Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Jimmy Dore - Bulletproof Blankets For Kids! Capitalism’s Answer To Guns

The market is always ingenious; the answer to school gun shootings: bullet proof blankets for kids! And Trump wants to arm teachers with guns too so then they can go into lessons with guns looking menacing in their gun holsters, while kids would be carrying about with them all day bullet proof blankets, Now I don't know how heavy a bullet proof vest is, but I a hunch that bullet anything would weigh a ton. Gee, what a place, hey, and the rest of us around the world think sod living there!





2 comments:

Bob Roddis said...

How can compulsory government school, where both paying for it and attendance are compelled by threats from the the state, be an attributable of "capitalism"?

Capitalism would allow social progressives to have their own private voluntary neighborhood with private voluntary schools teaching "progressive" values and where racists, gun owners and gun supporters are banned. And banned from the sidewalks as streets as well.

MMT seems dependent upon always fudging simple definitions and the meaning of well known words and concepts.

Tom Hickey said...

If one thinks that education is a human right, and that education in a liberal society where all lives are valued equally must be oriented toward providing equal opportunity, then the society must make such provision.

There are various ways to do this.

Presently, public education is the norm, although the present system in the US is far from providing equal opportunity owing to the way it is financed based on local property taxes.

The challenge is get from here to there.

Simply proposing an ideal solution is utopian. It also required a compelling argument for being "optimal" since there are alternatives. The challenge is get from here to there. Deciding where "there" is, is a political question in a liberal democracy, although the options must conform to liberal values in a liberal system.

This is further complicated in a liberal environment in which not all people are liberal or fully liberal, e.g., are traditionalists or some combination of liberal and traditional, with the fringes being anarchistic or authoritarian.

The paradoxes of liberalism present challenges in a liberal society, since the paradoxes involve "liberalism" becoming illiberal.

The challenges arise since just about everyone has boundaries and red lines that are not necessarily reducible to a simple principle like the non-aggression principle, or even a simple set of principles that are agreed upon.

The challenge is to combine the idealistic with the realistic. What is considered ideal is not universal. Ideologies proliferate. Thus, the liberal challenge is arrive at a modus operandi between different and often conflicting ideologies and what is feasible realistically.

The liberal project is a process. Trying to impose a particular view of it is illiberal.

Liberal democracy, as I understand it anyway, is supposed to be about working this out through compromise over time.

I would say that most MMT people are interested in picking the low-hanging fruit and optimizing what is most feasible to accomplish.

Then, the process can proceed iteratively and incrementally, exploring promising options and balancing emergent opportunities and challenges.

Those wishing to argue going full-Rothbard are welcome to do that in a liberal society.

Many don't view that as an ideal in the first place, and even granting it for the sake of argument, going directly there appears utopian given the present context of society.