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Exploitation, Economic and Political
EXPLOITATION, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal", according to Marx, is the characteristic of the modern capitalism. Compared with the exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions of the old regime. Then he went on to beuild his tortuous analysis of labor value in his Capital, which turned out to be rubbish.
The center of Marx's complaint is the old one of the worker or the peasant. How come that the middle man gets to mark up the labor of the worker? To the piece-worker, the putter-out pays ten cents a piece, and then sells it for twenty, or more. And by the time that the garment reaches the consumer it sells for a dollar or more a piece. Where is the justice in that?
The justice is that the employer or the putter-out is doing a lot of work so that the piece-worker can sell their piece. In the modern workplace, the employer provides the workplace, the tools, heating, cooling, refreshments, and often does all the legwork to make benefits like health care and other insurance easily available. Then he researches the markets, finds buyers, finds investors, finances the work in progress. Then, of course, he takes the risks of profit and loss. So who is exploiting whom?
And what about the politician that is levelling the charge of expoitation? Does not he take a chunk of the full value of the laborer's product? Does not he take his taxes off the top, whether sales, excise, payroll, or income tax, without particularly thinking about the worker's need or worth?
Ah yes, you'll say. But with those taxes, the worker buys civilization, as Justice Holmes wrote a century ago. Excuse me, Mr. Justice, but it is with his wages that the worker buys civilization. It is invidious to single out your particular preference--and a judge lives off taxes, after all--and call that civilization. In fact all governments, civilized and other, impose taxes, starting with the meanest guerrilla group in the mountains. It is the civilized nations that mitigate the brute force of government, naked, etc, with the veil of credit, exchange, capital, universal wealth, and ease.
Our liberal friends have made a nice business out of critiquing the exploitative tendencies in early modern capitalism, and no doubt they are right. But our task in these latter days is to deal with the problem of big-government exploitation. And that is about as "naked, shameless, direct, brutal" as you can get.
| perm | comment(0) | 
| 02/21/12 8:58 pm ET
Temperance is Moderation in All Things, Except Courage
WHEN ARISTOTLE applies his doctrine of the mean to the virtue of courage, he has a problem. The epitome of courage for the Greek polis is the courage of the heavy infantry hoplite solider, and a mean between rashness and cowardice doesn't cut it. The hoplite must have the courage to surrender his life, no matter what. That's just how the shock battle of heavy infantry with shields and spears...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/20/12 12:17 am ET
If Virtue is Voluntary, So is Vice
VIRTUOUS ACTIONS are voluntary, we want to say, for "the end... is what we wish for, the means what we deliberate about and choose". Yet we like to think that people don't actually choose vice, but only happiness: "no one is voluntarily wicked nor involuntarily happy". Aristotle wants to attack this because it obviously threatens his notion that both virtue and vice are choices. It could be...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/16/12 9:57 pm ET
America's Verdict on Obama
WHEN JONAH Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism back in 2008, liberals blew it off; they weren't interested in engaging its arguments. It wasn't surprising. Liberal Fascism said what conservatives have been saying about liberals for ages. It said that there was a fascistic streak in liberals that goes back to William James and the "moral equivalent of war."
Liberals want to mobilize the nation for great tasks, but not for war. They want to mobilize us into a civilian army to fight the good fight for education, for helping the poor, for health care. Specifically, they want us to follow their lead and pay for their plans for the welfare state. And anyone that doesn't follow is a rotten egg, expressed more elegantly these days as a racist, sexist, or homophobe.
There is a point to the "moral equivalent of war." From time to time, we the American people need to mobilize to respond to some great national emergency that is not war related: Think Hurricane Katrina. But health care, education, welfare, superannuation, the great liberal programs that are bankrupting the nation, are not national emergencies. They are the normal challenges of life that people come together and solve, generation by generation, in social cooperation. These tasks do not require extraordinary mobilization--as if for war--and they do not get solved well under conditions of compulsion. They are the normal complex interactions of the great panorama of the challenges of life, so they are unlikely to respond well to the one-size-fits-all strategy of war, moral or otherwise.
You could say, a century and a half ago in the middle of the chaotic transition from agricultural society to industrial society, that the emergency required decisive action. But not today. That is why liberals use the language of justice more often than war to justify their extraordinary powers. They say that people are poor because other people are rich, because of greedy bankers and corporate greed--or exploitation or inadequate education or anything that comes to mind.
The big problem, and it gets bigger all the time, is that every time our liberal friends capture an area of social cooperation and place it under the yoke of compulsion they wither the natural instincts and virtues of the American people for unforced, willing and voluntary social cooperation.
In the 19th century, foreign critics noted the extraordinary talent for cooperation in the American people. Whenever Americans saw a need, remarked Tocqueville, they formed an association to tackle it. But the modern, liberal approach is that whenever liberals see a need, they agitate for a government program to solve it. The difference between the old method and the new method is the difference between black and white. But it is a mistake to critique the liberal approach to society with the normal shibboleths of "justice," "corruption," and "abuse of power." The problem is bigger than that. The result of the liberal project, its culture of compulsion and regimentation, of enlisting the whole nation, as if it were an army, in its moral projects, is a vast human tragedy that is tearing our society out by the roots and that withers the tendrils of social nutrition and individual moral growth.
Now of course, we have Charles Murray's latest, Coming Apart, which puts numbers and percentages on the indictment served up by Jonah Goldberg. When we talk about "coming apart" we mean precisely the loss of social capital, the goodwill and willing cooperation, that is the unintended consequence of each new liberal program and each new ratchet of the culture of compulsion.
This year, 2012, Americans are getting a momentous opportunity to vote "yea" or "nay" on the liberal project. Right now, of course, everyone is talking about the weakness of the Republican candidates on the one hand, or the utter cynicism of the Obama FY13 budget on the other. People want the president to be defeated for the right reasons, and they despair of the prospects for a decisive rejection of the president and all his works.
Politics is seldom as clear-cut as that. Just as Al Capone was not convicted of racketeering but income tax evasion, the great liberal project of social regimentation will not be defeated purely on its merits but most likely upon subsidiary issues. Maybe it will be defeated just because people don't like liberals and especially don't like Obama.
But those of us that believe in American exceptionalism have faith that the American people will deliver their verdict on Obama, and it will not be Four More Years.
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/15/12 9:55 pm ET
New Federal Budget up on usgovernmentspending.com
SO NOW, A WEEK late, the president has submitted his FY13 budget. And of course usgovernmentspending.com/current_budget has all the data. But what does it mean? There's the higher deficit, $1.3 trillion for the election year of 2012 instead of the sub-trillion deficit budgeted for FY12 just a year ago. But we expected that, from the sub-par growth in this sub-par recovery. There's the...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/15/12 3:20 am ET
Obama Punts on Budget
THE FEDERAL budget is out today, and the advance word is that it doesn't look beyond the election in November. Writes Douglas Holtz-Eakin: As a campaign document, it will be straightforward. Tax increases as a sop to those who blame their economic misery on the affluent and Wall Street. Billions of dollars in new “investments” as the president restarts his successful campaign-as-handout...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/12/12 9:38 pm ET
Let's Epatez the Liberaloisie!
TRAVELING THE long hours across the Atlantic on Thursday I got a chance to catch up on some "classic" movies. As in Planet of the Apes and Close Encounters. Not to mention Sunset Boulevard. I admit it. I had never seen those great movies. I had no idea. No idea that the Charlton Heston vehicle was in fact an allegory on our horrible racist, speciesist, fundamentalist society. Or that Close...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/11/12 12:49 am ET
Jews, Politics, and Conformity
PARTY IDENTIFICATION for Jews has changed by 9 percent since 2008, according to Pew Research. Jews who support or lean Republican jumped from 20% in 2008 to 29% in 2011. And Jews who support or lean Democratic fell from 72% in 2008 to 65% in 2011. The 2011 study has a 6.5% margin of error. I know what you are thinking. What took them so long? What took them so long is that humans are social...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/09/12 9:51 am ET
Is the Future Cognitive? |
| 02/08/12 1:05 pm ETDems Ditch Catholics and Blue Collars |
| 02/07/12 12:25 pm ET Aristotle Fiddles the Mean on Courage
IT'S EASY ENOUGH to set up a general law or rule. It's when you have to apply the rule in practice that the fun begins. So it is with Aristotle's idea of the mean when applied to the virtue of courage. He defines virtue as a mean between two vices such as "the man of practical wisdom would determine it", for the vices exceed or fall short of "what is right in both passions and actions while...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/06/12 12:55 pm ET
How to Judge Actions
IF YOU ARE a philosopher like Aristotle or maybe a legislator in the business of judging the actions of lesser mortals, you need a template, a measure, by which to rule and hand out honors and punishments. To do this you probably need to be able to "distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary" action. Sometimes, of course, you have to do something, such as throw goods overboard in a...
| perm | comment(0) | | 02/03/12 1:15 pm ET
No Sex, We're Japanese? |
| 02/02/12 12:33 pm ETRomney's "Gaffes"(1) |
| 02/01/12 1:39 pm ETEnd of Mitt Milquetoast |
| 01/31/12 10:10 am ETLeaders Must Be Winners |
| 01/30/12 9:02 am ETAre Incontinent Fools Wise? |
| 01/27/12 9:04 am ETThe Anguish of the Reactionary President(1) |
| 01/26/12 9:45 am ETDuck and Cover, Mr. President |
| 01/25/12 10:18 am ETObama is not a Friend of Catholics(1) |
| 01/24/12 10:50 am ET| February blogs | January blogs |
A New Manifesto
A spectre is haunting the liberal elite—the spectre of conservatism.
The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?
Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.
Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.
The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.
All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.
Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.
The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.
The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”
The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.
AAM Book of the Day
Nigosian, S.A., The Zoroastrian Faith
AAM Books on Education
Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education
Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
AAM Books on Law
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century
F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract
John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present
AAM Books on Mutual Aid
James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century
David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland
AAM Books on Religion
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China
Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state
David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world
Republic, Regained
Liberal law dean Lawrence Lessig wants conservatives to join in reducing the influence of money in politics.
Morning Jay: Democrats, Inc.
Jay Cost explains the modern Democratic Party.
Media Matters Enemies List
How come I'm not important enough to be on it?
Is sexual abuse in schools very common?
Slate asks the unthinkable. It was great fun to hunt down the Catholic pedophiles. But what about public schools?
Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics
a liberal psychologist tells liberals to pay more attention to conservatives.
> archive
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
After a year of President Obama most Americans understand that the nation is on the wrong track. But how do we find the right track? Americans knew thirty years ago that liberalism was a busted flush. Yet Reaganism and Bushism seemed to be less than the best answer.
But where can we turn? Where are the thinkers and activists of the old days? Where do we find the best ideas? And how do we persuade our present ruling class to loosen its grip on power so that we can move the locomotive of state back onto the right track?
With all of our problems it seems like the worst of times.
In fact, this is the best of times. Under the radar a generation of great thinkers have been figuring out what went wrong and conjuring up visions of a better future. This book, "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" is an introduction to their ideas, and to the great future that awaits an America willing to respond to their call.
Although this book is addressed to all Americans, conservative, moderate, and liberal, and looks to a nation that transcends our present partisan divide, I must tell you that liberals will have the most difficulty with the book. The reason is simple. I am asking liberals to give up a lot of the power they have amassed in the last century. But we are all Americans, and we must all give up something for the sake of the greater good.
I am Christopher Chantrill and I am writing this book in full view. I'll be blogging on the process and the ideas, and I'll be asking you, dear readers, to help. Read the blog. Read the articles as they come out on American Thinker and ponder over the draft chapters here on this site.
Then send me your reactions, your thoughts, and your comments. You will help more than you know.
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006