Liberalism

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Liberalism

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I have noted Miles Mathis, for some time has been stating the following, this from one of his latest papers.
I have been saying for several years now that this rebranding of the left and the Democratic Party is a planned fail, manufactured to blackwash liberalism and drive everyone to the right, right into the waiting arms of the Republican Party.

Well, in that mold we see this week all the top alternative sites are reporting the SUNY professor claiming pedophilia is OK, but none of them are seeing it for what it is. Mike Adams at NaturalNews ran an article today revealing this guy, Stephen Kershnar (Jewish, of course), a professor of ethics and libertarian philosophy, actually comes out of West Point and the Air Force, where he also teaches and lectures.

That is the biggest red flag possible, since we have seen the Air Force was the main player in the January 6 false flag, even above CIA or FBI. We have seen Air Force bases as the focal points of hundreds of false flags over the decades, including the fake serial killers. We have seen that all military bases now have large psychological operations units, in which many Intelligence officers are assigned year-round duty manufacturing events. We have seen that there are literally millions of Intelligence agents and assets working for the various alphabet agencies, in and out of military, and that they have huge budgets to do whatever is necessary to destabilize us domestically. They do this mainly by creating fear via an endless line of fake events.

In one sense I do agree with Miles, it is the subversion of a group's ideas to identify with something else. But being English, my definition of "Liberalism" and "Left" would appear to be somewhat different to the average American.

In Britain "Liberalism" places itself squarely in the Centre. It is neither Left not Rights, and so this is why we can have Labour PMs, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Conservative PMs, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, all calling themselves "Liberals" first and foremost. And why the Globalist term "Neoliberalism" has "Liberalism" in its title.

So this thread, before I really come to any conclusions will begin by listing some people's thoughts on "Liberalism" and "Leftism", because I do find it fascinating Hitler, and his National Socialist German Workers' Party, official title, are classed by Leftists and a "Far Right" party.
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Left v Right

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Let's start with some infographics, that really tell us little except perhaps the views of the person making the graphic.

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I find it interesting that both Anarchism and Fascism appear on both left and right. And again the National Socialist German Workers' Party being "right wing", when Socialism "Workers of the World Unite" is considered a "left wing" ideology.

We also see where Liberalism gets its Centrist terminology. Through this, I suspect, it is clothing the other ideologies around it.
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Blair's Third Way

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British politics perspective, and possibly when Neoliberalism was born.
https://economictimeline.weebly.com/bla ... d-way.html
Blair's Third Way
  • Labour Party prime minister; Tony Blair, who followed Thatcher had run in 1997 on a platform of a “Third Way.”
  • It wasn’t the conservative approach, or the old labour party approach, which focused on trade unions, public ownership, a strong welfare state, government intervention and redistribution of wealth.
  • The Third Way was a shift to a more moderate platform that had free market policies, and maintained social programs; this was a new mixed economy.
  • It was a mix between the Keynesian economics and monetarism, or individualistic values with collectivist values.
  • During Blair’s running, the government increased public spending on healthcare and education and introduced a minimum wage.
Ebb & Flow of Liberal Economic
  • Following Thatcher`s unsuccessful attempt to boost the economy through pure capitalism, Blair turned Britain into a mixed economy, increasing government spending and providing people with social programs and benefits.

Tony Blair's Third Way would appear to be the official launching of the ONENESS doctrine, represented by the LGBT flag - the point in time where every political entity begins describing themselves as "liberal", strategically positioned between left and right. In stating this, it occurs to me the point of the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition*. How do you seamlessly shift the language and nudge conservative values into liberal values? Mingle the political parties so they become one, then use the old branding.

Also, I realise the article above conveniently misses out PM John Major, and he very much set up a lot of pegs for Tony Blair to inherit without having to get his hands dirty, particularly regarding the European Community. He was considered "a wet" - on the liberal side of conservatism. I remember his "Back to Basics" campaign, I'm interested to see how it fits with the Blair's vision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Basics_(campaign)
Major's speech, delivered on 8 October 1993, began by noting the disagreements over Europe:
  • Disunity leads to opposition. Not just opposition in Westminster, but in the European Parliament and in town halls and county halls up and down this country ... [a]nd if agreement is impossible, and sometimes on great issues it is difficult, if not impossible, then I believe I have the right, as leader of this party, to hear of that disagreement in private and not on television, in interviews, outside the House of Commons.
Major then changed the subject to "a world that sometimes seems to be changing too fast for comfort". He attacked many of the changes in Britain since the Second World War, singling out developments in housing, education, and criminal justice. He then continued:
  • The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they're still alive, they're still the best of Britain. They haven't changed, and yet somehow people feel embarrassed by them. Madam President, we shouldn't be. It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting a responsibility for yourself and your family and not shuffling off on other people and the state.

I highlight "responsibility", as surely this has been weaponised during covid, but we can see the start of the single narrative, and locking the general public out of the loop.

--------------

*I'm of the opinion all UK General Elections can be manipulated with such a high level of certainty they can get the exact result necessary for the next five years game plan. And if the required result is not reached, else a narrative change is needed, a new General Election is called to reset the board.

Example: with REMAIN losing the 2016 Referendum, parliament had certain people in power in the wrong place. The 2015 GE result was such to give David Cameron a majority, Liberals apparently ejected so he could begin the Referendum pantomime, even though it actually started five years earlier with the Lib-Con Coalition. It was also arranged to maximise the split between England and Scotland so the Scots would be nudged to vote Remain to spite the English - we saw this with the BBC running the same stories with two different headlines depending on whether you were looking at the Scottish or English region version. Likewise a more granular level of this was set up between Labour and Conservative voters in England which I will not address at this point. On losing the Referendum, Parliament was set to give the Article 50 trigger a relatively straightforward ride.

The 2017 GE was to change this dynamic and cause strife. It was also to give MEPs who would have been of great importance in the EU Parliament, but now about to be made redundant, seats in Westminster. At this point they had already decided they wouldn't go straight for a second referendum, but they ran the European Election anyway to get a feel for where the nation was. I think also they hadn't quite decided how to proceed, so they levelled the play in Scotland somewhat, allowing them to nudge either way in a subsequent election.

They came up with COVID-19 while running the BREXIT pantomime that paralysed the whole of the EU. The 2019 election was called, the result designed to fragment the UK into countries, like what they'd done to Yugoslavia. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now have separate political parties running them through Devolution which was given to us by Tony Blair's government. The Emergency Powers passed in the Corona Act allowed the National Health Service to be used as a Trojan horse to subvert the Act of Union 1707 and break up the United Kingdom. This is what they always intended to achieve via the European Single Market that morphed into the EU. -

Destroy the Magna Carta and Common Law, the Bill of Rights 1688 and Act of Settlement 1701 ...and this is what we are seeing repeated across the entire Common Law jurisdictions worldwide.


*In stating "they/them", I have in mind the Globalist, the Fabians, the Bilderbergers, though we should look at who is behind them also.
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Re: Liberalism

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Below is a transcript from DarkHorse Podcast Clips talking about American Liberalism and the apparent selling out of Noam Chomsky to totalitarian government. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are both PhDs in Biology, and I think they started this podcast in light of COVID-19 censorship of academics, it's from Livestream #115, Don't Say Anything at all.

Video Clip: Chomsky on opposite side of organic workers’ protest




I'll again just highlight some interesting points for now.

TRANSCRIPT
Bret Weinstein: I think many people, traditional leftists, are finding themselves bizarrely self excluded from their own revolution that they've been waiting for. So I've been watching Chomsky, who I've been shaking my head at for many months because he embraced the authoritarian nonsense. But my sense is, here you've got a guy who believes in the collectivist viewpoint, hearing about a collective action problem, the problem of vaccination and embracing what seemed to him, I'm sure, to be the scientifically responsible collectivist answer to this.

And here he is now on the opposite side of this organic workers protest that is, in fact, quite international across the entire west. You have these protests against mandates, and so you have icons of the progressive left who are now the opposite of the actual workers who are revolting from what appears to be the center-right. And I wanted to put this in context...


Heather Heying: Fascinating Incidentally, that the so called working class should be identified as center-right, when it has forever, at least in the United States, been the core voter base of the Democrats.


Bret Weinstein: My claim is that actually, this does make sense if you just simply track the parameters correctly. And that what's happening is a lot of people are using the heuristic, if it's on the right, it's bad. But what's really happening? We've all heard hundreds of people say left and right isn't really such a useful distinction anymore. It's authoritarian versus libertarian, for example. And no doubt there are other schemes that matter. But I don't think we should give up on left and right. I think it still matters. And if you map it correctly here, you'll see what's going on.

So my claim is, what defines the left is that it is biased in the direction of attempting to make progress. And what defines the right is that it is resistant to attempts to make progress on the basis that unintended consequences are an ever present risk. And so the question is, why is it that the workers are on the right now?

In part, what's happened is good governance is something that the left is favorable towards. This is a sympathy I have. Good governance is an important fact of civilization functioning. All of our governments have been captured by economic forces that exceed anything that our founders could have envisioned. They couldn't envision the Internet or economies of the scale or the kind of interdependence. And so the point is, those feedbacks captured the government and put it in the hands of powerful interests, which means that what could be good governance is actually not good governance at all. It's governance being used against the people, by those who have captured it. And we could go into why those people would be against the public. But basically, anything that corporations want that's also good for the people. It's already done. That means what's left for us to fight over are the things that would go one way if they were in the interest of the people, and they would go the other way if they were in the interest of the corporations, which is why they have corrupted these systems in order to get things done that aren't good for the people.


Heather Heying: It's part of why the idea of a private-public partnership puts so much fear into our hearts, because we know that what is meant by public is not 'us', it's 'the government'. At the point that private-public partnership gets invoked, it is the people who are out of the loop and who are not benefiting.


Bret Weinstein: It's private in public clothing. It's the Wolf in sheep's clothing.


Heather Heying: No, private public partnership is actually private corporations with actually supposedly public institutions, which are the government.


Bret Weinstein: Right. But in this case, the public institutions have been captured. And so it's really the puppet Masters are operating through both the private and they are operating through the public, which they captured.


Heather Heying: I think that's just a different way of saying the same thing. The idea is that the public government is supposed to exist for the people, not the other way around. And this is a point that's been made in England with regard to the NHS, the idea that we need to do things in order to protect, for instance, the health system. Like, no, the health system exists for us. We don't exist for it. The government exists for us. We don't exist for it. But at the point the government decides that it has its own agency, it's the AI revolution that we've been dreading in different clothing.


Bret Weinstein: Right. It's no accident it's aligned with these interests that are out of phase with what's good for the public. But in any case, Conservatives defend the past gains of Liberals, Liberals push towards progress. Some of that progress is foolish to pursue because the unintended consequences will be bad. So there's a tension between conservatism resisting the unintended consequences and liberalism pushing towards solution making that can be done. And what we have, the fact that civilization works at all is essentially by definition, the result of Progressives having actually pushed towards progress that was possible, made lots of mistakes along the way, which presumably were largely rolled back. But we have a functional system.


Heather Heying: But in the 20th century, we got workers' rights and children's rights and women's rights and civil rights and gay rights and disabled rights and on and on. Those are the ones that come to mind right away. All of these rights, in all of those cases, are actively being dismantled by some branches of so called liberalism and it's the Conservatives who are standing up and saying, wait, no, we keep those. And what they are arguing to keep is exactly what the Liberals were fighting for anything from ten to 100 years ago.


Bret Weinstein: And even more than 100 years ago. So I would argue that the founders, our American founders were radicals. They had a radical idea about good governance and they inscribed it into our founding documents. And the point is that you can see on the Department of homeland Security's site that they do not have that same opinion of those founding documents. That they have an antipathy for those founding documents is some force rolling back the gains of past Liberals. And the point is this is the natural role of Conservatives is to oppose it, right? And the real mystery here is, okay, what are the Progressives doing? They should be pointing towards solving new problems. They should not be on the side of unmaking the solutions to problems that we've already solved.

But what's happened is they have effectively been bought off. That the corrupt governmental structure has offered people who are feeling shafted something. And what they've offered them is they've offered to redistribute the wellbeing that exists among working people at various different levels. This is why the left is targeting people. They have been offered. You can Savage those people and you can have their stuff if you leave the rent seeking elites alone.

So the left is now a regressive force. It is not a progressive force. It is not a conservative force. It is a regressive force. And in the face of a regressive left you would expect Conservatives to defend the gains of past Liberals which is what we're seeing. And the really interesting thing is that some people see this. Glenn Greenwald sees it but Noam Chomsky doesn't. And that tells us something which is that you can't use these superficial labels. You have to look deeper into the puzzle.

There is a lot of interesting insights to go at, but as I want to get this safely up, I'll come back to them in subsequent posts. I did however underlined one fascinating statement above made by Bret Weinstein. In saying it he likely gave no thought to the following connection.

wells-blair-fabian.jpg
Novelist H. G. Wells, and former Labour PM Tony Blair, members of the Fabian Society, with Wolf in Sheep's Clothing logo centre

fabian-window-big.jpg
The Fabian Window, founding members of the society with logo depicted above the world being hammered into shape

Wiki:
The Fabian Window is a stained-glass window depicting the founders of the Fabian Society, designed by George Bernard Shaw. The window was stolen from Beatrice Webb House in Dorking in 1978 and reappeared at Sotheby's in 2005. It was restored to display in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics in 2006 at a ceremony presided over by then-Prime-Minister Tony Blair, emphasising New Labour's intellectual debt to the Fabians.

blair-window.jpg
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The stained glass window was designed by George Bernard Shaw in 1910 as a commemoration of the Fabian Society, and shows fellow Society members Sidney Webb and Edward R. Pease, among others, helping to build 'the new world'. Four Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw founded the London School of Economics with the money left to the Fabian Society by Henry Hutchinson. Supposedly the decision was made at a breakfast party on 4 August 1894. Artist Caroline Townshend (cousin of Shaw's wife Charlotte Payne-Townshend and daughter of Fabian and Suffragette Emily Townshend) created the Fabian window, according to Shaw's design in 1910. Also included in the window besides Shaw and Townshend themselves, were other prominent Fabians such as H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf, and Emmeline Pankhurst.
I suspect "stolen" can be substituted with "put away for safe keeping until the time was right for it to make a reappearance". And there are some very interesting names on that Wiki list that should be examined in more detail with regards to what we understand as "Liberal ideals".
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Re: Liberalism

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It isn't my intention to focus straight in on Tony Blair and the Fabian society, as I appear to in my last two posts, it's just the "Third Way" concept, I think, better explains Liberalism, than "American Liberalism" equals "Leftism". And it remains fascinating the symbolism behind a "wolf in sheep's clothing".

From 5 Ways to Recognize "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing":
A wolf in sheep's clothing is symbolic for someone who outwardly looks harmless and kind with good intentions but inwardly is full of hate, evil and deceit. We are warned of this false teacher in the book of Matthew in the Bible. This person seeks to twist truth and Scripture to fit their own agenda. They deceive their audience with false prophecy and teachings. Wolves teach false doctrine while appearing attractive.
Maybe "hate" is in the eye of the beholder, but it is an image that states, 'we appear like this, but that's not actually what we are about at all' in fact the "black" wolf in the "white" sheepskin would suggest, 'we are the opposite to what we appear to be about'.

On a different note from the above post, Weinstein starts by describing leftists as excluding themselves from their own revolution because of their belief in the collectivist viewpoint. But is the collectivist viewpoint solely in the reserve of leftism ideology? Is a cartel leftist?

Wiki:
A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. Cartels are usually associations in the same sphere of business, and thus an alliance of rivals. Most jurisdictions consider it anti-competitive behavior and have outlawed such practices. Cartel behavior includes price fixing, bid rigging, and reductions in output. The doctrine in economics that analyzes cartels is cartel theory. Cartels are distinguished from other forms of collusion or anti-competitive organization such as corporate mergers.

What about the Church, is it considered Leftist? And what of Church of England Archbishop Justin Welby's comment below? Is that in keeping with the true teachings of Our Lord and Saviour? Is it in keeping with Leftist ideology? Is it Liberal? And finally, does it echo Noam Chomsky's viewpoint regarding vaccines?

welby-quote.png
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Re: Left v Right

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collectivist.png

When talking about a collectivist viewpoint, I struggle to see the difference between left and right. How many "Independents" do we have in government these days?

Image

The First-Past-The-Post system is based on an individual from a geographical area standing and being elected to represent the people of that area. But this system has been subverted by unlawful "party politics" which collectivises these individuals into party groupings where the aims of the party trumps representation of the people. Members are "whipped" by threat of losing privileges - sitting on panels, committees, steering groups, etc, or being thrown out of the party altogether; this includes becoming a Minister, but Ministers, under the rules, should not be MPs anyway, as there is a conflict of interest between representing the State and representing the people. And indeed, those who push for Proportional Representation, the system favoured in central Europe and the European Parliament, basically choose to get rid of individual representation altogether.

Within PR systems, only registered political parties can stand, an independent candidate seeking election is barred. When a person votes, they are voting for a party not any one person in that party. The party chooses the people that represent it, and with the proportional nature of the system being based on percentage of total vote, voters can never "vote out" a candidate. This is why they were never able to remove Nigel Farage from the European Parliament until they removed Britain. And this is why, as I mentioned in an above post, the 2017 election was to move "global leader" MEPs who were about to be made redundant into seats in Westminster. They just switched out these MEPs in the European Parliament with other placeholder people. You cannot do that in FPTP, you must instead hold a by-election or full GE, and that is what we saw with the seemingly nonsensical 2017 UK General Election.

Another interesting comment from Heather, and which I would argue is completely wrong.
Heather Heying: Fascinating Incidentally, that the so called working class should be identified as center-right, when it has forever, at least in the United States, been the core voter base of the Democrats.

If the "so called working class" is people who work in manual jobs, which I think it is, they have always been the real small "c" conservatives. This class of people DO NOT WANT radical change. They want boring predictable normality so they can learn a job, do it, and get on with their lives. The "issues" people do not make up part of this group. Engels and Marx hung around coffee houses in London, they were not out doing manual work. And actually it leads on to another section Bret and Heather were talking about, that of BULLSHIT JOBS.
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Bullshit Job

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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

BY DAVID GRAEBER
The essay that lead to the book.
bullshitjobs.jpg

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes' promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the '60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done—at least, there's only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there's endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it's all that anyone really does. I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary”? What's necessary anyway? You're an anthropology professor, what's the “need” for that?’ (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn't seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I'd heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he'd lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, ‘taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.’ Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There's a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely (one or t'other?) Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It's even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It's as if they are being told ‘but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

Graeber comes to no real conclusion, or maybe he doesn't want to. But part of the problem with this argument is Capitalism somehow likes and desires market competition; it does not. It is more like Darwinism.

Any truly capitalistic business will attempt to kill all of its competition until there is none - Amazon for example. It is Survival of the Fittest, or the most underhanded. And once it has the biggest market share, iinstead of serving the customer, it can dictate to the customer. NO ENTRY FOR THE NON-VACCINATED for example.

OIP.jpg

Why am I going into this in a thread about Liberalism? For surely Capitalism appears today totally linked to Conservatism... And yet no, it traditionally and historically comes from Liberalism.
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Re: Liberalism

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Around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement Neoliberalism became the buzz word. At that time I very much classed myself on the Left and I couldn't understand why Neoliberalism had Liberalism in its title and yet it was the Left that was attacking it.

International Trade & Classic Liberalism

First paragraph from article explaining Classic Liberalism:
In recent centuries, many different economic theories have emerged to address pressing economic issues facing individual societies and the global economy. Diverse economic theories such as Marxism, Mercantilism, and Keynesian economics have been applied to solve economic problems and the changing demands in societies. One such approach that influenced contemporary global economic policy is Classic Liberalism. Originally developed during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, Classic Liberalism follows the principles of limited government intervention in the economy, free trade, and the idea that increased economic competition is beneficial for the economy. According to Classic Liberalism, these principles allow for the maximum level of economic growth and enable the individual to play the primary role in determining the proper economic decisions. Some of the major figures behind Classic Liberalism include Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, and John Stuart Mill. The principles put forward by Classic Liberalism explain the structure and mechanisms that define international trade and the economic successes created by current global trade policies. Despite the success of Classical Liberalism policies in the realm of trade, current global political trends threaten to alter the existing trade structure.

Slavery as free trade

This is the first section from the article, and I find it rather interesting, as the article confirms, slavery was always part of the Capitalists model, and again we get the hint of Darwinism.
For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slaveship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

For a generation, the relationship between slavery and capitalism has preoccupied historians. The publication of several major pieces of scholarship on the matter has won attention from the media. Scholars demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution, centred on the mass production of cotton textiles in the factories of England and New England, depended on raw cotton grown by slaves on plantations in the American South. Capitalists often touted the superiority of the industrial economies and their supposedly ‘free labour’. ‘Free labour’ means the system in which workers are not enslaved but free to contract with any manufacturer they chose, free to sell their labour. It means that there is a labour market, not a slave market.

But because ‘free labour’ was working with and dependent on raw materials produced by slaves, the simple distinction between an industrial economy of free labour on the one hand and a slave-based plantation system on the other falls apart. So too does the boundary between the southern ‘slave states’ and northern ‘free states’ in America. While the South grew rich from plantation agriculture that depended on slave labour, New England also grew rich off the slave trade, investing in the shipping and maritime insurance that made the transport of slaves from Africa to the United States possible and profitable. The sale of enslaved Africans brought together agriculture and industry, north and south, forming a global commercial network from which the modern world emerged.

It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), aimed to convince the French monarchy to deregulate key businesses such as the sale of grain and trade with Asia. Only a few specialists read them today. Yet these pamphlets, letters and manuscripts clearly proclaim a powerful message: the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise.
So we have the first economic ideas of laissez-faire ('let go') Capitalism by a group called the Gournay Circle in the decades leading up to the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799.
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Re: Liberalism

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I think it's useful to bring up the Potato Blight of 1845-1852 that effected most of Europe, we know it mainly for the million peasants who died during the Irish Potato Famine. Depending on the source, the role Charles Trevelyan played was either that of tyrant or useful middle-man. He was Permanent Under-Secretary to the Treasury, a civil servant, not an elected MP, and if we were to bring forward his role to say COVID, he would be Chris Whitty of his time. And remember Chris Whitty has just been Knighted for services rendered.

I am more concerned here with the policies he used, and the ideas that formed them.

The Irish Potato Famine and Charles Trevelyan
The British did not cause what we know as the Irish Potato Famine, which affected potatoes across the continent of Europe as well as Ireland. It was caused by a potato blight that destroyed the potato crops. But the starvation in Ireland and the deaths which resulted from the famine were wholly preventable and the British Empire did little or nothing to prevent it other than assign a man with a near-psychotic hatred of the Irish in general and the poor in particular, Charles Trevelyan to direct their policy. As the rate of deaths from the famine were nearing their peak, the man tasked with providing aid to the suffering wrote to Lord Monteagle that the famine was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population”.

In 1845, the year the famine began, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. For several decades Ireland had grappled with poverty and unemployment in its cities, and though there was ample Irish representation in the British Parliament, few workable solutions to the Irish problem were proposed. Irish resentment of the British, and British contempt for the Irish, was palpable. Most of the Irish, 80% of whom were Catholics, lived as tenant farmers on estates owned by absentee landlords, who used middlemen to collect their rents.

The crops the tenant farmers grew were for export and the profits went to the landlords. They were allowed to grow a few crops for themselves and their families, and the potato was one crop favored for this due to its yield and, unlike wheat, the fact that it could be used without further processing. When the potato crops failed they were left with no food, little money, and spent their days working crops which would provide no food for themselves. In response to the famine, the British government attempted to provide aid to these tenant farmers by removing tariffs on grain to lower the price of bread (the Corn Laws). This act led to the fall of the British government and the new government adopted the attitude of laissez-faire towards the crisis.

Charles Trevelyan was assigned to administer the new government’s response to the famine. Trevelyan believed that the famine was, “the judgment of God to teach the Irish a lesson”, and did little to provide help to the starving. What aid was sent to Ireland from the British Government and from British and other charities around the world was his responsibility to distribute, and he delayed the delivery as much as possible or tied its distribution to labor requirements. In 1847 Parliament passed the Irish Poor Laws, which established both workhouses and soup kitchens.

As it would do later in India, the export of food from Ireland during famine reached new heights as the Irish people starved. In the case of the starving Irish, the food they grew for the profit of the landowners was too expensive for them to purchase. At a minimum, the famine led to over a million deaths and over that number of Irish emigrated, many to the United States and Canada. In 1860 one of the founders of the Young Ireland Movement wrote, “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”

Below is a quote by Trevelyan taken from the Parliamentary Record of the time, it offers insight into the thinking, which in different terms is 'survival of the fittest'. In 'laissez-faire' capitalist intervention must be avoided, the market will fix itself.
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,
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Ayn Rand

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Doing a search on Laissez-faire Capitalism I came across this:

Ayn Rand on Laissez-faire Capitalism

Most people lack the courage to realise that Capitalism, real free uncontrolled, unregulated laissez faire capitalism - not the mongrel mixed economy we have today - was the ideal social system, which mankind had almost achieved then lost. They still lack the courage to realise that if justice, progress, abundance, peace, safety and goodwill are their social goals, then capitalism is the ideal to live for and fight for.

The truth we refuse to face and to admit is that the world conflict of today is the last stage of the struggle between Capitalism and Socialism, and that the whole world knows it. The most helplessly ignorant shopkeeper on any corner of any street on earth knows it in his own simple terms though he's unable to discuss political theory. Our attitude of moral guilt is not becoming to the leader of a world crusade and will not rouse men to follow us. And what do we ask men to fight for? They will join the crusade for freedom versus slavery, which means for capitalism versus socialism. But who will care to fight in a crusade for socialism versus dummies? Who will want to fight and die to defend the system under which you will have to do voluntarily, or rather by public vote, what a dictator would accomplish faster and more thoroughly? The sacrifice of all to all. Who will want to preside against murder for the privilege of committing suicide?

I quote from my article, 'Choose Your Issues' in the Objectivist Newsletter which I publish, quote: "Neither a man nor a nation can have a practical policy without any basic principles to integrate it, to start its goals and guide its course. If we do not fight for Capitalism, we have nothing to fight for, nothing to uphold, nothing to offer the world. We have no cause, no crusade, no moral justification."
This is an compelling argument against Socialism, and we can see she's describing a version of today's Communitarianism. But I'm still not sure what she sees as laissez faire.

Ayn Rand's Wiki bio
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge; she rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism. Instead, she supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, she is often associated with the modern libertarian movement in the United States. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.

Rand's fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy because of her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings have politically influenced some libertarians and conservatives. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.

Objectivism, Rand's philosophical system


This interview brings some clarity, I think this is the system Mathis is talking about, a section from the video:
Mike Wallace: Do you object to the democratic process?

Ayn Rand: I object to the idea that people have the right to vote on everything. The traditional American system was a system based on the idea that majority will prevailed only in public or political affairs, and that it was limited by inalienable individual rights. Therefore, I do not believe that a majority can vote a man's life or property or freedom away from him. And therefore, I do not believe that if a majority votes on any issue, that this makes the issue right, it doesn't.

Mike Wallace: Alright, then how should we arrive at action?

Ayn Rand: By voluntary consent, voluntary cooperation of free men, unforced.

Mike Wallace: How do we arrive at our leadership? Who elects, who appoints?

Ayn Rand: The whole people elects. There is nothing wrong with the democratic process in politics. We arrive at it by the American Constitution as it used to be, by the Constitutional process as we once had. People elect officials, but the powers of those officials, the power the government has is strictly limited. They will have no right to initiate force or compulsion against any citizen, except a criminal. Those who have initiated force will be punished by force and that is the only proper function of government. What we would not permit is the government to initiate force against people who have hurt no one, who have not forced anyone, we would not give the government or the majority or any minority the right to take the life or the property of others. That was the original American system.

Mike Wallace: When you say take the property of others. I imagine that you're talking now about taxes, and you believe that there should be no right by the government to tax? You believe that there should be no such thing as welfare legislation, unemployment compensation, regulation during times of stress, certain kinds of rent controls and things like that?

Ayn Rand: That's right, 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.

Mike Wallace: You are certainly enough of a political scientist to know that certain movements spring up in reaction to other movements. The Labour movement, for instance, certain social welfare legislation. This did not spring full blown from somebody's head. I mean, out of a vacuum this was a reaction to certain abuses that were going on. Isn't that true?

Ayn Rand: Not always. It actually sprang up from the same source as the abuses. If by abuses you mean the legislation, which originally had been established to help industries, which was already a breach of complete free enterprise. If then in reaction, labour leaders get together to initiate legislation to help labour, that is only acting on the same principle. Namely, all parties agreeing that it is proper for the state to legislate in favour of one economic group or another. What I'm saying is that nobody should have the right, neither employers nor employees, to use state compulsion and force.
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