In those remarks, Obama was criticizing Randian Conservatives - who are sadly not confined to the US - with their silly idea that today's rich are heroic self-made men. But there is another strand of conservatism which is wholly consistent with the idea that we owe our fortune to the past. Edmund Burke famously said that society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Which raises a paradox. Whilst economic research now supports Burke's view, much of the right no longer does so, preferring ahistorical inidividualist tosh. But as Will says:Stumbling and MumblingA Conservative without a sense of history is just a whining, pleading bully.
History & Wealth: Burke Vs Rand
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle
16 comments:
No libertarian or Austrian believes that EVERY rich person is "self-made". Many get rich manipulating our unfortunate fiat funny money system which is based upon looting purchasing power surreptitiously. Others receive special government favors and corporate welfare. Also, many get rich by holding patents and copyrights which are government granted monopolies.
Nobody is even partly "self-made". People achieve what they achieve primarily as a result of the application of the contents of their minds to the resources made available by their societies; and human minds and human societies are both forests filled with flora and fauna planted and germinated by countless other beings extended far beyond that isolated human. We're all just part of the continent.
Austrians cling to a disturbed, narcissistic form of individualism which is a psychological perversion born in ignorance of one's own fundamental nature.
Quote from Slavist Bob Roddis: "No libertarian or Austrian believes that EVERY rich person is "self-made"."
No, but every Austrian believes that unions of the rich are good should be absolutely free of so called government "violence" of forcing the those nice guys rich from not hire thugs to throw worker organizers down stairs and forcing them to honoring contracts and pension obligations.
Every Austrian believes that government should constantly monitor the unions of poor workers because unions of the poor are going to cheat and oppress other workers who like their bosses because they where paid to believe such drivel by union busting bosses.
Bob, if you like Austrian policies so much why don't you move to Georgia and sign up for those new private charter cities that Mikheil Saakashvili the well known student of Austrian economics is planning on to revive Georgia with shockingly hasn't done so well under Austrian policies but they do have their market "Freedumb" (like no minimum wage).
If you have any principle then you should jump at this chance for Freedom.
Austrians believe what the oligarch currently employing them believes. They have no other principles.
The fundamental libertarian principle is the prohibition of the initiation of violence and the prohibition of fraud. As Mr. Franko said yesterday, the MMT obsession is for the state and its SWAT teams to initiate and enforce DICTATES on those unwilling to go along with its those dictates.
Myth #1 Libertarians believe that each individual is an isolated, hermetically sealed atom, acting in a vacuum without influencing each other.
Libertarians are methodological and political individualists, to be sure. They believe that only individuals think, value, act, and choose. They believe that each individual has the right to own his own body, free of coercive interference. But no individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time in their goals, values, pursuits and occupations. As F.A. Hayek pointed out in his notable article, "The Non-Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’" John Kenneth Galbraith’s assault upon free-market economics in his best-selling The Affluent Society rested on this proposition: economics assumes that every individual arrives at his scale of values totally on his own, without being subject to influence by anyone else. On the contrary, as Hayek replied, everyone knows that most people do not originate their own values, but are influenced to adopt them by other people.1 No individualist or libertarian denies that people influence each other all the time, and surely there is nothing wrong with this inevitable process. What libertarians are opposed to is not voluntary persuasion, but the coercive imposition of values by the use of force and police power. Libertarians are in no way opposed to the voluntary cooperation and collaboration between individuals: only to the compulsory pseudo-"cooperation" imposed by the State.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard12.html
Bob,
Paranoia will destroy 'ya.
He's what I wrote: "Our history DICTATES that here in the West, "money" is nomisma, or a medium of exchange solely based on the DICTATES of the authority of our civil law."
No human being or small group of human beings is depicted as doing any 'dictating' in my sentence here.
Dictate: "to impose, pronounce, or specify authoritatively"
In occurrence 1, I opine that the traditions found in a study of the HISTORY of our western civilization
'dictates', or pronounces, that we use 'nomisma' or what MMT contemporaneously terms 'free floating, non-convertible state currency'.
In occurrence 2, I identify that it is solely our SYSTEM OF CIVIL LAWS that 'dictates', or specifies authoritatively, what are the specific characteristics of our monetary system.
No human 'Dictators' involved Bob.
Are you the 'word police' now?
Is the use of the word 'dictate' banned in 'Rothbardville'?
If so, who enforces the ban????
Bob,
"Libertarians are in no way opposed to the voluntary cooperation and collaboration between individuals: only to the compulsory pseudo-"cooperation" imposed by the State."
I submit that whatever one of your morons wrote this is making the false assumption that "money" is exogenous and the "compulsory cooperation" is code for "tax payments" which is false under our current monetary arrangements.
ie this statement assumes that the govt "gets the money" from the non-government (i know, i know 'loathsome term'...) which is FALSE and that these revenues are used to "pay for" govt initiatives which Rothbardians hate.
Too bad you all are caught up in metal-love and are hence blind to the truth of how our state currency system operates....
rsp,
What "libertarians" are opposed to is not coercive persuasion, but democracy and the rule of law.
"Libertarians" are in no way opposed to rule by capital, only to rule by anything other than capital.
The fundamental "libertarian" principle is the suppression of human rights and the imposition of totalitarian rule by capital.
Bob Roddis "The fundamental libertarian principle is the prohibition of the initiation of violence and the prohibition of fraud."
The devil is in the details. There are good reasons that there is a tug-of-war between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Both are based on good reasons. The problems arise when one tendency gets out of balance with the other. These need to be balanced in an optimally functioning society, and to the degree they are not, the society becomes dysfunctional.
There are also plenty of 'libertarians' who aren't anarcho-capitalists. The two categories are not the same. Anarcho-capitalists are a subgroup within 'libertarianism' who consider their conception of private property to be an absolute.
There are also plenty of 'libertarians' who aren't anarcho-capitalists. The two categories are not the same. Anarcho-capitalists are a subgroup within 'libertarianism' who consider their conception of private property to be an absolute.
Wikipedia has good historical summaries of Anarchism and Libertarianism.
Quote: "The fundamental libertarian principle is the prohibition of the initiation of violence and the prohibition of fraud."
So how exactly does the libertarian intend to impose this prohibition what he individually defines of as "initiaton of violence" and "use of fraud."
Since according to you "They believe that only individuals think, value, act, and choose"
how do intent to prohibit anything without a society thinks values and acts a common definition of "initiation of violence" and "use fraud"?
You can't commonly prohibit that which isn't collectively defined and agreed upon.
Libertarian aren't individualist at all. They are market collectivist.
You don't believe in a human individual. You believe in a apriori caricature of the human individuals limited to the actions of homo economicus as deduced by so called logic. That is why you simply shout mindless slogans from other libertarians which why ya' all sound the same and use the same talking rather than think as individuals.
True individualism begins with the creative aspect of man with by definition is beyond deduction and therefore cannot be constrained by collectivist evaluation of the market.
By reducing man to an animal that can only act within the popular approval (Adam Smith's sentiment) of the market you destroy the only real freedom a man has i.e. the ability to introduce creative principles to redefine the character of behavior that governs the markets.
Libertarians are collectivist who hate human creative power which can threaten established market order by acting outside of them and using human reason to direct them. They define any intervention with that market stasis as "violence" and thus kill any creative human expression for the sake of the collective.
That's what the term "laissez faire" refers to. Leave the established market order alone and untouched by creative reason.
"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it."
~Mikhail Bakunin
There are also plenty of 'libertarians' who aren't anarcho-capitalists. The two categories are not the same. Anarcho-capitalists are a subgroup within 'libertarianism' who consider their conception of private property to be an absolute
"Libertarians" are in no way opposed to rule by capital, only to rule by anything other than capital.
Rocky Mountain Wealth Concepts
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