10-25-2019, 10:47 AM
(03-23-2019, 11:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: ... Most libertarians cannot see that big business is a problem if left to itself. It and not the state puts competitors out of business, as the most greedy boss corners the market. The state alone can protect competition, and end collusion, with anti-trust laws. Libertarians are against the taxes and regulations that keep business from doing wrong, which they do if left to their "free" own devices. Money-grubbing bosses should not be trusted, but libertarians trust them. They can only see the government as a problem; not business.
At a certain point of corporate dominance, enterprises are free and people are in chains. The freedom to monopolize or to transform people into serfs is the foundation of tyranny through the economic order. One serves the elite without any show of disobedience or one starves. Starvation can be as lethal as a hanging - except that it is slower and more painful and degrading.
Quote:As I explained, the free market fundamentalists, which rule the Republican Party today, and have ever since Reagan at least, are very close to fascism, because they enable the corporate elite to rule without any oversight or regulation from the people through their government. Government by the people protects liberty. Government is not necessarily a problem, as the Reaganoids have falsely claimed and still claim. Free markets are not freedom; left to themselves, they are just bosses and tyrants, and they squelch competition and rip off consumers, workers, the environment and the economy with their financial games. Free enterprise without regulation is an oxymoron; it doesn't exist, despite libertarian slogans and ideals. That doesn't mean that a state-owned and run economy is any better. But the fascists like Hitler and Mussolini allowed big business to stay in business and flourish, and that boosted their war machine, as it still boosts ours in the USA. There's where state and business come together; the fascist corporate state which libertarians want. And the fascists permitted lots of gun ownership by citizens too, contrary to the nonsense perpetrated by the gun fanatics today who say they took guns away from people.
Monopolization and vertical integration both cause the disappearance of competition among elites, but those elites find competition among the proles for survival an end in itself -- a grim contest to determine who will suffer the most for the least. For all but the elites that might as well be a jungle in which all others are enemies seeking the same small share of the means of survival.
But at least the jungle has its virtues. Death by tiger is a horrible end, but at least the tiger is most likely to kill the sick, lame, inattentive, or reckless prey. Tigers do not enforce a hierarchy of servile deer. Human hierarchies of all kinds demand complete deference and servility, and those hierarchies enforce control with tortures more horrible than swift death.
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Quote:But this is the chief argument in politics today. The Reaganoids and the Trumpists continue to put forward the false meme that liberty means free enterprise and guns, and that businessmen are job creators. They are not; they are job destroyers. But lots of people who like Reagan, Bush and our fake president of today are only interested in dismantling the administrative state, so that they can continue to allow mass shootings and the pollution of our world in the name of freedom. No, neo-liberalism is false freedom. Today the authority and the elite are the wealthy oligarchs in corporate board rooms and at the Republican red-stater conventions who listen to Steve Bannon and racists like Yaronopolis or whatever the fuck his name is. Today the Republican neo-liberals have bowed down before and aligned themselves with the fascist slogans of racism emanating from the Trumpists and their fanatical, violent followers shouting Nazi slogans. Just like industrial Germany acquiesed in Hitler's regime because of all the money they made manufacturing the tools of conquest.
They believe in free enterprise -- enterprise free to exploit and humiliate people at will. Businesses are not so much job-creators as they are job-danglers; at their worst they want unemployed people competing for jobs that people already have. With guns -- the Hard Right acts as if people who are victims of or are loved ones of those who die due to gun violence need to recognize the need of such sacrifices to the real god of profits-first, people-far-down-the-line America: Almighty Mammon.
Donald Trump, let us hope, is as far as it goes -- and that he will fail. We need competition among our elites if we are to have freedom. As a People, we will need to re-establish the rationality and human decency that underpin a free society capable of bringing prosperity to us all.
Quote:... Democratic socialism which still allows a balance of free enterprise and state regulation and ownership is not anywhere near the bottom of the political circle, or anywhere near communism or fascism.
We may never attain one socialist idea of a state-run economy responsible to the People, but we can disabuse ourselves of the idea that crony capitalism achieves anything other than the gain and indulgence of economic elites. Maybe we will fair best -- and the possibility of achievement is essential -- a social-market economy in which capitalism can innovate in ways that improve the lives of most of us. The public-public partnership in which the government takes the risks and the monopolistic profiteers extract the profit as gravy is a bad idea.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.