(I'm not trying to cause a fire here or anything, nor am I condemning your ideology in this particular instance. In fact, the past few months or so of this board have contained the bulk of the most honest and straightforward debates in the entire history of this board. But, I'm hoping to hear some opinions on this.)
...is the evocation of Adam Smith and the classical economists, as well as the Founding Fathers and the classical liberals, for the defense of a worldview for which they provided a now distant, distant ancestor. This board is brighter than facebook, so I'm giving it a try here.
I guess the questions I have are as follows:
How can one expect to evoke Adam Smith honestly in defense of laissez-faire economics in this day and age, when his opinions about it were ambivalent. The Wealth of Nations starts out strong, but Smith literally spent the rest of his years describing misgiving after misgiving with the implications of what he found. These misgivings were merely outweighed by the movement out of feudalism. Adam Smith's consumerism looked nothing like today's capitalism, but he foresaw a lot of it, and man did he dislike it.
How does one say that our Founding Fathers "established capitalism," or created the constitution with capitalism in mind? That is so, so problematic. 1) They didn't know what capitalism was back then. 2) What we could later accurately describe as "capitalistic" structures were not only unknown in their time, but have nothing to do with now. 3) Many of them, like Smith, had plenty of misgivings about the ancestors of modern capitalist systems.
And this one really chaps my ass: in the past few days, I've seen so many "conservatives" on social media try to equate a single social program with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism. It goes without saying these people wouldn't know where to begin to define Marxism--let alone differentiate or explain his illegitimate kids.
I need to start a new paragraph to really explain how much this troubles me. These same people, in the same sentence do two things: 1) They equate one social program with the two most massive social engineering programs in the history of mankind that caused slightly less than 100 million deaths, plus a third comparison to a terrorist--and 2) They advocate a return to the total laissez-faire conditions.
The main argument I see against socialism is "it was tried, and it failed." Well so was total laissez-faire, jackass. There's a death toll that is completely inextricable from it that I guess most people just can't associate with it because there was no Mao or Stalin, in other words, no man to the method to the madness. In my view, there's no better historical explanation of what we ought to do than a comparison of the US and USSR in the 30s. You embrace ideology, you're gonna die--Lenin or Rand. You take a look at things and go "eh, what can we fix without changing everything" and you're gonna get a pretty sweet (New) deal.
I believe in a mixed economy for practical purposes (socialism would be ideal theoretically, but I'm not even aware of all the problems that would incrementally necessitate it), and I don't think there's anyone here that truly doesn't believe in an ostensibly mixed economy.
I think you guys ought to start pushing a little realism on your less nuanced brethren. I've tried doing the same with mine.
...is the evocation of Adam Smith and the classical economists, as well as the Founding Fathers and the classical liberals, for the defense of a worldview for which they provided a now distant, distant ancestor. This board is brighter than facebook, so I'm giving it a try here.
I guess the questions I have are as follows:
How can one expect to evoke Adam Smith honestly in defense of laissez-faire economics in this day and age, when his opinions about it were ambivalent. The Wealth of Nations starts out strong, but Smith literally spent the rest of his years describing misgiving after misgiving with the implications of what he found. These misgivings were merely outweighed by the movement out of feudalism. Adam Smith's consumerism looked nothing like today's capitalism, but he foresaw a lot of it, and man did he dislike it.
How does one say that our Founding Fathers "established capitalism," or created the constitution with capitalism in mind? That is so, so problematic. 1) They didn't know what capitalism was back then. 2) What we could later accurately describe as "capitalistic" structures were not only unknown in their time, but have nothing to do with now. 3) Many of them, like Smith, had plenty of misgivings about the ancestors of modern capitalist systems.
And this one really chaps my ass: in the past few days, I've seen so many "conservatives" on social media try to equate a single social program with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism. It goes without saying these people wouldn't know where to begin to define Marxism--let alone differentiate or explain his illegitimate kids.
I need to start a new paragraph to really explain how much this troubles me. These same people, in the same sentence do two things: 1) They equate one social program with the two most massive social engineering programs in the history of mankind that caused slightly less than 100 million deaths, plus a third comparison to a terrorist--and 2) They advocate a return to the total laissez-faire conditions.
The main argument I see against socialism is "it was tried, and it failed." Well so was total laissez-faire, jackass. There's a death toll that is completely inextricable from it that I guess most people just can't associate with it because there was no Mao or Stalin, in other words, no man to the method to the madness. In my view, there's no better historical explanation of what we ought to do than a comparison of the US and USSR in the 30s. You embrace ideology, you're gonna die--Lenin or Rand. You take a look at things and go "eh, what can we fix without changing everything" and you're gonna get a pretty sweet (New) deal.
I believe in a mixed economy for practical purposes (socialism would be ideal theoretically, but I'm not even aware of all the problems that would incrementally necessitate it), and I don't think there's anyone here that truly doesn't believe in an ostensibly mixed economy.
I think you guys ought to start pushing a little realism on your less nuanced brethren. I've tried doing the same with mine.
