Liberalism

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rachel
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Ayn Rand and Charles Trevelyan

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rachel wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 7:59 pm [Rand] I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute laissez faire, free, unregulated economy. Let me put it briefly. I am for the separation of state and economics, just as we had separation of state and church, which led to peaceful coexistence among different religions after a period of religious wars. So the same applies to economics. If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation and harmony and justice among men.
rachel wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 8:18 am [Trevelyan] Relief should be made so unattractive as to furnish no motive to ask for it, except in the absence of every other means of subsistence.

Ayn Rand and Charles Trevelyan are making the same claim. Where as Trevelyan's predecessor attempted to use an unseen hand to increase the supply of grain in hopes it would help the Irish situation, Trevelyan, in accordance to laissez faire doctrine, went for nonintervention. The thinking being, after a period of "adjustment" the mechanism would fix itself, and this is why Trevelyan set the bar for help so high.

The problem was two fold as the laissez faire economists saw it. Firstly with the Landlords, these people refused to take a hit when times were bad, they didn't see human labour as part of their managed resources. Instead, the Government would be expected to pay to feed Irish tenets while the Landlords (middle classes) kept on making profits. Secondly, the tenant farmers themselves, these people settled for very little, they worked the land for the landowners in the mornings, grew potatoes for food on their own plots as it was simple to grow and had a good yield, then with the rest of the day to themselves, did what they wished, which included getting drunk. This was seen as very unproductive.

Yet we see there was more to Irish tenant farmers than drinking in pubs. They spent their time creating things that were not for buying and selling, so therefore not governed by laissez faire economics.

Celtic-love-spoons.jpg
Celtic love spoons

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Claddagh rings

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Celtic Love Knot


http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a ... _id=004QE7
LAISSEZ-FAIRE POLITICS

The great thinkers of the 18th century discovered that "laissez-faire" economics and free trade led to peace and social justice (we now know it's because laissez-faire allows individuals to maximize "inclusive fitness"). In short, laissez-faire compels both peasants and tyrants to "unwittingly" lay down their weapons for beads and trinkets!

In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith made elaborate economic arguments for laissez-faire, but the attentive reader can find the hidden political arguments here as well:

"the king was ... incapable of restraining the violence of the great lords... They [made] war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and in the open country ... [was] a sense of violence, rapine, and disorder... [but] for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities they gradually bartered their whole power and authority [and] became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesman in a city."

"... commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived in almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors."
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Inclusive fitness

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Confirmation of the evolutionary nature of laissez faire economics:

Inclusive fitness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness
In evolutionary biology, inclusive fitness is one of two metrics of evolutionary success as defined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964:
  • Personal fitness is the number of offspring that an individual begets (regardless of who rescues/rears/supports them)
  • Inclusive fitness is the number of offspring equivalents that an individual rears, rescues or otherwise supports through its behaviour (regardless of who begets them)
An individual's own child, who carries one half of the individual's genes, is defined as one offspring equivalent. A sibling's child, who will carry one-quarter of the individual's genes, is 1/2 offspring equivalent. Similarly, a cousin's child, who has 1/16 of the individual's genes, is 1/8 offspring equivalent.

From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population. Prior to Hamilton's work, it was generally assumed that genes only achieved this through the number of viable offspring produced by the individual organism they occupied. However, this overlooked a wider consideration of a gene's success, most clearly in the case of the social insects where the vast majority of individuals do not produce (their own) offspring.

Overview
Hamilton showed mathematically that, because other members of a population may share one's genes, a gene can also increase its evolutionary success by indirectly promoting the reproduction and survival of other individuals who also carry that gene. This is variously called "kin theory", "kin selection theory" or "inclusive fitness theory". The most obvious category of such individuals is close genetic relatives, and where these are concerned, the application of inclusive fitness theory is often more straightforwardly treated via the narrower kin selection theory.

Hamilton's theory, alongside reciprocal altruism, is considered one of the two primary mechanisms for the evolution of social behaviors in natural species and a major contribution to the field of sociobiology, which holds that some behaviors can be dictated by genes, and therefore can be passed to future generations and may be selected for as the organism evolves.
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Adam Smith

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So in looking at information for this thread I've seen multiple references to Adam Smith. I kind of know who he is without really knowing who he is. So let's see what Wiki has to say as a means of a formal introduction.
Adam Smith FRSA (baptized 16 June [O.S. 5 June] 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Also known as "The Father of Economics" or "The Father of Capitalism", he wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. In his work, Smith introduced his theory of absolute advantage.

Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by fellow Scot John Snell. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at the University of Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow, teaching moral philosophy and during this time, wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day.

Smith laid the foundations of classical free market economic theory. The Wealth of Nations was a precursor to the modern academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, he developed the concept of division of labour and expounded upon how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity. Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were often satirised by writers such as Horace Walpole.
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Maajid Nawaz - COVID and Fascism

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Transcript: Maajid Nawaz on Why COVID Took Us Dangerously Close to Fascism
So, back to the idea that the state would seek to define your morality. It requires an array of tools to do that. When you look at fascism as opposed to communism, the distinction, so the communist would want to seize the means of production and have the state own all of it. But fascism is that partnership you spoke of. So a better word for fascism is actually corporatism, it is the merger of state and corporate power. Rather than a state seizing the means of production, it begins a partnership with corporates for the purposes of profit. And that's what we began witnessing happening under the COVID period.

Huge powerful, some of the wealthiest companies on the planet, big tech companies, big pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, right. If you were to look up who paid the largest criminal fines in history, the result that would pop up is Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, two big pharmaceuticals. The assumption that these companies - on violation tracker, you can go to the website, it lists all of the fines of fraud and all this stuff that they'd had to pay, the largest fines that you find - the assumption that these companies exist for your benefit is one that really must be interrogated. They exist for profit and you are the product, you are the thing that needs to be exploited for the purposes of profit.

So when the state began a partnership with these corporates, I took the view that during the COVID mandate period, in particular, our states, whether it's here in the US, in the United Kingdom, were no longer serving their people, but rather they were serving vested interests for the purposes of maximising profit, that's fascism. That's what Mussolini did. And it's how you utilise industry for the purposes of maximising profit to deliver a certain goal. and in that process, people are simply cogs in the wheel. The individual no longer matters, And it's incredibly, incredibly dangerous. And again, if you don't have that spiritual grounding Then there's a void and that void is filled by the state, and your morality then gets defined by the state.

That's very much Tony Blair's third way, called PPP - Public Private Partnerships.

How Tony Blair’s Labour built the ‘New Corruption’
https://socialistworker.co.uk/long-read ... orruption/
Thatcherism was, of course, decisively rejected in the 1997 general election. Labour came to office with Tony Blair as prime minister and Gordon Brown as chancellor. The problem was that, while the electorate had rejected Thatcherism, the Labour leadership had embraced it. Not only did they not roll it back, they consolidated it and indeed even extended it. Blair actually flew out to a famous meeting with Murdoch on the Hayman Island. He kissed the press baron’s ring shortly before the general election and gave him an effective veto over legislation once in power. And Blair also cultivated a certain Richard Desmond, at the time another press baron.

Brown actually came from the Labour Party’s soft left. As early as 1989, he had complained that “an extraordinary transfer of resources from poor to rich has taken place”. And he said it was “difficult to argue that there remains even a common interest between the top 1 percent to whom Mrs Thatcher has given so much, and the rest of the nation”. He complained bitterly about increasing inequality. By the time Labour came to office, the situation was considerably worse but Brown had changed. He had himself actually embraced Thatcherism. He was also wholly committed to Labour’s client relationship with the union buster Murdoch, competing with Blair for his favour.

What had brought about this change? Brown, it seems, had come to the conclusion that the labour movement was a permanently spent force and that in the modern world any government could only govern if it was at the service of the rich and super rich. Indeed, he achieved a breakthrough in social democratic thinking. He concluded that the only way a Labour government could possibly increase government expenditure was if the capitalist class was in a position to make a substantial profit out of it. This gave birth to the public private partnership (PPP) and the private finance initiative (PFI), which sees private firms build public buildings and then charge extortionate rents and maintenance costs.

The sheer scale of all this was incredible. By 2003, 34 hospitals, 239 schools, 34 fire and police stations and 12 prisons had been built with PFI finance. By the time Labour lost office in 2010, nearly all NHS investment was being financed by the private sector. Brown time and again proclaimed that Labour was the government of big business and that the enthusiastic embrace of the market was the way, indeed, the only way forward. On one occasion, he actually told the CBI bosses’ organisation that “business is in my blood”. He even went out of his way to praise Thatcher for helping Britain “rediscover a new and vital self-confidence”. And as for the trade unions? Well as Blair told his Alastair Campbell, “They can just fuck off.” And it was under Labour that private consultants were increasingly brought in to replace the civil service. Whereas in 1995 the Tories had spent some £300 million on private consultants, between 1997 and 2006 Labour spent in the region of an astonishing £70 billion.

......

It is always worth emphasising that it was under Labour that the privatisation of the NHS began. Decisive, however, is the fact that when Blair and Brown took office in 1997, the richest 1 percent had 20 percent of the country’s wealth and by 2004 they had 24 percent. According to one estimate, the richest 1 percent were individually on average £737,000 better off under Labour than they had been under the Tories. The position of the rich and powerful in British society had never been stronger, not since the 18th century. One last point worth making is how Brown responded to the 2008 financial crisis. Its impact in Britain was undoubtedly seriously worsened by his deregulatory regime. But before he lost office, he had made quite clear to big business that if re-elected he would impose a regime of austerity and carry through further extensive privatisations in order to protect the rich and powerful. This was not to be. David Cameron took office and launched his austerity offensive.

One last aspect of the New Corruption is the welcome extended to the global rich. Tens of thousands of people, many born and raised in this country, have faced the openly racist hostile environment policy. But for the global rich, there has been the golden visa policy, facilitating their settling in the country. Indeed, under the Tories, Britain has become a global centre for money laundering and has proven particularly attractive for rich Russians.

The Tories’ embrace of Russian money has actually caused some alarm in unlikely quarters. In July 2020, the Times newspaper in an editorial, called “Boris Johnski,” warned about the danger of the Tories being overwhelmed by sleaze. It pointed out that no less than “14 government ministers, including six cabinet ministers, have received donations from individuals or companies linked to Russia”.

Interesting given what is currently going on between UK-US and Russia...

Inflation Caused By Corporate Greed – Not Russia!
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Capitalism

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I can see why Marx pondered on Capitalism so much. As quoted in a post above - In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, [The Father of Capitalism] made elaborate economic arguments for laissez-faire, but the attentive reader can find the hidden political arguments... - We'll need to look closer at these arguments.

Wiki
An economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. As a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the following axioms: "the individual is the basic unit in society, i.e. the standard of measurement in social calculus; the individual has a natural right to freedom; and the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system."

Another basic principle of laissez-faire holds that markets should naturally be competitive, a rule that the early advocates of laissez-faire always emphasized. With the aims of maximizing freedom by allowing markets to self-regulate, early advocates of laissez-faire proposed a impôt unique, a tax on land rent (similar to Georgism) to replace all taxes that they saw as damaging welfare by penalizing production.

Proponents of laissez-faire argue for a near complete separation of government from the economic sector. The phrase laissez-faire is part of a larger French phrase and literally translates to "let [it/them] do", but in this context the phrase usually means to "let it be" and in expression "laid back." Although never practiced with full consistency, laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid-18th century and was further popularized by Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations.

While associated with capitalism in common usage, there are also non-capitalist forms of laissez-faire, including some forms of market socialism.

If we are basing it on a 'natural' system, then we know it doesn't make it good. Think of the lifestyle of a Cuckoo, remind anyone of Capitalism?


Common Cuckoo chick ejects eggs of Reed Warbler out of the nest


Now, this video, I used to really like David Harvey, he has a couple of podcasts going through Marx's Capital chapter by chapter. And this video is good at explaining the problems with Capitalism.


RSA ANIMATE: Crises of Capitalism (2010)


In this RSA Animate, celebrated academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?


RSA ANIMATE: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2010)


In this RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.
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Ayn Rand

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Interesting, Slavoj Zizek calls it Cultural Capitalism, but I hear a similar argument in Ayn Rand's final public talk on Altruism and Collectivism. This is worth looking at in more detail.

Ayn Rand's Final Public Lecture: "The Sanction of The Victims"

This is Ayn Rand's final public talk, given in November 1981 to an audience of businessmen at a conference in New Orleans sponsored by the National Committee for Monetary Reform. In this lecture, Rand observes that profit-seeking businessmen, despite conferring huge benefits upon society in the form of higher standards of living, are the "most hated, blamed, denounced men" in the eyes of so-called social humanitarians. This injustice is further compounded when these same victimized businessmen accept their attackers' moral standards and end up guiltily apologizing for their own productive virtues.

Recorded November 21, 1981

Ayn Rand: Why Altruism is Wrong
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Re: Liberalism

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Hungarian election landslide result leads to EU implementing sanctions?



The EU is a Disgusting Foul Beast


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Re: Capitalism

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Stakeholder Capitalism or Crisis Capitalism?
https://morgoth.substack.com/p/stakehol ... -or-crisis

It's worthwhile reading the whole of this article, but here's a preview. PPP, else Tony Blair's third way...
In the summer of 2020, during what was supposed to be a global lockdown, I watched prime American real estate burn to the ground at the hands of political activist group Black Lives Matter. I didn't expect fair or unbiased media coverage and I didn't get it, but what leaped out at me like flames through a store window, was the degree to which the corporate world actively endorsed and encouraged the riots and destruction. Surely this was "Woke Capitalism" going too far.

These corporations were not simply being politically correct; this was not just another case of an all-female Ghostbusters movie or a mixed-race couple in a TV ad. They were active participants in mass social unrest and politically-motivated violence. It was almost as if they had a "stake" in the crisis, a clearly defined role to play and that role was of the guiding hand, the weaver of narratives.

So-called "Stakeholder Capitalism" is the least sexy and therefore least discussed aspect of the Great Reset. The greatest Bond villain who never was can be mined for far more outlandish claims regarding trans-humanism and owning nothing, so the subject of ''Public-Private Partnerships'' tends to get left in the cold.

I feel it important to emphasize here: Stakeholder capitalism is neither new nor is it a creation of the World Economic Forum. Public-Private Partnerships have been around for a long time, particularly in Europe. What is new, however, is the scale.

Stakeholder capitalism differs from shareholder capitalism in that the drive to create shareholder profit at all costs is reeled in and replaced by corporations playing a far more active role in public life, with "ethics" being front and centre. It just so happens those ethics are social justice and progressivism.
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Agenda 21's little secret

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G. Edward Griffin - The Dirty Little Secret Behind Agenda 21


It seems to me this was always the point of laissez-faire capitalism. Marx gives us a description of the end game of capitalism, and it isn't a mom-and-pop-shop, it is mega corporations owning everything.
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Fascism comments

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Seen this good set of comments explaining Fascism, it's in response to "5 Ways To Stop Fascism with Paul Mason" video. I'm not posting it up, the thirty secs I listened to, it's shite. Anyway...
How does someone write a whole book on fascism without understanding what the word means.
Fascism is the fusion of the corporation and the state - and rejects individuality. Each person is not an individual but functions like a cell in a human body. Giving its life - work and everything for the good of the state. Corporations exist but only to serve the interests of the state. And the interests of the state are combined with the corporations.

Far right is extreme individualism. This means that on the right an individual is imbued with god given rights - namely life liberty and property. And the government only exists to preserve these rights.

Far left is fascism because again fascism is beyond individuality. Mussolini wrote an entire book on this. How could anyone be so ignorant? Far left is about the ends justifying the means and the greater good being more important than the individual.
The individual is the ultimate minority. This should be clear to even the most vapid.

For example you might be black - you might be female and black - you might be female and black with a mother from Nigeria. You might be female and black with a mother from Nigeria who grew up in Montana. You can keep drilling down into you have a minority of one.

This is the individual. And the American Right supports the rights of the individual.

Supporting "races" is a form of collectivism and indeed that belongs on the left. So the left might support a black man over a white man simply because of his color - without considering his actual character or merit.

Mussolini DENIES individualism as well and claims the era of individualism is over.

If you even read the first few paragraphs of his book you would understand this. Fascism is treating the state as a human body where each person is a cell - which serves the greater good of the state.

it's not a hard concept but likely its one you purposely try to deny because it reflects the collectivism that embodies leftism.

Communism as you may know was meant to be a system in which no one owns anything. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. In practice this leads to the state owning everything.

Fascism is the kissing cousin of Communism and is far easier to implement. Instead of the state owning everything - the state merely controls everything.

All the corporations and the individuals are subservient to the state - the way that cells in the human body are.

This is much the same as communism except that you can still have personal property and corporations - as long as they suit the needs of the state.

Now if you want to call this kind of government 'right wing" the words right wing and left wing have very little meaning in that context. Its a split where the only forms of government are two versions of collectivism.

Clearly it is not the kind of government the founding fathers had in mind. It is not the government of Locke - its is the government of Mussolini.
Delusional? How about we take a look at what the person who both invented the word Fascism and wrote the book on it has to say.

Here is what Mussolini wrote in his Doctrine of Fascism.

"Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life
stresses the importance of the State and accepts the
individual only in so far as his interests coincide
with those of the State, which stands for the
conscience and the universal, will of man as a
historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism
which arose as a reaction to absolutism and
exhausted its historical function when the State
became the expression of the conscience and will of
the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name
of the individual; Fascism reassert"


BTW the word comes from an Italian phrase meaning "a bundle of sticks is strong when bound together". This should give you a clue to the collective nature of fascism.

Fascism as you can see is a kind of collectivism. You claim my definition is "wrong" and cite some generic dictionary definition as if that really mattered.

Again we know what fascism is because we have current fascist countries and past ones to look to. We even have a literal book on it.

If I want to talk about Communism - shouldn't we look to Marx? Not the dictionary LOL. It's the same with fascism.

To put this into context:

Any country that mandates vaccine because it was for the good of the state (and hence the collective) is considered fascist.

Why Because state is asserting that you have no individual rights to your own body and thus they can dictate what they want to put in it for the collective - which in this case is the state.

That is fascism as plain as day.

And yet we have idiots running around worried about how "fascism" is coming to be because we don't support redistribution of wealth. LOL. Try to redefine objections to wealth redistribution as "white supremacy" or "authoritarianism". Bro. It is the OPPOSITE of that.

When the state denies individual rights and instead forces their will upon the citizens for the greater good of the state. THAT IS FASCISM.
Fascism and Communism are not EXACTLY the same but they are kissing cousins. Fascism and Communism are two sides of the same coin. One is National Socialism - and the other is international socialism.


Funny enough back when Hitler attacked Russia Stalin was like - oh those troops Hitler has on the border - don't worry. He is one of us. And his generals were like - I dunno it looks like he is going to attack.

Stalin felt this way because Communism and Fascism are so close. Nowadays so called "Communist" places like China are really fascist.

Marx style communism doesn't work anywhere - even a little bit. So the default real world "communism" is now just a kind of Fascism.

China for example has stock markets and is very proud of its country. And extremely angry when it is insulted. Which is a part of Fascism.
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