Emotional blocks to free-market capitalism
Submitted by atrickpay on Thu, 08/07/2008 - 00:17
Have you noticed how people obstinately refuse to be persuaded of the virtues of the free market?
No matter how eloquently we portray the inadequacies of the welfare state, detail the failures of government intervention, or defend the innate morality of capitalism, the man in the street is not convinced.
Indeed it is seldom that we can succeed in converting from socialistic modes of thought even the highly intelligent and supposedly unbiased academic.
Click here to continue reading article.
»
GREAT IDEA
IF you are recieiving welfare you're not allowed to vote . Otherwise you vote yourself a welfare raise. ???????????????
HAVE FUN,
TLF
GREAT IDEA
doub. p
TLF
socialism
BY the way since FRANKLIN R. what has AMERICA become?
SOCIAL security. GET IT . WE have become a socialist society in spite of celibrating 4th of JULY. OH how we can put on the show. But (SOMEONE) , after a spy mission while I was at work, told me how my back yard needs to be managed. In no uncertain terms either. $1000/day
your truely,
TLF
socialism
FREEDOM breeds ;FREE MARKET
TLF
GREAT stuff
YOU guys are right on today , till I got to the disagreer. THE disagreer starts out with the ideas of COMMUNISUM & ends talking about some- thing all together different, SOCIALISM. ONE system is as bad as the other since neither address the lazy bumms that get a free ride.
keep um comming
TLF
lol u guyz r so rite, i m so rong
If socialism doesnt work, then capitalism doesnt work either.
Ron Paul himself has also said that we could take care of poor people if we weren't bombing the shit out of everyone.
at it's most simple
at it's most simple interpretation.....why would you take away from a person and then give back to him with a giant bureaucratic middleman added while taking away his choice in how to use the money? It ends up costing him double or more to run the process through a middleman who knows less about it than the person himself. Unless your targeting completely uneducated incompent peoples, is this who we should be aiming at and aiming for?
"It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government."
— Thomas Paine
"Endless money forms the sinews of war." - Cicero, www.freedomshift.blogspot.com
Ugh!
I say that a lot anymore. I know exactly what you mean and don't have a clue how to communicate the virtues of free-market capitalism. They keep confusing it with corporatism. Peace
Prepare & Share the Message of Freedom through Positive-Peaceful-Activism.
That is *exactly* the problem that I have experienced. Talk of
free-market economics is interpreted (by ignorance and by the help of the MSM) as being the same thing as corporatism or, to use Mussolini's example, what he called: fascism.
_________________________________________
"An economy built on fiat money is a society on its way to ashes."
_________________________________________
"An economy built on fiat money is a society on its way to ashes."
By "corporatism" you probably mean fascism,
as Aguilar defines it in Fascism: Socialism with Shareholders, www.axiomaticeconomics.com/fascism.php
This was how free-market arguments got swept aside in the years leading up to WWII. Libertarians never succeeded in explaining to the average Joe that capitalism and fascism were different things.
Let's not make that mistake again this time around.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Well, another problem
is the label "YOU don't care about PEOPLE" Ugh! The elite have this down to a science and it will take someone smarter than me to break through this mind set. Peace
Prepare & Share the Message of Freedom through Positive-Peaceful-Activism.
I suggest showing them my
I suggest showing them my signature, first of all. Most people have a hard time arguing with the basic premise there. Then you can elaborate on the concept of how true individual freedom, as espoused by libertarians (where my freedom ends only where yours begins, and vice-versa), is actually the most humanitarian ideology of all. Discuss the ways minorities are held back by the systems that are ostensibly set up to help them, and how much better off they'd be if the law actually treated people as individuals (something it has NEVER done, in the US).
----------
Liberty for Dummies
On the subject of treating people as individuals,
there is a debate raging in Tucson, AZ between Tom Horne, the State School Superintendent, and Augustine Romero, the Senior Director of Ethnic Studies. Horne is trying to shut down the ethnic studies (also called raza studies) program in the Tucson Unified School District.
Victor Aguilar has weighed in with the following definitions in his Devil's Dictionary, www.axiomaticeconomics.com/devils_dictionary.php
Horne, Tom: “I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups… It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group and teach them separately.” I agree. If the $2.6M Tucson spends on raza studies were spent on honors math classes instead, there might be more of an audience for my Simplified Exposition, which has proven to be not so simple for students who have spent their lives wallowing in victimhood instead of trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in a math class. See Romero, Augustine.
Romero, Augustine: “Through the creation of this new [ethnic] identity and the development of a sense of purpose, our [raza studies] students develop a sense of hope.” Well, sorry to burst your bubble Romero, but I already have an identity (defined by the Mises Institute as “that asshole who criticized Austrian economics”), I already have a sense of purpose, promoting my book, and I already have a sense of hope. I hope that the $2.6M Tucson spends on raza studies will be spent on honors math classes instead, so there might be more of an audience for my Simplified Exposition, which has proven to be not so simple for students who have spent their lives wallowing in victimhood instead of trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in a math class. See Horne, Tom.
For reference, both men contributed to the 10 August 08 Viewpoints page of the Arizona Republic newspaper.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Tom Horne
Is my new hero for the day!
(I try to keep a daily rotation going, with occasional self fulfilling days.)
************
http://www.dvds4delegates.com
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
~Ambrose Redmoon
What he said!
http://www.tragedyandhope.com
http://www.im2moro.com
I've started a new thread
specifically on this topic at www.dailypaul.com/node/58249
I'm trying to rally Daily Paul bloggers to write letters to the Arizona Republic in support of Tom Horne.
This issue is coming to a head and an avalanche of letters from freedom-loving Americans, even if they live outside of Arizona, can turn the tide.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Update
On 17 August 2008, Arizona Republic columnist Doug MacEachern exposed Romero's "studies" showing that raza students outperform their peers as smoke and mirrors.
"The two pages of bar charts and the brief paragraphs that accompany them (prepared, according to the [Tucson school] district, by Romero himself) simply don't provide enough information to know whether the raza-studies program 'contributed, harmed or had no effect on the achievement of students who selected to participate in it,' Greene [head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansaw] wrote."
In support of MacEachern and Green, I have added the following definition to my Devil's Dictionary of Economics, www.axiomaticeconomics.com/devils_dictionary.php
MacEachern, Doug: “The [Tucson, AZ] school district itself defends the program’s academic value with this statement: ‘Research regarding Raza Studies students have found they outscored their peers in reading, writing and math as measured by the state’s academic accountability exam (AIMS).’ Had the claim been true, it would have constituted a rare objective justification for the district’s ethnic studies program. But the claim of proof-positive academic improvement is not true.” See Horne, Tom.
For reference, see the article, "Smoke and mirrors obscure raza studies," in the Viewpoints section of the 17 August 2008 Arizona Republic.
Daily Paul bloggers!
Let's rally around Tom Horne! This is a local Tucson issue now, but that doesn't mean that ethnic studies won't be coming to your high school tomorrow! Write a letter to the Arizona Republic supporting Horne's efforts to rid the schools of ethnic studies.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Nothing to argue with
Nothing to argue with there.
(Tell the truth now, you're Aguilar, aren't you?)
----------
Liberty for Dummies
Shhhh.....
Don't tell anybody!
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
http://www.dailypaul.com/...
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/55380#comment-586434
----------
Liberty for Dummies
I have to say, the most
I have to say, the most annoying words I have ever heard spoken are these. Socialism is a great concept on paper, you just have to find a government that wont corrupt it. BLAH>
Socialism doesnt even come close to working on paper. In theory it fails. Completely and totally fails.
Here's a reading list for anyone interested in reading about economics. Economics is an incredibly fascinating animal.
"Economics In One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt
"What Has Government Done To Our Money" by Murray Rothbard
"The Case Against The Fed" by Murray Rothbard
"Man, Economy and State" by Murray Rothbard
"Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises
Anyone that is interested in economics and history should read Thomas E. Woods' books.
"Who Killed the Constitution"
"33 questions"
"Politically incorrect guide to American History"
I'm afraid I have to
I'm afraid I have to disagree, somewhat.
The basic idea behind socialism is admirable: the workers control the means of production. That sounds like a great idea on its face. It's essentially the same argument the founders were making when they said that the people being governed should control the organs of government. But the founders had a problem: the king owned the colonies. They were his property; he could do with them as he wished. Their only recourse was to steal them, which they did. Were they justified in doing so? I think so, yes. So theft is not always wrong. But we already know this; nobody would condemn a starving person for stealing something to eat.
The question then becomes: are workers justified in stealing the means of production from their owners? I would argue that they are not, because they can just as easily create their own means of production and compete with the first. The founding fathers had no such option, at least not realistically. They could have abandoned the colonies and moved west, but that would have been suicide. The west was far more dangerous then, and without an established colony from which to launch such an undertaking, it would have been disastrous. These things take time; you have to take tentative, probing steps into the unknown, set up outposts, etc., before the common people (complete with women and children) can migrate en masse. The pioneers of the 19th century had all these benefits; our founders in the 18th century would not have, had they decided to take such an approach. They were like the starving man, trapped between two terrible options: tyranny, or war; starve, or steal.
So yes, the founders were justified in stealing the colonies from George III, but the factory workers are not justified in stealing their employer's factory. They can make use of the existing advanced infrastructure to launch their own enterprise.
When talking to socialists, I try to remember that they are not so different from me (I'm talking about the well-intentioned ones, e.g., the so-called "libertarian socialists" who look to thinkers like Noam Chomsky for guidance). They are opposed to coercion and tyranny. They believe in self-determination. The difference is in the solutions they've arrived at. They focus on humanity as an entity, rather than humans as individuals. This is where they take a wrong turn in their analysis of society: their solutions to coercion actually lead to coercion. We are all different, and that MUST remain at the front of our thoughts when we try to find solutions to our shared problems.
So that's the angle I take with socialists: I try to educate them about the power and importance of the individual.
(Please try to be as objective in your reaction to what I've said as I have tried to be in my analysis of socialism and especially socialists themselves. I'm sure at least one person will quickly skim my comment and their hands will start shaking and they'll rush to call me a socialist, hence the need for this last paragraph.)
----------
Liberty for Dummies
Socialists confuse motivation with capability,
as Aguilar discusses in his review of Richard Cook, www.axiomaticeconomics.com/cook.php
It is a mistake to question their sincerity, since most of them really are sincere. They're just misguided.
That's good, because the misguided can be turned with reasoned arguments. The insincere are beyond redemption.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
I admire your diplomacy.
I admire your diplomacy. But, however admirable people may perceive socialism. The idea behind it came to enslave nations. Its a direct way to redistribute wealth. But once again, I admire your diplomacy
I've read all of those,
and they are interesting. However, they are also quite long and make only a passing mention of socialism, and then only in terms of pre-WWII socialists.
Modern socialists have learned from the failings of their predecessors (specifically, they no longer use the word "socialism"), though their message is essentially the same. For instance, if you cut through the hype, there is really no difference between Richard C. Cook's National Dividend and Huey Long's Share Our Wealth program.
For a critique of some modern-day socialists, you don't have to buy a thick book. Go to www.axiomaticeconomics.com and you will find that Aguilar has a whole section on his website titled "Critiques of Socialism."
These are short (under 2500 words) essays that deal specifically with modern socialists that you can find hyping their drivel on the internet today.
Reading these essays will put you in a much stronger position than citing books written a half a century ago.
For instance, if you accuse Cook or Montagne of being socialists, they will just deny it, pointing out (accurately) that the word "socialism" does not appear on their websites. If you talk about Long's Share Our Wealth program, they'll claim (again, accurately) that it is never mentioned on their websites.
However, Aguilar has taken the time to read their websites and provides plenty of quotes that make it clear that both men are straight-out socialists.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
You obviously didnt read
You obviously didnt read Henry Hazlitt. The whole book is about disproving socialism. It is proposterous to say otherwise.
Its an easy and fast read too. And as far as "Thick Books"
Get real. Turn off the TV and pick up one of those "thick books".
Still, socialism doesnt even work on paper.
Yes, I have read Hazlitt,
and it's certainly the best one on the list for countering socialist arguments. In fact, I should have excluded it from my previous comment, which was directed more at ME&S and HA.
And I didn't say that the others were bad, just long and only incidentally related to socialism.
For instance, ME&S is almost a thousand pages and, while it is an excellent introduction to Austrian economics (I read it in high school when I was an ardent Austrian), only the last section is about socialism.
Rothbard's What Has Government Done To Our Money? and The Case Against the Fed are about monetary theory. While a central bank is a type of government intervention, it is not what is generally refered to as "socialism."
HA is even longer and heavier than ME&S (I read it twice when I was in high school) and is more on topic, but at a philosophical level that would totally go over the head of the type of people who fall for something like Montagne's Mathematically Perfected Economy. I mean, these are people who sincerely believe that his "mathematically perfected" system is going to deliver them a house for $83/month, nothing down. Talking HA to them would be like trying to teach a pig to sing.
Of Mises' writing, Socialism (which was not on the list) would be the best choice, though it is directed more towards people (like Oskar Lange) who believed in Soviet-style central planning. But there really aren't any people like Lange today - that argument has already been won.
However, for most people on the DP, I think the several short essays on Aguilar's site will serve them better when encountering a follower of some modern socialist like Cook or Montagne than wading through a thousand page book on economic theory will.
Feel free to wade through those books (or Aguilar's 270-page book, for that matter) if you want, but don't think that it's going to help you much if Montagne shows up at the DP again. He was on this forum for months and I don't recall anyone quoting HA or ME&S at him.
P.S. The papers on Aguilar's site have little cap-and-mortarboard symbols to indicate their target audience. While you may be capable of reading all of those papers, you still want to tailor your arguments to the level of the person that you are talking to. If he's a layman (as most socialists are), then just quote the one-hat papers, even if you've read the three-hat papers.
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Alright I'll retract my
Alright I'll retract my statement. But, although those books were written many years ago, they still apply today. Although I would agree that those books (Hazlitt exluded) wont give you words to plagerize against socialism. They do give you the ammo to figure out on your own why a free market works and in turn you can then figure out on your own why socialism doesnt. I didnt post that reading list to just disprove socialism. I put it up so that people know where to look for good reading on sound economics. But I do agree that it is extremely heavy reading.
I will check out the papers you speak of, though.
The Stockholm Syndrome
We have been held hostage and conditioned for generations now and it just seems inevitable that many of the victims would embrace the rhetoric of our captors.
Socialism and Christianity both depend on faith for support and faith can be readily manufactured just by wishful thinking. Reality and the free market, however, are driven by ugly evidence and inconvenient facts.
Who wants to dirty his hands with bricks and mortar when there's a dream castle freshly built, just for you, right around the corner, and all you need to move in is to help us identify a few troublemakers for the gulag and give up just a little more of your paycheck? Any day now folks, just help us eradicate the Jews and the queers and the potheads and the polyamorists. Paradise beckons and it's only a purge away.
"Roll up roll up for the magical mystery tour!"
Professor Bernardo de la Paz
Phantasmophage
LXXI BC: Ego sum Spartacus // MDCCCLVII: I am Dred Scott // MCMVL: Ich bin Anne Frank // MMX: Je suis Assange // MMXI: Ik ben von NotHaus
One thing that Birch doesn't consider is
that you may not be the first person to have approached the individual in question. When he hears the keywords that Birch mentions, he's not so much attaching false concepts to them, but attaching a face to them - the face of the last person he heard use those words in conversation.
There is little that you can do about this. If the last person who spoke to him was an asshole (and there are a few in every social movement), then you're going to have a difficult time getting though to him, no matter what you say.
One thing that you can do is to police your own ranks and have a talking to, or an ejection of, the ones who, through misguided enthusiasm, are doing more harm than good.
For example, few of the people at the Austrian Forum (http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/1430/19394.aspx) are doing the cause of libertarianism any good. Acting like cultists just scares people off - including the ones who might have been persuaded by a reasoned argument, had one been presented.
If we want to reach the average Joe, the person who is leaning towards socialism but is still capable of accepting reasoned arguments for free enterprise, then we need to disassociate libertarianism from the Mises Institute.
While the founders of the Austrian movement had important things to say, modern Austrians, especially those associated with the Mises Institute, are mostly just frothing-at-the-mouth cultists.
Libertarianism is not joined at the hip with Austrian Economics; it is perfectly compatible with Axiomatic Economics, and perhaps even with other, yet to be invented, theoretical systems.
There can be more than one axiomatic economic system in the same way that there can be (and are) more than one axiomatic geometric system. Euclideans initially got cultish when confronted with hyperbolic geometry, but they got over that. Today, non-Euclidean geometry is taught alongside Euclidean geometry in every math department.
We need to realize that criticism of Austrian ideas is not necessarily socialistic. The critic may simply (and idealistically) just want to improve economic theory. There's nothing wrong with that. When you actually do run into a socialistic (or Keynesian) economist, don't you want to have the strongest theory possible?
____________________________________
Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com
Socialism is the perfect
Socialism is the perfect system, if it worked correctly. No society has been able to pull of socialism. It doesnt work on the large scale.
How are the helpless going to help themselves? Answer me that.