You Just Might Be a Marxist
With his new book, Stanley Kurtz has done what the media refused to do — finally vet the president and his radical past, two years too late to prevent him from becoming president, but just in time to issue a restraining order on him next Tuesday.
Yet people seem to be under the misapprehension that in order to be a Marxist, one has to be as explicitly so as the president has been with his deliberate associations with socialist and communist organizations and individuals. But Marxism isn’t a doctrine so much as an attitude. It is founded on a couple of key illogical and immoral foundations, which many people find superficially appealing, human nature being what it is.
The first is the notion that what people “need” is an objective rather than subjective notion, which can be determined by benevolent third parties. After all, if one is going to reorder society and redistribute wealth, it is only “fair” that people be allowed to get what they “need” before depriving them of anything beyond that to satisfy the “needs” of others. This concept is exemplified by the famous phrase: “To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.”
But of course, in the real world, the difference between “need” and “desire” is purely subjective, and varies with the individual and their degree of self-actualization. At its most basic, there is no “need” for anything except air, food, and shelter. And such needs can be met in a North Korean prison. But when someone is lecturing someone else about what they “need,” what they really mean is that because they don’t perceive a need for those things, no one else really has one either — whether it’s flat-screen television, an SUV, a lobster dinner, a second home, or another handgun. They are perhaps happy to live in a rabbit warren, eat macrobiotic food, and ride their bicycle to work, and don’t think that anyone else should “need” more. And of course, since those selfish people don’t really need more, the rest of their resources are now available to satisfy the unmet “real” needs of the rest of society.
The other mythical foundation of Marxism is the labor theory of value, and its corollary, that “intrinsic” value exists. Like the “need” myth, it is one of subjectivity versus objectivity. Marxists believe that there is a knowable objective value for everything, and the very act of work creates it. That is, if a worker works a certain number of hours, his output is intrinsically valuable.
But of course, a little thought reveals this to be nonsense. Nothing has intrinsic value. Absent a person to value it, nothing has value at all. And the value of things is entirely subjective. If it weren’t, no trade would occur. Every voluntary exchange occurs because two people have something to trade, and each person places a higher value on the other person’s object than their own. If they both valued both equally, there would be no point in swapping. Even though there is a price denominated in dollars on an item in a store, that doesn’t mean that’s what it is worth. It won’t move off the shelves unless its price is lower than its value to some of the customers. If it is higher than the value to everyone, it will not be sold.
Both of these notions undermine the logic of the free market, and when they are implemented into policy and law, as they have been over the past century or so, the growth of wealth of the nation, and sometimes its absolute value, is accordingly reduced. And while they are intrinsically Marxist notions, many hold them who do not consider themselves Marxists.
So, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, let me disabuse them of their false consciousness:
If you believe, as the president does, that “it’s good for everyone when we spread the wealth around,” you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that “the rich” don’t “need” tax rate reductions, you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that, at some point, other people have “made enough money,” you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that we have to “keep people in their homes,” even when they have never had any equity in them, and despite the fact that they can’t afford the mortgage and the market is not being allowed to clear, then you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that there is a floor on the value of everyone’s labor, and it is a single number applicable in every state of the union, regardless of the cost of living, then you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that handing someone who pays no taxes a government check is a “tax cut,” you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that the government should pay the “prevailing local wage” on government projects, you might be both a Marxist and a racist, since Davis-Bacon was instituted to shut lower-paid minorities out of such projects.
If you believe that unemployment checks are the surest, fastest way to stimulate the economy, you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that the capital gains tax should be increased, even though it would result in reduced government revenue, because that’s what is required for “fairness,” you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that you know better than someone else what they “need,” and are willing to impose your belief on them at gunpoint and force them to purchase it, and not allow them to purchase things that they think they need, then you just might be a Marxist, too.
“it’s good for everyone when we spread the wealth around”
Actually, he said “when we spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”.
I know, it means the same thing. But you put quote marks around it, and it wasn’t an accurate quote. And it’s not hard to check these things.
“If you believe that “the rich” don’t “need” tax rate reductions, you might be a Marxist.”
Everything is relative
Everyone “needs” tax reductions, but somebody has to decide how they’re doled out.
If you believe that, at some point, other people have “made enough money,” you might be a Marxist.
In fairness, he WAS talking at a time when uncle sam was bailing those people out. I think his choice of words was poor, but I think you’ll find that most rational people would imagine that there is an amount of money that nobody could possibly imagine spending usefully in their lifetime. We might not all agree on the number though. And very few people would want to actually prevent anyone from exceeding that level of wealth.
If you believe that we have to “keep people in their homes,” …
Or you might be an economist who has the country’s best interests at heart. Abandoned homes and homeless people are both a drain on productive economic activity. One brings down surrounding property values, the other makes it harder for people to keep participating. When somebody loses their house they stop paying rates, they stop maintaining it – both contribute to economic activity. There is indeed a productivity gain to be had by find a settlement that keeps people housed, and stops all that collective real-estate value from being trashed. How much should be spent, and how many arms need to be bent to make it happen – there’s obviously debate to be had there. You can completely ignore the individual well-being of the people being evicted – but it’s still worth SOMETHING to try to prevent it.
If you believe that there is a floor on the value of everyone’s labor, and it is a single number applicable in every state of the union …”
Or you might find the prospect of people living in poverty in the “richest nation on earth” objectionable. I mean – all those wars were FOR something, right? But the mechanism is dodgy, I agree.
If you believe that handing someone who pays no taxes a government check is a “tax cut,” you might be a Marxist.”
Yeah, well, that’s obviously silly. That’s a payment.
“If you believe that the government should pay the “prevailing local wage” on government projects, …”
They should leave it to the market.
“If you believe that unemployment checks are the surest, fastest way to stimulate the economy, you might be a Marxist.”
Actually, in some circumstances, in the short term, yes. There is no doubt that simply handing out money to people who are guaranteed to spend it right away will in fact stimulate the economy quickly and in a competitive fashion. It’s quick, there’s very little overhead or red tape, and it’ll be spent in the way that’s most beneficial to the spender. I think one of australia’s better stimulus decisions was to just hand out 900$ to everyone who submitted a tax return that year. That quite clearly worked.
“If you believe that the capital gains tax should be increased, …”
Why should capital gains tax be any different to income tax? You sell something at a profit, you made money. That’s income.
If you believe that you know better than someone else what they “need,” and are willing to impose your belief on them at gunpoint and force them to purchase it, and not allow them to purchase things that they think they need, …”
Er, yeah. Gunpoint. And what’s this “and not allow them to purchase things that they think they need”. You suggesting that drugs be legalized?
If you have to have a joke explained to you then you might be a Marxist.
God, give it a break. If you are still confused about whether or not you are a Marixist why not keep it to yourself. We already have figured it out anyways,Mathew. This isn’t Chris is it?
No, I’m not a marxist. Marx had some interesting ideas on culture, but on economics and politics he was basically 100% wrong. Historical materialism was about as wrong as any theory can get. The great pity is that he never lived to see how disastrous his own ideas were. And just for good measure, let’s throw in that he was a dreamer who lived off somebody else’s inheritance.
IMHO, the “marxist” thing is a red herring. I think the author has dreamed up his own version of marxism so he can join the crowd trying to stick the label on everyone to the left of bill o’reilly. It’s silly. And I’m not chris
The law of diminishing returns kicks in on all the items you quibbled about. Distinctions are tough for Liberals to comprehend…like investment vs. income. Investment bears a risk. I buy a house and the value might go down due to overextended folks going through foreclosure next door. Income generally comes from actual work (excluding interest income). It’s an undeniable fact that marxist policies encourage sloth in those that lack ambition, and destroys ambition in those that have it. (Unless of course, you run the ‘game’)
“The law of diminishing returns kicks in on all the items you quibbled about.”
Absolutely. But nobody is saying these are sound “business as usual” responses. Chucking buckets of water around in your dining room is a bad idea … unless the curtains are on fire, in which case it’s a very GOOD idea. In a crisis, tradeoffs are made.
“Distinctions are tough for Liberals to comprehend…like investment vs. income.”
I understand your point, but I disagree. If the value of your investment goes down … you don’t pay any taxes.
In reality, most countries with CGT acknowledge the risk factor by taxing gains at a lower rate than income. Yes, it is a good idea to encourange investment. In property terms, some countries encourage property investment (for rental housing) by things like negative gearing.
But are they handed out evenly. The point is that Obama and the Democrats are engaging in class warfare, pitting one segment of society against another. As the article notes, they are also playing word games – in a truly Stalinist fashion – labeling any out-of-favor target group as “rich”. The label need not have anything to do with actual wealth.
…
Look at the actual history of what’s happening. Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae deliberately forced banks to loan money to people who could not afford the mortgages, and now they are forcing the banks to eat the losses when these people, predictable, cannot make the monthly payments. The Marxist point of view is that home ownership is a right, regardless of your actual ability to pay for it. A more realistic point of view is that rentals work quite fine and that home ownership is for those who have saved enough money to make the down payment and are financially secure enough to make the monthly payments. Also, bailouts should not be extended to those who tried to take advantage of a housing bubble by “flipping” houses.
In truth, the banking crisis would have been averted entirely if the government had just kept its hands out of where they should not have been, not decided that home ownership was a “right”, and let the market take care of itself. I would say that the Federal Government should have no part in the mortgage industry at all, except regulation of the banks involved. If the States want to help individuals in trouble with their mortgages, that’s another matter.
Ahah, you reveal yourself. First of all, poverty is relative. The poorest U.S. citizen is quite wealthy when compared to a beggar from, say, Bangladesh. Given that income distribution follows a Bell curve, like most things in nature, there will always be somebody in the bottom 20%; this doesn’t mean that they are necessarily starving to death, just that they have to make do with a Kia rather than a Mercedes.
Secondly, why is their poverty my problem (noting that I would be the one called upon to pay for Federal anti-poverty programs) [also note: I'm talking official government programs here, not charity]. I’m not rich, but I’m comfortably middle class. I have what I have because 1) my parents saw to it that I was educated enough and have the proper values to not end up on the dole, and 2) I tried to avoid those stupid actions that lead one to impoverishment. Of course stuff happens – my father-in-law died when my wife was in high school, and her mother relied on Social Security to help raise the children until she could re-enter the workforce. But, it should not be routine for people to rely on welfare from cradle to grave, as so often happens. Also, of course, and once again, such programs are best handled by the States at a local level, not by the Federal Government.
But a “tax cut” is what Obama is calling it.
There’s a difference between an unemployment check and a “tax rebate”. If the people aren’t working, then they aren’t being productive, they’re just spending other people’s money. Don’t forget that the money in those checks come from somewhere – if they are spending it, then I’m not, so in the end it just balances out.
Precisely. Keep the two even, don’t tax one more than the other. Especially don’t double tax it – once at the corporate level, when the company earns it, and then at the personal level when it’s paid out as dividends.
Illogical argument. Your point might be valid if the government were forcing people to take narcotics at gunpoint (see, BTW, the British-Chinese Opium Wars). In any event, the government’s legitimate concern extends primarily to the social harm caused by the use of these substances.
I’m going to partially quote again or this will get too long – folks, go back to the original.
“But are they handed out evenly”
Define “evenly”
“Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae deliberately forced banks to loan money to people who could not afford the mortgages,”
That’s a myth. Seriously – you’ve been sold a lie by people with an agenda. Banks were not forced to do anything that led to the current problem. They were writing bad loans entirely by choice, well outside the remit of any “community reinvestment acts”, with the assumption that property would keep appreciating so they could always recoup their capital by selling the asset. Then, also entirely by choice, they were selling these loans on and disguising the actual risks (which turned out to be a much bigger problem than the original loans). There were also a bunch of other dodgy practices (reserves kept too low, for example) that showed up AFTER the crisis hit, but the basic problem was a business model that relied on highly-leveraged property that always increased in value. When that stopped, the whole thing fell down. Go do some more googling and look at the numbers.
“The Marxist point of view is that home ownership is a right”
That’s not where I’m coming from, no. And as you’ll see in my earlier response – that’s not actually an assumption you need to make to see that an intervention might be worthwhile to the economy as a whole.
“In truth, the banking crisis would have been averted entirely if the government had just kept its hands out of where they should not have been … and let the market take care of itself.”
Actually the crisis is ENTIRELY because the government let the market take care of itself. I’ll point you toward the australian situation – our banks basically laughed their way through the crisis. We had one small niche investment bank go under. The rest kept posting their regularly increasing profits. Why? Because they weren’t exposed to the problems in the US system, because they weren’t allowed to be. A few years back, our regulator actually publicly warned one investment bank about the risks of doing what your lot were doing. It stopped doing it. After the balloon went up, all of our government’s actions were designed to counter external influences – when ireland jumped and guaranteed deposits, we did the same. They chucked some money at retail and stood up a bunch of government works programs to keep construction ticking along while export demand slowed. But our actual banks hardly even noticed the crisis. We didn’t have a “credit crunch” at all.
“I would say that the Federal Government should have no part in the mortgage industry at all, except regulation of the banks involved.”
Isn’t that a contradiction?
“Ahah, you reveal yourself. First of all, poverty is relative.”
Maybe you should try living on minimum wage.
“… my father-in-law died when my wife was in high school, and her mother relied on Social Security to help raise the children until she could re-enter the workforce.”
So … why was your poverty “somebody else’s problem”?
“But, it should not be routine for people to rely on welfare from cradle to grave, as so often happens.”
I don’t think it’s “so often” anywhere, and it’s not the situation for the people who found themselves out of work over the last couple of years. Somebody asked a good question a few years back – certain folks tend to assume that whoever is on welfare is just lazy. There’s something about them that means they’re on welfare. And yet … the number changes. How can that be? If it’s 5% of the workforce that’s too lazy to work this year – how can that become 6% the next year, and 4% the year after? Is the laziness of the people varying? What’s going on? Could it be something else?!?
“Also, of course, and once again, such programs are best handled by the States at a local level, not by the Federal Government.”
I’m not sure that’s particularly relevant – it’s just a smaller version of the same problem.
“But a “tax cut” is what Obama is calling it.”
Then he’s wrong.
“…if they are spending it, then I’m not, so in the end it just balances out”
In moral terms it might, but in economic terms, no – it doesn’t. Not in the current circumstances. That’s the point. All those people who stop working also stop being consumers (among other things). That affects the jobs of other people.
“Illogical argument. Your point might be valid if the government were forcing people to take narcotics at gunpoint”
No, I’m responding to the second half of the sentence – i.e. it’s wrong to tell people they can’t buy something. You’re responding to the first half – i.e. it’s wrong to MAKE people buy something.
“In any event, the government’s legitimate concern extends primarily to the social harm caused by the use of these substances.”
aHA! So … what about the social harm of mass unemployment caused by dodgy banking practices and poor regulation?
I think you’re making some very bad moral judgments. If somebody’s chucked out on the heap because their employer can’t keep a line of credit to operate, or because all of their customers have folded … and that newly-unemployed person discovers their savings have all disappeared as well, all because of the mendacity of a completely different group of people and stupid government oversight (or lack of) … don’t you think they deserve some sympathy? They did everything right, they saved, they paid their taxes year after year, and they’ve lost everything through no fault of their own. And that’s happened to MILLIONS of people, in supposedly the greatest country on earth – the land of opportunity. And you’re complaining about whether they should get a meagre unemployment handout so they can feed their kids.
And, more importantly, you’re quibbling over whether anything at all should be done to try to get that massive slice of the economy back into jobs and producing stuff. I think that should be a no-brainer. The US’ position in the world is entirely due to its economic production (and demand). Chuck that away, and you’re stuffed. You can kiss goodbye to that “leader of the free world” moniker.
Re: welfare. The number changes because, as you point out, the economy fluctuates. But the moral objection to welfare is still valid: it subsidizes an underclass of chronically unemployed people, people who do no work but expect the government to provide for their needs. The problem with our current system is that it does not distinguish between people who need the “dole” to see them through hard times and people who are satisfied to live on it permanently. Most conservatives have no problem with government assisting people, provided those people are making an effort. We object to those who do not try. Morally, it would be preferable to force otherwise healthy and able people to work rather than to subsidize their unemployment.
Admittedly, it sometimes seems that the wealthy have more influence on government and get more regulatory and tax assistance than poor people do. But again, as a conservative, I have to ask why a person who actually worked for his or her wealth should be penalized for success. And I have to ask how we can distinguish between this “self-made man/woman” and those individuals and families who are now “chronically wealthy” without doing anything to earn it. Liberal plans don’t seem to distinguish between the two.
We don’t want to penalize hard work and success. We also don’t want to reward sloth and dysfunction. Yet to us, liberals seem dedicated to doing both in the name of “social justice.” If you’re only interested in results then yes, taking from the rich and giving to the poor will reduce the gap. So will confiscating land and nationalizing corporations. But none of this will produce a healthy, growing economy.
Matthew is engaged in a bit of the presumptuous “myth-busting” that we’ve become all to used to in hearing the travails of the subprime mortgage market discussed. Paul of Alexandria’s discussion of the role of the GSEs may have been a little less than thorough, but to pretend that they had no role in the crisis is just plain out wrong. There’s some simple facts that don’t get discussed by the “financial sophisticates” attempting to minimize the role of Fannie and Freddie in the current crisis that their dismissals fail to address.
First of all, the claim that securitization was the root of the crisis ignores the fact that many more assets than subprime mortgages have underlied securitization structures over the years. Credit card receivables, auto loans, and corporate receivables have been the underlying assets for securitization structures for the last twenty to thirty years. Yet, oddly, even though the same incentives and moral hazards exist in these markets, we have not seen the sort of overleverage or excesses that led to the subprime crisis. By and large, even though the market for new ABS securities backed by these assets has dried up, the existing securities in these markets continue to perform continue to perform as expected at the time the securitizations took place. Moreover, one need only look at the failure of Washington Mutual, which engaged in minimal securitization activity and held little if any subprime paper, to realize that the subprime crisis did not have its roots in the securitization process.
So, rather than looking to financial engineering and Wall Street to find the source of our troubles, we would be far better served to look at the fundamentals of the assets they were securitizing to find the core of our problem. We need to ask ourselves why did they fail so miserably here, and not in all of these other asset classes. I’ll certainly agree with Matthew’s suggestion that the banks and investors’ most important mistake was in assuming that the value of their assets would continue to rise indefinitely. But, why did they assume this?
Certainly, it seems suspect to assume that the rocket scientists and speculators who backed this market would have just had a massive collective brain fart on this one asset class and have remained sound judges of credit and and finane in all of those other assets underlying ABS securitizations. And the oft-ignored fact is that, historically, the U.S. residential real estate market never had suffered a protracted price decline. Sure individual regions and markets saw significant declines and setbacks, but the national real estate market as a whole always saw gains in one market offsetting losses in others. No, there was something quite specific in the most recent real estate bubble that defied the historical patterns of the real estate market and rendered moot the banks’ assumptions in structuring and valuing these securities. What we need to find is the reason housing prices and mortgage asset values across the country entered into a bubble of unsustainable increases that could only end in a collapse to normal market valuations.
Now, many look to the Fed’s post-9/11 easing as the culprit here. This is certainly a plausible suspect. Abnormally low interest rates maintained for a protracted period will undoubtedly inflate real estate prices and incentivize investors to move down the credit spectrum as they seek to achieve attractive yields. Moreover, their national scope would explain why there was a bubble across regional real estate markets. And I won’t deny that the easing certainly played a role in inflating these markets. However, its hard to be satisfied with this explanation. As noted previously, we did not see a bubble across asset classes. Even the high-yield leveraged lending to support the boom in M&A activity among financial sponsors in the run-up to the crisis seems to have fared relatively well in the post-collapse era. More importantly, the post-9/11 easing explanation doesn’t fit the timeline of events in the mortgage and real estate markets. Even prior to 9/11, subprime lending and securitization was a growing asset class that was seeing dramatic growth in activity. Moreover, the Case-Shiller Housing Price Index puts the advent of the real estate bubble in roughly the 1997-1998 time frame.
Now we’re getting somewhere! Something happened in 1997-1998 that drove us off course, that played havoc with the appropriate assumptions for asset valuation. And sure enough, we find that it was here that the government implemented a couple of innocuous-sounding reforms that might serve to drive our problem. Firstly, the CRA was revised to permit subprime paper to be used to fulfill banks’ CRA requirements. This undoubtedly would serve to increase their appetite for subprime assets. They could, if the market worked correctly, substitute crappy loans to less credit-worthy borrowers with paper with reasonable yields that had a AAA credit profile.
I believe more significantly, at the same time, the GSEs were permitted to purchase subprime mortgages. And they entered in a big way. The GSEs, in fact, accounted for 10% of the holdings of non-prime debt. Their motive was simple. They sought to collect the spread between these high-yielding loans and the below-market rate that their implied guarantee from the government ensured them. But, even this 10% figure understates just how dramatically the GSEs goosed the subprime market. When you have a one-way player in a market buying up paper and never selling on a massive basis, you establish to all of the other market participants that it’s full steam ahead. There is always a buyer that can be relied upon to establish liquidity when you want out. Not surprisingly, much of the market quickly began to coalesce around the use of Fannie and Freddie’s standards for asset valuation and stress testing.
Far from being the case that the government’s sin in the subprime market was insufficient oversight and regulation, the government’s role in the creating the crisis was one of actively encouraging the growth of the toxic waste that blew up the financial system.
“They were writing bad loans entirely by choice.”
A Hobson’s choice. Because the government had made it possible to loan out the money, if they didn’t do it, their competitors would, leaving them at a potentially devastating competitive disadvantage. Only by having all banks agree not to go for the easy dollar could you have averted the stampede due to perverse government incentives, and that gamesmanship has “prisoner’s dilemma” written all over it.
“Or you might find the prospect of people living in poverty in the “richest nation on earth” objectionable.”
Statements such as this assume there is a static, linear relationship between money and what it will buy. But, no matter what games you play with money, all economic players are in competition with one another over the available pool of goods and services. It is a feedback system – it self adjusts for the games you play with the medium of commerce.
And, that is all that money is: a medium of commerce. It has no intrinsic value. When you put a floor on income, you simply ensure that fewer of the poor will be working at all. As a group, you do not change their overall lot.
So forcing Americans to bail out Wall Street; that’s no big deal. But asking the wealthiest to return to the tax rate they were at under Clinton, and suddenly we’re engaged in class warfare? Did you eat a lot of paint chips when you were a child?
“So forcing Americans to bail out Wall Street; that’s no big deal.”
Um. Who said it wasn’t a big deal? I didn’t. Did you?
“But asking the wealthiest to return to the tax rate they were at under Clinton, and suddenly we’re engaged in class warfare?”
I don’t understand how you could think that has anything to do with what I wrote. It sounds to me like I’m not the one who’s interested in “class warfare”
“…but somebody has to decide how they’re[tax reductions] doled out.”
I see. The collection of somebody and somebody else, etc., the Congress, own everybody’s income and dole out to each according to what the majority in Congress feel are some people’s needs. Sounds like a very good reason to vote them out now for pointing to too many rediculous needs, eg, free food for the millions, which should be a charitable activity. And it seems this is likely to happen in just a few more days.
“Sounds like a very good reason to vote them out now for pointing to too many rediculous needs, eg, free food for the millions …”
What – vote out congress? Good luck with that. Regardless of who wins, there will still be a congress, and it’ll still collect taxes (unless they’re reps, in which case they’ll borrow the money instead) and then dole it out according to how they see fix. Same as it ever was.
“And it seems this is likely to happen in just a few more days.”
Don’t get too excited. It might not be the whitewash you’re hoping for.
Taxes are involuntary and are taken at either gunpoint or the threat of gunpoint. If you don’t pay taxes, armed men are sent to arrest you and take you to jail, where you will be kept by armed men until tried. If you are convicted, armed men will take you to prison, where other armed men will keep you until the government decides to let you out. If you resist these armed men, you may be shot and killed.
If it wasn’t at gunpoint or the threat thereof, they would be called “voluntary contributions.”
If you believe that you can quote half a sentence, the somehow show that half to be false in some cases, without the other half, then you have shown that the whole is false, you might be a liberal. If you “prove stuff” with rhetoric, rather than logic, you surely are a liberal.
If you can’t understand what I just said, well, we just went over that.
Hmmm. Moptop, your Matthew is showing there, double-trouble.
Fair cop.
I actually decided to trim the quotes because the whole thing was getting far too long. I had sort of assumed people would read the original points that I was responding to. In hindsight maybe I should have just numbered them.
But I don’t think my “selective quoting” makes any difference to the argument. I was responding to them in full.
Please. One Unabomber Manisfesto was enough. You say you’re not a Red, but you sure talk like one . . . at least in terms of mindnumbing diatribe.
SHADDAP! YOUR LIPS ARE FLAPPING!
“And very few people would want to actually prevent anyone from exceeding that level of wealth.”
Unfortunately, many of those very few are lawmakers who seek to do just that, like our president, for example.
“I think you’ll find that most rational people would imagine that there is an amount of money that nobody could possibly imagine spending usefully in their lifetime.”
That is a *very* marxist attitude. Rich people don’t spend their money (after that point you have in mind), they invest it. Maybe they don’t invest it in the things that you think they ought to, and you want to take it from them and invest it differently? Maybe in a public transportation project with negative cash flow projected for the foreseeable future?
Way to miss the point. Really.
Anon, that is a good point on investing and covers a lot of ground which would include charity.
~ Eph 4:28 Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth~
If you are a Marxist do you or will you steal? Is income redistribution receiving stolen property? Is political pork a form or theft? Is tax dodging a form of theft? Do we answer yes or no to these questions?
Paul is writing to the church so obviously some of them were former thieves but if they were still stealing they could not be former thieves. Paul goes on to teach that he should work with his hands to earn enough to satisfy his own needs but does not stop there. He needs to earn in excess of his need in order to help another who does have a need and we call this charity. Government cannot have charity because it is an institution and not a person. Since it is always a person who makes the decision,when government tries to be charitable it is because of a personal decision and not of the institution. I won’t say that there may be times when government is the proper institution but needs great caution.
I believe we do need to distribute the wealth, not redistribute the wealth. We need opportunity for self employment and we need to have opportunity to develop marketable products and/or services at a price that moves the product at a comfortable profit, which is also paying the wages earned. Not all this effort is chargeable to labor as in labor produces all and is entitled to all. This is patently false. Labor does not produce the ideas or the management protocol
After this manner America created much wealth which has been distributed world wide, lifting many out of poverty. No other system has or can do this.
In order to do this we should have no more burden on business than the necessary order needed for it to function. There could be a lot of discussion as to what that order is but the answer is not in over-regulation .Capital gains taxes and soaking the rich are both counter productive.There is no way for the rich to invest without an increase in employment. I may be completely irrational but I will leave that up to your judgment.
Matthew uses many words but few facts so his argument is sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. From what I see, his chosen path has invariably led to poverty and want.
We are talking survival and that means if you were dumped in the marsh country of South Louisiana as the Cajuns were could you survive? They said,”Se la vi!” and set about to survive and they are here to testify that they did survive, not thanks to government.
They did not manage that survival on Marxist principles so maybe we need to look into the history of how they managed. Could Matthew cut this mustard?
Yeah! That next-to-last one in the list — the one where Pres. Obama said with his own lips that he knows that lowering capital gains taxes increases revenue, but he doesn’t care because he’s more concerned with “fairness” — that is right out of his own mouth! I’ve seen that on TV a dozen times! How can people see/hear that not understand what it means? Because what it MEANS is: All this tax talk has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with MONEY. This is all — Obamacare & the whole shebang — ALL of it — about POWER, & nothing else, period. Have you ever noticed that when some people say the word “fair,” everything they say after that is the exact opposite of “fair”? Maybe in January, when people get their first paycheck after the Bush tax cuts expire, they’ll begin to rouse from their lethargy, or get their heads out of the sand, or whatever. I used to think politics was boring. Not any more! I only wish it were, because it’s taking up all of my time, trying to keep up with everything that’s going on.
“Yeah! That next-to-last one in the list — the one where Pres. Obama said with his own lips that he knows that lowering capital gains taxes increases revenue”
Give us a reference to that, please. The video should be on youtube. It shouldn’t be hard to find. But in case you can’t, here’s what he actually DID say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpSDBu35K-8
He doesn’t say that lowering capital gains taxes increases revenue. Nobody in that clip says that – not even the moderator. What HE says is that when the rate was cut once in the past revenues went up anyway. Obama correctly points out that it depends on what is happening on wall street. If you cut the rate at a time when stocks are booming, you get more revenue anyway. If you increase it when they’re flat, you don’t. Everything being equal, an increased rate increases revenue. I repeat: At no point does anyone say “lowering capital gains taxes increases revenue”. If they did, they’d be rightly laughed off the stage.
Facts: they’re not the enemy, you know.
Well, I’ll allow people to compare the following quote from the clip to your representation thereof: “In each instance when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased, the government took in more money. And in the 1980s when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.”
Sure. And I’ll let people see the graphs of what actually happened to revenue for themselves:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/06/~/media/Images/Reports/2004/bg1765/figure11.ashx
Here’s an article about it with another graph that matches that data (see figure one):
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CapitalGainsTaxes.html
If you want to cherry pick that data you could try to claim that step changes achieved particular outcomes in the following 12 months. And you’d be spectacularly wrong. The long-term movements in revenue are much bigger than that. There’s one notable exception, though – the big spike in 86 was because everyone saw the increase coming and sold their shares before it took effect. Ignoring that anomaly, the increase made no difference to the trend – it kept increasing. And the last cut took effect during the dot-com boom.
In fact, if there’s any conclusion you can get from that graph, it’s that CGT changes FOLLOW share market movements. The changes seem to take place a couple of years after revenue trends appear.
But nobody who can see the data can honestly believe a cut in CGT increases revenue.
And no, obama did not say that he believed that. Not even close. The quote you picked was from the moderator. Even HE didn’t say he believed that. He just cherry-picked some step changes, as I said.
Facts:
You: “He doesn’t say that lowering capital gains taxes increases revenue. Nobody in that clip says that – not even the moderator. What HE says is that when the rate was cut once in the past revenues went up anyway.”
Actual words of the moderator: “In each instance when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased, the government took in more money. And in the 1980s when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.”
Ruth
Ok, you’ve got me. I should have taken more time over that post and quoted exactly what the moderator said. Fair enough.
However …
If anyone’s bothered to check the sources, they will have discovered three things for themselves:
(1) Obama never said that cutting CGT raises revenue. Not even close.
(2) NOBODY actually said that “cutting CGT raises revenue”, although the moderator tried to imply it with a selection of data.
(3) It is abundantly provable that cutting CGT DOESN’T increase revenue.
But thanks for checking my quote. I shouldn’t have cut that corner.
If you believe…….
Acts 2:44-46 (New International Version)
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.
Acts 4:32-35 (New International Version)
The Believers Share Their Possessions
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
-”you might be a Marxist.”
The verses you quote refers to believers doing for believers, and believers giving charity. No force is applied except that of internal compassion. Marxism is a system of governance where a great deal of force is applied. Christians give because they should and pay their taxes to Caesar by compulsion. Mixing scripture with governance is a bad mix as governments never seem to measure up.
Yes, but this is a voluntary prescription, not enforced sharing by government! Huge difference.
The verses you quote refers to believers doing for believers, and believers giving charity. No force is applied except that of internal compassion. Marxism is a system of governance where a great deal of force is applied. Christians give because they should and pay their taxes to Caesar by compulsion. Mixing scripture with governance is a bad mix as governments never seem to measure up.
It’s funny, though, how this issue was never detected or addressed in over 1000 years of Christian hegemony in Europe. It took a secular Enlightenment to bring that issue to the fore. Christians owe their modern-day awareness of the issue of force to that salutary fact, not to untamed Christianity.
Try to differentiate between the individual Christian and the organization that calls itself the authority.
Actually, you are very thunderingly wrong. This was the model of the monasteries of both the West and Byzantine Christianity. And it still is. Protestants sometimes forget Christianity began before 1517 :-}
You don’t know the history of the Ana Baptist and and others with different names but the same doctrines and belief that were persecuted in Europe and North Africa. That history is available but you will probably have to really search to find it.
The disciples were a voluntary association of individuals under special circumstances. Yes, this is how believers should act, but it is not to be expected of all people, especially non-Christians (looking at it from a particularly Christian POV). People in the U.S. are quite free to form communes of various types in voluntary association; many of these have been tried, and most fail in short order.
I might also point out
Leviticus 19:13: “You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning.”
Deuteronomy 24:15: “You shall give him his wages on his day before the sun sets, for he is poor and sets his heart on it; so that he will not cry against you to the LORD and it become sin in you.” [Both of the above referring to laborers paid by the day]
Luke 3:14: “4Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, ‘And what about us, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.’”
1 Timothy 5:18: “For the Scripture says, ‘YOU SHALL NOT MUZZLE THE OX WHILE HE IS THRESHING,’ and ‘The laborer is worthy of his wages.’”
Mr. Walters, do you have a point? Most people, I think, are aware that Socialism works – as long as it is confined to small groups/tribes. (There are other qualifications, but they need not concern us here.) The problem is that when you get to nation-state size, the glories of socialism result in places like the old Soviet Union, or even worse examples such as Cuba and North Korea.
Even places famous for being socialistic are modifying their behavior, due to the belated realization that it just doesn’t work very well. It is worth noting that one of the least-functional states, North Korea, has not instituted any type of market-based reforms.
IOW, your post is meaningless, since you are referring to a small group, and our current concern is with a nation.
Then most people would be wrong. Unless by “works” you mean condemns its participants to a tribalist beggardom in which their prosperity will only come from force (taking from their productive neighboring groups), fraud (conning & converting more people into sacrificing their wealth), charity, or the extent to which they refuse to follow their altruist-socialist philosophy and produce things for themselves. Those ‘working’ socialist tribes of history never came close to creating our contemporary wealth, prosperity, and standard of living made possible by Capitalism. It is a testament to Capitalism’s power to unleash human potential that even a mixed system polluted and chained by the altruist-socialist ideas of our savage past has enabled the vast prosperity we experience today.
Socialism is ‘I-love-you’ Cannibalism.
Marxism, like most such philosophies, is really a perversion of Christian (and other religious) teachings (I can only speak from a Christian POV, myself). The biggest difference is that Christianity assumes that people are not perfect and cannot be made perfect and gives doctrines to abide by that will help keep society tolerable. Marxism, on the other hand, like all utopian philosophies, assumes that human society can be made perfect if only the rules can be made strict enough and the malcontents purged. As has been noted elsewhere (see Looking for Racism (in All the Wrong Places)
By Robin of Berkeley at American Thinker and What Makes the Left Tick by by David Solway) “leftists” (read “socialists”) tend to be idealists with little experience in the realities of human behavior and the ‘real’ world.
Marxism, like most such philosophies, is really a perversion of Christian (and other religious) teachings (I can only speak from a Christian POV, myself). The biggest difference is that Christianity assumes that people are not perfect and cannot be made perfect and gives doctrines to abide by that will help keep society tolerable. Marxism, on the other hand, like all utopian philosophies, assumes that human society can be made perfect if only the rules can be made strict enough and the malcontents purged.
This is correct, and the other commenters here should take notice of it: on the question of using force against individuals, Christianity is in fact mute — at best.
At worst, it adapts readily and without modification to justifying said use of force — after all, of what worth are “doctrines to abide by” if not enforced? All that changes between the two on that issue is the name of the elite doing the enforcing (priesthood versus Party).
Whether human nature can be “fixed” or whether it is unfixable and therefore must be constrained, the use of force against those defective humans is logically necessary.
The only way out of that trap is the third option, the option of the Enlightenment: to treat human nature as being just like the rest of nature — a given fact, morally neutral — and develop ethical systems based on these facts of human nature.
It is this approach that led to the discovery that force (and its moral root, “duty”) is the problem, not human nature — and therefore that banning the initiation of force from society, a process called “civilization”, to make civil, is a requirement for successful human life.
Actually, Christianity has a number of things to say against the use of force, like, if you are struck, turn the other cheek, etc.
“At worst, it adapts readily and without modification to justifying said use of force — after all, of what worth are “doctrines to abide by” if not enforced?”
They are worthless if enforced.
I believe this is what I’ve heard one tv preacher call taking a text out of context in order to use it as a pretext. No one compelled the Apostles to follow Jesus, David. Freely choosing to lead a communal life is one thing; having the government require it is another thing entirely.
No compulsion? Perhaps you should study the texts further. What does scripture demand followers do to apostates?
Christ didn’t demand anything. Not one word of the Gospels suggests that Christians should (or must) impose any sort of punishment on an apostate. Got something else in mind? Something from a fallible human being?
The Gospels? Aren’t you being selective! The Bible is bigger than that, bub. You have heard of the Old Testament, yes? Stoning harlots etc. Or is that no longer part of Christian doctrine?
How about Sodom and Gomorrah? God “kills” everyone who doesn’t do as he says (or at least, what his representatives tell us he says). I imagine you’re going to point out that God himself did it, rather than Christians, but that’s a weak dodge; for one thing, Christians didn’t seem to be drawing any such distinction during their thousand-plus year control of European culture.
Seerak,
For all your claims you don’t know much about Christianity. Why bring up the Old Testament when Christian doctrine is based on the gospels. The purpose the Old Testament serves is as a history of the old covenant and the prophecy of the new covenant.
You seem to miss the basics of faith. First, one must choose to believe, then one bounded to the scriptures. Simply put if you do not believe the scriptures do not bind you, if you believe the scriptures are no burden.
I’m sure all the pagans that have been drowned, burned, stoned, decapitated, etc. throughout history at the hands of Christians are glad to hear you say that. But you are right – words can be ignored, its the guys with the torches that don’t ignore them that you need to worry about.
behead them?
whoops… wrong ideology…
Ignorance, thy name is Agnostic.
Try Deuteronomy 13:6-9, or if you’re not hip to the old testament, consider
Luke 19:27 and Matthew 5:17-18. You may be peaceful and only follow scripture of your choosing, but you can’t fake or ignore what is written in attempt to rationalize your choices.
Your faith based philosophy is incoherent. Try reason instead. It is a much better advocate of freedom.
Luke 19:27? Perhaps you should try reading the entire parable. It might be very enlightening. It is an allusion to the end times, when those who have not followed Him will be slain.
Matthew 5:17-18 … really? You see a call to violence in that? Christ came to earth to stand in our stead before God, to take on the punishment for our sins so that we may live in eternity in the Kingdom of Heaven. Christ said the law still stands, but breaking it is no longer condemnation to an eternity in Hell.
As for Deuteronomy 13:6-9, this is far to complex to try to explain to a non-believer. But in short, the Old Testament was then, the New Testament is now. If you truly want to understand this, go to a Bible-centric church with an open mind and heart and seek the truth.
“Christ said the law still stands…”
Yes, and the law he was referring to was the Old Testament. You know, like Deuteronomy 13:6-9.
Reality is the arbiter of truth. It cannot be fooled, and does not conform to your stories. When you say “open heart and mind” what you mean is “open, and empty its contents” not “consider all ideas, and let reason and reality be your judge”.
Well, thank God I’m an atheist, then!
Don’cha love it when people quote form the Bible to support injustice nad tyranny?
Or when people who would NEVER vote for someone who stated that they would make political decisions based on the Bible, expect THEIR quotes from the Bible to shame all of us hypocrites?
Don’cha love it when people quote form the Bible to support injustice nad tyranny?
I know you’re being sarcastic, but no, I don’t love it in the slightest. I have well over a millenium of Christian history in the West proving that they mean it.
Sure, and I have more than five millenia of history showing that human beings, regardless of what they claim to believe – even Reason – will murder, rob, rape, pillage, be grossly hypocritical, act irrationally, etc., etc., etc. Christianity has nothing to do with it, or at least, no more than any other faith, ideology, or belief, and a lot less to do with it than many.
Yeah, and the rational, atheist French Revolution churned up the Terror, which murdered more people in 3 years than the Inquisition did in 300. And rational, atheist, dialectical materialism murdered almost 100 million people in less than a hundred. Jesus Christ or Karl Marx? Moses or Mao?
(This where you sputter “B-b- but you can’t compare bad guys vs. bad guys!” or some other irrelevant nonsequiter of that import.)
That goes both ways, PD.
I agree that religion (of all kinds) is given way too much stick as a simplistic way to explain conflict. I don’t think there are many conflicts in history that have been primarily motivated by religious belief – not even the current one.
Nobody sets out to kill the other guy because they don’t agree on scripture. That happens because one side threatens the other (justifiably or not) or just wants to take his stuff. The last balkan war wasn’t about religion. Most of the crusades weren’t really about religion. Heck – I’m not even completely sure the inquisitions were really motivated by genuinely-held religious views. All of it was about power, security, greed and prestige (in the case of the crusades). I personally think the religious justifications are pasted on after the fact.
However…
Looking at the deaths that HAVE been chalked up to greedy, prestige-oriented historical regimes that claimed to belong to a religion of peace and wot-not, I think it’s a bit rich to claim it was all ok simply because christianity-based regimes (and others) didn’t get the chance to wield power in the age of mechanised war (the rate of improvement in technology for killing more or less guaranteed that every major war put the last one in the shade – at lest until modern democracies decided to change that). Their doctrine either made them nice guys or it didn’t. If it didn’t, then I wonder what the value was.
IMHO, ideologies are problematic. Period. I’m happy for people to believe anything they like, but the moment they start trying to project their beliefs onto politics, I get nervous.
Matthew, I would think it a bit rich as well, IF he had claimed it was all okay. He didn’t. Personally, I think it’s a bit rich for you to put words in his mouth and then condemn him for them.
This happened at that time for a very specific time and circumstance and it was not the rule but the exception. There are many verses testifying to property rights rather than community rights. Ananias and Sapphira had property rights. Hear what Peter had to say.
~ Ac 5:1 ¶ But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession,
2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.
3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.~
Read verse 4 very carefully. They were not required to do this. They could have kept the possession but it turned out that the authorities confiscated property shortly after this and they likely would have lost all anyway. That is not the point of this story. After the possession was sold the money was still the possession of Ananias. But when Ananias said all, then possession passed out of his hand into the hand of the Lord. As I understand this, if Ananias had said here is half the money there still would be no problem. These verses are very much misquoted to cover the covetous nature of Socialism.These verses in no way sanction the Socialist agenda.
The rule is that property belongs to the individual, not the government. Love and compassion is a big factor but unregulated. If its government is must have regulation. This should be sufficient to make the point if you want to accept it, but it is not required that you agree.
It is a crime that the main stream media did not ask these same questions two years ago. Obama gave plenty of clues about how he was going to govern, yet nobody (except a few brave sould on Fox News and on Talk Radio) seemed to care. Always remember that most of the slogans in Democratic presidential campaigns are straight Marxism. All of the issues Obama raised during the campaign, such as “fairness,” “spread the wealth,” and “redistribution” is pure Marxism.
However, you will never hear a Conservative Republican say any of this. How many Marxists want to REDUCE the size of government, REDUCE taxes, REDUCE spending, REDUCE government entitlements, and REDUCE government intrusion in everygody’s life? Oh, that’s right, NONE! We are rapidly approaching the point where there is no such thing as a “Conservative Democrat,” like John Kennedy (who actually increased the size of the military, go figure). Democrats today should really be called “Social Democrats,” because, at best, they are socialists and, at worst, they are out-and-out communists (like the far-left liberals). How far this country has fallen.
Time to put an end to this nonsense on November 2nd.
That’s because the public school system hasn’t been teaching about Marx and communism and have elevated socialist tenets as saintly deeds of the government while demonizing capitalism. people will never fully understand how close we are right now into becoming a socialist country as long we have a school system dominated by unions and teachers benefiting from socialist entitlements (job security by virtue of their union’s political strength).
I think the first thing we “need” to do is RESCIND THE RIGHT for government workers to unionize. It is a blatant conflict of interest and it has been used as a sword to decimate the taxpayers. The unions are using our money to elect their bosses whom they hold hostage with our money to get more money from us. They also subsidize political speech with OUR MONEY, taken from us by force, and forcing us to pay for speech we condemn. Thanks to JFK, with a stroke of a pen, we are in the middle of this tyranny, and with the stroke of a conservative pen, this should be undone. Before we are. Utterly.
IMHO we are a democratic socialist country…we just didn’t notice it happening.
Bear,
you can say that again!
“We can’t expect the American people to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they wake up one day to find that they have Communism.” – Nikita Kruschev
You are employed by NPR, CPB, ABC News, or the DNC.
Remember when Obama had the Republicans over to discuss ObamaCare? Well, he tried to joke that it was not some Bolshevik plot. I wondered if Obama was not more of a Menshevik Marxist.
http://www.bluecollarphilosophy.com/2010/01/obama-is-not-bolshevik-but-is-he.html
He is obviously somewhere in the Marxist camp but exactly where is hard to pin down.
If you believe that poor are poor because rich are rich; and rich are rich because poor are poor (i.e. zero sum) – you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that poor nations are poor because rich nations are rich – you might be a Marxist.
If you believe that it’s *unfair* that there is a gap between how much money people have, and it’s more important to limit this gap than allow equal opportunity to lawfully earn as much as one is capable – you might be a Marxist.
like i told my son…life is not fair…he asked if we shouldn’t try to make it more fair…i asked him who gets to decide what’s fair…he couldn’t answer
Obviously more than half the country “might be Marxist,” for many of these, so where does that leave us? The question is whether the epithet “Marxist” is useful. How about Christian Democratic Socialist? As always, it comes down to how the muddled middle (and you can put me right there) responds to the loaded rhetoric of the right vs the loaded rhetoric of the left.
At any rate, here is what we are trying to avoid:
http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=312
Of course, both sides insist that any fool would know that yhis took place because the proscriptions of their side were not followed. Clear as mud, except to the true believers.
Hahaha. It must be nice to live in a guarded intellectual mansion on a hill top and watch the squalid masses steaming in sweaty strife on the sun-baked plains below. No matter who wins, you can claim you didn’t lose.
Oh, but I have my constant internal agonies; just ask Mr Lucky.
Anyway, do you have anything to put on the table here, or just want to be jealous of my estate with its barbed wire, guard dogs, surv. cameras, and ten-year supplies of sunlight, moonlight, and do-right?
Not envious of your estate, Dwight, just your ability to see not taking sides as some kind of virture to be praised for.
What if I don’t take sides simply because both sides are wrong?
Everyone has a position of their own. I don’t subscribe to anyone else’s, and most of the public discussion of the “sides” is puerile and uninformed (not to mention wrong).
No doubt you folks will think I’m some sort of communist, but I’m more a genuine free-market supporter than most of your chaps will ever be. On foreign policy, my guides are kenneth waltz and hans morgenthau. But I also think there’s a role for government – and if it reneges on it, somebody else will step in, and it’ll be somebody I didn’t get the chance to vote for.
This is a reply to Matt/Moptop:
“What if I don’t take sides simply because both sides are wrong?” Well, then you would probably be a narcisist, and possibly a psychopath. You believe everyone but you is uninformed, purile, and wrong. That makes you psychiatrist bait or a genius like Einstein. The difference between the Big E and you is that when young he offered positions and theories that could be demonstrated by later experiments to actually explain observed phenomena.
But you claim both sides of the following kinds of questions before us today are wrong:
–Reaching higher and higher deficits is good for a country in financial trouble.
–Charities today should be replaced and/or augmented by government agencies.
–Presidents should lie in the faces of citizens on a regular basis. This is natural.
–The U.S. is just another country, like North Korea, Yemen, Iran, and Syria, nothing special.
–The government should take care of citizens whether they like it or not, because people in government are smarter than other citizens.
–Every single war is a bad war. No country should ever go to war to protect its vital interests.
No, D-White does take sides. The Gray Picket Fence he sits on is just there for the relaxation.
Lather was thirty years old today..
““What if I don’t take sides simply because both sides are wrong?” Well, then you would probably be a narcisist, and possibly a psychopath.”
Oh, come on. Just say it – call me hitler and we can all have a good laugh.
“You believe everyone but you is uninformed, purile, and wrong. That makes you psychiatrist bait or a genius like Einstein.”
No, I just don’t trust crowds. I haven’t met one yet that was right about everything. Part of the problem is that the words that people USE for those “sides” have been misused, dumbed-down and broken. I have no problem with actual conservatives – but the talking heads have redefined conservative to mean something quite unpleasant. And I have no problem with actual liberals – but americans have come to assume the word means stalinist (which is anything BUT liberal). I’m over it. I’ve voted for both sides of politics, and they both disappointed me. Now I just look at the issues and the facts. If that makes me a psychopath, well, … *snort*
“The difference between the Big E and you is that when young he offered positions and theories that could be demonstrated by later experiments to actually explain observed phenomena.”
You do realize that he was wrong about quantum physics, right?
“–Reaching higher and higher deficits is good for a country in financial trouble.”
No, that’s a misstatement of anything I’ve said.
“–Charities today should be replaced and/or augmented by government agencies.”
Nope. Charities are fine by me. But the government is in a different position. It has different responsibilities. Despite everything they do (which is excellent), the salvos don’t set interest rates or print money.
“–Presidents should lie in the faces of citizens on a regular basis. This is natural.”
I wish they wouldn’t.
“–The U.S. is just another country, like North Korea, Yemen, Iran, and Syria, nothing special.”
Nope. The US quite clearly ISN’T “just like” any of those other countries. It’s a very big democracy. But (IMHO) it doesn’t get to tell the other 95% of the world what to do all of the time, and will eventually learn that its real power has always been economic, not military.
“–The government should take care of citizens whether they like it or not, because people in government are smarter than other citizens.”
Get a grip. No, I don’t kick puppies either.
“–Every single war is a bad war. No country should ever go to war to protect its vital interests.”
You ever seen a good war? No, I don’t think countries should roll over and play dead. But I think they should wear the responsibility for their decisions.
After 40 years of academics and journolistas cramming Marxist dogma down our throats 24x7x365, it isn’t surprising that some people accept much of it as truisms. In fact, the Tea Party resistance to generations of propaganda by the monopolistic pravda is proof positive that the American people are brilliant beyond compare, since no other people of any time any where could have done the same.
After defeating these criminals and reversing their criminal agenda, the first priority needs to be eradicating the infested rats from the universities and media.
“In fact, the Tea Party resistance to generations of propaganda by the monopolistic pravda is proof positive that the American people are brilliant beyond compare,”
That’s a joke, right? First, everybody has been fooled, but second, some see the light. Hence, they are “brilliant beyond compare.” Funny stuff, indeed.
Just giving credit where credit is due anonymous.
No country has resisted marxism better than the US.
Sure, we have plenty of dolts (you would know better than anybody) but here we are, about to overthrow the latest takeover attempt.
Stay tuned Nov 2 for updates. The joke will be on you.
Ahh, Hope and change. Indeed. That is why I told my son years ago, ‘Hope in one hand and poop in the other one and see which one gets full first’. He got the point but the Obama crowd never will.
Very nice article, with penetrating insights.
Please, use the guy’s real name: it isn’t “Marx” (a name picked by his dad because he – the dad – thought it was more “macho” and Germanic), but “Mordechai” so that his crazy (and alas dangerous, since so attractively delusional) “theories” don’t constitute “Marxism” but “Mordechaism.”
Being a phony is oftentimes reflected in one’s change of name (example: Barry Soetoro, Jonathan Stuart Leibovitz, etc).
“Please, use the guy’s real name: it isn’t “Marx””
If it’s on his birth certificate, it’s his real name.
“(a name picked by his dad because he – the dad – thought it was more “macho” and Germanic), but “Mordechai” so that his crazy (and alas dangerous, since so attractively delusional) “theories” don’t constitute “Marxism” but “Mordechaism.””
Nice try. No, daddy marx didn’t pick a name for its machismo – he picked it to distance himself from his jewish past. He also got baptised as a lutheran. Why? Anti-jewish discrimination.
Did you not know that? Or did you just not think it was worth mentioning?
I have noticed one thing about russian communists, though – they did seem to have a strange obsession with nicknames. Lenin, stalin and trotsky were all assumed names. Bizarre.
I had a response for you, but obviously it was never posted by the page administrator.
It went like this: (1) daddy Marx had a choice of other less “macho” names but opted for this. (2) reasons he did it are immaterial to the phoniness argument. (3) son “Marx” (at least in London) had the option of going back to his real name, but he didn’t. (4) phoniness was for “mordechaist” fine – as much as the phoniness of their “theories.”
“I had a response for you, but obviously it was never posted by the page administrator.”
Really? I don’t think I’ve had any comments not published yet. Interesting.
“It went like this: (1) daddy Marx had a choice of other less “macho” names but opted for this. (2) reasons he did it are immaterial to the phoniness argument. (3) son “Marx” (at least in London) had the option of going back to his real name, but he didn’t. (4) phoniness was for “mordechaist” fine – as much as the phoniness of their “theories.””
Come on. You said, specifically, that daddy picked a name because it was more macho than mordechai. That is flat-out not true. He picked it because it was less jewish. Trying to claim that he could have picked a less macho name is irrelevant – that’s not why he changed it.
And why would marx change his name? He was raised a lutheran. His family name was marx. Why should he change it? Why would it even occur to him? Apparently he just didn’t care. So why pick on his father’ name – why not demand that he take his mother’s maiden name?
And the reasons do matter. And I suspect you agree, or you wouldn’t have cooked up a B.S. reason and ignored the real one.
But sure, baby marx’s theories were bogus. We can agree on that. But I am curious – why are you saying “their “theories.””? Why not “his theories”. What has his dad got to do with this? What is your obsession with daddy marx’s original surname?
Matthew, my apologies. My comment should have followed that of KTC
Mordechai is a name taken by a Jew in Persia made famous by The Book of Esther. He, like Marx’s father, needed to distance himself from the Jewish People to attain his position. Mordechai is a really a Persian name – Marduk – a Persian deity. Esther’s Hebrew name was Hadassah. The name she took to hide her Jewish background, ‘Esther’, is either ‘Starra’ meaning Star in Persian or “Ishtar” another local Babylonian goddess.
Marx’ ideas were unrelated to any Jewish background he had. Both father and son distanced themselves from their more benign heritage. Your attempt to make Marx Jewish reveals more about yourself than about Marx.
“Your attempt to make Marx Jewish reveals more about yourself than about Marx.”
I assume that’s directed at KTC. I personally think the jewish thing is irrelevant to marx himself.
But it was certainly very important to some of his critics. One german chap in particular regarded communism as a big jewish plot. That’s why I’m poking at KTC to explain himself.
@ Matthew and Jerry:
Read my initial post, both of you, very carefully, without being either defensive or jumping into conclusions (if you can).
Nowhere did I mention “jewish” – you did.
He changed his name (no matter his reasons), and that is indicative how phony he (and his father) was, as are his “theories.”
That was my point.
Let me ask the two of you, Matthew and Jerry: won’t you agree that the choice of the name “Marx” from a bunch of other arbitrary German names, names that is that never appeared in the person’s genetic lineage, must have some reasons behind it? There’s no evidence that it was randomly pulled out from a comprehensive ‘traditionally Germanic names’ Directory.
Since we don’t have an historical account on how that name “Marx” was picked, KTC’s reasons are as plausible as any other, and maybe quite more interesting than most. Mind you, the issue KTC brought up was not why daddy decided to change his family name, but why he settled on “Marx.”
KTC’s point that a non-phony Karl “Marx” while in London could have reverted back to his original and true family name but failed to do so (it’s known that he was fully aware of what his daddy had done) is a valid point which could lead one to believe that he was indeed a phony.
Jerry, since you brought up Mordechai’s “jewishness” you should be prepared for the response you’re soliciting.
Yes, absolutely dude, and the Maya didn’t see the World the way they did (as opposed to the way the Greeks or Chinese did) because they were Maya, but because …? Anthropologists would love to hear your explanations. They tend to cluster around the idea that social millieu, environment and genes are central on how social groups behave.
Karl Mordechai’s theories and actions (as those by Saul Alinsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, David Axelrod and many many other Jewish luminaries of the 20th century) had everything to do with the Jewish sub-culture they were brought up in, of being the “chosen ones,” carriers of the self-hate trait and hate for all non-Jewish social systems Jews live in or in close proximity to. Their constant and millennia-old obsessive efforts in trying to fight what they consider the “injustice” in them (some in a catch-22 mode), and to change those social systems towards what they perceive to be more “fair,” is something well recorded over the centuries in many social contexts. As is their intolerance even towards those Jews who don’t agree with them, their incessant tendencies to form factions and the ensueing in-fighting to the bitter end, which in some instances have been lengendary, all that is there for all to see, from early recorded history to this very day.
Everyone is right more or less. I am just desperate not to have Jews associated with a movement, Communism, that was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people. Lenin stated openly that he would much rather have innocents die than leave one member of the middle-class(bourgeoisie) alive. I cannot image trying to repeat that experiment, though likely less bloody, here in the United States, but the only thing important elected officials have to do is give permission. Humans will justify in retrospect how important winning at all costs was to the future of humanity, just as did Lenin’s followers.
@ Jerry,
You said: “Your attempt to make Marx jewish reveals more about yourself than about Marx.”
KTC isn’t “attempting” to make Marx Jew, Marx (really, Mordechai) was a Jew. By changing his jewish name to a Germanic sounding name didn’t make him automatically non-Jew.
As to your argument that it “reveals more about yourself than about Marx” one could as easily read that as applicable to Marx himself: what he wrote about human societies reveals more about himself than the human societies he was trying (so hard and in contrived manner) to describe. This wisecrack applies to all of us, Jerry, and that includes you – unless you consider yourself to be an exceptional case.
Logician:
“Matthew and Jerry: won’t you agree that the choice of the name “Marx” from a bunch of other arbitrary German names, names that is that never appeared in the person’s genetic lineage, must have some reasons behind it? “
Sure. Maybe he just liked it. Maybe he thought it seemed reasonably close (for somebody who heard hebrew) swap for mordechai? It would have been a fairly momentous decision, so I’d assume he didn’t just stick a pin in a phone book.
“Mind you, the issue KTC brought up was not why daddy decided to change his family name, but why he settled on “Marx.””
But that’s not true. KTC specifically wrote:
That is saying, quite clearly, that the change FROM mordechai TO marx was BECAUSE “the dad” thought it was more ‘”macho” and Germanic’ – and the “more” can only possibly apply to the name “mordechai”. That is the sentence I’m working with. That’s KTC’s original statement. If you can tell me that sentence means something other than the way I’m reading it, then you have a point. But until then, I maintain that KTC claimed that he knew the reasons why daddy changed his name. I say he’s wrong, because we DO know why daddy changed his name – to appear less jewish.
“KTC’s point that a non-phony Karl “Marx” while in London could have reverted back to his original and true family name but failed to do so”
It’s true according to YOU, but clearly not according to marx, who grew up with that name, raised as a lutheran. Why would he spontaneously decide to adopt a jewish name that he has never identified with, particularly while seeing obvious anti-semitism all around? Sheesh – how many people do you know whose family has changed its name at some point in the past? Are they all phonies?
“KTC isn’t “attempting” to make Marx Jew, Marx (really, Mordechai) was a Jew. By changing his jewish name to a Germanic sounding name didn’t make him automatically non-Jew.”
But conversion to christianity and baptism? No? What does he have to do?
But I’m glad that you wrote that. Because it means that one of KTC’s defenders has admitted the obvious – this IS about marx being a jew. His original post was worded to avoid the J word, but KTC is obsessed (as shown by a number of posts here) with marx’s dad’s original surname – a very obviously jewish name. That’s basically irrelevant to anyone who’s concerned with what baby marx did. Apart from the weasel about it being relevant to his “phoniness” (huh? what has phoniness even got to do with this), there really is no reason why anyone should care unless it was important to claim the guy was a jew. I think that’s obvious, and I’m glad that you do too. That’s why I’ve been poking at KTC to explain himself. So far he’s just dodged.
As for KTC’s other two examples – he picks ANOTHER jew (who really doesn’t make any bones about it – he regularly points this out during his show), and “barry soetero”. But his consistency slips a bit, there – because “barry soetero” was actually born with the name “barack obama”, to a father whose name was “barack obama”. So what rule should apply?
You call KTC “obsessive”? Let’s see, he has three posts in this thread to your five, what then do they make you? Psychotic, maybe?
I’ve read all the posts in this thread, and I’m still trying to figure out what are you trying to prove. You seem to desperately try to counter a simple fact by delusional arguments. Fact: one day Herschel Mordechai (Karl’s father) changed his name to Heinrich Marx. We don’t know what they did with Eva Lwow’s names (Karl’s mommy). By doing so Herschel and Eva didn’t become overnight non-Jews. Fact: the jewish blood in his (and his wife’s) veins didn’t stop being jewish after that name change. Fact: the jewish culture he and his wife were brought in was not abruptly erased from his and her past with this name change. Fact: that blood still flowed into his and her son’s veins (as far as we know Karl was his real son).
So, what are you trying to argue? That a mere name change majically transformed all that “jewishness” into “teutonic” or “saxonic” stock?
Get real.
As to whether this is “phony” or not – it’s certainly arguable, and I wouldn’t disagree with the suggestion that it is, given what we know about their change of names and the reasons behind it.
@Collin Peter,
Maybe the Mordechais and Mordechaists were able to fool Matthew and his ilk after all, into thinking that they were dealing with Lutheran descendents of teutonic knights. Funny and/or phony, Karl Marx reminds one in many respects of Groucho Marx.
Interesting question though: how many Marxist devotees would have been around today had the author of Das Kapital been someone by the name of Mordechai? Maybe, just maybe, the history of the World would be different.
Collin and Pol:
“You call KTC “obsessive”? Let’s see, he has three posts in this thread to your five, what then do they make you? Psychotic, maybe?”
No, I called him “obsessed with a particular subject, based on specific evidence in his posts”. I didn’t say he was “obsessive” because he had simply made a lot of posts. They’re two different things. Do any of you guys ever actually argue with something that somebody has actually written?
“I’ve read all the posts in this thread, and I’m still trying to figure out what are you trying to prove.”
I was trying to suggest that the real issue for KTC wasn’t the name – but the fact that marx was a jew. I want to know if that’s what he really thinks is important and, if so, why. I personally don’t see why it should be – but it seems to be very important to KTC and he doesn’t have the guts to just come out and say it straight.
But that’s ok – because you (and others) have been perfectly willing to leap in and say that you DO think it’s important that he was a jew. Thanks for that – you made my point for me.
So … converting to another religion doesn’t stop a jew from being a jew. That’s interesting. A certain spanish queen felt that way once, as well. But why do you CARE? Spare me the hooey about “phoniness”. What’s really at stake here?
And you’re even talking about “jewish blood”. That’s very interesting. Isn’t there jewish blood in every christian?
You’ve completely misunderstood my point. And in doing so, you’ve made this easy: So – why is it more important to you that marx was a jew than that he was a german?
Matthew, sorry but you don’t seem to be getting the points – it’s hopeless to continue this exchange.
But I’ll ask Pol potty (nice pseudonym there, and quite apt) you do think that marketing and promotion had something to do with the name change? Could that be then the “real phony” clincher part of the argument, and ironically the blight his “theories” brought to this world?
“Matthew, sorry but you don’t seem to be getting the points”
Hmm. Actually I thought I was – you think it’s important that marx was a jew, and that he was trying to hide his jewishness in order to promote his ideas, thus making him a fraud. I think it’s utterly irrelevant.
But it’s a bogus argument anyway. Marx didn’t SEE himself as a jew. He was raised a lutheran. He didn’t change his name – in fact, he left his name alone, just as he was named by his family. You reckon he should have changed it back for some reason, and because he didn’t that’s just like he changed it himself. That’s YOUR opinion, but it’s got nothing to do with any decisions made by baby marx.
“it’s hopeless to continue this exchange.”
Probably.
“But I’ll ask Pol potty (nice pseudonym there, and quite apt) you do think that marketing and promotion had something to do with the name change?”
What name change?!? Daddy marx’? We KNOW why daddy marx changed his name – so that he could hold down a job and fit in. Daddy marx hardly changed his name knowing that he would have a son who’d later go on to live of the inheritance of somebody else while writing a manifesto to bring down capitalism. Unless … you think he did?
“Could that be then the “real phony” clincher part of the argument, and ironically the blight his “theories” brought to this world??”
Sheesh. Unbelievable.
Exactly, Collin, packaging, marketing and promotion like all good capitalists – except for one small thing: he was a phony trying to sell the line ‘I’m a Lutheran Saxon.’
Matthew, picture this (an 1858 scene – Karl was 40 then, at the reading room of the British Museum):
John Eaton (a 22-year old brit student): Good Afternoon Sir, another rainy day and you seem to be quite wet.
Karl: Go about your business young man, I’m quite busy.
JE: Pardon me Sir, but I see a book you’re holding that interests me, “Zur Judenfrage.” Did you author it, Sir?
K: I did – now leave me alone, I’ve got work to do.
JE: Are you a Jew, Sir?
K: No ladd, I’m a German Lutheran, now leave me alone.
JF: That’s all right, I like your yiddish accent anyway. Have a nice day Sir.
Marx was phonier than his assumed name.
Most of his motivation came from a deep seated sense of self loathing and shame arising from a rather nasty skin condition that resulted in long periods of intolerable pain and great huge carbuncles (boils).
Some of his greatest vitriol was summoned when he has boils on his ass so bad he had to stand to write.
according to Karl, “. ‘At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,’ he cursed. ‘What swine they are!’
Yeah. Like you stupid douches, clamoring for more and more military funding, the biggest socialist system we have. Its literally a Marxist dictatorship within our nation, funded with your tax dollars. Think about it. Oh, forgot, you idiots hate doing that.
There’s a whole lot of bars around Bragg and Lejune, just full of poor soldiers and Marines who’d LOVE to hear your wisdom.
Especially at around 8PM on a Friday night.
Why don’t you go enlighten them?
1, I don’t see anyone here clamoring for more military spending.
2, How is the military socialist? That doesn’t even make sense.
@Tootsie: Who you talking to, there, Knuckles?
There are plenty of us who know full-well that the ludicrous military spending under the euphemistic heading of ‘national security’ (meaning securing everyone else’s nations) is just as quick a way to socialism as any redistributive policies.
Even aside from that, though, most people, believe it or not, are super-freakin’ smarty-smart-pants, just like you–even if they don’t necessarily agree with you. So calm down with the vitriol, would you? :/
The military=socialism! Of course, it’s all so obvious! How could we have been so blind to that shining truth?
Oh, right, because we aren’t morons.
Every now and then somebody will claim that I am a hypocrite to object to government waste since I work for the government. The fact that I work for one of the very few government entities specifically mandated by the Constitution (Department of Breaking Things and Killing People, although that isn’t the official name) cuts no ice. But now I find that I am actually a socialist. Oh, how it stings!
Anyone who believes: “….if a worker works a certain number of hours, his output is intrinsically valuable….” has never had to scrap out a part and make a new one.
Either that, or has never needed to work overtime to correct the failed work of another…
The second amendment brings this issue into sharp focus. Years ago, I was having a dinner-table discussion about the right to bear arms while on a business trip.
One lady told me, “No one needs an AK-47 to hunt deer.” Well, yes, I replied, that’s true, and in fact an AK-47 would be a rather miserable hunting gun. But freedom is not about what we “need,” is about being able to do what we want. The freedom of a sovereign people does not spring from having or doing only what they “need,” but being able to do and have what they want.
More of these thoughts here.
Most of the people reading this are Marxists. If you support:
Social Security
Medicare
Welfare
etc.
…any kind of transfer payment that takes money from one group and gives it to another is Marxist
Here’s a backgrounder…
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/207/133/Nostradamus_Prophecy:_Both_Democrats_and_Republicans_Are_Socialist_PHOTOS_and_POLL.html
Oh, BS, at least as far as Social Security and Medicare goes. These were both paid into by the (retired) recipients for their entire working lives, and if the government had only invested the surpluses when they weren’t paying out as much in benefits as they are now, instead of stealing from the funds instead to buy votes, there would be plenty of money in the now-totally empty “Trust Fund” to pay the benefits. The government turned them into Ponzi schemes that are not sustainable because they wasted those surpluses for at least 5 decades by raiding the funds.
When I was just starting out my own career in the early seventies and the max contribution for both funds was $1,500/year matched by the employer, I calculated that if I had both contributions instead and just put it in a savings account every year at 5% interest I’d have around a million dollars accumulated now to retire on, and if I didn’t live long enough to spend it all, the balance could be transferred to my heirs. But instead I will be eligible for $1,200/month for only as long as I live and when I die, my heirs get nothing. And that calculation didn’t even include the fact that I and my employers have had the rates jacked up continually ever since.
And that does not include that Medicare, according to that notorious right wing program “60 Minutes”, has 60 BILLION dollars of fraud in it EVERY YEAR. There is no reason to believe that both Medicaid and Social Security are any less subject to fraud and waste, with payments going to dead people and illegals and foreign nationals and fake medical billings and mothers who coach their kids to be disruptive in school in order to get them declared disabled with ADD and ADHD and other phony diseases.
It’s too late now to be able to fix them too, because there is no money left. The lying scumbags in politics at all levels first got a giant chunk of the population dependent on this garbage, and then stole all the funds that would have available now to get more people dependent on even more socialist programs. It’s people like you with insane ideas like this to begin with that have caused us to be in this place now.
We can’t tax our way out of this either, because raising taxes reduces the economic activity and holds down employment and tax revenues.
There is NO way that this does not end badly. Europe is already collapsing financially over these unfunded liabilities and we are just covering it up better so far. There will eventually have to be a financial catastrophe that makes the Great Depression look like Happy Days Are Here Again. Then whatever form of government arises from the ashes is either going to have a totally different relationship to the governed with the emphasis on personal responsibility and accountability or we will go all the way to 1984.
I am not optimistic that it will be the former.
Then the real Marxism will occur, when, as happened in all the insanely genocidal examples already tried (USSR, China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Cambodia, etc ad nauseum) not the wealth but instead the POVERTY is equally spread around. Of course, the nomenklatura or ruling class will still have their summer dachaus on the Crimean.
I would add one other thing: If you believe that in any exchange, one person gains and the other loses—that profit is always made at someone else’s expense—you might be a Marxist. In terms of real economics, a mutually voluntary exchange benefits both participants, and a person who makes a billion dollars through voluntary exchange has conferred benefits on humanity worth more than a billion dollars, and should be celebrated as a great benefactor.
Well said. It has the additional benefit of being true. A bonus: a society organized around that principle would thrive.
“The first is the notion that what people “need” is an objective rather than subjective notion, which can be determined by benevolent third parties. ”
What you are describing is Marxism-leninism. Lenin added the temporary dictator to fill the gap before the workers were ready for self rule. There has never been a pure marxist system only marxist-leninist ones.
The original author has it right. Marx established his distinct “scientific socialism” on the basis of an objective value of labor (“labor-power”). All the failed attempts at socialism are rooted in Marxism.
Time to put an end to this nonsense on November 2nd.
On Tuesday we can *begin* to put an end to it… but we are looking at a 10-year slog at least. The crypto-socialists will not go quietly.
One of the most successful lies of Marxism over time has been that forced redistribution in some form or another is equivalent in every way to giving to charity, except that it helps fill in the gaps that voluntary charity might miss because of greed or whatever, so in a way it’s morally superior. But in real charity, those who collect money (or help organize volunteer work, or what have you) do everything in their power to make the best use of the resources they have, which may be scant, and also to make sure those who give are pleased with the fruits of their gift so that they will continue to give in the future. When the government operates its form of charity, it has no such concern, because it does not ask people to give; it takes, and tells them they should feel good about the taking because they should have wanted to give in the first place. Even if I was confident the money was being used with maximum efficiency and to the most good, the choice should still belong to me. But that money is known to be wasted on petty bureaucracy, and on policies designed to keep the poor dependent.
Yeap, I don’t know anybody who’s heart grows warm at the thought of writing a check on Apr. 15th.
I would like to very slightly dissent with the author (whom I know and respect) and note that humans have both perceptually obvious needs (like food, water, shelter) and more abstract needs (such as freedom).
Given our natures as rational creatures who depend on our minds for survival, *freedom* is just as essential to our lives as food and water.
Look up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, if you aren’t already familiar with it. I first encountered it nearly thirty years ago in a Navy leadership and management course, and it has stuck with me as a handy way to evaluate where a person might be operating. Or, as a tool in my own periodic self evaluations.
Lots of good philosophical questions are raised here about intrinsic, subjective and objective value. Ayn Rand has a good answer to this apparent dilemma. See “Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand” by Leonard Peikoff. “Atlas Shrugged” is a good place to start too. There is in fact objective value for people.
What’s the difference between a communist and a socialist?
The commie is in a hurry.
Mr. President
I need to get laid.
I see Michelle has the ability.
Would you kindly spread the wealth around?
Not with yours pal!
#22: You are right, liberty is a human need, and everyone wants liberty for themselves. The Marxists do not want liberty for others, but only for themselves.
Another Marxist view, fundamental to it, that people do not and cannot think but only reflect their economic circumstances (self-contradictory, since economics is about property, which only exists because law). Marx and Engels omitted themselves from this view. See their German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto. That is why Marxists deny that those who disagree with them are thinking.
If you believe that certain property should “belong to all of us” (such as the airwaves), you might be a Marxist.
The first is the notion that what people “need” is an objective rather than subjective notion, which can be determined by benevolent third parties.
Food is an objective need. Period. That fact undercuts and destroys your entire “what does a man really need?” argument.
After that, there is only one way to deal with the “need” issue, and that’s to question the idea that need, whether “objective” or not, is a unilateral moral claim (“duty”) on others. That assumption is why Marxism has diffused so easily throughout the culture with little or no resistance, even as the eponymous “Marxism” itself is rejected.
As I have long said, Americans never took to “socialism”, so long as it was so named (especially after the overwhelming historical verdict of the last century) — but repackage it under the rubric of “liberalism” (by co-optingt it into its own opposite, as the Left did), they swallow it hook, line and sinker.
After each disaster of a system based on need/duty is complete, the Left simply waits long enough for time to obscure the finer details enough to repackage the exact same ideas with enough cosmetic changes to get away with reintroducing them as something new.
Sometimes, they don’t even wait for that; they also like to introduce concurrent such variations, and set the terms of thought in political science (which they control 100%) in order to facilitate portraying these variants on a theme as being radically different. Case in point: the conventional left/right political spectrum, which presents communism/socialism and fascism as “opposites”; they in fact are different only in superficial details, but are objectively identical at the basic level of using need/duty to trump individual rights (tyranny).
That common core, the “need/duty” fetish, by the way, is called altruism.
Food is not totally objective. It depends on individual tastes. Some might want lousy tasting, low quality, food, that allows them to live, in order to save money for things they regard as more important, while others might want to spend a lot more on food, to get better quality, safety, and nutrition.
Food is not totally objective. It depends on individual tastes. Some might want lousy tasting, low quality, food, that allows them to live, in order to save money for things they regard as more important, while others might want to spend a lot more on food, to get better quality, safety, and nutrition.
The choice of which food is optional — but it presupposes a yes answer to a more fundamental choice — to eat or not. The first is optional, the second is not (if you want to live).
I would substitute collectivism for altruism. Or perhaps use the term government altruism, or forced altruism. I have no problem with altruism as long as it is individual and voluntary. If Bill Gates wishes to give all his money to a charity to feel good, that is his decision. It is only when that decision to give is cooerced, by either government or societal pressure, does it become evil.
Where does beer come in? Many attest to it’s necessity, and it goes back as far as history itself.
If there were more good beer around, there’d be more friendship around.
I’ll drink to that!
(Most sensible thing on here so far..)
Time [to begin the long uphill battle] to put an end to this nonsense on November 2nd [as free people must.]
FIFY.
I would substitute collectivism for altruism. Or perhaps use the term government altruism, or forced altruism. I have no problem with altruism as long as it is individual and voluntary.
You would be making a mistake. Collectivism is just altruism implemented in politics.
Also, you are confusing altruism with benevolence. Where the latter simply involves giving or helping because one honestly values the recipient of charity (which makes it selfish by definition: concern with one’s own values and/or interests), the former includes the notion of duty. It is the duty component which is the source and root of altruism’s incompatibility with liberty.
That is why “forced altruism” is a redundancy.
Forced Altruism, The Redundancy:
[The] social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service…. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.”
Auguste Comte, Catéchisme Positiviste
That’s the guy who *coined the term*, note. People all over love to substitute their idea of benevolence for this tyrannical moral horror when they hear the word “altruism”, but that is simply (and fatally) wrong.
Comte invented the term, but he does not own the language (particularly since his was French). Language changes, and has changed in the last 170 years (Comte wasn’t even translated into English until, what, the 1840s?) and altruism means something different today than it did then.
Speaking of which, check out all the meanings of ‘positivism’ in Comte’s OWN day. He couldn’t even maintain control of the one word he is most associated with.
The definition I looked up of altruism said “unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others”. It said nothing about force, so I challenge your contention that altruism implies force. Benevolence was defined as a desire to do good, or a generous gift. Both basically involve helping others with no expectation of any return, other than possibly feeling good.
Neither is inherently bad, and may often be good, as long as the person doing them is doing it voluntarily. If somebody wishes to spend their whole life doing voluntary charitable works for others, I have no problem with them. I might even chip in a donation to help them. If they imply there is something wrong with me if I dont join them, or donate to them, then I do have a problem with them.
I also challenge your idea that duty is wrong. Many in the military beleive it is their duty to defend their country. Many religious people beleive it is their duty to preach their religion, and do charitable works. As long as their decision is individual and voluntary, and they dont insist that everybody has the same duty, and as long as their doing their duty does not harm me, or take anything from me, I have no problem with them.
The key wrong here is pressure, compulsion, and force, not altruism, benevolence, or duty. This is where I differ with Randians, because many of them beleive that even voluntary charity is wrong.
One more clarification. Altruism as an individual philosophy or decision is not wrong. But altruism defined as a duty of every human being, I agree is indeed wrong.
I can decide to voluntarily impose a duty on myself, but nobody else has any right to impose any duty on me, other than not harming others, and honoring any debts I have voluntarily assumed.
Re: ‘Forced redundancy”
I think you mean an oxymoron . . . ?
Items do have an objective value, it is their price in a free market. The key though is that objective value is determined by the market automatically balancing the sum total of all the many subjective values of each individual buyer, producer, employer, and worker. The failure of marxism is it thinks that a centralized burocratic expert can set that objective value better than the market can. But they can’t, since they can never know both the information, and the desires, of the many participants that set the market value in a free market.
Of course the free market can have distortions, like having a monopoly producer, or having non-transparent information on the details of the object being sold (like the home morgage derivatives, or fraudalent products sold by scam artists). This is where some regulation of the market can be helpful. But you have to be extremely careful to make sure this regulation only addresses these market distortions (like monopoly and false information), rather than allowing the politicos, regulators, and lobbyists, to substitute their desires for those of the market participants.
If you have a competitive market, with the participants fully informed about the relative details of what they are buying, then government has absolutely no place trying to impose further regulations, no matter how “unfair” they might think things are, or how some participants are being “exploited”, or buying something that is unwise or unsafe. Absent forced slavery, any adult, making a voluntary, fully informed decision, in a competitive market, can never be cooerced, or exploited, or he would not make that voluntary decision. And each buyer is the best judge in what is wise or safe for them, regardless of how unwise or unsafe we might think they are.
> At its most basic, there is no “need” for anything except air, food, and shelter.
One has no need even for these if one happens to be suicidal. With every decision we make we are trying, often desperately, to achieve happiness. Sometimes we settle for less misery. Sometimes we don’t even settle for that. Those who take their own lives want the pain to end and suicide looks like “up” from their perspective. So in the final analysis, *all* needs are subjective, hence so is all economic value.
One has no need even for these if one happens to be suicidal.
The glitch in your reasoning is that you are treating “objective” as meaning “value outside of any context”. That is properly identified as the notion of intrinsic value, rather than “objective” value as Rand calls it, and that idea does indeed have the problems he identifies.
Objective value, on the other hand, is determined by the interrelationship between two things: your goal or purpose, and the facts of reality in the nature of things around you. Reality says: if you want to do X, you must do Y with items possessing nature Z.
You want to die? A gun is of value to you (if part of your goal is to die FAST), a rutabaga isn’t.
That being said, all choices, purposes and goals — and the morality concerning itself with them — presume having chosen to live (i.e. of setting it as one’s ultimate goal, to which all other goals and purposes are ultimately aimed). Choosing death is the end of the line for all further choices, and therefore for morality itself; just sit down, make no further choices at all, and you’ll eventually achieve this “goal”.
> The glitch in your reasoning is that you are treating “objective” as meaning “value outside of any context”. That is properly identified as the notion of intrinsic value, rather than “objective” value as Rand calls it, and that idea does indeed have the problems he identifies.
Are you addressing me? I didn’t even use the word ‘objective’ or the phrase ‘objective value’, though I do believe it to be synonymous with ‘intrinsic value’.
Having read your response three times through, I’m still unsure of your objection to what I said. It sounds almost as if you’re agreeing with me, mostly, but in the form of a disagreement. I certainly didn’t spot the glitch in my reasoning, even with your help.
> That being said, all choices, purposes and goals — and the morality concerning itself with them — presume having chosen to live (i.e. of setting it as one’s ultimate goal, to which all other goals and purposes are ultimately aimed).
> “presume having chosen to live”?
Says who?
Before looking at the theory, look at the man. Karl Marx was a loser. He lived in poverty all his life. What money he did have came from his pal Engels Capitalistic parents who owned manufacturing facilities in Germany. Marx, his wife and six children lived in poverty because dad did not get a JOB. Three of the children died do to poverty -thanks dad. Marx had affairs on his wife, who continued to stay at his side no matter the circumstances. Marx was a drunk and would spend days in the same clothes and never take care of himself. Much like Darwin, who was also a drunk and lost half his kids before they reached adulthood, Marx was a loser. Why would anyone even read his garbage.
Bingo.
A loser, Karly Mordechai was someone whose notion of “theory” was largely devoid of any serious empirical evidence; one who thought that his “desire” to describe the world in his terms and delusional conditions trumped “reality” itself.
As I noted under post #13, his phoniness is stampted forever on and for all to see in his chosen “name.”
And, as you boldly point out, why spend time even reading his stuff let alone seriously study it, except if one (possibly a psychiatrist) is interested in mental illness.
Just a couple of other points, since you also mentioned another loser, Darwin.
This delusional and pathetic figure wrote a book (on the origin of species), which together with that written by Mordechai (das kapital), significantly influenced human history. But that influence was devastating: it brought upon humanity arguably the darkest century in recorded history. The 20th century was marked by so much human sufferring (wars, revolutions, genocides, starvations and the like, causing deaths in the hundreds of millions of people). Those deadly marks trace an intellectual path leading directly to these two volumes.
It was these two books that pushed upon humanity at least two (possibly more) deadly notions, namely that (a) humans are animals; (b) the Universe and life in it have no purpose.
Atheism and its morbid consequences, rose out of these two volumes written by these pathetic losers. Every page of these volumes has the stench of dried up blood and rotten flesh of killing fields, splattered all over that dark 20th century.
It’s high time, that the real history of these two morons be written.
If you had the faintest understanding of who darwin was and what he wrote/did/thought, you’d leave out the revisionism. You’re attacking a complete fabrication.
No, darwin did not invent the holocaust. There is nothing in darwin’s work that justifies a BS claim like that. He would have had no time for marxism, either – you’re just jamming two things together and pretending they’re connected. The only people who’ve ever had a serious problem with darwin have been american evangelical/fundamentalist christians. The rest of the planet is fine with evolution.
Oh …. and humans ARE animals. I know I am. What are you?
And if the absence of a god means the universe has no purpose for you, that’s your problem.
Humans aren’t animals? That will be news to the genetics folks.
BTW the Catholic Church accepts Darwin. Which makes anti-Darwinism a Protestant cult.
When that history will be written, it will be revealed that one of the greatest frauds in science (AGW and “climate change” will pale by comparison) is the darwinian “theory of evolution by means of natural selection” when the terms “natural” “selection” and the agency(ies) of “selection” are either logically undefinable or straight out false. The (empirically thus rigorously unprovable) darwinian “theology” (just like marxist – well, mordechaist – theology and their unsubstantiated assertions) that “random” gene mutations from largely “unknown causes” are involved in speciation, points to their false “gods” namely, “random events” and the “unknown factors” to explain development of Life on Earth.
The modern day cast of characters of that ‘theory’ is also of some interest, one in particular: the atheist and delusional charlatan Dawkins and his (scientifically unprovable gibberish) that “evolution is centered at the level of the gene.”
One of the great scientific tragedies took place in the mid-1930s, when “darwinianism” was artificially linked to the science of genetics.
21st century theism is an answer to all these false and pernicious “religions” of “marxism” and “darwinian evolution.”
Now, all these are admittedly very brief comments, since this isn’t the forum to fully and properly address them. They are supplied as a stimulus to the open minded, though to ponder further and not to automatically accept what the atheist scientific “establishment” dishes out to you.
I’m sorry, but I don’t even know where to start with that. You’re talking fairy-tales. Sorry.
Of course you don’t; the only things residents of La-La land see are “fairy tales.”
You may wish to start reading, assuming you can, some of Kurt Godel’s work. As a start, it could assist you in finding “elements of reasoning” to comprehend at least some of the points V-L is making – something you are obviously lacking.
Some advice, stay out of things you know little or nothing about. It helps you avoid making a jackass out of yourself, as you’ve done with a number of posts thus far.
“Of course you don’t; the only things residents of La-La land see are “fairy tales.””
You’re backing a guy who’s arguing for creationism, and I’m the resident of la-la land?
“You may wish to start reading, assuming you can, some of Kurt Godel’s work. As a start, it could assist you in finding “elements of reasoning” to comprehend at least some of the points V-L is making – something you are obviously lacking.”
He hasn’t MADE any points. I’m quite aware of godel’s implications about religion, and I’m also aware that nobody takes any of it seriously. Some might say he even accidentally proves the non-existence of god. But that’s all just fairy tales. Why not the flying spaghetti monster?
“Some advice, stay out of things you know little or nothing about. It helps you avoid making a jackass out of yourself, as you’ve done with a number of posts thus far.”
Yep. It’s all about the logic and reason for you, isn’t it? Like I commented elsewhere – just get on with it and call me hitler and we can have a good laugh.
I’m perfectly happy to read a serious discussion/argument about actual theology or (even) a rational discussion about religion. I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject. From a literary/historical/cultural point of view, I think it’s fascinating stuff. But volterra-lotka’s post was just a serious of bogus assertions at odds with just about anything sensible. Chuking godel’s name into the mix doesn’t change that.
Matthew,
You haven’t responded to a single point V-L has made and this renders your claim to be the arbiter of things sensible (as in your statement “…at odds with just about anything sensible”) a bit of an exaggeration, if not a joke.
Logician: “You haven’t responded to a single point V-L has made”
Oh, Ok. If I really HAVE to …
“When that history will be written, it will be revealed that one of the greatest frauds … is the darwinian “theory of evolution by means of natural selection””
I’m not sure when you think this history is GOING to be written, but right now there is a vast, repeat VAST quantity of evidence to back up the theory of evolution by natural selection.
“when the terms “natural” “selection” and the agency(ies) of “selection” are either logically undefinable or straight out false.”
Huh? Selection is very simple. When a genetic variation gives an organism the ability to survive and prosper in a given environment, then that variation has a good chance of being handed on. If a variation causes a disadvantage, then that organism will prosper less, and the variation will be less likely to be handed on to future generations. The variations that “fit” will “survive”, hence, “survival of the fit”.
“The (empirically thus rigorously unprovable) darwinian “theology””
Not true. There is now at least one well-known example of an organism evolving a new and novel capability in the lab, and the researchers have generations of frozen variations to study the progress. Not to mention, of course, the entire fossil record.
“(just like marxist – well, mordechaist – theology and their unsubstantiated assertions)”
But marxism WAS empirically tested. It failed – at least his political and economic theories did. They don’t work. We know that. Evolution by natural selection has yet to be falsified by actual evidence.
“that “random” gene mutations from largely “unknown causes” are involved in speciation, points to their false “gods” namely, “random events” and the “unknown factors” to explain development of Life on Earth.”
You don’t think there are ever random gene mutations? Try telling that to someone with radiation sickness, or cancer.
“The modern day cast of characters of that ‘theory’ is also of some interest, one in particular: the atheist and delusional charlatan Dawkins and his (scientifically unprovable gibberish) that “evolution is centered at the level of the gene.””
Clearly you don’t like dawkins. That’s your problem – I would have thought you’d just stick to facts. But, I think you’ll find that his “gibberish” is most definitely scientifically provable. Or, rather, it’s provable that genetics is an important part of the process. Obviously there are other environmental factors as well. Genes alone don’t build an animal – for that, you also need a functioning womb.
“One of the great scientific tragedies took place in the mid-1930s, when “darwinianism” was artificially linked to the science of genetics.”
So what do YOU think genetics is about? You seem to want the “religion” of evolution to be decoupled from the “science” of genetics. Ok – so why?
“21st century theism is an answer to all these false and pernicious “religions” of “marxism” and “darwinian evolution.””
Whether or not marxism is a religion, darwinian evolution is most definitely not a religion, any more than chemistry is a religion.
And what’s this “21st century theism”? What’s happened to theism in the last 10 years to revolutionize it? Have I missed something?
“Now, all these are admittedly very brief comments, since this isn’t the forum to fully and properly address them.”
I don’t think a longer version would be any better. You’ve made a series of false assertions and I can only assume you’d just make more of them. You’ve wasted a lot of time attacking darwin and dawkins if you’re worried about brevity.
“They are supplied as a stimulus to the open minded, though to ponder further and not to automatically accept what the atheist scientific “establishment” dishes out to you”
The “atheist scientific establishment” wants people to use their minds. That’s the point. You’re the one who refuses to accept something that doesn’t suit your dogma – and for some reason you’re happy to put a broken political system in the same category as a provable scientific hypothesis.
Tell me in simple terms – what is it that you DO believe is true?
@Matthew:
Glad to see you responding to some of my points; noted that it took Logician’s post for you to do so. Since you obviously aren’t a biologist, I’ll keep it simple, as I did with my original post.
1. You say “…VAST quantity of evidence…” No Sir; what exists is a VAST quantity of largely unsubstantiated assertions. This will become evident from the points that follow, at least.
2. You state the term “selection” and note that you conveniently ommit the qualifier “natural” from it (a basic darwinian term). My suggestion, the reason you did so is because the term “natural” is undefinable. Further, please try to define “selection” (meaning some form of optimization under way) and above all the AGENCY or AGENT who does this “selection” or “optimizing.” There’re at least half a dozen schools of thought on this very subject, all trying to define exactly these terms (“mathematical ecology” being just one of them). All have failed miserably (both on the theory as well as the empirical evidence front) in their attempts.
3. You state “…in a given environment…” Now again, please try to define EXACTLY and beyond reasonable doubt that “environment.” You can’t, no-one can for any given suggested “speciation” event. Besides, that’s why there’re competing schools of thought – not only in biology, but in all scientific fields. Take the well known SJ Gould for example in biology – he ins’t by any stretch mainstreet “darwinian.”
4. Speaking about that “environment” how exactly did this “environment” come about? I know, “unknown factors” “random events” and “unreplicated by computer simulation” conditions “coincidences” “chance” and the like brought it about. These are the little “gods” of modern evolutionary “science.” You can’t do without them.
5. You brought up these (long discarded even by darwinian evolutionists) notions of “fittest” and “survival”. If I now ask you to define them, then you’ll bump into self-referencing and come across Godel’s two “impossibility theorems” eventually – that’s how his name came into the mix.
6. But you brought up Godel for his theorem about the necessary “existence of God-like entities.” Your claim that he “actually disproved the existence of God” is laughable.
7. A final point (no need to elaborate more): you mentioned “evolution in the lab” – well, now this is the icing on the cake. “Lab” is many things (a place you can cook up all kinds of goodies) but one thing it isn’t is “nature” as “nature” was thought of at least by poor pathetic Darwin.
You ask me to put in simple terms (that’s what, BTW, I’ve tried to do so far, stay away from technical jargon and math) what it is that I believe – 21st century theism. Briefly, that there IS an intervening GOD, who created the Universe and Life in it, and us humans as their end product (so far) with purpose and a free will. Acts of speciation are GOD’s acts, and that GOD and science (not the atheist, biased, loaded with agendas type science, but the pure, clean, always with expiration dates, humble, stick-to-the-facts type) are integral and inseparable parts in that purpose.
Volterra-Lotka
I think you’ll see from this thread that I’ll argue with just about anyone – that’s if I disagree with them (which doesn’t always happen). But only if they’re rational. I don’t think creationists are rational, any more than truthers are rational or people who think crystals can cure cancer are rational. All of these groups try to magic evidence into existence, or play word games, or try to paint themselves into a corner then claim their corner is the whole house and everyone else is in the corner. I’ll respond to some of your points just so I can illustrate what I mean, but I’ll probably get bored …
“1. You say “…VAST quantity of evidence…” No Sir; what exists is a VAST quantity of largely unsubstantiated assertions. This will become evident from the points that follow, at least.”
There are people with great big racks of fossils showing the evolution of single organisms over hundreds of thousands of years at a time. Anyone who says it isn’t happening hasn’t see this. Your problem (I think) is that you reckon something had to make it happen. Well, show me some evidence of that “something”‘s existence, or even a single case which can’t have possibly happened without an intelligent agent (and that flagellum claim has already been debunked) and you might have a point.
“2. You state the term “selection” and note that you conveniently ommit the qualifier “natural” from it (a basic darwinian term). My suggestion, the reason you did so is because the term “natural” is undefinable.”
Rubbish. It’s just a word. It means the world around the organism. Its environment.
“Further, please try to define “selection” (meaning some form of optimization under way)”
Selection means the relative prosperity, in a given environment, of an evolutionary trait.
“and above all the AGENCY or AGENT who does this “selection” or “optimizing.””
There isn’t one. The environment (which includes surrounding organisms, obviously) determines if an evolutionary trait is successful or not.
“3. You state “…in a given environment…” Now again, please try to define EXACTLY and beyond reasonable doubt that “environment.””
The stuff that’s around an organism that affects its survival. The food sources, the physical and chemical conditions, competing organisms, population pressures. Need more?
“You can’t, no-one can for any given suggested “speciation” event. Besides, that’s why there’re competing schools of thought – not only in biology, but in all scientific fields.”
Sure. YOU’RE the one trying to turn “darwinianism” into a high church. Biologists have moved on a bit since darwin. He’s hardly the beginning and end of the scientific story.
“4. Speaking about that “environment” how exactly did this “environment” come about?”
That’s that god thing, isn’t it? Are we going to argue about the big bang now?
“5. You brought up these (long discarded even by darwinian evolutionists) notions of “fittest” and “survival”.”
Actually, I think I emphasized “fit” and “prosperity”
“Briefly, that there IS an intervening GOD, who created the Universe and Life in it, and us humans as their end product (so far) with purpose and a free will. Acts of speciation are GOD’s acts, and that GOD and science (not the atheist, biased, loaded with agendas type science, but the pure, clean, always with expiration dates, humble, stick-to-the-facts type) are integral and inseparable parts in that purpose.”
Yep. That’s what I figured. I’ll stick with the science.
@ M:
Lotsa luck, buddy; make that “the loaded with crap atheist ‘science’.”
Notice, you really didn’t answer a single one from the points you chose to address, aside from giving high-school type definitions, and you conveniently avoided (among many others) the SJ Gould point.
Since you can’t unfortunately advance the discussion beyond repeating trivial cliches, consider the exchange over.
V-L,
Matthew must be one of those who expect G-d to come knocking at their door to accept as evidence of G-d’s existence. Meantime, they do accept the SETI/NASA motto: absence of evidence is no evidence of absence but only for life-out-there ‘science’ things, like Aliens, ETs and UFOs. You see, Hollywood, sci fi, and atheist ‘science’ has told them so, and of course there has been so much of that “evidence” all around them. These charlatans have made quite a bit of money selling them that boloney, they no longer know what is and where to look for evidence.
The work by Einstein, Godel and Hawking (when he was sane, not now) to name a few mean nothing to them, but the Marx and Darwin theologies with all that ‘evidence’ and ‘theory’ they supplied is another matter. Hypocrisy galore.
V-L
“Lotsa luck, buddy; make that “the loaded with crap atheist ’science’.””
Good luck with blind superstition.
“Notice, you really didn’t answer a single one from the points you chose to address, aside from giving high-school type definitions”
I believe they’re called “brief, sensible answers”. I’m not sure what you were expecting, unless the only responses you’ll accept are those you agree with.
“and you conveniently avoided (among many others) the SJ Gould point.”
I’m not sure why you think he supports your argument. Gould himself has pointed out that the creationist habit of pointing to him to support their claims is bogus. He’s not on your side, really. Read for yourself:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html
“Since you can’t unfortunately advance the discussion beyond repeating trivial cliches, consider the exchange over.”
I expect that it doesn’t matter what I write – you’ll say the same thing. That’s why I was reluctant to get involved. I’ll let others make their own decisions.
Matthew,
Please, read my comments carefully (i.e., with care and FULLY). You always seem to on purpose bypass the two (“random” and “unknown”) hurdles I’m constantly pointing out to you. And BTW, you are NOT alone in this; all atheist scientists do that, including the “punctuated evolution” guy, Gould (and I never argued that he’s a ‘creationist’ – just someone who poked obvious holes into this Darwinian theology). After he dished Darwin, he promptly resorted to the two little gods of atheist science (“randomness” and “unkowns”) and used them as traditional “deus ex machina” to produce the sudden speciation events he argued for. According to him, run back time and run again this little “evolution” tape, and it would be a different outcome: la la, we wouldn’t be here. He then used some Popperian (by far inferior to Godel’s) “logic” to peddle his little theory. We all know that, we all know what “falsifiable hypotheses” are, and the nature of the statistics involved (and that includes the fundamental probability related assumptions regarding identical and repeated experiments and how much of swiss cheese they make of these “theories.”) In any case, too bad that they don’t have those “statistics” (data sets and exact hypotheses) to test for their contrived “evolutionary theories.” To this date, no one has produce the null hypothesis to test the “evolution theory” (ala Darwin, Dawkins or Gould or anyone else for that matter). But sure as heck, they ask for the “GOD” hypothesis. Hypocrisy and double talk, the goddesses of arrogance.
If you believe that you know better than someone else what they “need,” and are willing to impose your belief on them at gunpoint and force them to purchase it, and not allow them to purchase things that they think they need, then you just might be a Marxist, too.
And this is why we need the 2nd Amendment.
Those dead, white slaveowners weren’t stupid.
Re the discussion of Acts above, their voluntary communal experienced worked, but just for a while. It soon involved squabbles, and enforcement issues.
If you believe that people belong to certain classes, and that rules governing all members of that class exist and can be discovered, and the only valid explanation of certain class members not following those rules is treason or treachery, then you are a Marxist.
You talking about india, or what?
It’s not limited to India. It’s prevalent here in the US and in the UK, too, and all over the world.
Ever heard the term “race traitor” or “self-loathing Jew”? That’s a Marxist concept.
I think you’ll find that both concepts predate marx
Karl Marx revealed that business owners are leeches on society, draining away the wealth that rightfully belongs to the workers. At least, the workers who have jobs.
Jobs working for who? Those evil employers draining away the wealth?
Marx “revealed” no such thing. He asserted it. The world is still waiting for the world to act in the way he claimed.
Define “leech.” I work for a “big business,” they give me a paycheck & assorted benefits for my time and labor. The guy who took the risk, invested the capital, built the business from nothing, and runs it from day to day makes a lot more money than I do. If his business fails, he loses a fortune; I just find another job. I’m sponging, if you will, off one “big business” after another until I retire. In addition to salary and benefits, I’ve got mobility. I think you’ll find that these are things that workers in Marx’s day didn’t have – or had much fewer of.
I’m at Disney World on vacation. While walking to breakfast this morning, I saw two adult men with Che t-shirts.
The Marxist disease is frighteningly deeply entrenched.
““To each according to his need, from each according to his ability” is one of those hip little catchphrases (like “Hope and Change” or “One People, One Nation, One Leader!”)that stirs the spirit of the idealist and fires the imagination of the ambitious. However, as with most bumper-sticker philosophies, a few moments rational reflection reveals this one in particular, as not only flawed, but downright evil.
“To each according” glibly disregards that there must be someone to decide what each ones needs and abilities actually are. Put into practice, it makes slaves and beggars of us all — slaves to those who decide what your ability is, and beggars to those who decide what your needs are.
“The other mythical foundation of Marxism is the labor theory of value, and its corollary, that ‘intrinsic’ value exists. Like the ‘need’ myth, it is one of subjectivity versus objectivity. Marxists believe that there is a knowable objective value for everything, and the very act of work creates it. That is, if a worker works a certain number of hours, his output is intrinsically valuable.”
Following the logic of this, one may deduce that a house next to a sewage plant in Jersey City, is an even swap for an identical house on the beach in Carmel.
It is ironic (or pick a better red-state word) that two of the supposedly more conservative elements in our country, Christianity and the military, by the mere fact of their existence have contributed significantly to what the author would call our Marxist state. Christianity has that core belief about the ascendancy of the spiritual over the material and helping “your neighbor.” Yes you can make the distinction about helping of your own volition, or because you are “forced,” but the underlying value put forth is what makes it possible for a majority of people to go along with government “helping.”
Ever since the Revolution, our government has collected taxes to support the miltary and pay not only for their weapons, but their housing, health care, food, pension etc. and as the military has become more and more of an occupation, this government program has set an example of how the Feds can “take care of” people. One can split hairs about what roles can/should be handled by the states, as opposed to the Feds, but in either case they are taking your money “by force/at the point of a gun” as some here like to call it.
Look, it does seem clear that AT SOME POINT, too much government as in an all-socialist state chokes off so much initiative, liberty, ambition, enterprise, whatever, that one has to guard against that. We may or may not be getting close to that point, but the “problem” is not unrelated to how we have become prosperous as a culture, with high expectations for ourselves and our children, expectations that are currently being buffeted by rude shocks, panics, bubbles bursting, industries vanishing jobs outsourced, and super productivity demanded from many of those who still have jobs. At any rate, we have had so much “Marxism” in our culture for so long, that it is part of who we are. Towns, since before the revolution used tax dollars to support the poor, often widows or the elderly, but sometimes families, who just happened to be poor.
Matthew seems to be able to talk convincingly about the way things are, using five or six sentences to the paragraph that actually make a point, leading, of course, to some here saying that he sounds like a Marxist. Probably an elitist too, the way he spells his words. Never trust anyone who can spell.
D-White,
Never trust anyone who can smell.
The stench on the Picket Fence is the smell of rotting carcass D-White ideas.
Marxism as DNA. The discredited Historical Imperative rots, that is not enough, “probably”. There must be some other way to scam this. So keep it up until someone tosses their life on your altar.
I know Marx never sucked Engels’ blood. Mao and Stalin “probably” never studied Marx.
“Probably”, there is another alleged “centrist” who simply can’t dump that smell. “Probably”.
Ooh, ooh that smell, can’t you smell that smell,
the smell that’s around you. D-White.
“Probably”.
And I should have let him go on…smiling…babywide.
Mr. Simberg, it’s all in the packaging for this administration, isn’t it?
Whereas ‘correspondents’ asked Obama point blank the following questions and of course expected a ‘No’ type of response from the CiC:
‘Are you a Marxist’?
‘Are you a Socialist’?
‘Do you consider yourself an ideologue’?
‘Do you believe Affirmative Action is being abused’?
Obama is a glaringly obvious supporter of Marxist teachings and the antiquated and biased ‘social justice’ model he has milked to no end.
Obama’s upbringing, his voting record, autobio, off-the-teleprompt responses on t.v., radio, being an attendee and possible speaker of an anti-Semite convention whereas one L.A. Times ‘news’ provider has yet to relinquish etc.,
Albeit it’s more difficult for him to hide or the MSM to cover his leanings now.
Sure, he can speak of ‘..fiscal responsibility’ or ‘I’m for small businesses, why look at the small business ‘stimulus’ bill available whereas the Government will own said bank and company, I mean, ‘assist’ to flourish’ etc., people who choose to use their brain matter see the guy for what he is.
Better late than never, right?
Oh heaven forbid this country might actually ever bring its minimum wage laws into line with the cost of living. Nobody anywhere in this country can live on $7.25/hour, not even in Alabama. Where I live what would be a living wage for a single man with no kids is $12.36/hour. Yes, by all means, let’s make sure that we’re all wage slaves making no more than a business owner thinks he can get away with paying us without us walking out the door. By all means, everyone knows the magical answer is “If you don’t like your job, go find another one that pays more” as if going right down the street one will find the same job paying a living wage, as if the other business owner doesn’t know what the prevailing wage is in his area. Yes, let’s make sure that the millionaires and billionaires can enjoy their lives in their air condiditioned ivory towers and be able to afford that third yacht they don’t need, far more important than such “evil” “Marxist” things as a living wage for the workers and decent health care that one doesn’t have to go hungry to afford. Far better to make sure the Rockefellers and Carnegies get more Benzes and Learjets. If you think capitalism works for anybody but the uppermost 3 or 4% of the population then you might be an ignorant brainwashed piece of shit.
All wealthy societies are based upon slave labor.
1) America – Irish and Chinese built the railroads; currently, job outsourcing to Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, Indonesia etc.
2) China – underpaid labor including prisoners
3) Russia – after Russian Revolution, Gulag and Kolhoz(collective farm)
4) Germany – during WWII, slave labor of Jews, Poles, etc.
We must consider that what might await all wealthy countries is not the current European model, but the Middle Eastern model where too many people and too few jobs cause employment to be random and infrequent unless you work for the government – and then only if the government remains in power. The Middle East system is truly Darwinian where only the fittest or luckiest (perhaps they are the same) survive.
Another choice is what the Left views as unsustainable: continuous growth through Capitalist innovation and implementation. Our small world cannot support such growth, according to these Leftist pundits. It is for this reason that I believe that Obama has not taken a more productive course. He does not believe that creating jobs is the answer to unemployment. More unemployment benefits, extended forever will do just fine.
I believe every member of Congress should be dragged outside and shot.
What does that make me?
Jeff Foxworthy should write a book.
If you think that it is your duty to “Protect the Change”….you might be a Marxist.
Alright….
Maybe not.
Having read Main Currents in Marxism which is considered by many to be the greatest explanation and criticism of Marxism written I have to disagree with the premise of this article. If you believe some of the above you may be a socialist but Marxism is actually more concerned with consciousness than economics. Marx studied economics at the London School of Economics in an attempt to give his ideas more “heft” but trying to attack the economic ideas doesn’t do much to combat Marxism given how critical philosophy is to it. In fact Leszek Kolakowski who wrote the book starts by the simple sentence that Marx was a German philosopher. That is the most important fact in understanding Marx. Marx was a German philosopher concerned with German philosophical issues and not Jewish ones. His family had kicked their Jewish heritage to the curb and Marx grew his philosophy by adapting Hegelian ideas. The key idea to Marx is that primitive communism was the original state of mankind but the necessary division of labor allowed the creation of classes and the ability of one class to enslave another. As technology and social revolution created a world of efficiencies there would reach a state where only one class enslaved another and the enslaved class would have no choice but to revert to man’s true state of communist living to free itself and also the exploiting class since the means of exploitation dehumanizes all. Marx is arguing that man himself does not understand his true nature. The idea of false consciousness is not a slogan its what really drives the ideas of Marxists. The idea of Labor Theory is again more related to the idea of enslavement than economics (though again Marx tried to express those ideas economically). The theory of the value of labor is that the worker does not sell his skills. He sells his need for food and shelter for himself and his family. The production of what he therefore produces is less than it would be under a state of communism wherein he would follow his true nature and produce for the community. Since this is a form of degraded labor it stands to (Marxist) reason that we are looking at labor in a form that is not of creative use but of a minimal creative input that can be absolutely valued. Think of the worst kind of sweatshop work and not neurosurgery. Again Marx stated this in economic terms as well but he is not an economist. He is a philosopher trying to assert that he has reached a basic truth that can be asserted even in the sciences.
The Nazi’s came out of the same philosophical schools of thought as the Marxists even if they did choose different philosophers for their ideology but many of the underlying ideas are the same. There is a true nature of man which a subset of enlightened humans can guide the rest towards and should at all costs. Even if Marxists seems concerned with the Third World its only to the extent that they can find a substitute for their proletarian class that never materialized. Marxism and Fascism were in the end a means by which Europeans could assert themselves over others. Scratch a Marxist or Fascist and you will find an actual European or a European wannabe who wants to assert the control they feel is due them. If you think this is not true you should take into account the contempt both those philosophies have for democracy. The idea that the democratic process can reveal what other people feel is their own motives, own ideas and own consciousness is hateful as can be to the totalitarian. A person is only human and worthwhile when he happily submits to the guiding hand of those who know better and if they do not (or deemed that they can not as the Nazis did well some sort of forceful means must come into play).
Very wrong to argue that Marx had just gotten rid of his jewish heritage by adopting Hegelian ideas, as if that were so simple and easy. The blood and DNA of the Mordechais was still flowing in him, as some previous entries have pointed out, and by adopting the name “Marx” didn’t wash off his jewish ties.
But let me make a related point, since you’re discussing both marxism and nazism.
Both Marx and Hitler had jewish blood in them. But the Jews seem to care more about dis-associating themselves from Hitler’s jewish ties because to them he targeted mostly them. At the same time Jews don’t seem to bother much about Marx’s jewish blood ties, or Lenin’s or Trostky’s. Yet, the horrors marxists have inflicted to humanity in all Continents, not just Russia, far outnumber the horrors Hitler has committed. Interesting to observe.
Oh heaven forbid this country might actually ever bring its minimum wage laws into line with the cost of living.
So all jobs should provide enough to live on? Is that what you’re saying? The kid with little life experience living with his parents should make as much as his parents with twenty years or more of experience? The minimum wage should be so high that an employer decides not to hire the untrained person, train them, so they can move on to a better job and the employer has to continually do this over and over again. You believe a person has a right to a job over someone else willing to work for less? Willing to work for less because they have a greater need for the job? A job that would provide them with experience and the resources to improve themselves so they can move on to a better paying job?
I know many people whose only work ambition is to make enough to pay for their daily beer; Not the children they’ve produced or to help their family. These people have the audacity to hope that they get paid more than they are worth. Worth being what people in a free market are willing to demand for their labor. You can demand more when you make yourself worth more than the other guys… or you can moan about how unfair life is and dream of stealing from the rich.
Compete with the rich and quit whining.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the apologists for Marxism seem to think that some how it makes them appear like super intellectuals?