the neoliberal vision of the future

[butchersapron]

Has he ran out of paradoxes?

 

[Kizmet]

Not sure that backing up arguments is so onerous for the rest of us. For you it's a chore too far quite clearly.

When it's unnecessary and done purely to avoid the point of the discussion as is often the case.

 

[Kizmet]

What uni was it?

Why does that matter?

 

[butchersapron]

*unsubscribes from thread*

Oh no, not you!

The threads been dead since time anyway.

 

[butchersapron]

Why does that matter?

Because of your pathetic poem about getting taught.

 

[Kizmet]

.

 

[Kizmet]

Because of your pathetic poem about getting taught.

It's lyrics. And it's Rage. And it's irrelevant that I went to Manchester Uni.

 

[butchersapron]

I think that's about all we need to know.

 

[Kizmet]

Oh no, not you!

The threads been dead since time anyway.

The start.

 

[Kizmet]

I think that's about all we need to know.

Way to prove my point, butch.

 

[Blagsta]

This is why you have such problems dealing with people of different perspectives to yours. Because you take little account of circumstances.

This is a thread, conversation, a debate. You don't need to behave in the way you do to try to undermine any different point of view. Witness the way Blagsta made a complete arse of himself consistently repeating a request for a link he had already been given. Just because he chose to dismiss the source without reading it.

Oh the irony.

 

[Kizmet]

You wouldn't know irony if it hit you in the face. Which, ironically, it looks like it has.

 

[Blagsta]

Yes dear.

 

[audiotech]

Similarities between Communism and the Nazis? How fucking original is that?

The guiding philosophy of Communism is its idea of equality. Nazism is based more on a base survival of the fittest notion, the direct opposite to equality. Hitler once stated “the idea of struggle is as old as life itself. In this struggle the strong, more able, will win while the weak, less able will lose”. This statement was central to Nazi philosophy.

This fool needs to note that is why many industrialists supported the Nazis because it fitted in with their work practices. The difference between the industrialists and the Nazis was that the former based their bullshit on laissez faire economics, the Nazis on the superiority of the aryan race.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Explain to me exactly how I was wrong. A debater (I forget which one) claimed that rights cannot exist without duties, and there was great agreement about this among the other socialists on this forum. I simply pointed out that the concept of rights in exchange for duties is precisely feudum, the property right on which feudalism got its name from. So, everyone in here who claims that rights MUST exist together with duties are by definition feudalists, i.e. adherents of feudum. How is that a strawman? Exactly what is wrong about this conclusion? Are you saying that I *can* have certain inalienable rights that I don't need to pay for with duties?

How can rights possibly exist without responsibilities? Even in your utopia, nobody would have the rights you advocate without taking responsibility for ensuring that the rights of others are not violated. You accept your rights and you accept responsibility for observing these rights when it comes to others. The only question up for debate is the nature of these rights - what is a right and what is a privilege? In the end we don't really have any rights - the only "rights" we can really depend on are in fact simply the privileges we can defend physically. Which is why your peaceful utopia will never exist - when you have a system with varying degrees of privilege you'll also get people trying to take that privilege for themselves and using force to do so.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Which begs the question, a giant what?

Now there's a question... I'll leave it to your imagination.

 

[teccuk]

I could easily kick this guy to death. I could really pound my boot into the stupid cunt's face over and over again.

You are fucking awesome.

I just wanted you to know that.

 

[onarchy]

Well resources and logistics are very important. Where is the logistical comparison with Singapore? The question was how will you finance the building of infrastructure. Where's the money going to come from to set up import and export infrastructure?

The money for setting up export infrastructure is going to come from investors who are attracted to the combination of a) low taxes, b) good governanve, c) low wages, OR see the potential that other investors are likely to be attracted by these things and therefore builds the infrastructure to cater to them.

 

[onarchy]

All of those so called "natural rights" you cite clearly do impose "heavy loads" on society as you like to call them.

In the beginning of the United States the total tax revenue collected to pay for the protection of natural rights was about 1% of GDP. That's not exactly a "heavy load." Compare that to the 50-60% taxes in welfare states today.


Recall that this debate about duties grew out of my claim on this forum that each individual should be allowed to live in peace and make peaceful sovereign decisions about his own life, to which the response from this forum was "grow up!" followed by a rant about duties. So it was perfectly clear from the very start that "duty" referred to something MORE than having to live peacefully. That "more" was the welfare state. And THEN I pointed out that this line of thinking, that you OWE part of your life to someone else in the form of a debt that can never be repaid, is precisely what serfdom and feudalism was all about. When the enlightenment philosophers conceived of "inalienable rights" (i.e. duty free rights) it was in contrast to rights purchased by the neverending debt of duty as was so common in the feudal age.

Of course, for someone who is not interested in actually learning anything but to simply rant and "win a debate" regardless of how it is won, then ignoring the first part of the discussion allows one to make completely tangential semantic points about the meaning of "duty."

 

[ernestolynch]

Bellend

 

[ymu]

Yes, yes, I am fully aware of the severe depression that started in 2008 and that is still ongoing. This was indeed caused by Keynesian politics that had been pursued for a long time, with a loan financed deficit spending spree, but if you look at the market prior to 2008 it had been virtually one long bull market since the beginning of the 1980s.

This is just bollocks. Growth in the post-war period was both higher and more stable before the 1980s.

UK real growth in GDP:

US, Japan and world real growth in GDP:

You're welcome to have an opinion on whether altruism is just for suckers, but if you want to claim that it also increases societal output, then you will need evidence. Given the Darwinian approach of Randian 'thought', you might want to have a look at the work on the evolution of altruism, which made a major breakthrough in the 1980s. Dawkins added a chapter on it to the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene (it was not known when the original edition was published in 1976).

The 'problem' of altruism between individuals with no kinship had puzzled evolutionary biologists for years, because the selfish gene approach could not explain it. Until it could.

The classic example is vampire bats. Individuals who have fed well will regurgitate blood for those who have failed to find food. This increases the overall benefit for the group of bats because the gain for a bat that is in danger of starving to death is greater than the loss for a bat which has fed well. But why would any individual bat, with genes which have survived because they are good at surviving, give away the advantage it had gained in order to save an unrelated individual from starvation?

It turns out that being able to recognise an individual makes the difference. A bat that has been fed by another is more likely to feed that bat when they have fed well and their erstwhile benefactor is in trouble.

Selfish individualists might get very fat when things go right for them, but they are in extreme danger of starving to death when things don't go so well. Sharing out a surplus creates a greater value from the total harvest than if it were all kept by those lucky enough to produce more than they needed and enhances the cooperative individuals' ability to survive and flourish, through bad times as well as good.

The idea that just letting people get on with the business of individual accumulation will automatically maximise societal accumulation has no bearing in any evidence that I'm aware of. It doesn't even follow logically. If you allow individuals with power to increase their own share of the pie at the expense of the workers you end up with an impoverished internal economy where the workers cannot afford to buy what they make. The welfare state makes risk-taking less risky and allows individuals to remain productive instead of consigning them to poverty simply because illness or misfortune struck them or their family. Collective purchasing of critical services offers better value for money and massively reduces the bureaucracy required to provide those services.

This is an interesting blog post from the IMF, outlining some research into the drivers of growth:

Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth

Some time ago, we became interested in long periods of high growth (“growth spells”) and what keeps them going. The initial thought was that sometimes crises happen when a “growth spell” comes to an end, as perhaps occurred with Japan in the 1990s.

We approached the problem as a medical researcher might think of life expectancy, looking at age, weight, gender, smoking habits, etc. We do something similar, looking for what might bring long “growth spells” to an end by focusing on factors like political institutions, health and education, macroeconomic instability, debt, trade openness, and so on.

Somewhat to our surprise, income inequality stood out in our analysis as a key driver of the duration of “growth spells”.

We found that high “growth spells” were much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions. The effect is large. For example, we estimate that closing, say, half the inequality gap between Latin America and emerging Asia would more than double the expected duration of a “growth spell”. Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a “growth spell”. Inequality is of course not the only thing that matters but, from our analysis, it clearly belongs in the “pantheon” of well-established growth factors such as the quality of political institutions or trade openness.

This makes complete sense. It is a long forgotten conveniently dismissed tenet of Fordism. Ford de-skilled workers whilst paying them more than previously - because an economy based on mass production of consumer goods needs workers who are paid enough to buy the things that they make.

That is not going to happen in a situation where individuals are allowed to accumulate wealth and power without constraint. When workers have no other options for survival, their wages and conditions can be screwed into the ground in order to increase profits for the selfish individualist. Because they're selfish individualists, even if they recognise the externalities of their actions - that if every worker was as badly paid as theirs there would be no consumers left to buy stuff - they will still act in their own immediate short-term interests because they can't rely on the rest of the selfish individualists not to grab what they can while they can.

 

[ymu]

Do you think that people think highly of Mother T, while at the same time knowing that she did very little good? Now I've not idea of whether she did any good or not, but I'd say that any high opinion of Mother T is because of a popular belief that she helped people.

She was an evil old bat. There's no kind of altruism involved in enriching your order whilst keeping people in poverty and coercing them into following your own peculiar plan for gaining eternal glory.

Christopher Hitchens has written a lot on this. This is a summary article which summarises his approach.

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> That is not going to happen in a situation where individuals are allowed to accumulate wealth and power without constraint. When workers have no other options for survival, their wages and conditions can be screwed into the ground in order to increase profits for the selfish individualist. Because they're selfish individualists, even if they recognise the externalities of their actions - that if every worker was as badly paid as theirs there would be no consumers left to buy stuff - they will still act in their own immediate short-term interests because they can't rely on the rest of the selfish individualists not to grab what they can while they can.

Also probably worth mentioning the strong correlation between Gini index and whether a given country is a nice place to live or a horrible shithole with corpses lying around everywhere.

 

[Crispy]

<rest of winning post snipped>
When workers have no other options for survival, their wages and conditions can be screwed into the ground in order to increase profits for the selfish individualist. Because they're selfish individualists, even if they recognise the externalities of their actions - that if every worker was as badly paid as theirs there would be no consumers left to buy stuff - they will still act in their own immediate short-term interests because they can't rely on the rest of the selfish individualists not to grab what they can while they can.

Outstanding post, ymu

 

[Jeff Robinson]

In the beginning of the United States the total tax revenue collected to pay for the protection of natural rights was about 1% of GDP. That's not exactly a "heavy load." Compare that to the 50-60% taxes in welfare states today.


Recall that this debate about duties grew out of my claim on this forum that each individual should be allowed to live in peace and make peaceful sovereign decisions about his own life, to which the response from this forum was "grow up!" followed by a rant about duties. So it was perfectly clear from the very start that "duty" referred to something MORE than having to live peacefully. That "more" was the welfare state. And THEN I pointed out that this line of thinking, that you OWE part of your life to someone else in the form of a debt that can never be repaid, is precisely what serfdom and feudalism was all about. When the enlightenment philosophers conceived of "inalienable rights" (i.e. duty free rights) it was in contrast to rights purchased by the neverending debt of duty as was so common in the feudal age.

Of course, for someone who is not interested in actually learning anything but to simply rant and "win a debate" regardless of how it is won, then ignoring the first part of the discussion allows one to make completely tangential semantic points about the meaning of "duty."

Society has become far more specialized and technocratic since the foundation of the United States. The costs of the justice systems are inevitably far more expensive as new and increasingly complex forms of human relations (commercial, familial, civil etc) require regulation. Even if that wasn’t the case, the distinction you make between collective funding through taxation for a justice system (needed for the “night watchman state” of the Locke/Nozick variety) and for a welfare state is one of quantity not quality. So far you are arguing about degree not principle. If I accept that my fellow citizens have rights not to be murdered or raped etc and I am prepared to contribute tax money for a public justice system that seeks to prevent such infringements, what is the principle difference with me recognizing that fellow citizens have a right not to die of preventable illnesses and me being prepared to contribute tax money to a public health system?

According to Hayek, the difference is that coercion (including taxation) by the state is only justified when it is used in a predictable manner to prevent coercion (the intentional acts of individuals) between citizens. Criminal violence is an intentional act whereas ill health arises from a complex matrix of variables including the availability of scientific and cultural knowledge and background impositions of property and contracts etc. But why should coercion only be understood as something intentionally done by individuals? In the case of ill health for example numerous epidemiological studies reveal patterns between illness and the structural conditions of poverty that show the state of a person’s wellbeing is not so unpredictable or random, but heavily affected by their place within social hierarchies (class, race, gender etc). If such patterns of ill health are fairly predictable, routine and structural, then I see no reason why they shouldn’t be viewed as unjustifiable coercion that hinder people in such ways that they should give rise to rights.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Shorter version of the above: libertarians are mean and selfish bastards.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Shorter version of the above: libertarians are mean and selfish bastards.

Also probably worth pointing out that libertarians, Rand cultists and the like only have a rhetorical relationship with actual neo-liberals.

A key aspect of neo-liberalism being the use of the coercive power of the state in support of e.g. various kinds of primitive accumulation, repression of dissent etc.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

t's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

Excuse me...attribution please.

Louis MacNeice

 

[fredfelt]

Outstanding post, ymu

Not really. People will always need stuff. There will always be a market. If there's a market capitalists will be willing to pay labour and resource costs to supply that market. Therefore it's not true to say that there would be 'no consumers left to buy stuff'.

It is true to say that there is constant downward pressure on wages and conditions though. A nation state's power to maintain rights of individuals are diminished in a world with few controls on enterprise.

When nations were able to exercise powerful control over corporations there was a degree of social responsibility required for corporations - such as pension rights, collective bargaining rights, tax returns to the country which they operate. These demands of corporations have been reduced and power of corporations increased. The power has shifted to such an extent that any country which attempts to place demands or regulations on business faces consequences. Ultimately if a state demands higher standards than another state corporations may be able to reduce costs to moving operations to the lower tax state.

This leaves less money available to invest in the future of the state (education, pensions, welfare, infrastructure) and fewer options for the state to control their own destiny. This is the neo-liberal vision of the future. In my mind it's quite bleak but now the world is set on this path I fear it's very difficult to return to a regulated market economy from what's sliding towards a global anarcho-capitalist economy.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Again though, neo-liberals may talk as though they want the state to vanish, but they actually rely on its coercive power for all kinds of stuff.

They just don't want state power applied to restricting corporate profits, they're perfectly happy to see it beating the shit out of dissidents.