Socialism is generally defined as holding in common the means of production and labor in an economy.
State socialism is when the government owns those means. This economic construct is laden with inefficiencies and lack of freedom and potential for oppression and force. Besides, it doesn’t work.
There is, however, a worse economic construct than socialism, and that is corporatism. Corporatism is the situation in which taxpayers support, via subsidy, private corporations and entities.
Originally posted by me at Cause of Liberty blog.
For millenia, logic (the ability to make step-by-step arguments and arrive at the same conclusion as another) was assumed to be a sound avenue for arriving at truth (an epistemology).
However, during the 19th and 20th centuries, this assumption fell into disfavor as society slowly replaced the pan-human capacity for reason with “group-think” ideologies that assume that different races and different socio-economic classes somehow have different “logics” (polylogism: multiple systems of logic).
I’ve been thinking recently about why we have such intense divisions within humanity. I think I have part of the answer and it comes down to the way conservatives and non-conservatives (liberals, libertarians, anarchists) see themselves and others.
Conservatives in the U.S. like to put forth the idea that those who founded the USA did so on conservative principles. Of the fundamental tenants (not dogmas or doctrines, according to Kirk) mentioned in the previous post, which are in agreement with the principles of the American Founding? A Whig in the British Parliament, Edmund Burke joined the Radical Whigs (there’s that darned r-word again) in support of the American colonists’ rights to self-government and to fight against an over-reaching monarch. And although most of his conservative writings were in response to the bloody French Revolution and the “radical” ideas of “liberty, fraternity, and equality”, conservatives promote Burke’s opinions on the American revolution and the fundamental principles of the American Founding as being, well, conservative. Let’s see how conservative those ideals were.
In an effort to understand conservatism, I started reading Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Kirk, via his influential book, is considered the Father of the conservative resurgence that occurred in America and Britain starting in the late 1960’s and reaching its pinnacle in the 1980’s with the Reagan administration in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. I was raised conservative and first became aware of politics when conservatism was at its apex, but my experiences in the world and a more nuanced study of recent (and ancient) history forced me to question some of my conservative heritage. After reading the introduction and first chapter, it is official…I have been declared a radical by the self-stated non-dogmatic conservatives.
Well, it now seems that we are down to two main presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. Interestingly, both represent the more liberal portion of their respective parties’ ideologies. The question is, who should you vote for and why?
I haven’t written much recently because of a heavy reading load. However, I hope to write a lot this summer. Much of my writing will contain themes from Mahatma K. Gandhi, Leo Tolstoi, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The relations will become apparent as the writing progresses. Hopefully there will be a depth and power in their words that will carry my weak words to my intended point. Read the rest of this entry »
This post was initially a letter to my brother about this book.
The book, The Unsettling of America, is one man’s take on the road that agriculture has taken in the United States and the governmental policies that have led us down that road and the cultural effect it has had and is having on the citizens of the United States. Here is the email:
I was just reviewing the end chapters of Democracy in America and was reminded of the following from Tocqueville:
[Warning: it might hit a nerve]
I don’t know if this movie, Amazing Grace, just hasn’t received much press (or maybe I just don’t watch enough TV) but I hadn’t heard anything about it until my wife ordered it from Netflix. However, this is a movie I would recommend to everyone.