Two Reductionist Arguments: On Conservatism. On Classical Economics.
by Bruce Webb
On Conservatism.
Modern Conservatism = Protection of Property Rights.
The historical process in Northern Europe and Britain from the mid 17th through the 19th century was marked by a sometimes gradual, sometimes violent collapse in belief in the Divine Right of Kings, and for that matter Popes. Conservatism replaced its traditional appeal to Authority with a claim to absolute right to Property. Discuss.
On Classical Economics.
Economics (which as a discipline developed in parallel in time and place with Modern Conservatism) foundationally assumes that Homo Oeconomicus is psychologically motivated by Accumulation and not Consumption/Display. Discuss.
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I maintain that a lot of what is baffling in Conservatism to those of us whose thinking derives from Liberal Enlightenment’s elevation of The People to primacy, can be explained by a combination of these two arguments. How do you logically combine Liberty and Patriarchy? Why is debt as a result of war acceptable, while debt as a result of social spending not? Why assume that tax cuts will in all cases increase reinvestment? These questions which seem to come from all over the field all can be answered and made inter-consistent by appeal to the two stated arguments.
The results are almost by definition unacceptable to the liberal imagination, and those of a moral bent might use harsher terms than ‘unacceptable’, but that doesn’t mean they are irrational.
I’ll advance some specific arguments and conclusions in comments. For now consider this an open thread on the historical and psychological foundations of conservatism, or if you like of liberalism.
The relation between preservation of Property and Accumulation is obvious. Only by the latter can you protect the former even in part from the fundamental enemy of both: Taxation.
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In Northern Europe at least the fundamental unit of Property was the household which combines the family (Lat. familia, which extended beyond the parent/children to include servants and others) and the homestead, which in turn includes the house and the yard. (‘husband’ includes the element ‘hus’ or house, yard and for that matter garden is ultimately derived from ‘guard’). The Head of Household, normally if not always the Father, the ‘Pater’, had ultimate control of that within the confines of his fences and walls, and equally the responsibility to defend them. This very much included such things as matters of faith and morality, particularly sexual morality. All of that falls into the realm of Family.
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Liberals have a difficult time understanding why working class social conservatives will work against their own economic interests in allying with capitalist economic conservatives. I argue this is because the Conservative does not see any hard line separating Property and Family, each if you will mirrors the other, a threat to one is a threat to both.
Well, Bruce
it doesn’t seem like much of a mystery to me. though maybe i am failing to make some fine distinctions.
conservatism is, almost by definition, a predispostition to preserve the status quo, while it’s opposite (called liberalism today in this country, but not the same as what liberal means in other times other places), is then by definitiion an “urge” to change things. It is hardly unreasonable that those as “have got” under the present regime are cautious about changing it, while those as “has not” will be anxious to give changes a try.
This applies to family mores as well as to economic and political arrangements. The interesting thing is that modern Republicans have discovered how to make allies out of people afraid of changes in family mores and get them to vote for policies that favor the haves agaist the family conservative have nots.
They are helped in this by the perverse fact that the success of “liberal” economic policies has given the have nots enough “have” that they become afraid of losing it. And most people, have as well as have not, are totally incapable of seeing that taxes actually make them richer.
I suspect the haves are not as blind to this as the “almost have nots”, but the haves find the demogoguery about taxes and gummint very useful in getting the votes they need to get the power which they want… to use taxes even more to their own short term interest.
Of course there is a limit to the extent that taxes make even the poor richer, but again you are asking too much of human nature to expect them to understand that degree of subtlety.
Finally, I think that “liberals” make a huge mistake to think of themselves as the “moral” side. Yes, saving people from the worst effects of poverty is moral. But as anyone of the “family conservatives” or even the fiscal conservatives could tell you, there is a hell of a lot more to morality than giving the rich persons money to poor people.
just to confuse things
it should be noted that “conservatives” today are not interested in preserving the status quo, they are interested in overturning it to “return” to some ancien regime where they think they will be among the “haves” and have more.
I don’t think that explains small town and rural conservatism well.
This is reductionism in search of totalization.
“Finally, I think that “liberals” make a huge mistake to think of themselves as the “moral” side.”
It is very hard to reconcile the privileging of Property to People with the Sermon on the Mount. I suggest that small c conservatives reconcile it be equating ‘Property’ to ‘Family’ and argue that your responsibilities to humanity radiate from the family on out. This is in rather radical contrast to liberal ideas of universal humanity.
I did not suggest that liberalism was inherently ‘moral’. only that from a liberal stance conservatism often seems not immoral necessarily but amoral. When instead it is just drawing from a different moral well.
Bruce,
My theory: Conquer. War is the natural condition in the Anglo Norman accumulative process. Gotta have the locals under control! It was easy in Europe, the locals did not care too much who was exploiting them, their own tribes, Brythion, Roman, Celt, Saxon, Frank or Norman. They were tied to the land and as long as their rents were tolerable did not care who collected them.
Started out in 400 as the Romans faded in Latinized Britain the Saxons were first invited in and later came to colonize the Brythionic lands first to protect them from more aggressive Picts and Irish, then to subject them to new rules and methods of organizing.
Some think the Arthur legend arose from local romanticism over a Brythionic hero who pushed the Saxon back for a period.
Somewhere along the line the Saxons and Angles adopted the Roman church along with the Irish.
Then the idea of the vik came about in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, that is merchantile conquest, if you could trade you traded if you could do better pirating you stole and if you saw some place to conquer you conquered. The main land Saxons decided to go east and or stop the second wave of Hunnic tribes, leaving the seafaring conquests to the northern Germanic tribes.
The Danes took eastern mid land and made York a center of trade, and conquest. They displaced the saxon “ownship society” and created a near feudal society in the Thane Geld.
Alfred the Great and his heirs kept the Danes at bay for few generations. Largely with war and a system of Burghs which were fortified towns which could withstand incursions from the more profit oriented Danes.
Then in 1066 the great vik of William occurred and after Harold defeated a Danish invasion he lost to a new group of french speaking vikings.
The cultural history of Norman England is filled with war, conquest, and civil war. The last battle was 1798 in Eire, not too long after Culloden in Scotland in 1744.
War is in the genes.
Look at the words in the second verse of the Star Spangled Banner: lots of conquering.
The key to Anglo Norman war making was it was a profitable Vik activity.
The colonial period was somewhat profitable until the French and Indian War where the British got a large piece of land and not much to show for it, the war was a net loss, which would have been okay with Henry V but not with the rest of Europe contending for profits.
So, the problems with the colonies were to be profitable to King George, which meant no expansion to just get subsistence land and more taxes to make the colonies a paying proposition. King George was with the 13 colonies like the US is with Afghanistan. No money from the venture and no chance of winning the hearts and minds.
This is not to say that the vik spirit was dead in the colonists, they were Anglo Norman, just they were not going to be the mark for others’ viks any longer.
The US immediately began viking against the native Americans, the French and the Spanish. Certainly and luckily we lost early in Canada which was always a target even though it was not a paying place until about 75 years ago.
There is the expansion and the wars against the aboriginals.
All is militaristic. And nothing enlightened, the US wanted to look like Europe and keep its own sphere in the Monroe Doctrine, too bad there was little more money in the southern continent than in the northern, at least right away. The industrial revolution….Krugman’s 1873 depression was really the UK going like the US vis a vis China.
A key event in the last century was Mac Arthur warning against a war on the Asian land mass, he was a colonialist, he was governor fo the Phillipines, etc. He recognized you cannot vik in Asia maybe […]
Bruce said: “I did not suggest that liberalism was inherently ‘moral’. only that from a liberal stance conservatism often seems not immoral necessarily but amoral. When instead it is just drawing from a different moral well.”
I dunno about the moral well, but from my view point there is definitely different moral starting and ending points. Conservatives start morality from family, liberal starts morality from ??? Both cross through the same humanity over all point. The conservative might very well stop there, but most conservatives do not go too far past. Where the liberal goes well beyond. Some liberals actually place environmental issues over human.
Bruce also asked: “Why is debt as a result of war acceptable, while debt as a result of social spending not?” In the US war spending is based upon existential needs. Social spending is not.
Using the family centrist view point war protects my family and household and therfore neary all social mores may be forgiven. While social spending is sharing what the family/household has with its neighbors. that can only work when there is excess in the family/household. Who makes that determination of excess if you are a conservative? The patriarch.
Who makes that determination for the liberal? Anyone else sometimes (perhaps more often than not) over the patriarch.
Why assume that tax cuts will in all cases increase reinvestment?
US conservatives seem to think you must have some measure of belief in the irrational, and of course the modern propagandists are fine with making a lie truth and then condemning anyone who says the emperor is naked as unpatriotic. Sad the need for fairy tales told to children to show the moral bankruptcy of modern propagandists. It has worked for the christians for 2000 years though.
Why is debt as a result of war acceptable, while debt as a result of social spending not? Measure of mandatory faith in a falsehood. Debt is only good in a crisis.
However, if you consider what put Kings into debt: wars and famine.
Joseph’s seven fat followed by seven lean years is instructive.
In the fat years you must put up non perishable things for the lean. That is why Greenspan Moynihan went off with raising SS revenues.
Debt is no good but being a creditor is also not so good if the non perishable are no good when you need to get through a faine or a war. Or if in the case of the Templars your debtors decide to kill you off.
Debt is only good in war if you come out the other end better off, i.e. winning and gaining economic power. It happened in WW II, it is not happening since therefore the race to bankruptcy.
The opportunites to vik are just not there.
i am not up on my isms.
us small town rural types have this idiot idea that the way daddy did things got us fed. we are not so sure about the way them city slicker gummint types want to change things. but in general if you don’t confuse us or scare the horses we are open to new ideas, and farm subsidies.
Bruce said: “I did not suggest that liberalism was inherently ‘moral’. only that from a liberal stance conservatism often seems not immoral necessarily but amoral. When instead it is just drawing from a different moral well.”
I dunno about the moral well, but from my view point there is definitely different moral starting and ending points. Conservatives start morality from family, liberal starts morality from ??? Both cross through the same humanity over all point. The conservative might very well stop there, but most conservatives do not go too far past. Where the liberal goes well beyond. Some liberals actually place environmental issues over human.
Bruce also asked: “Why is debt as a result of war acceptable, while debt as a result of social spending not?” In the US war spending is based upon existential needs. Social spending is not.
Using the family centrist view point war protects my family and household and therfore nearly all social mores may be forgiven. While social spending is sharing what the family/household has with its neighbors. That can only work when there is excess in the family/household. Who makes that determination of excess if you are a conservative? The patriarch.
Who makes that determination for the liberal? Anyone else sometimes (perhaps more often than not) over the patriarch.
well enough, i suppose.
but when Jesus says sell all you have and give to the poor, he may have been talking to specific persons. Me, I can’t help but note that Tiny Tim would have had a pretty skinny Christmas after all if Scrooge hadn’t saved his money all those years.
And it’s one thing to accuse the conservatives of privileging Property to People, and quite another to answer even the people’s question of “how will this work?”
War is in the genes for sure.
including the genes of the Huns whom you mention, and the Arabs, and the Watusi, and the Sioux, and the Irish, and…
CoRev
I could go with you a ways, but when you think “environmental issues” are not “human issues” you betray and ignorance too deep for words.
Then I guess I’d have to say that Social spending gets pretty damn existential in ANY community, but especially in an empire where you need the contribution of all peoples who are no longer in a position to guarantee their own bread. Same reason the stomach feeds the head, and the head feeds the arm. Hell, I have even heard that generals make sure that privates get fed.
CoRev
I could go with you a ways, but when you think “environmental issues” are not “human issues” you betray an ignorance too deep for words.
Then I guess I’d have to say that Social spending gets pretty damn existential in ANY community, but especially in an empire where you need the contribution of all peoples who are no longer in a position to guarantee their own bread. Same reason the stomach feeds the head, and the head feeds the arm. Hell, I have even heard that generals make sure that privates get fed.
CoRev– You say, “In the US war spending is based upon existential needs. Social spending is not. ” What existential need does the US have that can be derived from blowing up civilians in Afghanistan? I am not arguing that war is immoral. I just don’t see what this country needs that it doesn’t have without “defeating” the Taliban.
Fact is that anyone who wants to can get ahold of enough ammonium nitrate and diesel oil to blow up the Mall of America. I doubt seriously that anyone in Afghanistan has it in for Nancy Ortiz or CoRev’s family. I don’t see how you can justify a war that spends money for nothing in the way of asset acquisition and doesn’t protect us from anything we haven’t done to ourselves already.
The liberal political theory starts from the Sermon on the Mount and similar teachings of Jesus and his Apostles. So, I’d say it’s essentially a simple extension of family to include all people in the same nation and to some extent, people outside this country as well. You know, “Least of these my brethren”, “Do unto others,” and all that stuff. Not actually in conflict with the preservation of property if you regard the well-being of your fellow citizens a species of property held in common through out system of laws. NO
CoRev,
What is moral about your family owning all the land while the serfs are starving?
Family values, in some cultures the main prophet said sell all your possessions and follow me.
He also said “it is easier to push a camel through the eye aof a needle than get a rich man into heaven.
Your family values or the family of man?
“In the US war spending is based upon existential needs.”
What was existentially lost when the USAF Air Force only got 135 F-22 when they shout a crying existential need for 788?
What is existential about having 12 carrier battle groups steaming around?
I can go on.
“Social spending is not”. [existential]
Why is there so little poverty in the aged? Why is there any poverty among children.
The eye of the needle?
ILSM, I seldom respond to your rants because they are always singular topic, but you are confusing miltiary spending with WAR spending.
Thank you Dale, you make my point perfectly.
“I maintain that a lot of what is baffling in Conservatism to those of us whose thinking derives from Liberal Enlightenment’s elevation of The People to primacy, can be explained by a combination of these two arguments.”
Why stop reducing there? You can reduce further.
If modern conservatism has tried to replace the divine right of kings with an absolute right of property, then it’s a flimsy veil over its fundamental nature. To quote Phil Agre, conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
That simple statement is sufficient to eliminate any mystery about how the conservative mind will react to any given proposition. Try it, you’ll see.
ILSM, how about this saying. “Look out for number one, since nobody else will.”
As for this: “What is moral about your family owning all the land while the serfs are starving? ” Isn’t the actual question what is moral about greed? Excessive greed?
Saddam was not an existential threat to the U.S. What were pissing your pants at the thought of those balsa wood drones?
The attack on 9/11 was not in any meaningful way mounted from Afghanistan. On the other hand Bin Laden was responsible and if left unattacked would have coordinated new Cole attacks (mounted and launched locally) or attacks on other American targets here and abroad. Killing him and rolling up al-Qaeda from the top down would have contributed to our national security. Instead an amazingly successful Special Ops operation that with a few hundred troops ousted Bin Laden’s protectors and put him on the run. At which point Rumsfeld and Bush decided to fight Afghanistan on the cheap to maintain support for war on Iraq.
We could have literally decapitated Bin Ladin and his top leadership and pulled out of Afghanistan with the warning that if they sheltered foreign fighters in the future we would send those SEALS and Rangers back in to do it all over again. We could have kept that particular existential threat under control at a lot smaller cost.
Likewise we could have put paid to Saddam and his sons and whatever successors kept up his policies for a lot less than a full out invasion, occupation and reconstruction. Instead the Neo-Cons wanted a base so as to achieve their real objectives, elimination of Hezbollah and it’s patron Iran as an existential threat not to the US but to Israel, a goal that they are still actively promoting as we speak.
Only the deeply self-deluded believe either the extended war in Afghanistan or the war on Iraq had anything to do with a real existential threat to US soil. As such your attempted distinction between military spending and war spending is simple nonsense. Aircraft Carriers and Wars of Choice (“let’s throw some crappy country up against the wall to show whonis boss”) are just the flip sides of the Neo-Cons openly expressed plan to use the US military openly to put in place a New American Century (the PNAC).
You know this, it is just that it leaves a sour taste. Tough, as warmonger Friedman said in defense of all this- “Suck on this!” (and yes both Tom and I mean ‘lemons’)
As I suggest to Coberly above it does not explain small town and rural conservatism or social conservatism more widely, aristocrats not being particularly known for some commitment to sexual restraint or family values as currently held by working class conservatives.
On the other hand both aristocrats and social conservatives were very devoted to preserving the property and prestige of the Family, which for the upper aristocracy was expressed as the ‘House’, the House of Windsor, the House of Savoy, the House of Hapsburg etc.
I am looking for commonality here, I really doubt the Tea Partiers are intent on restoring a hereditary aristocracy so that they can tug their forelocks to the Squire as in days of yore.
Ilsm, back in my days in the History PhD program at Berkeley my main area of study was Western Europe from the Fall of Rome in 476 to Magna Carta in 1215 with a particular concentration on Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Britain from the laters historical origins in the 1st century BC to the relative extinction of the former in 1066. So while none of what you say is totally wrong, most of it is not quite right. In particular the notion that the Anglo-Normans were just later day Vikings kind of went out with the works of F.A. Freeman. In particular the residents of medieval Europe were not the helpless victims of this savage Norsemen in quite the way accepted.
For a useful corrective you might want to pick up a copy of Peter Sawyers book, called from memory simply the Vikings. I was lucky enough to take a course from Prof Sawyer when he was a visiting professor in the 80s, at the time quite the controversial figure because he literally rewrote the book on the Viking incursions in Europe that conventionally started in the 8th century. It is not at all clear that either the tactics or the aims of the Vikings were really any different than the 4th and 5th century Saxon raiders of Roman Britain turned conquerors of Post Roman Britain.
ilsm
think you might be confusing a few things here. if my family owns all the land and manages it so the serfs get fed, is that less moral than the leader of the people taking my land and dividing it among the serfs who don’t know how to farm it and starve?
don’t think jesus was about redistributing wealth. he was concerned about that rich man’s soul. thta is an entirely different proposition from your worrying about it.
and while i am not generally fooled by the propaganda of the right, i’d have to say that a naive faith in the “family of man” makes me wonder how you are going to feel when all those other men’s families come in and eat your lunch, not having heard the Word?
CoRev
greed is by definition excessive greed. it’s when you care more about money than life.
i hate to have to add, but i do, that life has something to do with caring about your neighbors. But not in the way that some so called liberals want to give all of the rich mans money to the poor just because they have less.
S9 and Bruce, that definition is so ignorant and political it is stupid.
as to commonality, you have too much faith in mankind’s taste or capacity for “logical consistency.”
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
There you have it. A statement of the conservative dispostion, and the liberal “urge” all in the same paragraph.
where both sides go wrong is to assume they have a monopoly on virtue or morality. despite whatever lip service they may pay to the contrary.
Free market conservatism is really at the heart liberal enlightenment. Man broke free of the bondage imposed by Kings and Czars who were the central authority of the day. Now the liberals want to return us to a kind of welfare state where we are more dependent on the state like in the days of old. A rejection of free market conservatism is a rejection of liberalism and it’s the appeal of taking the blue pill.
Good one!
On the surface not a lot of substance, but who could not be convinced by the authoritative succinctness?
Care to explain why Rush and Beck insist that Jefferson’s original formulation was “Life, liberty and property” rather than “pursuit of happiness”. Ya miss the talking point?
Bruce, bring it back on topic please.
greed is by definition excessive greed. it’s when you care more about money than life.
Greed is want. Man does not want money for its own sake rather he wants it for what it can buy him. If you did not want things money would have no value. A larger point is that all human activity seeking to achieve something is driven by wanting a benefit from what you’re endeavoring to do. This is the sentiment for the Gorden Gekko speech in Wall Street. The fact that is spoke truth to people is one of the reason Michel Douglas won an Oscar for this role.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
So all inspired hard work is done out of a sense of greed, even in devoting service to others since the want to make the world a better place for others is a want and thus is greed.
Except historically conservatives did not break with King and Czar, the classes that largely filled the ranks of conservatism not being in particular bondage to begin with, and to the extent they ever had been broke those bonds centuries before the Enlightenment. To some degree Conservatism subordinated Monarchy but never abandoned the idea of strong central government. The idea that the Manchester School economics or Burkean Conservatism was in any sense libertarian and opposed to monarchy as such being ridiculous revisionism.
Can you pinpoint the time and place in which free market conservatives actually broke free from monarchial bondage? In any country? Was there ever a time when ostensible Free Traders did not rely on their equivalent of the Royal Navy to suppress colonial competition? Ever wonder why the symbol of Gandhi’s Congress Party was a spinning wheel? It wasn’t because Manchester cotton merchants were spitting on the image of the Empress of India Victoria or Her Viceroy.
The moral of the Christmas Tale is that Tiny Tim would have been happy either way, just as he presumedly was the Christmas previous. The salvation of Scrooge from the bleak depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Future was the whole point, not that he sprung for a big fat goose.
It is a story of Redemption and not Charity as such.
well, hell, Bruce
Charity is the path to Redemption, unless that’s the reason you take it.
And you kept it on topic how?
Ilsm was arguably off topic but once you responded to him you were fair game pilgrim.
Owl
you miss the point. a desire for stuff is not greed. until it becomes an excessive soul destroying desire.
unfortunately you, i suspect, use the normal desire for stuff as a rationalization for the soul destroying true greed.
owl
actually, most people who have anything interesting to say have read more than Ayn Randian fairy tales.
your “free market” won’t work. never has worked. it’s just a political slogan about an abstraction that describes one of the aspects of trade, and a much smaller aspect of life, which has been lived by some kind of communitarian consensus for half a million years. your free marketeers haven’t even half managed half a century.
if, god help us, the people who tell you these fairy tales ever get political power you will find out right quick what they think of human freedom.
that liberal nanny state you are so afraid of is nothing more than an intelligent concern for keeping the labor supply alive while waiting for the next business cycle, incidentally providing an army to defend the property of the captains of industry.
The moral basis for liberalism is humanity, and improving its general living conditions. The environment is important for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is humanity has to live in it
The moral basis for conservatism is stable structure. This typically manifests itself as property and/or family, since those are tangible and easy to grasp and define, almost always and everywhere. But allowing conservatives to co-opt family values is a huge error; it is wrong – factually, morally, and tactically Domination by an aristocracy is not a good definition of conservatism, but it is a good description of how structure is frequently imposed on society – to the self-serving ends of the aristocracy, by no coincidence.
Conservatives are against change, free thought, and secular humanism, and are suspicious of science because those things will always challenge the current structure. Cf. Galileo.
Russell Kirk tells us that conservatism is a mind set, not an ideology. This explains why hard liners in the old Soviet Union were the spiritual equivalents of frex, Jesse Helms or Strom Thermond, with whom their ideological overlap was essentially zero. They were all about maintaining structure, and to the small mind, that means the status quo.
Remember, the cornerstones of the conservative mindset are ignorance, prejudice (Kirk is proud of these!) magical thinking, and false choice. These are necessary conditions, since an overarching commitment to maintaining stability is generally inconsistent with the natural course of humanity – which is progress. Every political, social or technological advancement ever achieved has been over the staunch objections of conservatives.
Give a conservative an ideology, and he becomes a regressive. Hence, the tea party movement.
In short, liberals are about people and progress. Regressives are about things and preserving a static society.
The reason have-nots get sucked into regressivism is that they are deceived by right wing propaganda about values and rights. Some people have a natural tendency to this mindset anyway, and thus, irrationally, embrace a mode of thinking that is overtly contrary to their own self interest.
People are conservative/regressive out of greed, ignorance, fear, gullibility, or some fundamental misanthropic personality flaw. The latter group cannot be reached by truth, logic, or any manifestation of reality
WASF,
JzB
Bruce, undoubedly your liberal mind thinks you made a point, but only used the term, “war”, that you used. I did not mention anything specific. I didn’t even mention US involvements.
So this pilgrim was well within scope of the topic. You and ILSM were both off. Oh, topic too! 🙂
And we know pretty well how the Irish were evangelized from Britain and Scotland from Ireland and how the Anglo-Saxons were evangelized by a combination of Scots and evangelists dispatched directly from Rome with the ultimate issue decided in favor of Rome at the Council of Whidby. With the Britons who originally Christianized Ireland holding back because with their national hero Arthur perfectly willing to consign those invading heathen Saxons to hell. Luckily for my English ancestors Pope Gregory 1st and the other St Augustine (of Canterbury) being a little more charitable.
“So all inspired hard work is done out of a sense of greed, even in devoting service to others since the want to make the world a better place for others is a want and thus is greed”
Ummmmmm not so much. It is done out a sense of “selfishness” which in biological terms is what all organisms exhibit. The desire to perpetuate your genes to the next generation is quite strong and we will do almost anything to do so even throw ourselves in front of a truck to keep our “yet to be childrearing” offspring alive.
This is where many conservatives go off the reservation I think. They certainly recognize selfishness as a biological reality but take it to the extreme of obscene selfishness (greed). If a little selfishness is good a lot must be better!!
I agree though that we do things to feel good about ourselves and to look good to others. This is certainly self serving. This is why who you hang with (the others) matters. Many in gangs have to behave antisocially (committ a murder) to be accepted amongst their group.
“ Conservatives start morality from family, liberal starts morality from ??? “
Its all about the size of the circle of inclusiveness. Conservatives want to keep it as small as possible, liberals want it to be as big as possible. Conservatives are more inward thinking liberals more outward thinking.
The Good Samaritan did not have a lot to share.
Let’s not confuse Charity and Compassion.
Okay a review of the Parable shows that the Samaritan was not a poor man. But I think the point stands.
Indeed, let us not.
The Samaritan gave his money to the landlord to care for the robbery victim. We are not told whether he was a poor man.
Paul says something about Charity:
1 Corinthians 13
1Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
4Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Note verse 3. Charity is not “giving to the poor.” but it is a state of mind (soul) that very likely will lead to giving to the poor. And Yeats delivers a lovely line about compassion in “The Countess Kathleen” but it’s too long to go into here.
CoRev 12:57
And you capitalized ‘WAR’. Are there any other wars we are engaged in? Or do you maintain we are in a perpetual war against ‘Terrorism’ and ‘Islamofascism’. Your argument that this is non-specific belies every contribution you have made over the last several years.
Greg, I think I can agree with this observation. I also think that a liberal can quickly become a conservative when the center of the circle is his own family, and the bulk of the sharing is both uncontrolled by the patriarch and from his larder.
Where do rich people get money from? Do they print in their basement? Rich people make money by over charging for their product and under paying their workers. Basically rich people get rich by taking other peoples money. So, if doing so is good enough for them then it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Greg
to declare that altruism is “really” selfish because you do it to feel good is to destroy language.
there is no claim by any sane person that “feeling good” is part of the definition of either altruism or selfishness. altruism is something you do for another’s welfare. selfishness is something you do “for yourself.” you can try to stretch a claim like “you helped him “for yourself.” [and sometimes that might even be true. Why I said that Charity is the Road to redemption unless that’s why you choose it.] But that kind of “reasoning” is simply the devil talking.
i would suggest that the terms conservative and liberal are far too broad to describe the individual motives of the disparate groups that fall under each heading. The so-called Tea Baggers have nothing in common ideologically with the One Percenters, and not all One Percenters adhere to a strictly conservative ideology. The issue is further complicated by the difference between political and social ideologies which both conservative and liberals espouse. Tea Baggers are more the social conservatives, but despite their differences with the conservative One Percenters they cling to the notion that there is some common thread that links the two groups due to their conservative perspectives. The same kinds of differences exist between liberal sub-sets. The term left wing is used so generally that one might think that there is some common point of view between Nancy Pelosi and Noam Chomsky. There ain’t!
So the entire argument is rather unproductive. There is much confusion because of the vast broadness of definitions of the two groups and their respective sub-groups. CoRev begins his definition of conservative with, “Conservatives start morality from family,….” One could just as well argue that they start from self and operate on ego with only a thin veneer of superego, which they define as narrowly as suits each one’s individual needs. And the same might be said for many who would describe themselves as liberals. Such a discussion is just so much mental masturbation. There are far more critical issues that might take up this space.
btw, sorry if you don’t like “devil” talk. that’s just the easiest way for me to say it. self deluding, self abuse might be another way to put it.
jazz
again, sounds nice to the progressive, but
“ Every political, social or technological advancement ever achieved has been over the staunch objections of conservatives.”
is just a tautology. Every damn fool mistake has been advanced against the advice or objections of conservates. what does this prove? nothing. only that on any given issue, those who tend toward the status quo are “conservatives,” those who tend toward the “new” are “progressives.” by definition.
you may find some constelation of characteristics that tend to go together. but where you fall on the conservative-progressive spectrum is largely a matter of who your friends are.
now, if you want to go into why people whose interests are not served by the agenda of those calling themselves conservatives in this country today, you will probably find yourself agreeing with me.
but this “progressives good conservatives bad” is simply bad thinking.
lost a clause in there. no matter. the meaning is clear enough.
but it gives me a chance to say that this self righteous, not to say priggish, we are so good and they are so bad, attitude is exactly what keeps you from making an alliance with your natural allies againt the Enemy of both of you. And that is just as the Enemy planned it.
Bruce saying this: “Your argument that this is non-specific belies every contribution you have made over the last several years.” I’m just not sure how it contradicts my prior several years worth of commenting. Some what of an exaggeration?
Bruce, for heaven’s sake, war is the analogy of protecting the family/household in your definition. So in that instance we are in a perpetual effort to protect our family/household. It appears you are not reponding to my comment but to your own liberal anti-war belief structure.
BTW, with that definition of WAR, can you see why conservatives disagree with much of ILSM’s and the anti-war commentary? It is one of our core beliefs to protect our family/household. And, in this instance that is an analogy for protecting our country; therefore, we have ths conservative support for military spending. That does not necessarily mean fighting each and every WAR. Remember who was against the Kosovo incursion. It might also explain conservative support for protecting allies and other friends.
So stop the emoting and take advantage of one of the most interesting threads started in quite some time. Thank You for that.
Jack, I presume you meant the one percent richest of us. If so, 70% of the uber rich, 1%ers, voted for Obama. Does that mean they are conservative? I dunno?
Peter John
I imagine the rich person would say he gets his money from charging for a service that you are willing to pay for. Hard for me to see just where you suppose the “over” charge comes from. Should he sell it to you at his cost?
I would agree, if pushed that much wealth comes from theft, or conquest, but not all of it. and a world with some rich people in it seems to work better than a world with none. so i don’t cultivate envy in my heart.
I am no historian, however, I may have read Sawyer avbout 20 years ago.
I have been reading informally Welsh mythology going towards Arthur etc- Triads and a few years ago I did some reading back and forth between German and Norse mythology.
Sigurd through the Tyrfing cycles.
I have also read a few Icelandic Sagas.
I accept the similarity between Saxon and Viking evolutions.
I think the later Saxons who did not go viking went toward the continental power along with Otto and the Holy Roman Empire.
I am not a historian I am a military logistician by education and career.
I do get on a topic and read alot. Lately I am back at the War Between the Sates and into Grant’s Memoirs, he was a regimental quartermaster in the Mexican War as well as a guy who intruded on the field of battle between moving supplies and commissary stores.
I sympathize with Grant as a quartermaster. Helped him keep chasing Lee and not have to fall off.
If conservatives had their way, the earth would be flat, old women would be burned at the stake on the word of teenagers, black people would be slaves, women would not be able to vote, labor unions would be illegal, the New Deal would not have happened, and you and I would be serfs.
It is not a tautology. Conservatives aren’t just bystanders to progress, they fight it tooth and nail. W.F. Buckley was the one who displayed rare lucid candor when he stood astride history yelling, “STOP!” I did not put him in that position, and he wasn’t kidding.
BTW, I never said there cannot be good conservatives. Many conservatives are good people. Naive, misguided, ignorant, slaves to ideology – whatever, but good. I’ve known many over the years. Likewise there are bad liberals. Poltical orientation is orthogonal to personal ethics and strength of character. What I’m saying is that conservative thought is not reflective of the real world, conservatives are often married to an ideology (Randism, frex) which is unworkable and wrong-headed, and many of them are unreachable.
If I’m being priggish, then fine, I’ll live with that.
Meanwhile, go try to make an allience with the tea party and let me know how that works out for you.
BTW, there have been some posts at Modeled Behavior about some possibility of allance between liberals and libertarians. I haven’t examined any of it in detail, but you might want to check it out.
Cheers!
JzB
Coberly,
Trust in the lord. Divide the loaves.
I suspect the sharecroppers were real happy paying rents from the excess value of their labor in the Mississippi delta.
The issue is serfs/sharecroppers are renters paying rents, and whether there is any value in capital worth the rent and how much rent is theft of labor.
I guess that line of thinking in antitheological being from Marx.
I am sure Bruce Webb can clarify the value of English manors after the balck death in the mid 14th century and the serf population declined precipitously.
What value is land without renters or employed labor?
There is logic in the Native American view that the land belonged to the great spirit and man could not hoard, much less fence it or destroy all the free animals on it and so destroy their livelihood and culture.
Ownership is only sustained if you have power. The motive to accumulate and charge stifling rents.
From the sermons I have heard I don’t know much and I don’t take too many clerics words seriously.
CoRev
A conservative often becomes a liberal when a member of the family circle either goes to jail or becomes disabled………………
A lineral becomes a conservative when the material is more important than the moral.
There is no difference in this country.
“to declare that altruism is “really” selfish because you do it to feel good is to destroy language. “
I’m not sure I made that claim. At least not that claim exclusively. This is certainly operative at many levels of our behavior, I hope you wouldnt disagree with that. It is important for us to feel good about ourselves, to not is to be on the edge of depression.
Altruism is seen in a lot of species, even those that dont appear to be able to reason and think “this is just the right thing to do”. It has a biologic purpose and the primary purpose of biology is getting your genes to the next generation. In that sense its selfish. It wouldnt keep appearing over and over in biology if it didnt have success in perpetuating genetic material. The biologic definition of selfish is NOT the same as the social darwinist definition.
” altruism is something you do for another’s welfare. selfishness is something you do “for yourself.”
We have the ability to choose to be altruistic or not ( I think the choice not to be is against our nature in a sense) but other species, as far as we know, dont have the choice. But it keeps showing up, so it must serve a selfish (in the biologic sense) purpose. There is a difference between the unconscious selfishness in our biology and our conscious selfishness.
I thought it was clear my distinction between biologic selfishness and human selfishness, which is really more often greed.
Good conservatives want to preserve what works, more or less. Good liberals want to change those things that, more or less, don’t work, or aren’t working now. Both of these tasks are difficult for different reasons. Conservatives defend what works well enough, and explain away or ignore the shortcomings. Liberals say we can do better, and sometimes we can. Sometimes. Maybe often. But surely not always. The discussion used to interest me more, but wholly does not interest me when people have partisan, ideological or “four legs good, two legs bad” mindsets.
On the narrower point, though, I think Bruce is right about “property” as understood in ordinary terms, and pretty much follows the Aristotelian and Toquevillian explanation of it being an outgrowth of the household. Teabaggers have fetishized a more techical concept of property, basically what in real estate is called “fee interest, or fee simple.” This typically leads to the mistaken notion that “I can do anything I want with my property” – that this is what freedom is.
In the legal sense, “property” is relational, that is, “mine” or “yours.” It is the property rights that define this relationship, and as such, property rights are just a category of rights. While the 5th Amendment does provide special protection for property rights against takings for public use (purpose) without just compensation, other amendments protect other rights: free speech, voting, right to a jury trial etc.
Mostly when people talk about property rights, they mean “real estate,” or “real property.” But, the larger role for property is the constitutional notion of intellectual property (IP) as described in Article I, Sec. 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Here, it’s actually possible to have a discussion about why property rights are “valuable” and the public purpose of protecting them. We want the advancement of science and art. Those things will advance if those doing it can reap exclusive reward – for a while. But the over-arching purpose is about building the public domain.
I realize that some ideas pay off sooner than others, but it seems thems the breaks. The tendency has been to grant owners of IP longer and longer limited periods.
I’m no expert on this, but it did change my thinking about a lot of things when the Napster controversy was hot. Why for example, do I have to pay full cost to download music that I already own 1 or more license to (that I bought as LP, Cassette and/or CD)? What about my property rights?
This is really a deeper example than you might think.
ilsm
ever read about Thorstein Orrabeinfostri? (Thorgasil?) I can’t find it, but it’s an interesting story about one of those Icelandic voyagers, though I don’t think he was properly a Viking.
and since you raise the question, apply Bruce’s analysis of “conservative” v “liberal” to the American Civil War.
Greg
I am not sure you made that claim either. maybe you said somebody else made that claim. i have certainly heard it made.
generally i agree with what you are saying here. the social darwinism that says competition is the highest good or some such crap totally ignores real Darwinism which discovers that organisms discovered cooperation about a hundred million years ago. maybe more. certainly primates and especially humans have enhanced their survival through cooperation.
and just to keep annoying people, i would say it is one of the chief works of the devil to persuade us that we are “in it for ourselves.” and i can guarantee that a lot of “conservative” people agree with me about this. so what, exactly, does it mean to call them conservative in the same breath you call, say, Newt Gingrich, or Tom DeLay?
ilsm
i am not a cleric, and my sense is that a lot of “the church” is self serving when it is not in the service of the lords.
plenty of bad stuff done to serfs by bad landlords. no question. but the question was whether my ownership in and of itself was an evil. and i tried to suggest that what is going on in former Rhodesia doesn’t look like a huge improvement over what went on when the bad old whites “owned” the land.
i am a real softie about American Indians myself. but they tended to starve a lot. and they did raid each other and kill off their competitors. so maybe we are not talking very carefully here.
jazz
you really are being quite irrational. it’s like you put on your “liberal” suit this morning and got all pumped up for the big game against the “conservatives.” rah, rah, ree.
btw, i would not have been a serf. i would have been the liberal monarch.
i doubt i could make an alliance with the tea partiers. they put on their conservative suits this morning and got all pumped up for the big game…
Jack
a straw man i have no argument with.
i hate to say the argument here is silly because it is THE argument of our times. and no one ever said that silly people do not make history.
i think you’ll find that “property” grows out of “family” because family was here first. and … for example… the shift from display to acquisition comes as the need for “capital” emerges, and the need to rationalize it to the mores of the folks watching it happen.
then i’ll think you find that the justification for property of all kinds, besides the “it’s mine” that every two year old understands, is that it stabalizes the action space so that ANY kind of social cooperation is possible. there is no “conflict” between “property” and “people”. there is often (always?) a tension between, if not the conflicting claims of different “property” and different “people” between the need for order and the need for change.
the greatest liberal of all time said “i have not come to change the law…” and then proceded to turn it upside down… according to what the people thought the law was, but not, apparently, according to what God thought the law was.
again, i am being annoying on purpose. the knee jerk thoughtless rejection of ‘religion’ as brain dead conservative backward repressive … etc etc… is just stupid…. as stupid as the fundamentalist reading of words as if they knew the “the” meaning of them. but i have a feeling i won’t get anywhere trying to explain that to people.
if “liberals” would recognize what it is they really value, they would either find it easier to make alliances with “conservatives” or at least know why they can not. as it is, both sides are running around shouting stupid things at each other while the Enemy feasts.
“On Classical Economics.
Economics (which as a discipline developed in parallel in time and place with Modern Conservatism) foundationally assumes that Homo Oeconomicus is psychologically motivated by Accumulation and not Consumption/Display.”
No, I really cannot see that one as being true. Adam Smith being the founder of classical economics…..and WoN is absolutely packed full of examples of things being driven by consumption desires rather than by accumulation. Smith is, after all, the bloke who points out that the purpose of all production is consumption.
I’d say that foundational assumption is the other way around: that it is consumption/display which is the motivation assumed by classical economics.
Conservative and liberal, when you boil them down, are two different survival strategies. As you noted there are cooperative and non cooperative strategies (altruism falls under cooperative) and in any particular “environment” there are agents using both coop and non coop strategeies and equilibriums can be reached. One of the interesting finds of biologists is that there is a natural limit to non coop strategies, iow, one will ever find a stable environment of noncoop strategy agents, they eventually destroy each other. One CAN find pure coop strategies, they would be stable but the presence of enough coop opens the opportunities for some non coop to thrive (using some coops as marks).
When I think about it its easy to see why pure coop could survive and pure non coop couldnt. If uou are ONLY looking out for yourself there is only one looking out for you. If you are ONLY looking out for others, you only have one NOT looking out for you………yourself!
The answer to your last question I think has to do with strategies that rely on deception. One can always find defectors within a group using a particular strategy, especially coop strategies. Non coops use some coops as marks and as long as they dont encounter them again they can get away with it and survive a while. They develop all sorts of ways to appear to be coops, hiding their non coop nature. Many modern conservatives are in the coop camp (using a different mix of altruistic non altruistic strategies than liberals) and dont YET see Gingrich, Delay and I’d throw Palin in as well, as defectors.
There certainly are some faux coops on the liberal side as well and in general I view the faux coops on the liberal side as more disingenuous than the misguided conservatives who want us to believe that being non coop is the best way for our society to advance. I view the faux liberals as believing in altruism in theory but not practicing it well, while the conservatives simply dont believe in altruism. The conservatives are more “honest” but more dangerous. I like liars better than sociopaths (I’ve been known to lie before too 😉 )
CoRev,
I was around more than one DoD acquisition during the run up and early parts of the current WARs. They seem to be waged on the economy of the US.
There is nothing existential about multi-billion dollar highly technical “experiments” to counter a fear.
The existential object the waste of the US taxpayers’ dough on phony tactics which are wildly amazingly sensely expensive.
And since they are urgent needs they never are tested.
Existential WAR to fight some wild fear they call terror!
This is has been a great topic.
I woke up thinking about the golden rule.
I do not know how liberals think.
It seems the worshippers of the false god accumulative property think of the golden rule as.
“Love they rent payer as thyself.”
Or maybe I was meditating on the first of the popularly described 10 Commandments.
Is it an accident the one about false gods is first?
Thanks Tim. That is why I wrote ‘reductionist’.
But to say that Adam Smith and WoN is the foundation of the academic discipline of Economics is to say much the same as saying that Herodotus’ History is the foundation of the discipline of History, it seems to me that by the time Economics got to Manchester a lot of WoN had gotten lopped away just as historians of the same time tended to reject Herodotus’ project as even constituting ‘history’.
The standard argument, perhaps limited to Chicago people, is that tax cuts incentivize investment and tax increases discourage it which only works under the principle that investors are motivated more by ROI, i.e. accumulation, than on facilitating consumption. The whole meme that investors will simply exit the market rather than trying to leverage their investment to maintain the same net return and so allow the same level of consumption is what I am getting at here.
Turn it around. Assume you need a set level of ROI to maintain capital after taxation at a level that maintains your current level of consumption. If taxes are lowered you have three choices: one, deploy the freed up capital in a way that increases your store of retained capital, i.e. invest it all, and maintain the same level of consumption or two maintain your level of investment and increase consumption or three some mix. Supply side assumes that in all cases the outcome is one-more investment instead of two-more consumption. But most of history argues for outcome two, less taxation simply translates to more conspicuous consumption, the rising tide going to benefit Swiss watchmakers and Parisian jewelers.
“Tax cuts increase reinvestment”. Unless of course they don’t.
“The standard argument, perhaps limited to Chicago people, is that tax cuts incentivize investment and tax increases discourage it which only works under the principle that investors are motivated more by ROI, i.e. accumulation, than on facilitating consumption.”
I can’t speak for Chicago but the argument that this little classical liberal uses is very different. It’s that capital is mobile so a change in the taxation of capital will lower investment in that jurisdiction as that mobile capital will go off and seek the world rate of return elsewhere. It’s also the argument that’s used by everyone looking at the tax incidence of capital and corporate taxation as well…..
The US War Between the States!
My ancestor was on the Union side, however the Scots-Irish in the south saw the federals as equal to the English lords.
The north was mixed industry and agriculture while the south was largely agrarian. North could make locomotives, unquestioned materiel advantage!
To simplistic me, two moral dynamics drove the issues: emancipation: no longer conscience humans, of different race, as property, and central authority (or the right to disassociate with same) which could drive socio-economic change– new mores in the (once considered independent) states.
As an aside I once has a couple of drinks in Texas with a man whose Louisiana family tradition included slave holding and his opinion was the institution of slavery would have faded with mechanization, anyway.
From the materiel (logistics is my field) stand point the north had all the advantages. From a moral standpoint the north had a slight edge, although the states rights were a strong moral.
I have seen that Grant was a strong unionist and less an abolitionist and he worried about the north’s moral commitment thus he grabbed on to Vicksburg and willed the victory to give the north a recruiting and taxing plum for pursuing the war.
In my mind the slave question drove the north to exercise federal will, the fight in the south was largely carried by the rights issue. They needed to have the right to seceded.
The most bloody wars are moral. If all the south were defending were the plantation system, it would have been less sanguine.
By the time the sides needed conscription it evolved into industrial war which the advatage was to the north, which still needed the morals of preserving Union.
Although for some it was the glory of war.
The lost lesson in that war is that the materiel is not enough, by orders of magnitude!
The lesson is lost in today’s capitalized war machine.
The Divine Right of god’s representative on earth was, in theory, replaced by the rule of law. It happened that, in reality, the law which men in power wrote and had enforced protected property. Which is the same thing as claiming an absolute right of property, but includes another step aimed at making the whole thing sound better.
Economics assumes that us folks are motivated by consumption and that accumulation fosters consumption, so accumulation is a good thing. Much of the focus was on accumulation because there is magic in it. Accumulation was more interesting than consumption, except to Malthus.
The fundamental enemy of accumulation and property is having that property taken by force. Saying that taxation is the fundamental enemy mistakes a particular case of taking by force with the general category. To sustitute taxation for taking by force shows clearly the influence of propoganda in a society where other forms of taking by force have been fairly successfully reduced. Still, the point of the rule of law is to avoid the use of force, intimidation and fraud by those other than government. Government is to have a monopoly on coersive force. Taxation is a manifestation of that monopoly, and is enshrined in law, as well as restricted by it.
coberly: “ in general if you don’t confuse us or scare the horses we are open to new ideas, and farm subsidies.”
😉
coberly: “but when Jesus says sell all you have and give to the poor, he may have been talking to specific persons.”
He was. 🙂 But when he was talking about rich people and camels he was speaking in general.
coberly: “Me, I can’t help but note that Tiny Tim would have had a pretty skinny Christmas after all if Scrooge hadn’t saved his money all those years.”
When you do that you are holding everything else equal. 🙂 But if all the Scrooges had been less miserly all along, and, instead of piling their money up, had spread it around, whether by investment, wages, or charity, all of the Tiny Tims would have been better off to start with.
Dickens gives us a view of a modern society that relied greatly on private individuals for the general welfare. It seems like conservatives long to return to such a society, while liberals are glad it’s gone.
Perhaps we need to distinguish between the formal conservative “argument” of pamphleteers and the natural conservatism that is parochialism. If one were a member of a criminal clan that had preyed more or less successfully on the locals for generations, some kid coming up the ranks and saying “let’s think big” would very likely run into opposition. Bandits don’t respect property and don’t honor the rule of law, but may well be conservative ways similar to other isolated communities. They don’t need no stinkin’ theory. They just know that change can hurt you. Modern politicians try to stitch together coalitions by arguing that disparate groups share common interests or beliefs. It needn’t be true in order for them to make the argument.
coberly: “I imagine the rich person would say he gets his money from charging for a service that you are willing to pay for. Hard for me to see just where you suppose the “over” charge comes from.”
These days, monopoly power is widespread. (Even if three or four firms control the market instead of just one.)
Sorry Min. The comment system blocked your message. I know why but the reason would just make you laugh in disbelief, I’ll ask Dan to fix it.
“Then the idea of the vik came about in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, that is merchantile conquest, if you could trade you traded if you could do better pirating you stole and if you saw some place to conquer you conquered.”
The Greeks and Phoenicians undertook the same sort of raiding and trading as the Norse. Just ask Homer. I’m not sure an “idea” every really developed to raid and trade in the Scandihoovians lands or elsewhere. What developed was boats that allowed this sort of enterprise to work over great enough distances that reprisal became impractical. Criminality outside of one’s own community was the rule, rather than the exception, in the good old days. It took rule by the Romans or the Mongols or the Brits to cut down on taking by force outside of one’s own community.
And, oh by the way, we might want to look at the rule of law under the Romans and the Mongols and Hammurabi before we attribute too much, or too narrowly, to conservative thought.
coberly: “if my family owns all the land and manages it so the serfs get fed, is that less moral than the leader of the people taking my land and dividing it among the serfs who don’t know how to farm it and starve? “
Again with Zimbabwe!
ilsm: “A lineral becomes a conservative when the material is more important than the moral.”
I think that statistically, liberals become conservative (when that happens) when they marry and have children.
Well maybe in professional circles but there is the popular argument that if you tax gazillionaires they will just go Galt, with or without perpetual motion machines. The pure fact is that US CEOs and Wall Street traders really have no other place to go that would compensate them at the same rates, making their threats to hold their breaths until they turn blue about as persuasive as that of your typical three year old. But instead you have pasty Wall Street traders insisting that if we restrict their compensation they will just start doing their own landscaping, stop tipping lavishly, and if necessary take over our jobs and do them ever so much better because (and this is a real example) they know how to control their bladders while staying on top of a position that could break either way.
I have spent my time in academia, and in large organizations, I know that writing is hard work, and that a day spent in meetings can be grueling. On the other hand you are usually sitting in comfortable chairs with water pitchers, coffee pots, and cookies close at hand. Not all 50 hour work weeks are created physically equal.
But back to the argument. If the result of accommodating business in a way that keeps them from fleeing to the lowest cost venue is to keep local working conditions/wages better than those of the sweatshops of the ‘Made in America’ N. Marianas then so be it. The Mayor of NY and the Governor of California both make the argument that raising taxes on the wealthy will just result in them relocating to Mississippi, as if NYC, LA, and SF didn’t have intrinsic attractions for the rich and powerful. The beautiful people are not going to desert LA for Podunk for comparative tax advantage.
KH, “ It needn’t be true in order for them to make the argument.? Which argument might that be? Like those you just made?
Sheesh!!!
Well I don’t think you can separate Divine Right from Rule of Law. Historically monarchs have always been thought to be bound by law, even the Absolutism of Louis XIV the Sun King (l’Etat cest Moi) would not have gone that far, Divine Right not equating to Despotism. Instead the Monarch or Pope represented themselves as the Vicars or Representatives of that higher power, ‘lese majeste’ being a capital crime because it was an indirect blasphemy against God. Similarly popes of the early to high middle ages apparently saw no conflict between proclaiming their authority against that of the Holy Roman (i.e. German) Emperor while taking the title ‘servus servorum dei’ (servant/slave of the servants of God).
But this will take some thought, when I said ‘reductionist’ I meant it. Thanks Kharris for the insight.
Well it wasn’t references to Tiny Tim or Dickens.
kharris
excellent point.
I don’t trhink you are correct ILSM. I beleive you are describing greed. What I am trying to describe is self preservations where the self is the family/household. And, yes under certain conditions it can go in both directions downward to actual self or expanding to a community family.
Min
yes. and yes … the camel and the needle was a parable for all of us. not just the rich, but those who cling to anything that keeps them from Truth.
I think you may be a bit wrong about all the Scrooges. Ebeneezer indeed suffered from “greed,” which was (is) something like worshipping money for itself (and the things money will buy). But normal aquisition of money and things is not greed. I think the evils of the industrial revolution came more from greed than from the aquisition of property as such.
I am not at all fond of most of what i see of industrialization and capital etc… on a personal level, but I can’t say that all that development did not at least create the infrastructure for a better life for people… if they are sane enough to use it for a better life.
i don’t think that either “liberals” or “conservatives” know what the hell they are talking about.
Min
absolutely. the distinction is between the “inherent evil of capitalism” and the incidental evil that comes with capitalism… not perhaps any different from the incidental evil that comes with every other ism.
ilsm
i take it it had nothing to do with “conservative” v “liberal” then.
i agree with you in general but have a slightly different take. the “lords” were clearly the big slave owners. i think the poor farmers who fought for the north were afraid that the slave owners would out compete them and bring their system north, but certainly west. but on both sides, the rhetoric that was used to build enthusiasm was not entirely honest.
certainly the north could appeal to patriotism, and the south could appeal to “ffreedom” just as they do today… a freedom that is only the freedom of the large slave owners to keep slaves and impoverish the very folks fighting for them.
and all that other stuff you mention.
kharris
generally agree. but the romans and the brits did not cut down on taking by force.. they just organized it.
greg
i’d have to work too hard to disagree with you here.
so all i can say is that sociopaths are liars.
Min
that is, when they have something to lose. let me insert this here
a famous play based on the anguish a father feels at watching his daughter fall for an illegal immigrant (who he believes is using her to beome a citizen)… has led every reviewer to accuse the father of incestuous feelings and being in general a person so disgusting as to be worthy only of contempt.
these reviewers have obviously never been fathers.
Greg said,
“Its all about the size of the circle of inclusiveness. Conservatives want to keep it as small as possible, liberals want it to be as big as possible. Conservatives are more inward thinking liberals more outward thinking”
of course this sounds nice to the liberal. but it is quite nonsense. conservatives are eager to share the fruits of conservatism with the whole world.
and if you watch a bunch of liberals turn on someone who is not p.c. you will be reminded, if you knew, of the difference between a dove and a wolf. the wolf shows mercy to a fallen foe. the dove does not.
well, indefense of CoRev
the formulation “conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy” is pretty stupid.
however Rush et al are far, far more stupid. I think they got the “property” bit from Locke who just hadn’t refined his thinking enough yet. Jefferson put it better, because he knew what he was talking about.
“There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth– by work, by gift, and by theft.
And clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much”
— Henry George
oh, good, Tim
let us impoverish ourselves so the nice capitalist will not go to a more “business friendly” jurisdiction.
it’s too bad we are so stupid we can’t think of an answer to that one.
well, not when you notice the first false god they came up with after hearing that was a golden calf.
damn, and i still don’t know what reductionist means.
kharris:
there seems always a tendency to deify the law.
i suspect the reason is that parents teach their kids that breaking the law can get you killed.
Bruce, you miss the point that changing residence is/can be a paper function. BTW, ask NY, NJ, MD, CA, IL etc tax officials how that tax increase on the rich/millionaires has worked out. Most will admit revenues from that class of tax payers have gone down.
Oh cool. I always wondered what justified support of partial birth aborttion. Now I know…The Sermon on the Mount!
I do not think that monopoly is inherent in capitalism, as opposed to other economic systems. However, the so-called free market tends to monopoly and does little or nothing to restrain it. Thus calls to “let capitalists be capitalists” ring hollow.
Romans and Brits – and Mongols – did reduce taking by force. That’s why trade blossomed in each case. Piracy and brigandage was suppressed. Taxation is the cost of suppressing piracy and brigandage. The net result was almost always extremelly positive for the mechant class. Not so clear for the former ruling class. Often good for non-criminal peasants, but for other reasons than for the merchants.
Bruce said way up high that conservatives aggrandize the law as a way to protect themselves from the great threat to property, which is taxation. The point I make earlier, way, way below is that taking by force is the threat to property which the rule of law seeks to prevent. Taxation is the one form of taking by force that the law enshrines. I will not cite the Monty Python Palestine bit, buy you know what I mean. Taxation is the form of taking by force that is generally beneficial. Conservatives were big on hanging petty thieves in order to make an example to other, more consequential robbers. They hate all forms of taking by force…except fencing of the common, and colonization, and…you get the idea. It is in today’s culture that we hear only about the horrors of taxation, because we are so good about suppressing other forms of taking by force.
and it looks like we have been arguing at cross purposes.
i have been defending, in a manner of speaking, conservatism as one of a pair of forces that create tension between, among, and within human beings. the need to preserve vs the need to change.
while Bruce it seems wants to talk about the history of a word as used in political discourse, by those who have, perhaps, too much “property” to protect, to enlist the support of those who have at least a little to protect, by convincing them that their interests are the same.
and a few others here, some of whom are convincd that conservative is good, and some of whom are convinced that conservative is bad. in other words, the kind of people that politicians rely on.
Kings and rulers of all sorts were constrainted because they were not omnipotent. If they caused their supporters or their rivals too much grief, the supporters or rivals would try to kill them. The stronger the king, the less he cared. Harald Finehair found out that he had way more power than his disorganized rivals, and cared not a bit for what passed for “law”. Iceland was populated by those who could neither tolerate him nor resist him. For a less historic example, but one I like, consider Gilgamesh. He violated every rule regarding the behavior of a king in his time, and the only thing his subjects could think to do was create a rival to take him down a peg. Nobody told him he had to follow the law.
Right off the bat, this topic made me think of the Magna Carta, which was drawn up to protect the property and various mostly economic rights of the wealthy from the king. Conservative thought (which seems to be reflected in most conventional tellings of British history) makes the Magna Carta out to be an Ur-source of democracy, but it was really just intended to make sure that the benefits of oppressing peasants and owning all the land were enjoyed by everybody who controlled enough spears, rather than just the one guy who controlled the most spears.
Defining ‘conservatism’ in three words in most minds would be reductionism to the point of absurdity. My intent was to spark push back, looks like that part worked.
Well I was thinking Magna Carta when I put this together.
The sentimental reading of Magna Carta that ruled through the 19th century held that it protected the rights of all Englishmen. The twentieth century reading was more in line with Kharris and seeing it as primarily a protection of the wealthy. I suggest that a fair reading of it shows a protection of the rights of all legitimate property holders, which extended well below the level of the land owning barons but didn’t reach as far as actual serfs, which in England did not include all peasants, at least not in 1215 when the Great Charter was first issued. The dividing line being between those who could defend their tenures in the King’s Court and those that couldn’t, which line cut significantly below that of the aristocracy. wealthy, nobility (choose your term of choice).
But, it was minor push back. Too few conservatives actually commented. What we have is most comments agreeing with your general definitions (an echo chamber), and many sub-discussions of minor points.
Even my own comments did agree with the core elements of your definitions with my own interpretations/explanations. When I tried to reduce WAR and relate it to the defense of family/household, we went off into the weeds of the recent war fighting.
But, it has been an intersting thread in which to participate.
If I am being irrational, you will do me a big favor by pointing out exactly where and how.
You can email me at jazzbumpa@gmail.com
Cheers!
JzB
I always learn something new here. And, I have just become acquainted with reductionism. Went to school so long ago they didn’t talk about it. Not enough room on the wall of the cave, you know. So, I looked it up in Wiki, which sayeth http://www.answers.com/topic/reductionism.
And, having thought about it, I don’t see what reductionism has to do with conservatism. I cast about for the simplest pieces of the puzzle I could understand. I noted that no one exactly defined conservatism in enough detatil for me to pick out pieces
How about this–conservatism is an expression of the Y gene and liberalism tells the Y gene to put on some decent clothes before the preacher gets here. NO
Nancy I am guilty of reductionism. Not Conservatism. Sorry for the confusion.
jazz
i may do that. but if you can’t recognize that what you wrote is not rational, i am not sure i can splain it better in a personal letter.
kharros
yes, but it was a beginning.
ah, heck.
i tried to carry the banner for conservatism (as a half-reaction) but even CoRev didn’t notice.
Bruce–Umm. I was making a joke. I thought. Oh well. NO
When I married I was in the US military, when I had kids they were military brats for a while.
I became less than conservative and far less the militarist when the soviets evaporated and the war machine went on as if nothing changed.
Why were the peace dividends stolen?
I had risen high enough to see the main talent of “leadership” was never question the plundering of your own country. Never let it get in the way of your income stream. Never question or have an iron constitution to recognize that ill got gain is okay as long as it is yours.
By then my marriage was over and gone and the kids grown.
Maybe I become liberal when I no longer had any moral flesh in the game that I cared to lose.
I became liberal when the crooks and the worthless trash they bought won at huge costs to society.
Think xenophobia as self preservation.
There was a study that suggested men become more conservative after parenthood, women become more liberal.
I noticed.
min
you won’t hear me calling to let capitalists be capitalists. capitalists are useful people, but quite dangerous. i am all for paying them well for what they do. but i don’t want them making the rules.
i have no idea whether monopoly is inherent etc. but it seems to come along. tho it may not be the worst of the evils of capitalism.
greg
gotta think about that. i suspect it was another of THOSE studies.
ilsm
i may be a liberal in the same sense you are and for the same reasons. but it is a mistake to lump all “conservatives” together and imagine you (generic you) are superior to them.
there really is a difference between “crook” and “conservative.” though the biggest crooks these days pretend to be conservative.
certainly they are related.
There is a fundamental fallacy here. Conservatives do not base their opinions on reasons. They will create reasons for them if challenged, much as we backformed the term “acoustic guitar”, but the reasons for their opinions are made up after the fact of the development and acceptance of their opinions.
Recent studies, including a few written up in the journal Science, reveal that conservatism is partly biological in that some people are more predisposed to shock and disgust. These sensations are more powerful and harder for some to deal with than others. These more sensitive people tend to develop conservative politics as they find certain things familiar and pleasant while others are base and repugnant.
Liberal politics tends to flow from a sense of fairness and a desire to minimize harm, both of which require reasoning to be meaningful unlike a visceral reaction which does not require thought. A conservative no more reasons that a tax cut for a billionaire must be a good thing than I have to decide to activate my gag reflex in the presence of rotting meat. Called to account, the conservative can produce some rationale for his or her feelings, just as I could argue that my gagging was a reasoned reaction to inedible and potentially harmful animal matter.
—-
Amusingly, I was just wading through Nietzche’s Gay Science. (Don’t ask. It could have been Kierkegard.) He made a similar argument about conservative rationalizations, though without our modern understanding of its physiological basis – see Book One, Section 29, Adventitious Liars.
“Well maybe in professional circles but there is the popular argument that if you tax gazillionaires they will just go Galt, with or without perpetual motion machines. The pure fact is that US CEOs and Wall Street traders really have no other place to go that would compensate them at the same rates, making their threats to hold their breaths until they turn blue about as persuasive as that of your typical three year old. But instead you have pasty Wall Street traders insisting that if we restrict their compensation they will just start doing their own landscaping,”
At some rate of taxation that second is true. Not at anything like current rates, I agree. The example often used in hte literature is of Swedish surgeons painting their own houses rather than doing more surgery and paying house painters: given the tax wedge they pay on marginal earnings this is privately rational but really not what is rational for the society as a whole.
For coberly on capital mobility: all economics is about trade offs. Yes, you can restrict capital mobility but to what effect? I’m open to the idea that restictions on hot money in difficult times has greater benefits than costs. Given the UK experience of capital controls though I’m not open to the idea that capital controls in general are worth the costs. It really was only 30 years ago that to leave the UK with more than £25 in your pocket (and yes, this applied to credit cards paid out of a UK account etc) required the written permission of the Bank of England. Something which very much was not easy to get.
65 years ago George Orwell (Eric Blair rather) has to get written permission to use some of his own US $ royalties to purchase streptomycin from the US to try and cure his TB. He was only allowed to do so when he agreed to purchase more than one set of treatments. Sadly, he was allergic to it and thus it didn’t cure him.
That restriction of liberty simply is not, to my mind, worth whatever restricting capital mobility might bring. Others might differ of course.
As to the Northern Marianas….umm, without capital mobility, without people investing there, of course the place whould be in even more shit than it is now.
Kaleberg said: “Liberal politics tends to flow from a sense of fairness and a desire to minimize harm, both of which require reasoning to be meaningful unlike a visceral reaction which does not require thought.”
Yup! Fer sheure, liberal politics, visceral without thought. At least for a few.
Kaleberg
what nonsense. published in the Journal “Science” it’s still nonsense. “Liberals” were perfectly capable of sending innocent people to the Guillotine, and I have watched the PC’ers peck some poor bastard to death because he made a joke that invoked a racial stereotype.
You say that “conservatives don’t reason,” which I agree is mostly true, then you give clear and convincing proof that neither do liberals.
Much of modern work on how we make decisions, moral or otherwise, shows visceral or emotional areas of the brain are the driver and reason is added in later, sort of a post hoc job of justification. We are great rationalizers.
The big difference between conservatives and liberals according to Johnthan Haidt
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
is what they react viscerally to. Liberalsa are more visceral about justice, harm/care issues, and fairness/ reciprocity while conservatives are more visceral about ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity, and authority/respect.
This article ties in to a lot of what Bruce has talked about in his posts on conservative thinking.
Haidt makes a very interesting observation that I cant disagree with. He says that liberals dont really understand politics as well as conservatives do. They treat politics like its a shopping spree for a choice, while conservatives treat politics more like religion, which is more in line with the roots of politics since all early political leaders were also USUALLY religious leaders.
well, the current generation of “conservatives” treat politics like it ws war. they are organized and focused which is more than you can say for “liberals.”
and while liberals are more viscera about justice and fairness, it is only because those are the banners of their tribe. give the liberals the upper hand and justice and fairness turn out to be just as self serving as it does for the conservative tribe.
in terms of todays politics i am what you would call a liberal. but i hate self deception and sanctimonius posturing even among “my own people.”
“well, the current generation of “conservatives” treat politics like it ws war. they are organized and focused which is more than you can say for “liberals.”
Agreed, and much of that has to do with religion as well. Historically while wars were fought for secular reason, people were motivated to take up arms with the help of religion. One thing you can say about religion is that it is an organization.
“and while liberals are more viscera about justice and fairness, it is only because those are the banners of their tribe.”
I take issue with your “only” modifier. I think their are many more people form the non conservative side who are NOT tribal, or at least wayyy less tribal. Maybe another way to look at it is that they see their tribe as bigger.
Read his article and go to the test he offers that places your political views on a spectrum. Its quite interesting and informative.
All those areas (in group/loyalty, harm/care etc. ) are operative in all of us, why we are attracted to a certain party and what issues we have stronger opinions about differ in all of us.
The test he offers makes statements and gets you to say on a scale of one to five how much you agree with the statement.
Interestingly I’ve taken the test 3 times (over two years) and have found how passionately I’ve answered some of the things change over time. This probably speaks to your comment;
“give the liberals the upper hand and justice and fairness turn out to be just as self serving as it does for the conservative tribe”
For some that would undoubtedly be true, our relative position affects our concerns. Look how many religious conservatives, who have created this myth of the “oppressed Christian in America”, turn to govt help to enforce Ten Commandment displays and the sort. These same people abhorred govt involvement in rectifying segregation.