[lit-ideas] Re: Hard core ideology
- From: "Veronica Caley" <molleo1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 17:44:05 -0400
Lawrence: Capital is a fact of all Liberal Democracies. To rail against people
with money is futile. A nation will bail out its major industries if it feels
their collapse will affect the nation’s stability. It is the job of people we
vote into office to do the right thing. If they haven’t, and many of the
people in office today seem in that category, then we should vote them out of
office at the earliest opportunity.
Yes, indeed. The problem is not people ranting against people with capital.
The problem is that in Economics 101 we were all taught that when one purchases
stocks in a company, that helps the company capitalize, expand, create new
products through research and development. As in, for example, American
creativity and research and development of a company like Apple. What has
happened though is that the innovations have occurred here, but the making of
the products is promptly sent over seas. The company and management becomes
rich, the stock holders do well, and we end up with millions of unemployed.
But enough of us are employed to buy the product, when combined with people
over seas, so that top management becomes very wealthy, ordinary people in
mutual funds make some money, and everyone else loses. On way or another, we
pay for all those unemployed, through unemployment comp, food pantries,
shelters and prisons.
Re Marx, I believe he said that when women enter the labor force, companies
will hire them because they usually are paid less. When children are employed,
school age, they are paid even less. We have child labor laws, but lately, in
Maine, the governor raised the number of hours high school age kids can work.
They make even less. So men loses their jobs to women, women lose their jobs
to children, and some jobs are lost by everyone here to everywhere in the world
where people work for even less. To protect themselves, people form unions.
The business people destroy unions and buy robots. Now, let's see, where is
the Bastille again?
Veronica Caley
Milford, MI
----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence Helm
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 5:05 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hard core ideology
Jack, in your comments you continue to misunderstand me. I concede that all
language is ambiguous, but there may be another principle at work here. A
couple of books by Harold Bloom come to mind: A Map of Misreading, and The
Anxiety of Influence. A person can become so stifled by his own
presuppositions that he is incapable of reading another person’s writing with
any semblance of objectivity.
I’m not complaining about entitlements as I’ve indicated 2 or 3 times. I am
saying a nation shouldn’t commit to them unless it can afford them. This is
mere common sense. If you bought a house you couldn’t afford I would consider
you foolish. The same principle applies to governments. How is that a rant?
But I do hear a rant against capital and people with capital. Capital is a
fact of all Liberal Democracies. To rail against people with money is futile.
A nation will bail out its major industries if it feels their collapse will
affect the nation’s stability. It is the job of people we vote into office to
do the right thing. If they haven’t, and many of the people in office today
seem in that category, then we should vote them out of office at the earliest
opportunity.
Home owners were given enormous entitlements through the dumbing-down of
Fanny Mae and Freddy Mack. People with inadequate incomes were allowed to
purchase houses that in more sober times they wouldn’t qualify for. You would,
I gather rather give more entitlement money to these unqualified homeowners
than keep major portions of a nation’s capital viable?
You were dismissive of Fukuyama a note or two ago, but no one has proved him
wrong. There is still nothing “out there” to compete with Liberal Democracy.
So who still rails against it? Disgruntled Marxists, Communists and former
Communists, Left-wing Liberals, Islamists and Radical Muslims. I can’t think
of anyone else. Can you? But they would do well to read the Stoics. There is
nothing they can do about it. No one out there can defeat Liberal Democracy.
Only we (speaking for Liberal Democracy) are in a position to do that. If we
spend our money like “a drunken sailor” we may very well accomplish something
our enemies could not. All we have to do to keep Liberal Democracy viable is
to live within our means.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jack Spratt
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 10:37 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Hard core ideology
There's nothing here to respond to. It's just an ideological rant about
liberals and Marxists. When you say entitlements, who are you complaining is
getting the entitlements? The people or the corporations? Corporations have
legal status as people. The banks (legal corporate people) received almost a
trillion dollars (800 billion dollars) in 2008 to keep from collapsing.
Homeowners received zilch, and they drive the consumer economy. Had homeowners
been given the 800 billion dollars to pay off their mortgages, they'd be
spending and the economy would be growing. After all that money, the banks
aren't even lending. One of the reasons today's financial mess can't be fixed
the way the savings and loan mess was fixed around 1990 is because today the
corruption in the financial industry is immeasurably greater.
J.S.
Lawrence's:
No, it isn’t sloppy use. A “BUBBLE” (upper case) implies passivity, an
accident. The stock market goes up and no one knows why, but let’s all make a
lot of money! -- and then the BUBBLE bursts. A “Ponzi Scheme” implies
maliciousness. The orchestrators of the scheme hope to make their money and get
out before the Ponzi bubble (lower case) bursts. In the Western European and
North America cases, the orchestrators hoped to have their welfare entitlements
in place and the heck with the bubble-bursting (cynical capitalists knowing the
Ponzi bubble was going to burst, made their money and got out). Fannie Mae and
Freddy Mack were tools of Liberals who (following the Liberal ideal of taking
from the rich and giving to the poor) insisted on selling houses to people who
couldn’t afford them.
As I said in an earlier note on this subject, I have no objection to
entitlements, as long as a nation can afford them. The Obama administration,
among others, is pushing through entitlements irresponsibly in my opinion. It
is as though he hopes to get his pet programs approved before his Ponzi bubble
bursts.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next election. Will
Americans want fiscal responsibility or more entitlements? In France when this
issue was put to them, the voters chose the continuation of their entitlements
instead of fiscal responsibility. Will we do the same?
Social Security isn’t supposed to be an entitlement. It assumes a growing
population. The West has no intention of giving it up so when it discovers that
its population isn’t growing, it imports workers from elsewhere. That would
work out if the imported workers fit the pattern we have in America, but in
much of Europe they have been importing Islamic Fundamentalists who have no
intention of integrating into European society. It would be better, in my
opinion for these nations (and ours) to decide to pay for the Social Security
shortfall as another entitlement. If foreign workers can’t or won’t integrate,
it would be better for all concerned if they stayed in their own countries.
BTW, Jack, you are beginning to sound like a fellow who liked to argue with
me years ago, an Economist who called himself a Marxian.
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