[MD] Capitalism

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
Personally, I think that if this doesn't bother you, if you don't think social justice is more important than a buck, you're not a moral person. Sorry, but that's how I see it."


Ian replied:


I would say, that's a no-brainer, no apology required, who could possibly disagree. [and] Not sure why social Darwinism needs to be a "doctrine". Like MoQism surely it is just a means of understanding the mechanisms at work. We still have moral choices to make.



dmb says:

Social Darwinism is just a matter of understanding the mechanisms at work AND the desire for social justice is no brainer? You don't see the contradiction in that? Social Darwinism says that the economy operates according to certain laws, as if to say "that's just how the world works" and so it sees attempts to regulate the marketplace as a kind of error, as a matter of defying nature. It fools us into thinking that human constructs are natural and unchangeable. This is very much at odds with the main thrust of pragmatic liberalism, which says that we can and should apply human intelligence to problematic situations, that we can and should develop creative adaptations. Let's take labor unions, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, safety regulation for example. To a liberal pragmatist these are solutions designed to counteract the increasing power and wealth of giant corporations, against which individual citizens are virtually powerless. This same solutions are seen by free-market purists as a form of interference and oppose them in favor of the "invisible hand of the marketplace", as Adam Smith called it, which is basically a metaphor for the overall effect of individuals seeking their own self-interest in a competitive environment. You hear this sentiment expressed in various ways by the conservatives right here in this forum. Actually, around here and in today's Republican Party this sentiment has been shifted into overdrive with some turbo thrusters to boot. Think of Reagan's "Government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem" or the old 18th agrarian notion that the best government is the one that governs least. 

Take the current debates about health care insurance, for example. We've all seen how the Conservatives have reacted. They're calling it socialism, fascism, a government takeover, compared Obama to Hitler, Stalin, Mao and (gasp) the French. (I really don't get that anti-French thing. I guess the hostility against that sort of Western democratic socialism is especially virulent because it works and that success is just last thing these people want to admit.) The elected officials in the Republican party are not much more reasonable than those tea-baggers who carry misspelled signs calling liberal "morans" and "commanists". They seem genuinely terrified about the ridiculously fictional "death panels".
This is just not how a liberal pragmatist sees it. The fact is we already have death panels and they don't work for the government. They work for private insurance companies. There job is find some reason, any reason, to deny coverage. And here we are not just talking about people who uninsured, usually because they can't afford it, but also those have insurance and reasonably believed they were covered. According to a Harvard study published last fall, 45,000 Americans die every year for lack of insurance coverage, despite record breaking profits for the insurance companies. Think about that. How many people die every single day because of this problem. This is the richest nation in all of human history and yet somebody dies every 12 minutes because of money. That is a real problem and it demands a real solution. In this case, the so called invisible hand just isn't working. We tried it and the result is great wealth for the insurers and a whole lotta death for everybody else. At this point, to reassert the free market as the solution to this problem is totally obscene. That solution IS the problem. 

By the way, I personally know two people who died for this reason. Both of them were quite close to me. On top of that, one of my favorite musicians killed himself last Christmas day because he needed more medical care but couldn't get it because he already owed $70,000.

Haven't noticed how the free-market advocates are so very simpatico with the so-called christians? Haven't you noticed how those elements are also very simpatico with strident demands for patriotic loyalty, the willingness to go to war at the drop of hat and the almost sexual admiration they heap upon authoritarian leadership styles? I mean, one of the reasons for posting the Max Weber piece was to address a kind of cultural tone-deafness. This tone-deafness is so bad that people think left is right and life is death. It's takes a really, really confused mind to count Chinese dictators as socialists. To see the desire to solve a problem that is literally a matter of life and death as some kind of sinister plot is not any less confused. 

And I realize you're not a tea-bagger, Ian. At least, not that kind. But to say social justice is a no brainer and in the same breath wonder what wrong with social darwinism also demonstrates a certain tone-deafness. And I have to say that's more than a little bit creepy coming from a supposedly educated person like yourself. It's drivel, man. It's incoherent nonsense.


Can you tell that I'm a bit angry here? I can't understand how Obama remains calm. Guess he's a better person than I am. 

 

  







 		 	   		  
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