Government goes too far

[HealthyDebate]

Government goes too far

https://www.unionleader.com/opinion/colu...96a90.html

[pbrower2a]

Government going the wrong way ensures that any tendency to any extent does harm, let alone offense.

[HealthyDebate]

The 1% give campaign donations and cushy job promises to politicians. When the globalists commit fraud and destroy the economy, the elites get huge bailouts and pay small fines to the government.

https://www.godlikeproductions.com

[Eric the Green]

Government doesn't go far enough

[TML]

Americans used to ridicule the Chinese for being too weak to resist tyranny, but now Americans have found out that they are cowards, too.

[Einzige]

The modern State is just an extrapolation from capitalist class society. You would have to overturn capitalism and its law of competition to overturn the existence of the State which mediates and regulates that competition.

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-16-2021, 05:41 AM)Einzige Wrote: The modern State is just an extrapolation from capitalist class society. You would have to overturn capitalism and its law of competition to overturn the existence of the State which mediates and regulates that competition.

Thing is, maintaining racism as a goal by the deplorables became more a goal than approximating equality in control of the means of production.  With the racists and the elites working together, we got a mess during the conservative era, the recent unraveling.  You seem to be working with a theory in which capitalism was the major problem, to the exclusion of all others.  With race being the more dominant problem these days, your system of analysis which does not include racism is totally inadequate.

S&H projected that the major problem confronting the crisis would be confronted.  The problem you are driven to solve just is not drawing the attention of the culture.  Sorry, the problem of division of wealth seems to be waiting its turn.  Even then, you are making the Industrial Age mistake of assuming violence is required to significantly change the culture.  Not so anymore.  It seem’s likely enough that when the problem is finally addressed, it will be resolved by means not anticipated.

[pbrower2a]

(03-15-2021, 08:12 PM)TML Wrote: Americans used to ridicule the Chinese for being too weak to resist tyranny, but now Americans have found out that they are cowards, too.

Black Lives Matter would seem to negate your assumption that a vast majority of Americans are cowards. 

It is Big Business, which depends upon a rat race or brutal management to enforce its ways, that makes Big Government a necessity, whether to mitigate the effects of monopolization and and the ability to make everyone economically expendable or to clamp down on dissent. Small government has become a utopian ideal and more nostalgia than a practical objective. 

As for the Chinese... they are at the stage of economic development at which democracy typically works well. Consider Japan in the 1950's. The problem is the Chinese Communist Party which liberalized the economy but not the political system. 

Yes, America has its cowards, especially its bigots and its romantic reactionaries. The Michigan plot and the January Putsch show that there are people who do not merit general trust in their observance of the basic decencies that make America a democracy. One of those basic decencies is the acceptance of political defeat, and one of those people is Donald Trump. I could also name some elected officials, too. 

Democracy does not mean that one gets what one gets; it decides for the time who gets what they want. Does it always work well? No -- but the benevolent dictator who really does good for the People and the Philosopher King are far rarer than their desirability might suggest. Heck, I would like to be rich, but our economic system has seemed to act as if poverty were a necessary norm for keeping people under control on behalf of rapacious and irresponsible elites who think that everyone else is responsible to them before themselves and their families.

Absurdity leads to failure, as people with a certain level of learning (they took high-school geometry, which teaches this as a means of proving truth indirectly, and such is the divide between those who can succeed in college and those who cannot) well know and cannot avoid.  That may even be the divide between those who believe Donald Trump and those who reject him -- even more than the usual divide between conservatives and liberals.

[Einzige]

(04-16-2021, 05:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-16-2021, 05:41 AM)Einzige Wrote: The modern State is just an extrapolation from capitalist class society. You would have to overturn capitalism and its law of competition to overturn the existence of the State which mediates and regulates that competition.

Thing is, maintaining racism as a goal by the deplorables became more a goal than approximating equality in control of the means of production.  With the racists and the elites working together, we got a mess during the conservative era, the recent unraveling.  You seem to be working with a theory in which capitalism was the major problem, to the exclusion of all others.  With race being the more dominant problem these days, your system of analysis which does not include racism is totally inadequate.

S&H projected that the major problem confronting the crisis would be confronted.  The problem you are driven to solve just is not drawing the attention of the culture.  Sorry, the problem of division of wealth seems to be waiting its turn.  Even then, you are making the Industrial Age mistake of assuming violence is required to significantly change the culture.  Not so anymore.  It seem’s likely enough that when the problem is finally addressed, it will be resolved by means not anticipated.

This is the rhetorical position of the Left-Wing Of Capital, e.g. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/BreeNewsome/s...7026406400

And this is the proper response to it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/bordigasm/sta...2204464128

Racism is useful for Capital (which again is not a mere division of wealth but a total social relationship) because it can never be solved in a satisfactory way. Capital can be abolished, but if we make racism the enemy, and tell each other only to focus on that, we need not worry about Capital. (Is racism a problem? Of course. Can it be dealt with to some conclusion without first dismantling capitalism? No.)

You in the petit-bourgeois and/or labor aristocracy think this is clever. A Trump voting hardware store owner isn't the enemy, but ExxonMobil, whose class interests he serves, is. Similarly, you aren't the enemy, but Google and Microsoft, whose class interests you serve, ade.

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-16-2021, 06:07 AM)Einzige Wrote: This is the rhetorical position of the Left-Wing Of Capital, e.g. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/BreeNewsome/s...7026406400

And this is the proper response to it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/bordigasm/sta...2204464128

Racism is useful for Capital (which again is not a mere division of wealth but a total social relationship) because it can never be solved in a satisfactory way. Capital can be abolished, but if we make racism the enemy, and tell each other only to focus on that, we need not worry about Capital. (Is racism a problem? Of course. Can it be dealt with to some conclusion without first dismantling capitalism? No.)

You in the petit-bourgeois and/or labor aristocracy think this is clever. A Trump voting hardware store owner isn't the enemy, but ExxonMobil, whose class interests he serves, is. Similarly, you aren't the enemy, but Google and Microsoft, whose class interests you serve, ade.

A wiser answer than you usually provide, but the problem addressed first would be the one that greatest concerns the people, and the method used to attack it is not your preferred approach.  We will see if the laws regarding voter rights and police immunities change.  After that, likely next awakening, it will be hard to ignore the division of wealth.  We will see what methods the people will choose to apply.

[Einzige]

Lol, this is, of course, not true, and even conservative New Dealer progressives like yourself recognize this (e.g. universal health care polls much higher than Black Lives Matter as an issue for public support, yet BLM is being acted on and UHC is not).

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-16-2021, 11:08 AM)Einzige Wrote: Lol, this is, of course, not true, and even conservative New Dealer progressives like yourself recognize this (e.g. universal health care polls much higher than Black Lives Matter as an issue for public support, yet BLM is being acted on and UHC is not).

The way things are drifting, the filibuster will have to be killed to meaningfully kill the crisis issues.  After it is gone, we will see what happens to health care.  It does not seem to be a Biden's first 100 days issue, but it is on his queue in the first two years.

The number of protestors for BLM is larger than the health care protestors.  Mistakenly or not, racism is the hotter issue.

[ponystage]

Americans say that no one bought or sold anything when Somalia was anarchist.

[pbrower2a]

(04-16-2021, 06:07 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(04-16-2021, 05:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-16-2021, 05:41 AM)Einzige Wrote: The modern State is just an extrapolation from capitalist class society. You would have to overturn capitalism and its law of competition to overturn the existence of the State which mediates and regulates that competition.

Thing is, maintaining racism as a goal by the deplorables became more a goal than approximating equality in control of the means of production.  With the racists and the elites working together, we got a mess during the conservative era, the recent unraveling.  You seem to be working with a theory in which capitalism was the major problem, to the exclusion of all others.  With race being the more dominant problem these days, your system of analysis which does not include racism is totally inadequate.

S&H projected that the major problem confronting the crisis would be confronted.  The problem you are driven to solve just is not drawing the attention of the culture.  Sorry, the problem of division of wealth seems to be waiting its turn.  Even then, you are making the Industrial Age mistake of assuming violence is required to significantly change the culture.  Not so anymore.  It seems likely enough that when the problem is finally addressed, it will be resolved by means not anticipated.

This is the rhetorical position of the Left-Wing Of Capital, e.g. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/BreeNewsome/s...7026406400

And this is the proper response to it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/bordigasm/sta...2204464128

Racism is useful for Capital (which again is not a mere division of wealth but a total social relationship) because it can never be solved in a satisfactory way. Capital can be abolished, but if we make racism the enemy, and tell each other only to focus on that, we need not worry about Capital. (Is racism a problem? Of course. Can it be dealt with to some conclusion without first dismantling capitalism? No.)

Racism is a divide et impera trick of capitalists who seek to create wedges in the formation and survival of labor unions.  Also working to the same effect is religious bigotry. Labor unions asked for and got prohibitions against discriminatory behavior by themselves. Note well that organized labor was firmly behind the struggle for civil rights for Southern blacks.

Should capital be separated from race, then there is no connection between capitalism and racism. I look at the reconstruction era; freedmen were forming businesses of all kinds in the aftermath of the Civil War. Many failed because they were undercapitalized... but on the whole these efforts were too successful for the interests of the land-owning, agrarian elite which had little use for commerce and banking, especially if by negroes (the polite word of the time). The agrarian elites still needed super-cheap labor to turn a profit. Although forty acres and a mule is fully inadequate for making a living as a farmer, it was adequate in most of the South, where a farmer could grow two crops a year. The planters did not want potential field labor having that as an alternative.

So imagine that blacks are successful in forming and preserving businesses throughout the South. Racism in the form of Jim Crow becomes impossible. Jim Crow existed to maintain a pre-capitalist economic order: the feudal order that transformed from a slave system to one of sharecropping. 

The American South wallowed for about a century after the Civil War in the agrarian age, and its politics and social conditions so showed.  

Quote:You in the petit-bourgeois and/or labor aristocracy think this is clever. A Trump voting hardware store owner isn't the enemy, but ExxonMobil, whose class interests he serves, is. Similarly, you aren't the enemy, but Google and Microsoft, whose class interests you serve, ade.

A Trump-voting hardware-store owner is effectively aligning himself politically with entities such as Home Depot that would like to squeeze him out of business if he votes for Donald Trump. Small business has been far more conservative in economic and political values than people of similar levels of economic success because it has little to gain from the welfare state. A welfare state means higher taxes to support everything from educational improvement (the hardware store owner often fares well with limited formal education as might not be so even for a clerical worker.  Better roads? All the better to give one's customers easier access to a Big Business competitor as a customer or employee. Better parks? Nice  except for the higher taxes that are a real cost. 

Small business is typically in a precarious position, and Marxist literature is fully inadequate to explain this. The real enemy of the working class is the monopolistic and cartelized entities with their giant bureaucracies, those bureaucracies full of people who rarely could hold a skilled trade because they might get their delicate hands dirty or own and operate a small business because they lack the self-discipline to defer gratification. (If you wonder why giant corporations have those huge bureaucracies, it is to keep smart people from turning against the plutocratic order. In a modern economy there might not be enough jobs for intellectual poseurs excessively educated to be working people but falling well short of the standards of formal education suitable for the professions.  

Bureaucracies, unless operating on a cost-plus basis (insurance companies and banks do that), do not create profits for their employers. But they can ensure that people of moderate talent read best-seller schlock instead of Karl Marx. They get the consumer goodies and have much to lose in the event of a proletarian revolution. White-collar workers were a cornerstone of fascist causes