly stated theory is correct, the thousands of financially incentivized Kiwis in the medical field will have come up with more advanced treatments than their millions of counterparts that only have 'a sense of pride and accomplishment' to budge them.
|
Nebuchad, how I define economic liberalism leaves plenty of room for welfare systems, unionisation and public spending. As long as the government doesn't interfere in market processes, they can go for a massive social welfare and massive public spending for all I care. In fact, it can be contingent on massive public spending to ensure education so consumers can be intelligent and astute to process as much infomation effectively as possible. Afterall, the theories of economic liberalism relies on the consumer having the perfect information to make the right choices. Though obviously there is less space for economic liberalism the more public spending takes up of national spending, as long as competitive aspects are kept in public spending, and public spending is done effectively I don't see it as contrary to the theories of economic liberalism.
What you call economic liberalism, appears to simply be "neoliberalism", as far as I am able to tolerate that word.
|
Canada11279 Posts
@DanHH
Maybe.
I mean that's a very extreme example. But the problem with those communist dictatorships is that it actively punishes freethinkers, which inevitably leads to self-preservation rather than innovation. It eats its own. I would guess the dictatorship wins due to sheer numbers, but the death toll would be catastrophic and with most actual innovative people dead or working in research prisons.
|
Economic liberalism is necessarily opposed to certain flavors of unions and public spending.
Excessive public spending acts like an override on the market process. Resources get spent on what the government says they should be spent on, starving private buyers of those resources. If the spending is funded through taxation, it's even worse where they overlap - the private competitors are compelled to pay for the excesses of the publicly funded operation.
Monopolistic unions likewise subvert a free labor market - on the business end, they effectively assert that they own the business they're unionizing, with full control over how it functions and first rights to the revenue, with the nominal owners only responsible for keeping the books. This is brazen theft. On the labor side, they act as middlemen, negotiating to maximize their own profit at the expense of the workers. And they keep exceptional workers from independently negotiating raises by clamping salaries to a formula.
These are the cases that are inherently anti-liberal.
|
|
|
On August 12 2018 07:34 Dan HH wrote:From the same op-ed linked by Intro Show nested quote + Americans, along with most of the rest of the world, today enjoy a material standard of living that is radically better than what our parents or grandparents enjoyed during the so-called golden age of the postwar era. And it’s not just those shiny gadgets that Mr. Tomasky dismisses with such shallow contempt. We have better food, housing, health care, and — yes — access to education, including higher education, than most people would have dreamt of in the Eisenhower era. (And extreme poverty around the world was cut by half in about 30 years, one of the unappreciated miracles of human history.) These advances are taken for granted, and even held in glib contempt, because the process that creates them (capitalism) is largely invisible to most people, who have very little if any understanding of where material progress comes from and how it happens. By almost any measurable metric (calories and kilowatt-hours consumed, square feet inhabited, etc.) this American life looks pretty good compared to the 1980s, much less the 1950s. Saying that the process (which unlike most people, he defo understands) that creates available technological advances / material progress is capitalism is the same manner of oversimplification that he accuses Tomasky & co of. How has he quantified capitalism's contribution? All those examples apply to Soviets and other communist dictatorships, having better housing, healthcare, gadgets and especially access to higher education in the 70s & 80s compared to the 50s. I'm not denying that personal gain is a good motivator but surely having a large amount of people exchange ideas over time has something to do with it, rather than being purely down to the economic system. Let's try the following thought experiment: the entire world falls under a shitty communist dictatorship with central planning and state determination of needs, except New Zealand which continues to be liberal but walled off. The two don't cooperate or fight with eachother. Which society has made more 'material progress' after 50 years? If Williamson's condescendingly stated theory is correct, the thousands of financially incentivized Kiwis in the medical field will have come up with more advanced treatments than their millions of counterparts that only have a sense of pride and accomplishment to budge them.
I think that criticism might have more merit if the part you quoted was the end of the essay. However he also talks about Ford and education and says
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
This should remind us of the primary goal of this essay. it's not a comprehensive review of capitalism or socialism, but it is saying the word socialist, like that of libertarian, is not used correctly, and that this presents a problem. I suppose you could argue if "Capitalism" is a primary reason we have the things we do, but Williamson is focusing on a different point, that what the American left say they want vs what they hold out as examples are not the same.
|
In fairness, socialist (much like libertarian) has historically had broad usage, without always being confined to a belief in workers seizing the means of production. The combination of ethical socialism (capitalism creates and sustains bad people!!) with economic socialism (the state should have more of a role in the economy than it does now, because it would be more efficient!!) that Sanders and co represents I think does have a right to be called genuinely socialist, in that it clearly pursues the goals of Fabianist, democratic socialism (summed up by what I've always thought was a nice phrase - 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth to working people' - in the UK Labour party's manifesto pre-1980s).
|
On August 12 2018 07:55 Buckyman wrote:
Economic liberalism is necessarily opposed to certain flavors of unions and public spending.
Excessive public spending acts like an override on the market process. Resources get spent on what the government says they should be spent on, starving private buyers of those resources. If the spending is funded through taxation, it's even worse where they overlap - the private competitors are compelled to pay for the excesses of the publicly funded operation.
Monopolistic unions likewise subvert a free labor market - on the business end, they effectively assert that they own the business they're unionizing, with full control over how it functions and first rights to the revenue, with the nominal owners only responsible for keeping the books. This is brazen theft. On the labor side, they act as middlemen, negotiating to maximize their own profit at the expense of the workers. And they keep exceptional workers from independently negotiating raises by clamping salaries to a formula.
These are the cases that are inherently anti-liberal.
The first case could happen in the case of extreme public spending which can only occur by government overinterference of market forces, but in the theory of economic liberalism, as I support it, the government has no role ouside of public goods and services and those essential to the function of a modern state including that of a military. The only way to truly impact market forces excessively is in effect to overspend in the military as far as modern countries go so far in modern history. There is no real example of that occuring as of yet. Some countries do have high public spending like the "Scandinavians", which conform to theories of economic liberalism and they do well, whilst others like France do not so well; the difference is in how they spend their public spending.
As to the second case of your "monopolistic unions", that sounds like a utter disregard to property rights of a capitalistic system, and I am hard pressed to think of a single example where a private company is kept under that situation under labour laws. Don't know what the heck that system is that you described as a union, but it sure isn't a union. At least not any union in the modern developed world. Even if I accept the broad theory of your unionisation theory the situation can simply not occur in an economic liberal society in the first place.
There's imply no reason that as long as the theories of economic liberalism is adhered to, that public spending and unionisation cannot exists side by side with economic liberalism. Public spending adhered to the principles of economic liberalism would not overide market economy. Except perhaps in cases of disaster or war, in which economic liberalism is irrelevant. Strong labour laws would never override the concept of the property rights of owners.
However they cannot exist side by side by "neoliberalism", as "neoliberalism" calls for the destruction of public spending and labour rights. Economic liberalism is not neoliberalism.
|
On August 12 2018 07:57 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 07:34 Dan HH wrote:From the same op-ed linked by Intro Americans, along with most of the rest of the world, today enjoy a material standard of living that is radically better than what our parents or grandparents enjoyed during the so-called golden age of the postwar era. And it’s not just those shiny gadgets that Mr. Tomasky dismisses with such shallow contempt. We have better food, housing, health care, and — yes — access to education, including higher education, than most people would have dreamt of in the Eisenhower era. (And extreme poverty around the world was cut by half in about 30 years, one of the unappreciated miracles of human history.) These advances are taken for granted, and even held in glib contempt, because the process that creates them (capitalism) is largely invisible to most people, who have very little if any understanding of where material progress comes from and how it happens. By almost any measurable metric (calories and kilowatt-hours consumed, square feet inhabited, etc.) this American life looks pretty good compared to the 1980s, much less the 1950s. Saying that the process (which unlike most people, he defo understands) that creates available technological advances / material progress is capitalism is the same manner of oversimplification that he accuses Tomasky & co of. How has he quantified capitalism's contribution? All those examples apply to Soviets and other communist dictatorships, having better housing, healthcare, gadgets and especially access to higher education in the 70s & 80s compared to the 50s. I'm not denying that personal gain is a good motivator but surely having a large amount of people exchange ideas over time has something to do with it, rather than being purely down to the economic system. Let's try the following thought experiment: the entire world falls under a shitty communist dictatorship with central planning and state determination of needs, except New Zealand which continues to be liberal but walled off. The two don't cooperate or fight with eachother. Which society has made more 'material progress' after 50 years? If Williamson's condescendingly stated theory is correct, the thousands of financially incentivized Kiwis in the medical field will have come up with more advanced treatments than their millions of counterparts that only have a sense of pride and accomplishment to budge them. I think that criticism might have more merit if the part you quoted was the end of the essay. However he also talks about Ford and education and says Show nested quote +The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction. This should remind us of the primary goal of this essay. it's not a comprehensive review of capitalism or socialism, but it is saying the word socialist, like that of libertarian, is not used correctly, and that this presents a problem. I suppose you could argue if "Capitalism" is a primary reason we have the things we do, but Williamson is focusing on a different point, that what the American left say they want vs what they hold out as examples are not the same.
I do somewhat agree with the semantical aspect of it, I've seen the terms 'social democracy' and 'democratic socialism' used interchangeably during the previous US presidential campaign. You can't tell outright what a self-described socialist actually wants, but I don't consider that much of a problem, we don't need a single word to figure people's positions out. The only thing 'socialist' tells me is that the person in question wants a more equal society than the present one, something that's not at odds with the Nordic example that the author attacks. Despite his focus on privatization, it's quite clear from their GINI coefficient what the American left is talking about when pointing at them.
The bit you quoted regarding his position on state run education is a small compromise he builds up in order to tear down later and conclude that it suffers from 'too little capitalism'. He focuses on how unhappy people are with the effectiveness of K12 education as opposed to higher education, suggesting that the reason the latter is a more successful system is because it follows more capitalist principles than the former.
The essay, including his issue with the word 'socialist' being applied to Nordic countries, appears to me mostly about people (especially self-described socialists) not appreciating capitalism enough and not attributing enough of our societies raising standard of living to it. The 2nd to last paragraph is very clear about this.
|
On August 12 2018 06:35 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about? I'm not sure I see where he said that, and I don't think anything he wrote implied it. In fact, he says Show nested quote +Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion. and Show nested quote +There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.
These both imply, at least to me, that he sees risk calculation as a part of our politics. The first paragraph of that section Show nested quote +Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death. appears to separate risk and a "philosophical" conflict, but there is no exclusionary principle or argument laid out here.
Ok, but for the sake of argument let me present a combative but not unreasonable interpretation of the author's (sub)text here, and you tell me why this caricature is must so very wrong:
Socialism is the new libertarianism because people are stupid and don't know what either term means. Socialism won't work because it can't work (see my book on this topic, where I show how stupid socialism is). When people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have. They were on the right track with libertarianism but got derailed with Ron Paul's failures. They think they want socialism, but all they really want is a nice safety net like our capitalist Scandinavian friends. In fact what they really want is not less capitalism, but more. Capitalism cut world poverty in half in the last two decades and gave us iphones. Critics of capitalism don't even understand that capitalism is the only reason we have iphones in the first place!
|
On August 12 2018 08:47 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 07:57 Introvert wrote:On August 12 2018 07:34 Dan HH wrote:From the same op-ed linked by Intro Americans, along with most of the rest of the world, today enjoy a material standard of living that is radically better than what our parents or grandparents enjoyed during the so-called golden age of the postwar era. And it’s not just those shiny gadgets that Mr. Tomasky dismisses with such shallow contempt. We have better food, housing, health care, and — yes — access to education, including higher education, than most people would have dreamt of in the Eisenhower era. (And extreme poverty around the world was cut by half in about 30 years, one of the unappreciated miracles of human history.) These advances are taken for granted, and even held in glib contempt, because the process that creates them (capitalism) is largely invisible to most people, who have very little if any understanding of where material progress comes from and how it happens. By almost any measurable metric (calories and kilowatt-hours consumed, square feet inhabited, etc.) this American life looks pretty good compared to the 1980s, much less the 1950s. Saying that the process (which unlike most people, he defo understands) that creates available technological advances / material progress is capitalism is the same manner of oversimplification that he accuses Tomasky & co of. How has he quantified capitalism's contribution? All those examples apply to Soviets and other communist dictatorships, having better housing, healthcare, gadgets and especially access to higher education in the 70s & 80s compared to the 50s. I'm not denying that personal gain is a good motivator but surely having a large amount of people exchange ideas over time has something to do with it, rather than being purely down to the economic system. Let's try the following thought experiment: the entire world falls under a shitty communist dictatorship with central planning and state determination of needs, except New Zealand which continues to be liberal but walled off. The two don't cooperate or fight with eachother. Which society has made more 'material progress' after 50 years? If Williamson's condescendingly stated theory is correct, the thousands of financially incentivized Kiwis in the medical field will have come up with more advanced treatments than their millions of counterparts that only have a sense of pride and accomplishment to budge them. I think that criticism might have more merit if the part you quoted was the end of the essay. However he also talks about Ford and education and says The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction. This should remind us of the primary goal of this essay. it's not a comprehensive review of capitalism or socialism, but it is saying the word socialist, like that of libertarian, is not used correctly, and that this presents a problem. I suppose you could argue if "Capitalism" is a primary reason we have the things we do, but Williamson is focusing on a different point, that what the American left say they want vs what they hold out as examples are not the same. I do somewhat agree with the semantical aspect of it, I've seen the terms 'social democracy' and 'democratic socialism' used interchangeably during the previous US presidential campaign. You can't tell outright what a self-described socialist actually wants, but I don't consider that much of a problem, we don't need a single word to figure people's positions out. The only thing 'socialist' tells me is that the person in question wants a more equal society than the present one, something that's not at odds with the Nordic example that the author attacks. Despite his focus on privatization, it's quite clear from their GINI coefficient what the American left is talking about when pointing at them. The bit you quoted regarding his position on state run education is a small compromise he builds up in order to tear down later and conclude that it suffers from 'too little capitalism'. He focuses on how unhappy people are with the effectiveness of K12 education as opposed to higher education, suggesting that the reason the latter is a more successful system is because it follows more capitalist principles than the former. The essay, including his issue with the word 'socialist' being applied to Nordic countries, appears to me mostly about people (especially self-described socialists) not appreciating capitalism enough and not attributing enough of our societies raising standard of living to it. The 2nd to last paragraph is very clear about this.
That last paragraph is thrown into a bit about how conservatives can better make an argument, given the current "moment" of socialism, it's almost an aside sandwiched into a different point.
I think referencing his examples undermines the criticism you made, at least somewhat. He assumes capitalism is a large part of the advances we have. At the end of his education example he says
There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
I'm taking a macro look here. His argument is that these are all word games; the left says they want socialism when the example they give is capitalistic ("free enterprise, free markets, private investment"). If those societies are touted as successes, then that is what the American left should be touting. In this formulation of his argument, we actually don't have an issue with him being simplistic at all, because the "success" is assumed.
I guess I just don't have an issue with him saying "what you claim to want isn't socialism" and a simple "the smartphone is the result of capitalism."
I think there's a lot more in this essay that justifies his use of "that we call capitalism." But perhaps that's too nitpicky.
|
|
|
On August 12 2018 09:29 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 06:35 Introvert wrote:On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about? I'm not sure I see where he said that, and I don't think anything he wrote implied it. In fact, he says Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion. and There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.
These both imply, at least to me, that he sees risk calculation as a part of our politics. The first paragraph of that section Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death. appears to separate risk and a "philosophical" conflict, but there is no exclusionary principle or argument laid out here. Ok, but for the sake of argument let me present a combative but not unreasonable interpretation of the author's (sub)text here, and you tell me why this caricature is must so very wrong: Socialism is the new libertarianism because people are stupid and don't know what either term means. Socialism won't work because it can't work (see my book on this topic, where I show how stupid socialism is). When people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have. They were on the right track with libertarianism but got derailed with Ron Paul's failures. They think they want socialism, but all they really want is a nice safety net like our capitalist Scandinavian friends. In fact what they really want is not less capitalism, but more. Capitalism cut world poverty in half in the last two decades and gave us iphones. Critics of capitalism don't even understand that capitalism is the only reason we have iphones in the first place!
I admit I'm a little confused as to how we got from your first post to here. He quite obviously knocks on socialism repeatedly. he doesn't reference his book and that's not even "the thing" he is known for, so that might be unfair :p
He seems to treat risk aversion as a legitimate political concern. But while it may be part of politics, this discussion we are having isn't actually about socialism (or even capitalism) as an idea. He assumes the success of capitalism but he doesn't dismiss the concerns of others as unreasonable.
I think "when people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have" is the point. The rest of that is fine, though I will agree with you that it is "combative." Although this is actually a rather tame essay by some measures for Williamson.
I agree with the assessment that the nation at this moment isn't having some sort of philosophical debate. That seems fairly obvious to me.
Edit: I certainly think what is happening is political, and I think he does too.
|
On August 12 2018 09:29 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 06:35 Introvert wrote:On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about? I'm not sure I see where he said that, and I don't think anything he wrote implied it. In fact, he says Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion. and There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.
These both imply, at least to me, that he sees risk calculation as a part of our politics. The first paragraph of that section Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death. appears to separate risk and a "philosophical" conflict, but there is no exclusionary principle or argument laid out here. Ok, but for the sake of argument let me present a combative but not unreasonable interpretation of the author's (sub)text here, and you tell me why this caricature is must so very wrong: Socialism is the new libertarianism because people are stupid and don't know what either term means. Socialism won't work because it can't work (see my book on this topic, where I show how stupid socialism is). When people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have. They were on the right track with libertarianism but got derailed with Ron Paul's failures. They think they want socialism, but all they really want is a nice safety net like our capitalist Scandinavian friends. In fact what they really want is not less capitalism, but more. Capitalism cut world poverty in half in the last two decades and gave us iphones. Critics of capitalism don't even understand that capitalism is the only reason we have iphones in the first place!
I'd rather iphones didn't exist, personally. The incessant "spend almost $1k a year so you can have the hip new phone" pressure put on people as a status symbol is absolutely horrible for a struggling middle class. They're expensive enough to hurt, but not to the point where enough people go "eh... I can hold off for a few years."
I'm upgrading from a Moto G3 to a G6 right now, primarily because of some annoying issues I'm having, and I still feel kinda gross about it.
|
On August 12 2018 10:09 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 09:29 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 06:35 Introvert wrote:On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about? I'm not sure I see where he said that, and I don't think anything he wrote implied it. In fact, he says Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion. and There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.
These both imply, at least to me, that he sees risk calculation as a part of our politics. The first paragraph of that section Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death. appears to separate risk and a "philosophical" conflict, but there is no exclusionary principle or argument laid out here. Ok, but for the sake of argument let me present a combative but not unreasonable interpretation of the author's (sub)text here, and you tell me why this caricature is must so very wrong: Socialism is the new libertarianism because people are stupid and don't know what either term means. Socialism won't work because it can't work (see my book on this topic, where I show how stupid socialism is). When people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have. They were on the right track with libertarianism but got derailed with Ron Paul's failures. They think they want socialism, but all they really want is a nice safety net like our capitalist Scandinavian friends. In fact what they really want is not less capitalism, but more. Capitalism cut world poverty in half in the last two decades and gave us iphones. Critics of capitalism don't even understand that capitalism is the only reason we have iphones in the first place! I think "when people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have" is the point. The rest of that is fine, though I will agree with you that it is "combative." Although this is actually a rather tame essay by some measures for Williamson. I agree with the assessment that the nation at this moment isn't having some sort of philosophical debate. That seems fairly obvious to me. Edit: I certainly think what is happening is political, and I think he does too.
The problem I have with Williamson, is I don't think he really understands the left at all. It's not surprising, as most on the right conform to economics of neoclassical orthodoxy. I don't think it is a matter of worrying about losing what we have, as many of the fights these days are for things that haven't been achieved (universal health care, free college, etc). I think most socialists would support a Green New Deal- the difference is ideas about how to get it. The Green Party leadership promotes American Monetary Institute (AMI) policies with the slogan of "greening the dollar". They and other socialist factions believe that we cannot realize a progressive platform without massive reforms- even destroying the current system and rebuilding entirely, while MMT Greens believe it to be possible within the current system.
If you want a more philosophical view, I highly recommend the sample chapter of the MMT textbook that outlines some basics of the different schools of economic thought. Something I think Williamson could use a copy of. 
http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/mmt/docs/Chapter_1_Sample.pdf
|
On August 12 2018 10:09 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On August 12 2018 09:29 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 06:35 Introvert wrote:On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed. I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link. ‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.
A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.
But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.
Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:
I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.
You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.
Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.
Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:
If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.
Something’s not quite right there.
The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.
(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)
The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.
Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.
But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”
(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)
Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.
The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.
Beyond Words about Words
.... written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about? I'm not sure I see where he said that, and I don't think anything he wrote implied it. In fact, he says Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion. and There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.
These both imply, at least to me, that he sees risk calculation as a part of our politics. The first paragraph of that section Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death. appears to separate risk and a "philosophical" conflict, but there is no exclusionary principle or argument laid out here. Ok, but for the sake of argument let me present a combative but not unreasonable interpretation of the author's (sub)text here, and you tell me why this caricature is must so very wrong: Socialism is the new libertarianism because people are stupid and don't know what either term means. Socialism won't work because it can't work (see my book on this topic, where I show how stupid socialism is). When people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have. They were on the right track with libertarianism but got derailed with Ron Paul's failures. They think they want socialism, but all they really want is a nice safety net like our capitalist Scandinavian friends. In fact what they really want is not less capitalism, but more. Capitalism cut world poverty in half in the last two decades and gave us iphones. Critics of capitalism don't even understand that capitalism is the only reason we have iphones in the first place! I admit I'm a little confused as to how we got from your first post to here. He quite obviously knocks on socialism repeatedly. he doesn't reference his book and that's not even "the thing" he is known for, so that might be unfair :p He seems to treat risk aversion as a legitimate political concern. But while it may be part of politics, this discussion we are having isn't actually about socialism (or even capitalism) as an idea. He assumes the success of capitalism but he doesn't dismiss the concerns of others as unreasonable. I think "when people say they want socialism, they aren't being philosophical, or political, or even engaging with value-oriented ideas; they are instead just worried about losing what they have" is the point. The rest of that is fine, though I will agree with you that it is "combative." Although this is actually a rather tame essay by some measures for Williamson. I agree with the assessment that the nation at this moment isn't having some sort of philosophical debate. That seems fairly obvious to me. Edit: I certainly think what is happening is political, and I think he does too.
what I meant with the first post was that he seems pretty contemptuous of the electorate, and perhaps is arguing that they aren't "political" in the sense of deliberate engagement with ideas, but are basically just reacting to media and marketing pressure playing off of primal fears, latching onto words that have 'lost' their meaning
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
