#capitlaism

[commieclimbercatgirl]

When people say "pure capitalism and pure communism are both bad, we need something in the middle", why is their "something in the middle" always capitalism with some progressive tax system and some social programs, rather than communism with a bit of inheritance (or whatever they think is so great about capitalism).

These people pretend to be some enlightened centrist can never seem to envision a world where the capitalist class doesn't rule over the working class.

[politicalsci]

[antilagardelle]

Absolute empathy is barbarism, absolute tolerance is intolerant, absolute inclusivity is exclusive. Nonconformity is a convention, and post-modernism is a doctrine; Absolute liberalism is misoneism, and absolute conservatism is liberal. Freedom is found in captivity, order in chaos, and fixity in fluidity. 

[phroyd]

The Next Reckoning: Capitalism and Climate Change

Fixing the planet is going to be expensive. Can we stomach the bill for human survival?

The world’s most difficult problem has a solution so simple that it can be expressed in four words: Stop burning greenhouse gases. How exactly to pull this off is somewhat more complicated — just not as complicated as most Americans have been led to believe. As James Hansen, the don of modern climate science, told me last year, “From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees Celsius.” Readily possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report from last October, which provoked widespread terror, echoed this conclusion. Keeping warming to 1.5 degrees above historical averages was possible, it found, provided we immediately began to eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions. This was terrifying only because we have not begun to do any such thing.

Most zero-emissions plans — “road maps,” in bureaucratese, or “pathways,” per the I.P.C.C. — propose some combination of the following elements: carbon taxes, effectual international treaties, increased subsidization of renewable energy, decreased subsidization of fossil fuels, nuclear energy, reforestation, land-use reform and investments in energy efficiency, energy storage and carbon-capture technology. But when it comes to drafting actual laws to achieve these policies, to quote the Heritage Foundation fellow Nick Loris, “the devil’s in the details.”

[See what survival looks like in Bangladesh after the oceans rise.]

The Heritage Foundation ought to know; for decades, it has demonstrated mastery of the dark arts of climate-change denialism. This strain of influence peddling would be harmful enough had it managed merely to deepen the public ignorance about global warming. But denialism has had devastating downstream effects (to borrow an industry term). It has managed to defer meaningful consideration of nearly every urgent policy question that now awaits us, if we are serious about trying to stop this.

The most fundamental question is whether a capitalistic society is capable of sharply reducing carbon emissions. Will a radical realignment of our economy require a radical realignment of our political system — within the next few years? Even if the answer is no, we have some decisions to make. How, for instance, should the proceeds of a carbon tax be directed? Should they be used to finance clean-energy projects, be paid out directly to taxpayers or accrue to the national budget? In a healthy democracy, you could expect a rigorous public debate on this question. But such a debate has rarely surfaced in the United States because, as of this writing, only a handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives, out of a caucus of 197, have endorsed the basic concept of a carbon tax — an idea that has its roots in conservative economic thought.

And what should be done, if anything, about the people who lose their jobs once coal plants, whether because of market pressures or federal mandate, are forced to close? Should unemployed coal miners be retrained as wind farmers, receive unemployment checks or be abandoned to their plight? You could imagine a robust political debate about this issue as well — perhaps with the right in favor of letting miners fend for themselves and the left supporting a federal welfare program — were such questions allowed to be debated.

What should be done for the far greater number of people in poor and neglected communities, both in the United States and abroad, that stand to suffer most grievously from a hotter climate in the years ahead? What penalties should Exxon and the other major oil and gas companies suffer for their sins? What branch of government should impose those penalties, and should criminal liability be extended to individual lobbyists and chief executives? Should old, declining nuclear plants be preserved, and should new, smaller plants be commissioned, and who ought to make such decisions? How much federal funding should be invested in researching speculative geoengineering or carbon-capture technologies? Should insurance rates in coastal regions be increased abruptly to reflect the actual threat of sea-level rise, or phased in gradually? What sanctions should be imposed on foreign nations that fail to comply with the terms of global climate treaties? On these and many other such questions, reasonable minds might disagree. But beyond the reaches of the scholarly and activist literature, reasonable minds have not been given the opportunity.

It has become commonplace to observe that corporations behave like psychopaths. They are self-interested to the point of violence, possess a vibrant disregard for laws and social mores, have an indifference to the rights of others and fail to feel remorse. A psychopath gains a person’s trust, mimics emotions but feels nothing and passes in public for human (with a charming Twitter feed, say). The psychopath is calm, calculated, scrupulous — never more so than while plotting murder. There can be no reasoning with a psychopath; neither rational argument nor blandishment has a remote chance of success. If this indeed is the pathology that we are dealing with when it comes to the climate impasse, then we should be honest about the appropriate course of treatment. Coercion must be the remedy — exerted economically, politically and morally, preferably all at once. The psychopath respects only force.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the new book “Losing Earth: A Recent History,” based on an article that appeared in this magazine.

Phroyd

[jesseturri]

Tyranny and Centralized vs. Decentralized Power

“It was Montesquieu’s analysis that occasioned the great debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists in the United States in 1787 and 1788. As everyone understood at the time, the fledgling polity was far too large to qualify as a small republic. Federalism was the remedy suggested by Montesquieu. A loose confederation of republics could command sufficient resources to provide for the common defense while its member republics remained small enough to maintain free institutions. Unfortunately, however, most of the states composing the nascent American union were themselves too large to be considered small republics; and, under the constitution proposed by the Federal Convention, the national government had much greater scope than the confederations Montesquieu had in mind.”

The excerpt above is from an article I recently read in The American Interest called “The New Face of Tyranny,” which gives an interesting historical account of the rise of American federalism and extols the dangers of centralized power. Apparently, according the this article, where historical tyrannical government regimes have failed in the past, contemporary despotic centralized governmental powers may finally undermine liberal democracy and prevail due to our ever advanced technology. The author, conservative leaning professor Paul A. Rahe, quotes Montesquie quite a bit with regard to how scary large centralized governments can be:

“In a large republic, Montesquieu observed, “interests become particular; a man senses then that he can be happy, great, glorious without his fatherland; & soon that he can be great solely on the ruins of his fatherland.” One consequence of such a republic’s size is that “the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to the exceptions; it depends on accidents.” The situation “in a small” republic is more favorable: There, “the public good is more fully felt, better known, closer to each citizen; the abuses are less extensive there & as a consequence less well protected.””

While I waver back and forth between a unitary abolish-the-States type position and some sort of democratic confederalist position, I do think more and more that Murray Bookchin and the social ecologists ultimately have it right. Bookchin observes: “Both Marxism and anarchism have always agreed that a liberated, communist society entails sweeping decentralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the abolition of the state, and the breakup of the large cities.” The problem, of course, is that things take a while to catch up with theory that’s well ahead of its time. Marx’s observation, though, that we need to move through various stages to get to the point where we can have complete decentralization (i.e. communism) seems accurate to me… which is why I sometimes think, for the immediate future anyway, that a benevolent unitary system might be a step in the right direction; i.e. I do think (perhaps naively) that a centralized governmental power can be viewed optimistically as a responsible and just provider of social goods, providing positive liberty or “freedom to.” And if by abolishing the states losing our “laboratories of democracy” becomes a concern there really is, as Adam Kotsko has pointed out, “nothing to stop federal agencies from carrying…out [small-scale policy experiments] in whatever administrative units prove convenient — nor indeed from doing so based on recommendations from local activists.”

That said, once again, I do also agree with Bookchin that a positive step toward decentralization would mean a greater focus on and participation at municipal levels. Bookchin again:

“The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—the city, town, and village—where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy.”

So yeah, I still have a healthy anarchistic skepticism when it comes to centralized power… Like I said, I waver back and forth. Either way, regardless, greater citizen participation at local levels of government seems unavoidable and fundamentally critical.

Anyway, my biggest quibble with the Rahe’s article is that the critique only focuses on the political side of things (not surprising for a slightly right leaning political magazine). Rahe writes:

“It foreshadowed Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings concerning the dangers of administrative centralization; and it pertains to virtually every republic on the globe. All of them are based on the English or the American model, and, by now, in all of them, thanks to ambition and emergencies, the administrative state and the executive power loom large. Beneath the benign surface of every republic in the world, there lurks the edifice of a despotism more fully tyrannical than any government in earlier times.”

Not an unfounded fear, one must admit. Perhaps a more comprehensive view, though, would be to apply Tocqueville’s warning about the dangers of administrative centralization and executive power not only to the imperium but to the oeconomia as well (which is why I use the term political-economy when talking about such things because in my mind the two are inseparable); I mean, why not? After all, tyranny isn’t only found in empires associated with the State, it’s found in private corporate empires as well. So while I do understand and sympathize with Rahe’s fears of governments using privately developed profit-making technology to spy on and oppress citizens (Rahe uses CCTV cameras and facial recognition software as examples) it makes zero sense to decentralize governments but continue to allow corporations to retain their global reach, power, and tyrannical administrative centralization.

…

Painting above by Rico White

Tyranny and Centralized vs. Decentralized Power was originally published on TURRI

[christiannightmares]

I’m only speaking in the voice of the man in this Wonder Bible commercial from now on (Found here; For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/102231335346/a-creepy-1970s-commercial-for-an-album-that-brings)

[warsofasoiaf]

If you think is best let's compare capitalism vs socialism, both economic systems.

Well, economic systems require legal and political systems to be implemented, even the ancap and ancom models put specifics in for those types of systems and the lack thereof. Isolating these concepts in practice is very difficult, so much of life under these two models requires the interplay of all of the systems working together, rendering this an argument of theory.

Arguments of theory don’t sit well with me because something can be theoretically possible but impossible in practice, and in my view, the practice matters much more. The practice is what people actually experience, the theoretical only exists on paper and in the mind. That’s why I tend to argue examples rather than theory, because any argument can be made with the caveat “according to the theory.” Similarly any argument can be dismissed with “but that wouldn’t happen according to the theory,” regardless of the actual effects in practice. That dismisses the primary means of refuting a theory: empirical observation, experimentation, and analysis of evidence, rendering any discussion unproductive.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[thebooshislooseandalittlebitraw]

Cw food, poverty, homelessness Heya, so I currently run a blog about the history and anthropology of food. A few years back me and some conrads founded Exeter Food Fight which is a free food street cafe that currently feeds 100 people a week. This article hopefully details how to start something similar and a little bit about what we do. Please read and share this!