Worldwide Debate Over The Economic Crisis

Post 1 : About The Election

Are We This Stupid?

An amazing thing happened last week in the United States.  In a very low voter turnout the majority of the people said they either don't see a problem with the last four years, or they don't believe anyone can do any better than the current set of leaders we've had the last two years, or they just don't care.  In this election they had the opportunity to express themselves, to put their government in a position to get things done, to at least try to end the paralysis it's been in.  Instead they both re-elected the Democrat president and strengthened the Republicans hold on the House of Representatives while doing nothing to weaken them in the Senate.  One side or the other needed to be significantly weakened or at least in some way sent a clear message to cooperate with the other.  Instead the voters and non-voters conspired to help the two sides dig their trenches all the deeper.  It's as if the majority of the American people decided to give reality the finger, or maybe just refuse to take responsibility for their role in self-governance. 

We've been blaming our leaders for not being able to put aside partisanship to get things done, but when we had a chance to correct that, we essentially allowed our own partisanship to reinforce there's.  We actually seem to have asked our leaders to go right on not getting anything done while our government heads towards fiscal oblivion and our economy has all the symptoms of D.C.S. (dieing civilization syndrome).  Just as President Obama will most certainly no longer be able to justly blame future economic woes on President Bush, the American voters will no longer be able to justly blame the politicians in general for our government's inability to get anything done.

If we cease to be a great nation in the next few years, let future historians know that it wasn't any of our leaders' fault.  It was ours, we the people, or at least the majority of us.

Post 2 : Worldwide Debate Over The Economic Crisis

We Are Not Alone If We Are

If your ideology defies reality you must call reality an ideology, so as to create an illusion of plausibility.

Based on my reading of both domestic and foreign journals on our current economic state, worldwide, and on the results of last week's election, something has dawned on me.  The debates between the Capitalists and the leftists needs to stop.  Unlike any fair and honest debate, it has not served in any way to advance our knowledge or understanding of economics.  Instead it has only served to deceive us.
 
Through it the world has been cruelly deceived into thinking we can defy reality.  It's as if a bunch of adults had taken up the habit of telling every child they see near a precipice they will fly if they jump off.  Only in this case, while the potential consequences are just as horrible, there can be no authorities to tell the real deceivers to leave the gullible alone.  The deceivers I speak of are, to be fair to them, self-deceived, but not all of them are unaware of the disingenuous tactic they've been using to advance their cause.  They just believe the ends can justify the means.

Their disingenuous means is to set themselves against a mythological ideology they call Capitalism.  The reason Capitalism is a myth is because it is an attempt to explain the natural phenomenon of market forces within human civilization by a means other than objective observation and study.  Instead of treating the facts of how market forces operate as the facts that they are, they stuff them into a fabricated ideology called Capitalism, so they can debate reality itself and not look ridiculous.

Like real isms it may have some purely ideological/philosophical elements, but they also make it include things that are factual and thus should be ideologically neutral.  e.g. Quality of goods and services naturally trends upward with higher compensation.  Competition does usually produce more favorable price to quality ratios for consumers.   Centralized decision makers intervening in market decisions tend to make services less sensitive to individual needs.   These are not the facets of an ism or ideology, they are part of reality.

Marxists and other leftists needed to create this label, "capitalism", in order to give their ideas which flew in the face reality the illusion of merit.  Or from their perspective, the delusion of merit.   I should add, as the recent re-election of a leftist president in the United States seems to indicate, this intellectual slight of hand has been very effective. It seems most of the world is now fooled by it.  A world-wide delusion has set in.  One where the above realities about how goods and services best get distributed can be treated as just someone's unenlightened or poorly informed opinions.  They're part of an ideology after all, right?  So the leftists can claim they have no more merit than their ideas that happen to fly in the face of such things.

Of course we cannot dismiss these factual ideas about product distribution by simply attaching them to a made up straw-man-like ideology and then posing another ideology against it, but why do I say contemporary leftist ideologies fly in the face of reality? Because they do.

The most fundamentally flawed of them is the one that laid the foundation for the others.  Marxist economics is based heavily on what has come to be called Marx's Labor Theory of Value.   In fact, according to my reading of Das Kapital, this was the base assumption of the book.   Marx pretty much came right out and said so.  'All value is ultimately derived from labor' would be my paraphrase.  While this is a great place to start if one wishes to argue workers are being unjustly exploited, property owners have no intrinsic right to their property, and all property is ultimately that of the community's, it's none the less a horrible place to start if you want your ideas to withstand any respectable application of critical thinking.

If all value derives from labor, what does that say about ideas that dawn on people while their not working?  What does it say about forests, rivers, mountains, and other natural wonders?  What does it say about talents that only a few people have at certain levels, like leadership, craftsmanship, artistic ability, creativity?  What does it say about human dignity? It's not a matter of having caveats for things in order to save the Marxist assumption about value from being untenable.  Value either derives from labor or it doesn't.  If it doesn't then Marx's Labor Theory is wrong from the very start of its argument.  If value does derive from labor than individual worth and dignity is nonsense and I have some cardboard homes to sell that should catch me a high price.

Obviously value does not ultimately derive from labor.  Labor is just another part of the set of goods and services that we human beings endeavor to distribute between ourselves and benefit from.  This isn't capitalism.  This is just how things work.

Marx may have been attempting through this base assumption to give individuals more dignity, but he actually did the opposite by equating their whole value to their ability to work, and even worse for the plausibility of Marxism, he forced it to stand on a foundation of dehumanization.  If your ideology's base assumption quickly falls apart, or even worse becomes monstrous, when confronted with both reason and reality, then your ideology is implausible.

It is this implausibility that made it necessary for the straw-man called "capitalism" to be created, so that the facts and realities that make Marxism implausible could be dismissed as just being part of its rival ideology, Capitalism.

The other major contemporary leftist ideologies, Progressivism and socialism, don't escape the same implausibility of Marxism.  It's not that they necessarily can't escape it, but they simply don't try.   It's too convenient for their causes to reject reality and pretend that anyone who tells them free market forces will ultimately maximize the effectiveness of the distribution of goods and services is simply part of a rival ism, "capitalism", and thus it's actually possible for them to know a better way.   As if someone may know a better way of dealing with gravity than assuming you'll fall if you jump off a bridge.

It's a titanic slight of hand and it's worked.  Now it seems most voters in the United States believe reality is just a nasty ideology they need not agree with.   My advice to the rest of the world is to stop depending on us.  Whether you agree with the leftists in this country or not doesn't matter.  Reality is not an ideology you can argue with.   If you defy it, as the left will insist on doing, everyone who depends on you will lose.

My advice to my fellow travelers in the struggle for individual liberty is to lean on one of our surest allies, reality.  She can be a harsh mistress, as the saying goes, but we gave it one really good try this election cycle to help our fellow citizens see what the left is doing and most of them chose not to see it, so now they have to deal with that harsh mistress.  There is much suffering ahead and I for one will not be shy to say, "I told you so".

As for all the people about to lose your jobs, we so called "heartless conservatives" will be doing whatever we can to help you, within reason of course.  Look to churches, synagogs, and other volunteer organizations if you have need.  We are all going through very rough times and we all will get through them the best if we come together and help each other. 

I just wish so many of us hadn't bought into and played along with that "capitalism" trick the left used.  Will these be the last words of a great nation to warn others who come along after us, "reality isn't an ideology!"?