'The Resurrection' (detail) by El Greco 1596-1600, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Written for ATB by my dear friend Kenny Pierce
On Easter, Christians celebrate what C. S. Lewis called, The Grand Miracle, the one single event in human history that changes the meaning of the entire human story in general and our own personal story as well. A lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the contemplation of Easter. All you can do each year is contemplate what Easter will have to teach you this time around.
I think it a particularly great challenge to attempt to explain to people who aren't Christians, what it is that Christians see in Easter particularly since the Christian response to Easter is so highly individual, given the richness of the Myth That Really Happened. So I thought that I would take a shot at explaining to an imaginary audience composed of interested and intelligent, but unbelieving, imaginary friends one of the odd ways in which I think Easter looks different when you're seeing it from the other side, as it were. This is very far from the most important thing to understand about Easter. But it's interesting, I think, in its own quirky way, and it's almost certainly something that hasn't occurred to you if you are not yourself a Christian.
God is, of course, the Author of the human story, the Dramatist who created this world that famously is all a stage. Most monotheists would agree with that, at least in some sense. Now, Easter tells us what kind of story God is writing it is a mystery novel and a thriller and a romance all rolled into one, but most especially it's the kind of novel where you can't tell what's going to happen next. It turns out that the infinite God is not unlike M. Night Shyamalan the moment when the Resurrection happened is exactly like the moment the audience realizes that Malcolm is himself dead, only more so. The second time through The Sixth Sense the entire story is different from the first time you watched it, because you know the great central secret: Malcolm is dead. And for Christians, the second time through the story, as it were whether it is the story of one's own life and apparently pointless sufferings, or the New Testament story of the disciples cluelessly tagging along behind Jesus without ever figuring out what he was talking about, or even the second time through the Old Testament the second time through, the entire story is transformed, because you know the great central secret: Jesus is alive.
I have a wonderful Jewish friend, a person, by the way, considerably more intelligent and nicer than myself, and one who understands Christianity incomparably more deeply and sympathetically than I understand Judaism. One of my friend's objections to Christianity is precisely that the Resurrection, if it means what Christians and indeed Jesus himself claim it means, radically transforms the apparent meaning of the Tanach and upends all sorts of rabbinic apple-carts, even though the rabbis strove diligently and sincerely to understand the story God was telling. My friend cannot accept that God would be so deceitful and so unfair as to set the Jewish people up to believe one thing and then spring such an astonishing and
unforeseeable surprise upon them. But to a Christian, the Resurrection is the mother of all great plot twists, sprung with a dramatic skill that, as one would expect, utterly transcends the abilities of M. Night Shyamalan or Neil Jordan. Of the millions of people who saw The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game, there are bound to have been a few who figured out the secret before the director's great moment of triumph. But the Resurrection is the one unsurpassingly masterful plot twist that nobody figured out in advance. And Christians rejoice in that moment of unforeseen, unimagined, astonished enlightenment in very much the way moviegoers delighted in the shock of revelation in The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game. Indeed, we suspect that God shaped us to delight in plot twists precisely because He Himself delights in them. The pleasure Shyamalan and Jordan take in knowing that their skill made it possible for viewers to see one movie the first time through and a radically different movie the second time ˆ at the same time recognizing that in fact it has been the same movie, honest to its principles and playing fair with the viewer, all along ˆ is an echo of the pleasure God takes in His greatest of all surprise endings.
But of course, there is the difference that in both The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, the surprise, while artistically deeply satisfying, is also tragic and poignant. The Resurrection, by contrast, is not only the greatest of all surprise endings ˆ it is also the happiest of all unexpectedly happy endings. What looked on Friday like the most unspeakable of tragedies turns out on Sunday to have been the setup for the most delightful of all romantic comedies. It rather strains the bounds of credulity to think, for example, that Mark Darcy would really choose Bridget Jones, but that patent mismatch fades to nothing beside God the Son‚s choice of us as His Bride ˆ and yet while the former is fiction, the latter is triumphant fact.
Once Easter settles into your heart for good, hope can never be lost. No matter how bleak things may seem, the God who sprung the Resurrection on an unsuspecting world (and, to be candid, a not terribly grateful one, all in all) well, who knows what surprises He has in store for us? Easter assures the Christian of two quite remarkable things about the Eternal, Omnipotent, Omniscient God of the universe: (1) He loves surprises, and (2) He loves us.
Or, as the Christian songwriter/performer Carman Licciardello put it:
On Friday night, they crucified the Lord on Calvary,
But He said, „Don't dread; in three days
I'm gonna live again, you'll see.
When troubles try to bury you and make it hard to pray
It may seem like Friday night
But Sunday's on its way.
I love reading the comments of Kenny, ST, GD, nofate, g-man, and the others, but...Alexandra, where, oh, where are you? Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac Brachman | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 03:07 PM
slowtrain,
We just can't seem to get on the same page about what it is we're actually talking about. Which isn't actually surprising, since this thread has been all over the place and involves a dozen or so largely separate topics.
Just to make sure that at least on this comment we're clear on what topic it is that I'm trying to address:
In this comment I'm concerned to explain what, precisely, constitutes an ad hominem argument, because (a) I think it's very important to know how to spot 'em and (b) you seem a little bit confused on what is an ad hominem and what isn't. That's my main goal. But one of the things that determines whether a given assertion about a person's lack of character is an ad hominem or not, is the question of what exactly is the topic under discussion. And I think that by far the biggest problem we're having in this thread as a whole, and certainly the biggest problem that's keeping you from being able to see why your aspersions on the old economists' motives could be an ad hominem if my aspersions on Keynes and Imus and Carter are not, is precisely the fact that different people are talking about radically different topics at different times, and I think everybody's having trouble keeping straight what topic we're on at any given point.
So I think I need to go back and walk us through the way in which this thread has repeatedly leaped from topic to topic, engendering much confusion along the way.
Obviously Topic #1 was Easter.
Relatively early in the discussion I wound up discussing my personal faith journey (Topic #2), in which I mentioned in passing -- intending only to address its relevance to how I wound up fully convinced of the truth of Christianity -- the appallingly low (in fact pretty much nonexistent) standard of intellectual and professional integrity in secular American Departments of Religion, and included a throwaway comment about African-American Studies and Women's Studies.
You reacted strongly against that digression because, I think, you took me to be impugning all religious scholars rather than just the airheaded liberal variety. So there was a sideline in which you engaged me about the competence of Departments of Religion (Topic #3) and in which you and nofate went back and forth about racism (Topic #4), the latter of which I managed to stay out of for a while.
Topic #3 got resolved, I think, once it was clear that my aspersions on religious scholarship were aimed at a particular subset of religious scholarship rather than at religious scholarship in general. As for #4, I was doing a pretty good job of staying out of that one until the Ghost got me riled up with some highly dubious American "history," along with an implication that nobody could possibly disagree with her on the subject unless it was through ignorance of said history, and also along with the very bizarre idea that the American Constitution promises that "bigotry and racism [as defined by the Ghost] will not be aided and abetted by the law [which Ghost takes to be equivalent to 'will not be legal,' thus reducing her assertion about the Constitution to alternate-reality absurdity]." Furthermore, she implied that persons who are not liberal deny "that such conditions ever existed in America," allowing her to imply (at least this is what it looked like) that people like nofate (and myself!) who strongly object to affirmative action, are comparable to Holocaust deniers. I then took on Topic #5 (the distinction between allowing something under the law and imposing it by law) and Topic #6 (the nature of the guarantees actually made by the First Amendment, as opposed to the guarantees the Ghost thinks the Constitution ought to have made). In Ghost's response she introduced Topic #7: she tried to pretend that racism is the province of white Republicans and that liberals are the only hope of America's entering the Promised Land in which bigotry and racism no longer exist -- and THAT, precisely because I think that the Democratic Party has for almost a half-century been the country's most shameless enabler and institutionalizer of racism, with catastrophic results for precisely the people liberals claim to be helping, finally managed to get my dander up. (In that context, by the way, I interpreted her reference to "liberals" as a reference to the Democratic Party as an influential political force, rather than to the very small group of people who fit the highly idiosyncratic definition of "liberal" that Ghost prefers to apply to herself.)
Before I could respond, though, you posted a very long and involved comment that clearly came from deep in your heart. You were still focused on Topic #4 and seemed to be extending it into Topic #8, namely, the distinctive civic responsibilities of Christians. Much to my surprise, you pulled in a passage that I had written about Topic #6 and at least seemed to interpret me as having intended to address either Topic #4 or (marginally more likely) Topic #8.
So then I responded with a single paragraph that amounts to, "Sorry, slowtrain, I was talking about Topic #6," and then went to work on Ghost's Topic #7, about where today one can find the most virulent forms of racism and therefore which persons we should trust to provide solutions to that chronic problem.
Your next response seemed to be mostly agreeing with me on Topic #7, though I may not have understood it fully. But since you talked about "wrestling" with the issues I'd raised, I tried to make my position on a couple of those issues more clear. Specifically I advanced two propositions: that (Topic #9) the dominant and most destructive (though, it is important to emphasize, I never pretended the only) form of racism in today's America is the racism practiced by black people both against people of other races and against other black people, and that (Topic #10) the characteristics that lead to human success are both largely constant across all cultures, and also incompatible with the culture of victimhood encouraged among blacks by modern liberalism.
And that's where the Rutgers team and Imus made their appearance, in this aside that I wish I could take back just because the confusion it has caused makes me tired: "...if the Rutgers women's basketball team really is capable of feeling that they have been harmed in the slightest -- much less that their season has been ruined -- because a blowhard liberal radio shock jock made an ass of himself, then that is devastating news. Devastating not for Imus, but for the basketball team."
My point here was not that Don Imus was an ass. It was that the Rutgers players thought he was, and that they proceeded to react, to his perceived asininity, in an exceptionally unwise manner. That's because I was bringing them in as an example supporting my proposition on Topic #10. And, having brought them in as an example for #10, I re-used them, in conjunction with the radically different treatment Ghost's liberal watchdogs dealt out to the slandered Duke white boys, as an exhibit of my core contention vis-a-vis #9.
In your next comment you appear to have interpreted my contention under #9 (the dominant form of racism is black racism) as something I did not for a moment mean or, for that matter, say. "Friend," you observed, "you cannot legitimately place all the blame for this state of mind on 'black America.'" Quite right -- which is why I didn't place all the blame on them. I would call that Topic #9a except that there's never been any actually disagreement on that topic, just misunderstanding, since fully (I believe) resolved.
But in that same comment you raised a new topic -- but I think without realizing that raisingt a new topic is what you were doing. For you took up the question of whether Don Imus actually is, in actual fact, a fool, under the apparent impression that I had taken that position. In fact, this was an entirely new and completely unrelated topic. Thus we arrive at Topic #11, which is the nature of folly and the conditions under which it is appropriate to say that a given person is a "fool." This topic has nothing to do with anything that had gone before in the discussion except accidentally. It was a brand new, and quite different topic. It's very important to recognize that fact, because from this point on the confusion seems to have exploded exponentially.
You also, by the way, included a paragraph that I think illustrates a very common, but exceptionally pernicious, fallacy of thought, which I think I can sum up in your own words, "Who feels it, knows it," and, "Who feels it not, knows it not." This is such a widespread "self-evident" belief in our post-modernist society, and has (in the tragically lopsided formulation that it generally takes and that you have presented here) such devastating consequences for clarity of thought and consequent wisdom of action, that it deserves to be its own topic and its own thread -- but I haven't even gotten around to mentioning it until now. [sigh] As I say, I can't keep up. I suppose maybe I'll get there eventually.
At any rate, I dealt with Topic #11, as I thought, in a single paragraph -- which I very mistakenly thought was all that would be necessary to address your apparent contention that "fool" and "influential person" were mutually exclusive categories. And in that process I made what turns out to have been the disastrous mistake of mentioning Lord Keynes -- not in order to make any point about economics, but solely in order to illustrate the principle that a man can be highly influential and also a complete fool, at one and the same time. I wasn't even out to prove that Keynes and Carter were in fact fools, just to illustrate that I didn't think the two categories were mutually exclusive. My focus was entirely on what it means to call somebody a fool.
Your next comment is, I think, a very good illustration of the confusion that has reigned in the latter half of our discussion. You accused me of dodging the issue and concluded that my argument -- which was intended to show that "influential" and "fool" were not mutually exclusive categories -- failed to prove "that Don Imus is a categorical fool." But that's your issue, not mine. We were on two different topics, and I think we've pretty much stayed that way since.
Meanwhile Ghost had taken my passing reference to Keynes and turned it into yet another completely different topic: the validity of laissez-faire economics versus Keynesian economics. That gives us Topic #12. And once I got started talking about Keynes in responding to her, I couldn't help but raise Topic #13, which is that intelligence, far from precluding folly, actually tends to enable it. The similarity of Topic #13 to Topic #11 and to what you perceived me to be arguing back when I was actually arguing Topic #10, took the confusion to much greater levels.
I can tell that you are also frustrated by the way this thread has mushroomed into a vast array of topics pretty much completely related to each other, by this passage:
What leaves me chuckling is that in taking me to be dismissing Don Imus as a categorical fool and setting out to object to that dismissal, you were precisely taking a passing and inconsequential comment and suddenly turning it into the main topic of discussion, completely eclipsing, no, displacing the real subject, which was how one responds, if one is wise, to malicious, baseless and asinine criticism by a foolish person who is in no position to do one any actual harm. I really am chuckling, by the way; I'm not at all upset by the change in topic, except insofar as we've spent lots of time talking past each other. I think the topic of what constitutes folly is a very interesting topic, and if that's what you'd like to talk about I'm all for it -- in fact, I proceeded to address that topic at great length. I just want to be able to keep straight what it is we're talking about at any given moment, that's all.
So, with all that review behind us, I think I should be able to explain why I took your reference to the old guys' motives as an ad hominem.
If we had been discussing Topic #11 (how does one tell if somebody's a fool?), then the question of whether the old guys' were rationalizing their own selfish motives, would have been more or less on topic, because the question would precisely have been whether or not those guys were fools. In that case, the question of whether the ideas they were proposing were in fact valid ideas, would have been completely irrelevant -- because, as I've explained before, whether a person is foolish or not is determined not by the truth of the conclusions he winds up with, but by the logical leaps and rhetorical tactics he uses to get to that conclusion. Now, I still think that your approach, even in pursuit of Topic #11, would have been a poor one; but you would at least have been on topic. (It would have been a poor approach because you still wouldn't have been refuting an argumentum ad auctoritatem, which is the only time it's really valid to address yourself to a person's motives without first showing that his logic and rhetorical tactics are in fact faulty. So it still would be a form of the ad hominem, but not as blatant or serious as I at first took it to be. Note, by the way, that at no point in the discussion of Topic #11 have I ever argued that Keynes/Imus/Carter were fools because their motives were bad; I have gauged their folly consistently by their logic and tactics. This is a point to which I shall return shortly.)
But I at least was under the impression that you were discussing Topic #12, which is the validity of the ideas of laissez-faire economics. And if the point was to say, "Those ideas are flawed and invalid," then an appeal to the presumed motives of the people who developed the ideas, is the very essence of the ad hominem tactic of distraction.
So you are quite correct that I don't consider my comments about Jimmy Carter and others to be "resorting to an ad hominem," but you are quite wrong in thinking that I do not consider my comments to have impugned their character. The fact that you apparently think that the latter is a synonym for the former, shows I think that you haven't grasped what an ad hominem actually is. And because you (seemingly) don't realize that impugning somebody's character is not necessarily an ad hominem if their character is the topic of discussion, but is absolutely an ad hominem if their ideas are the topic of discussion, you don't realize that it matters enormously whether we are discussing Topic #11 or Topic #12 -- and so you don't notice the radical change in topic, not recognizing its crucial significance.
You see, when you say, "I recall that you started the whole argument with your comments about Jimmy Carter and others," your recollection is faulty. I didn't start Topic #12 with my comments about Jimmy Carter and others; Ghost introduced it by springboarding off of a tangential comment I made about Topic #11 and introducing a new main topic of conversation. I was actually continuing Topic #11 -- which I also didn't start; you introduced it by springboarding off of a tangential comment I made about Topic #10 and introducing a new main topic of conversation. I mean, I'm not complaining or trying to blame anybody or cast moral aspersions, because each of these new topics has been a topic of interest; I'm just trying to untangle the...well, not the "conversational thread," but more like the snarled up tangle of about a dozen conversational threads.
From your last, I begin to suspect that you have jumped to yet another topic, which is the distinction between idealistic utopian political philosophies and the actual practical result of implementing those philosophies in societies made up of foolish and self-deceiving and selfish and power-hungry and unscrupulous persons. If your point about the motives of the old guys was intended to reinforce that point, then I'm not sure I understand how you think it's relevant, but I would tentatively withdraw my evaluation of your old-guys argument as an ad hominem since you would ex hypothesi not have set forth that argument in the context either of Topic #11 or of Topic #12. I confess that I still don't see how exactly the motives of the old theorists would go to the point you're trying to make, but I'm willing to suppose that if I were to understand the point you're trying to make I would see the relevance of the old guys' motives.
Now, let's go back to the question of when it's appropriate to declare that somebody else's motives are bad.
First of all, there are times (such as the global warming debate) in which people tell us, "You should accept that what I say is true, even though you don't understand why, because I'm so much smarter than you and I'm telling you it's true." This is the argumentum ad auctoritatem -- the appeal to authority -- and while it is the weakest of all potentially valid arguments, it is, when properly used, a valid argument. Indeed, practically everything we human beings believe reduces, in the end, to trust in some authority or another; and it is arguable that the most important of all intellectual skills is the skill of being able to choose which authorities are most likely to be worthy of your trust.
Now, the whole point of the appeal to authority is that the person who is trying to convince you does not give you any arguments or evidence. He just says, "Trust me," or else, "Trust this person who I believe is trustworthy." So it's not a logical fallacy for you to attack the reliability of the authority rather than the quality of his arguments -- because he isn't giving you his arguments in the first place. His trustworthiness is his entire argument, and therefore the only way to refute his argument is to question his trustworthiness.
For a person to be trustworthy, he has to be trustworthy in two different respects. (1) He must be competent, i.e., if he believes something, then it's likely to be true. (2) He must be honest, i.e., if he tells you something, then it's likely that he believes it, and hence it is likely to be true.
Motive is relevant to both forms of trustworthiness, because there are lots of people who are liars and lots of people who are self-deceived, and motive goes both to the likelihood that somebody is lying to you and also to the likelihood that he is lying to himself. So if somebody is asking them to trust you, and you do not first check to make sure they have no conflicts of interest (such as the conflict of interest that you, slowtrain, point out in the case of the old guys), then you're a foolish, gullible person.
But note that all of this is relevant only within the context of the appeal to authority. If the person says, "You should agree that I'm right, and I'll prove it," and then proceeds to lay out evidence and logical arguments, then he is not appealing to his own authority, and to pretend to refute his position by impugning his motives is to comment an ad hominem tactic of distraction.
Now, there is still a situation in which you may rationally speculate about his motives even if he has given you real arguments rather than just saying, "Trust me." If you have already taken up his arguments on their merits and shown that his arguments are patently foolish and/or dishonest, why then it is legitimate to ask, "Why would he resort to such arguments? Why is he so desperate to believe something that he clearly has no good reason to believe?" Thus, if you had refuted the old guys' arguments, you could then have said, "And I think the reason they believed this nonsense is that it suited their class-warfare motives." You might have been wrong and uncharitable in so saying, but you wouldn't have been committing an ad hominem.
But if you start by impugning their motives, and then work from there backwards to, "...so therefore their ideas aren't very good," then that is, unquestionably and indefensibly, an ad hominem attempt at distraction, not a responsible and rational refutation of their position.
I mean, look back at my treatment of Keynes's folly. When I explained, at some length, that I think the Keynes of the General Theory was a complete fool, did I at any point mention motive? It's not that I can't come up with what I think are pretty good guesses at the motives that the Keynesian academic and political establishment have for trying to convince themselves that the General Theory is anything but a complete stinker. I can do that off the top of my head just by appealing to negative (but I think largely valid) stereotypes about politicians and members of the non-private-sector, non-profit-motive-constrained academic/bureaucratic intelligentsia. Given that a politician is by definition somebody who desires the power to force other people to do what he wants, and that people in general like to believe that their own motives are honorable, politicians naturally are going to prefer economic doctrines that say, "The common man needs me to tell everybody what to do for the sake of the common good," to economic doctrines that say, "The best thing I can do for the common good is mind my own damned business and stay out of the way of everybody else's." And given that people in general like to feel important and like to see themselves as benefactors of mankind, professional economists in general are going to prefer to trumpet economic doctrines that say, "My fellow citizens need economic experts like me to guide and direct the national and world economy," over economic doctrines that say, "It would be a really terrible idea to have me trying to guide and direct the national and world economy because I don't come within a thousand miles of being smart enough to keep from screwing it up." I mean, consider this: if you ask the ordinary American to name a famous economist who's alive today, seven out of ten won't come up with a name at all, and 2.9 of the other three will say, "Alan Greenspan." As long as the Keynesian ideal of central-bank manipulation of the money supply for the common good is still government orthodoxy, there is always a chance that Mr. Obscure-Outside-Of-Academia Economics Professor could become the Federal Reserve Chairman and thus become, for a few heady years, somebody whose every utterance is a matter of breathless fascination to the stock markets and news media of the world. But if the more extreme Austrians win out and the Federal Reserve Act is repealed, how is Martin Feldstein supposed to become a household name? It's not like winning the Bradley Prize is going to do it for him.
Thus it is absolutely beyond question that Keynesianism tells politicians and academic economists several things they very badly want to hear: they matter, they are smart, and they need to be in charge, for everybody else's sake.
Yet this is the first time in the conversation I've addressed the motives behind the tremendous influence of the putrescently awful General Theory. I have not once said, "Keynes was a fool because Keynesianism let him believe about his own unmatched brilliance and his own importance to the world what he narcissistically wanted to believe to begin with." Instead I have said that the Keynes of the General Theory was a fool because his logic has gaping holes everywhere you turn and his rhetorical techniques are deeply and shamelessly dishonest.
Again, the only thing I've said about Jimmy Carter's motives is that he seems to be obsessed with self-justification. But even then, I thought I had made it quite clear that it was precisely the fact that his books are getting more and more irrational and more and more shamelessly dishonest, that led me to the conclusion that he is increasingly driven by inappropriate motives. I certainly did not say, "Jimmy Carter is obsessed with self-justification, and therefore his books are wrong." The logical progression goes the other way -- and it must go the other way. You must first show that the reasoning is bad and the tactics unethical, and then proceed to speculate on what motives would drive a person to resort to such reasoning and such tactics. If you try to argue in the other direction...
...then you commit an ad hominem.
Now, a personal note:
I have never seen any hint of that in your arguing, my dear slowtrain, in which respect my admiration for you is genuine and sincere. When I say that you seem to me to be committing a logical fallacy, please do not presume that I think you're doing it on purpose. I don't mean that at all. Even the most careful and most sincere person stumbles into a fallacy every now and then, just because people are fallible.
Finally,
In that case, I am 100% on your side on this one, and I apologize for having misinterpreted your earlier comments.
Posted by: Kenny | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Kenny,
[part2]
There is nothing ad hominem about my comment. It was made in the context of the actions and times of the people alluded to. As a matter fact, I find the suggestion that I have run out intellectual steam and have become informed only by the emotions, somewhat disparaging. Remember, you positioned the debate, granted that Keynes has only been sixty years dead, a much shorter period than two centuries, these are all historical people, (sixty years or 200 years make no difference), whose claims and influence are still one way another relevant. If they were not, we would be here debating about them. I recall that you started the whole argument with your comments about Jimmy Carter and others, not by merely refuting their arguments. Yet, you don’t consider your comments “resorting to an” or having impugned their character, even when it is obvious that their character is what your comments were all about. Don’t get me wrong, this is not in their defense and it is not that I admit I am guilty of your accusations, but it is necessary to point out the inconsistencies in your arguments. I don’t think that my comment bears on motives as much as it bears on conducts. In any case motive is just as important as conduct and you know it, may be not to you but it is to me. If you don’t believe me ask any court judge, prosecutor or defense lawyer. In fact, in many aspects of life, it is more important than any argument you could make, because in the end it constitutes the essence of any argument. I can reasonably say that most people who become idealistically or intellectually corrupt do so after ascending to the high plains of power that inhabit those placements, not before. Of course, the potential must have existed, but it is not the same as motives. For example, today’s politicians, who have been nourished by the principles of liberty, whose goals undergo rapid metamorphoses, first, ideals turn into ambitions, then ambitions become obsessions to remain in power for as long as possible, often losing the inhibitions that underlie liberty, in their perverted pursuits. Suddenly, they become arrogant and uncaring, even in matters with serious implications to the lives and well-being of Americans. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” It has been said that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is fair to say that the criticism of anything done by those in power, be it political or economic power, to keep others out of power or to make it difficult for others to acquire power, cannot be legitimately characterized as aspersions. I stick to my comment in spite of your mischaracterization.Our own democratic system, for crying out aloud, was wrought by the wisdom of the founders — not perfect but pretty good and intentioned. But all you have to do is look around to see it has been exploited by people after they get into office. It is even worse now than ever; a situation that Bob Dole, Gerald Ford, among others, and most recently Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska (the longest serving Republic) said, “When I got here we had 50 - 60 votes a year. Now, we have 50 -60 votes a month. But those are posturing votes — they votes that are trying to catch the other side off place or to try to make someone vote against what their constituency wants them to vote. It is very political. One party loses seats because the other wins. It is hyper political, pretty soon then that party is on top, but then they get more political because they don’t want the change to come again.”
There is no question that the general proto-capitalist processes of alienation and commodification advanced by many of the people in question at the time and that accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism, inspired plenty of aberrations from whatever the ideal might have been. That does not mean that industrialization was bad, but to argue that things could not have been done differently or to ignore any wrong that may have existed in the process, even if there were unintended consequences, just because of the benefits of results strikes me as falsehood. At least for the fact the cost of what has been accomplished as benefits would only be the apparent and incomplete cost, not the real cost. Someone once said to me “War is hell, but war is inevitable, we go to war to defend ourselves, but in general war is not entirely bad, look how far the human race has come in technology and it is all because war accelerates development and human advancement. I think I have said more than I had intended to on this particular issue — I wouldn’t want to create a “diversion” by saying more, not that I hope to escape being accused of doing just that by what I have said already. Well, I will stick to my motto, nonetheless.
I don’t see the need to make such logical leaps; they are unnecessary and in fact, out of context. These are not what I said or implied. I admit that the portion of my comment that you allude to dwelt on hypotheses, but I disagree that they were Whorfian in nature. In fact, I was careful to present it as a hypothetical dialogue. However, if the hypotheses prove to hold true, then the conclusion would apply. But based on your response, I assume they don’t, so there is nothing to worry about. I suspect that the problem you have is with the second part of that paragraph, but I qualified that in the paragraph that followed.Kenny, the day that I perceive a hint of desire in me to score points or win an argument by sarcasm, slander, and malicious innuendoes, is the day I quit arguing. And the day that I perceive that this is how debates are done at ATB, is the day that I bid the ATB community farewell. As said before, I am not a fan of Friedrich Nietzsche the only thing he ever said that I agree with him was, “Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I am not upset by how much money Ken Lay and his gang made at Enron, not necessarily, but I am upset by how they made that much and the consequences of their actions and I don’t find wealth offensive, but find theft offensive.I am a true capitalist and I am pretty wealthy myself; better believe it, friend. :-)
Posted by: slowtrain | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 05:19 AM
Kenny,
I have been trying to post my comments for days now to avail. I hope it makes it this time. [It was divided into two parts in case length was the problem only to realize the culprit was the word "f...ing" in the text, which I removed. xxxxA]
[part 1]
Perhaps the reaction to Don Imus’ comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team might have been different or should have been different. I have said many times already that it is matter of trust between African Americans in general and Caucasian Americans in general. I suspect, that much of the emotion that met Imus’ comments stemmed from the historical context of the language that he used, not necessarily because Imus said those words. I am inclined to believe that if those words had no historically context or baggage from the past — they would not have raised the consternation they did. And to deny that fact or minimize its implications seems to me disingenuous. Having said that, I must also say, as I have said many times before, that as much as history should not be truncated, it should not be read backwards either. Unfortunately, the comments in question do have historical baggage and the baggage is associated with deep emotions.
I originally brought Don Imus in not in order to prove that he was, in fact, a fool, but in order to discuss what would have been mature and success-oriented behavior for those whom he insulted -- and who, by their reaction, clearly considered him to be a fool. Very well, grant them their premise -- did they respond to this "folly" the way a wise and mature individual would respond? Or did they respond in an immature and self-destructive manner? And if the latter, is it not true that the subculture (including their families and coach) that encourages them to that unwise reaction, thereby does them a grave disservice, especially in light of the fact that our own reaction to others' malice usually has the capacity to do us far more harm than the others' malice could hope to do on its own?
It is not as simple as that. Say you encounter a guy who suffers from PTSD as a result of the Vietnam or Korean war, what would you say to him when ever he experiences as flashback, say from a loud noise, a certain smell, the sound made by a car suffering from a wrong or bad octane. Would you try to understand and try to allay his fears of would simply tell him to get over it and quit acting like a fool? Agreed, this analogy may not satisfy everyone, but it will do.
I bet, if the insult had been, say, “mother-f...ing bitches”, “sore losers”, “go home, you pathetic losers”, “crack heads”, “crack queen”, “welfare queens”, instead of phrases with allusions that suggested symbolisms of the racists past, I believe people would have reacted differently.
You see, labels take on such strong significance that people often ignore facts that contradict their previously held beliefs. In the United States of America, stereotypes abound. These exaggerated generalizations impact people of all descent—African Americans, Jews, Irish people, Italians, Polish people, Arabs, etc. Common stereotypes include, the associations of Italians with organized crime (the Mafia), the perception of Irish people as beer guzzling, cantankerous and belligerent, Chinese people as sheepish and obsequious, African Americans as intellectually inferior, lazy and dependent, Polish people as offish, Germans as mechanical, unfeeling and sadistic, or the English as stiff and apathetic, French as sensual and immoral, Romans as violent and imperialistic, American Appalachians as hillbillies—backward, “moon shiners” and gun toting white trash, and so and so forth.
But if your were to insult German by calling him Nazi or an Italian by calling Fascist, I am willing to predict their response would be different as opposed to the previously mentioned stereotypes. I am also willing to predict that if someone insulted you by calling you “dope head”, “arrogant, pompous, rabid war mongering capitalist SOB”, your reaction would be different from say if the person had called you “Jew-hating Christian, racist SOB”. Wouldn’t it?
Permit me to say once more that the lack of trust between African Americans and Caucasian Americas troubles me greatly, as I imagine you are concerned about it too. However, as much as it does, I don’t think I can blame the girls, their coach and families for reacting the way they did, neither can blame people, including you, who believe that they were foolish for reacting the way they did and Imus was not; or perhaps that both sides were foolish for acting as they did. Because at the heart of the matter is trust or lack of it, which neither side has enough of for the other.
As long as there is a fundamental lack of trust, these problems will remain, since it is very difficult, perhaps impossible for someone to constantly be on guard as to be politically correct 100% of the time — such a life is an incredibly difficult life to live and must take a huge chuck of fun out of life. Not that one is incapable of respecting others by not saying nasty things to them and about them, when measured against how he knows those people would feel by what he says to them, but because of the fear of being perceived as a racist, bigot or a malicious person. Sadly, this is the condition many Christians have found themselves, in that everything we say, which given our moral foundation, would likely be at variance with prevailing cultural sensibilities, are viewed as judgmental and bigoted. So what do you do? Do you retreat and live your life in secret or do you play along — living hypocritically by the demands of “unreasonable” people who are out to get you no matter what?
As for laissez faire, I had hoped that my position was clear enough, since I made sure to qualify my statements in my comments. I did not categorically say that the concept was bad. I did argue against the excess associated with it or better stated, with some of the proponents, but not the essence, as evident in the excerpts below:
1. “The whole notion of laissez faire or strict free market economic system requiring no intervention is hogwash.”
2. The careful regulation, not undue regulation mind you, that was suggested is not necessarily what some economists and West European nations already view as the social market or mixed economy that seeks an equilibrium or middle road between socialism and capitalism, aimed at maintaining a balance between a high rate of economic growth, low inflation, low levels of unemployment, good working conditions, social welfare, and public services, through government intervention. This model would remain essentially respectful of free market. In fact, the social market economy is opposed to both a planned economy and laissez-faire capitalism.
Frankly, I don’t think my position on laissez faire is essentially different from yours. Which is a somewhat awkward, the following, after all isn’t it the whole issue with Keynes and his theory.
Posted by: slowtrain | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 05:12 AM
When will Alexandra be back?
*pouts*
Posted by: Liquid | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 11:03 PM
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 08:46 PM
I'm not sure Alexandra is around to respond to the honor Stix..... we all wish she was here.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 08:24 PM
Blogommentarians,
In light of the fact that Kenny launched this thread with a Christian theme, is there any objection---despite the detours into Keynes, Don Imus, the Reverend Tawana etc--- to mentioning a Christian innovation online which you may or may not be familiar with?....Good.
( As for GD, she may be pleased, if not alarmed, to hear of a wiki connection. Not that it's anywhere near that level of influence, success or notoriety at this stage. But the child, apparently, has encountered no interventions or suction procedures on its way to the light, i.e. it has been born)....
Conservative Christians now have their own Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia — Conservapedia.
The site was launched in November by Andy Schlafly, an attorney and son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and 58 students at a school in New Jersey, mediabistro.com reports. It currently has more than 3,800 entries.
According to Conservapedia's mission statement, "Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-America . . .
"Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America."
http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
Notice: gringoVision is not a licensed affiliate of said site, nor authorized to advise on it or make available a guided tour. All inquiries, whether religious, theological, political, spiritual,epistemological, eschatological or in some cases confessional, should be directed to conservapedia at your convenience.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now at gringoman.com VIRGINIA TECH: AMERICAN JIHAD?
Posted by: gringoman | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 08:20 PM
I forgot to tell you the link
http://stix1972.typepad.com/stix_blog/2007/04/thinking_blogge.html
Posted by: Stix | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 04:37 PM
You have been tagged for the Thinking Blogger Award
Posted by: Stix | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 04:29 PM
Some interesting new comments by former CIA Chief George Tenet who's "slam dunk" comment was used by this Republican administration as both a justification for the war in Iraq, and an excuse to blame intelligence for Republican administration failures.
Why do I think that the American People trust and believe ANYBODY more these days than this Republican administration and its supporters? There is more and more truth that is coming out every day. The administration's attempts to control the media by brute force of strident assertion is failing.
Â
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 04:43 AM
Sharpton is small potatos. The real focus should be on the failures of this Republican administration and the failure of modern Republican political ideology. Americans should resolve never to let Dubya happen again.
truthdigÂ
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 06:22 PM
But that doesn't change the fact that what Sharpton is doing is the right thing to do, and I think that in itself should be applauded, even if we keep in mind the obvious fact that people can do the right thing for the wrong motivations
Absolutely. But (there's that word), I can't keep the rest of it out of my thinking, even when I say I agree that at this time he is doing the right thing. It really hurts to type that. Ouch!!! I guess it wouldn't bother me so much if I thought he had really changed his ways and could believe that his real motivation is not as it appears on the surface.
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 02:57 PM
[Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson] are taking the crushing of 1st amendment rights of conservatives as far as they can, under the guise of improving the racial dialogue.
I think you're almost certainly quite correct. But that doesn't change the fact that what Sharpton is doing is the right thing to do, and I think that in itself should be applauded, even if we keep in mind the obvious fact that people can do the right thing for the wrong motivations.
Posted by: Kenny | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 01:14 PM
But when a man resorts at every turn to dishonest tactics of debate (Keynes's shameless misrepresentation of his opponents' views is an obvious example, his obfuscation is another, his constantly equivocal use of the terms he presents as central to his theory is yet another), to gaping holes in logic, to hopelessly inconsistent and even self-contradictory usage of terms -- then that man is a fool...a person who relies on debating tricks and logical fallacies is a fool even if, by sheer blind luck, he happens to have stumbled into a correct opinion through the back door...
Are you sure we're not talking about Al Gore?
Cooperation is not the natural state of society; its dominance in American society, and the robustness and longevity of that dominance, is precisely what makes America the place more people in the world want to move to than any other five countries you could name all put together...Those who would practice violence, and those who would practice fraud, must be restrained, or else the climate of trust that is a prerequisite for willing cooperation will be destroyed, crippling the societal mechanisms assumed by most proponents of laissez-faire. And such people cannot be restrained by appeals to their better nature or by remonstrance or by offering to cut deals with them; those who practice violence or fraud can only be restrained by violence, and by such forms of fraud as undercover police work or double agents. Which means you have to have a government, before you can hope to have a free market.
But that does NOT mean that most of the regulation that modern America assumes is necessary, is in fact a good idea...
Absolutely, including the follow on regarding... "creating unintended side effects and perverse incentives that are likely to cause more harm than the law manages", in regard to such events as Enron, or currently, the VT shooting. Many are out there calling for improved gun laws, ignoring the fact that there are already so many on the books that it takes a legal expert to keep up with them all, creating a boon for the lawyerly class. From what I have read and seen, the shooter obtained his guns legally. Enron shareholders bought and sold their shares legally. In both cases, what law, or bureaucratic process, could have possibly protected those poor souls from the unpredictable use the firearms were put to, or the insidious manipulation of the Enron insiders? So we go on another politically motivated regulation writing spree, creating more unintended consequneces as we go.
Mac: LOL! My mom is actually, really upset because they kicked Rosie out! She truly believes that Rosie left, not due to anything she said or did, but "to pursue other avenues of creative expression", or whatever bilge line was offered by the execs over there.
I agree with you about Sharpton. He is trying to improve his credibility with his base, get Tawana Brawley even further in the background, and lay back for a while. His eventual target is probably conservative talk radio. He and Jesse have discovered something powerful and they are taking the crushing of 1st amendment rights of conservatives as far as they can, under the guise of improving the racial dialogue. And if you libertarians out there think they don't include you, think again. Quotas, racial set-asides, government regulation and contracts, control of educational content, and the return of the Fairness Doctrine with a new name and look is what they are all about. But, hey, "I'm not going to send mixed signals," Sharpton told the Post".
And I can walk on water.
Posted by: nofate | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 11:46 AM
Sharpton is just making a stab at improving his credibility. He can look reasonable when it suits his purpose; he was able to do so back in early '04, in the early primary going among the Dem. contenders that year for Pres. It's not that hard to look reasonable in Dem. presidential primary debates when you're standing next to the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom have the emotional maturity of 13-year-olds. In that company, of course, John Kerry looked positively Lincolnesque. But every once in a while the old opportunist and hatemonger would peak out from behind the mask. Carol Moseley Braun (former senator from my state, the seat now held by Barack Obama) who is (relatively speaking) a racial moderate, even called Sharpton out on his forays into militant rhetoric on the campaign trail during her brief run that year. (Braun became the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate in '92, lost the seat to conservative Republican and political neophyte Pete Fitzgerald six years later. Fitzgerald, independently wealthy and a political dilettante (spelling?) as well as naive, decided not to run for another term; he was sick of Washington by 2003 and announced that year that he would not run in '04. Obama won the primary against a number of other Dem. contenders that year, then beat Republican last-minute replacement Allan Keyes (the original Republican nominee having dropped out of the race following a scandal over marital problems) in a landslide).
Anyway, I was posting tonight to express my deep sorrow that Rosie O'Donnell is resigning from "The View," thus depriving us once again of wide exposure to her sagacious and considered opinions on the serious issues of the day. It's really breaking me up. I'm crying so hard that I'm laughing. Shalom, Mac Brachman
Posted by: mac Brachman | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 09:19 PM
I'm totally serious; Al Sharpton has just set about undercutting the whole point I was trying to make earlier about "liberal" attitudes toward racism. Not that one man's possibly temporary change of heart instantly alters the entire cultural dynamic, but if Sharpton really takes the black hip-hop industry out behind the same woodshed he took Imus out behind, he'll be a shining counterexample for what I was trying to argue is the liberal habit of shameless double standards and coddling of black cultural self-destructive behavior.
So I say again, three great big cheers for the Reverend Al Sharpton -- which is the first time I think I've ever said those three words one afte another without sarcastic intent.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 08:32 PM
Hooray for Al Sharpton!
I'm entirely serious. This may be the first thing Sharpton has ever done that I've approved of, but I approve of this wholeheartedly.
I'll see about coming back later tonight and explaining why it is that I'm using the Rutgers women as a teaching example, for my own children, of how not to handle the inevitable situations in which you are publicly but patently unjustly insulted by a malicious jerk. But right now I'm helping my daughter cook farsh so I have to get back to work.
KP
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 08:28 PM
April 18, 2007
The Rev. Al Sharpton has cancelled plans to honor Island Def Jam CEO Antonio "L.A." Reid during the National Action Network's annual four-day convention, which started today in New York. The New York Post reports that the change of heart comes on the heels of the controversial remarks made by Don Imus. Sharpton's next target is record labels who release Hip-Hop music that contains questionable content.
"We don't want to be inconsistent," Sharpton told the Post. He also tells the paper that he spoke to Reid about the change of plans. Sharpton says that they both agreed it would be inappropriate for the civil-rights activist to give the record executive an award at a conference where Sharpton has promised to name the names of corporations that support "gutter" rap.
"We're going to target companies over the issue of lyrics. I'm going to be more forceful. I'm not going to send mixed signals," Sharpton told the Post
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 07:29 PM
Yeah, I see what you mean Kenny.... (not really).
As I said before, this was all nonsense, and the only good that came of it was some additional controversy over "rap" music lyrics which have transcended simple racism and entered the ether zone of bald-faced advocacy of criminal activity and demeanor of which I disapprove. I also think it has as much to do about making quick money as anything else.
Anyway, I think the pressure is on.
Link
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 07:26 PM
Back from the meeting and wanted to clarify something from the previous comment, specifically this bit:
"But if you think that it was anything but foolish, unwise and ungracious for them actually to choose to respond that way, then I feel bad for your children (if you have any), whom you are failing to equip for success and happiness in life."
I only meant in this particular respect; I didn't mean to be making a sweeping assertion of anybody's complete failure as a parent. With eight kids of my own I know probably better than anybody here that you can't teach your kids everything you'd like them to know and that you have to pick your battles. There are a number of ways in which I feel sorry for my own children because I haven't yet been able to get the light bulbs to turn on for this or that principle of success. So I hope nobody felt totally slammed on there...I did specify "at least in this respect" in the penultimate paragraph, but I should have been far more rhetorically careful in that earlier bit.
Humble apologies. I should know better than to try to dash something off in a hurry when I know I'm not going to have time to re-read it before hitting the "Post" button.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 11:54 AM
"Who's 'they'"?
The Rutgers basketball team (corporately -- news accounts give me no information about how they responded as individuals) and their coach. One account of their response may be found here. Note the more or less complete absence of grace (both in the sense of grace under fire and in the sense of granting grace to an offender); note the insistence that they had been deeply harmed; note one player's statement that, "Right now, I can't really say if we have come to a conclusion of whether we will accept the apology."
If you can't understand why the Rutgers players might feel like responding that way, then you have little sense of empathy for your fellow human beings. But if you think that it was anything but foolish, unwise and ungracious for them actually to choose to respond that way, then I feel bad for your children (if you have any), whom you are failing to equip for success and happiness in life.
Not having time to explain myself further, I refer you to the Book of Proverbs: "A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult," and, "A man's wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense." I would also recommend Lewis Timberlake's It's Always to Soon to Quit and/or (preferably "and") Born to Win; or the ever-shrewd advice of Judith Martin. The way the Rutgers basketball team and their coach have responded to Imus's remarks has been foolish and immature, and it is a great pity that those responsible for raising/mentoring them have not done a better job of equipping them for success and happiness in life, at least in this respect.
And I would expand on this theme but I have to leave now for a meeting in another building.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 10:25 AM
Or did they respond in an immature and self-destructive manner? Who's "they"?
I don't think anybody made a compelling argument to have him fired given the status quo.... Not even sure why they fired him.
Gonzales should be fired for compelling reasons, and he's staying on apparently.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 04:49 AM
Wow. I don't have a prayer of keeping up here.
Let's see. I think I'll focus on slowtrain mostly, this evening. No offense, Ghost.
1. I originally brought Don Imus in not in order to prove that he was, in fact, a fool, but in order to discuss what would have been mature and success-oriented behavior for those whom he insulted -- and who, by their reaction, clearly considered him to be a fool. Very well, grant them their premise -- did they respond to this "folly" the way a wise and mature individual would respond? Or did they respond in an immature and self-destructive manner? And if the latter, is it not true that the subculture (including their families and coach) that encourages them to that unwise reaction, thereby does them a grave disservice, especially in light of the fact that our own reaction to others' malice usually has the capacity to do us far more harm than the others' malice could hope to do on its own?
2. But I do think that Imus, Keynes and Carter are/were fools, in that they were the opposite of wise. In Imus's case, I would I suppose be willing to stand corrected, since I have not made myself thoroughly conversely with his...well, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and call it "thought." (Though, let's face it, in political talk radio that which usually rises to the top is hardly the cream.) The few times I've stopped to listen to his show when it was being aired in H.E.B., he's usually seemed to me to be saying something that did no credit to his intelligence and open-mindedness; but I am willing to admit that I do not have a very extensive sample of his thought and polemic to hand and may hold him in less respect than he deserves. (And yes, oddly enough, one of the H.E.B. grocery superstores in Austin is apparently managed by somebody who is a big Imus fan, and they at least used to keep a television up on the wall in between the cheeses and the express lane that, when I went past it on a grocery run, seemed to be tuned to Don Imus, of all people, at least half the time. Very bizarre, that always seemed to me...what, exactly, was Don Imus considered to have to do with fresh mozarella? But I digress.)
In Keynes's and Carter's case, however, they were/are both very intelligent men, but unquestionably men who turned/have turned their intelligence to the task of self-deceit. It becomes more clear with every book that Carter produces that he is obsessed with self-justification and utterly incapable of taking to heart the advice of Proverbs that "even a fool is considered wise if he keeps his mouth shut." As for Keynes, I genuinely and soberly have in all my life read only three books with a higher average of logical fallacies and dishonest rhetorical tricks per page -- and all three were by religious people pushing wild-eyed theological theories (that the King James Version is the One True Word of God; that worshipping on Sunday is the Mark of the Beast and any day now the American government is going to make it illegal to go to church on Saturday; and that if any Christian doesn't "speak in tongues," there is something wrong with that Christian). I mean that absolutely literally, as in the sense of actually counting the fallacies and dishonesties encountered across a sample set of pages, and as in only having read three worse books, all of whose titles I remember clearly ("The King James Version Defended," "National Sunday Law," and "The Holy Spirit and You") -- and the last of those three I'm not sure was as bad as the General Theory. Not even Elaine Pagels resorts to folly with the loose-the-hounds-and-whip-the-horses enthusiasm that Keynes did in the G. T.. So I don't really give a damn how smart he was or how influential he was; the book is a foolish book, full of folly from beginning to end, and as far as I'm concerned that gives any person of sense full justification to refer to the man as a fool.
But if it bothers you to call him a fool, then don't. It won't really bother me that much either way.
But there is one thing you said that does bother me very much indeed, one thing I absolutely would deny with all the passion I have, roaring at the top of my lungs in outrage. That would be the apparent implication that I believe that if a person is a fool his "actions are of little consequence" and "he should not be taken seriously." Au contraire, I think that the cost in human tragedy of human folly, and most especially the folly of the eloquently and persuasively foolish, is incalculable, and rivals the damage done by human malice. As my friends have heard me say often, there are few things in this vale of tears more destructive, more catastophic, more apt to Satan's hand, than are the good intentions of a fool.
I really believe that you have mistaken my discussion of how the Rutgers basketball themselves should have responded to a malicious person who fatuously, needlessly and egregiously insulted them, with (apparently) a general principle that when people are behaving foolishly we should pay them no mind even if they are accumulating an enormous following. Not that I'm blaming you; I'm sure it was my failure to express myself clearly that led you astray. But, to be honest, it really is somewhat disheartening to find that I seem to be considered capable of believing that Hitler -- whom I believe I specifically referred to earlier in this very discussion as a "damned fool" -- was a person whose actions were of little consequence and who ought not to have been taken seriously. One likes to think one has come off as at least a little more intelligent that that.
You also seem to be a little confused about how I would determine that a person is a fool. It has very little to do with the conclusions they draw. It has everything to do with the reasoning that they put forward, i.e. the path they take in order to arrive at that position, and/or the tactics they use to try to recruit others to their side. If the question is whether or not the Austrian school does a better job of explaining economic law than do the neo-Keynesians, then I'm not going to consider a person a fool just because he's a neo-Keynesian, even though I think on the whole the Austrians pretty much kick the neo-Keynesian metaphorical butt. Let us say that, when I listen to my neo-Keynesian acquaintance's arguments, I find that he and I differ on the emphasis we would place on various facts, or that we hold a difference in factual opinion that isn't easily verifiable in either direction, or something along those lines -- something that requires an exercise of the faculty of judgment, in other words. But let's also say that I find that his tactics of debate are honorable and his reasoning generally (even if not perfectly) free from gaping logical fallacies and reasonably self-consistent. In that case, then I absolutely do not consider him a fool, even though I consider him to be disastrously in error.
My friend Jim Raffensperger, to name just one example, is I think diametrically opposed to me on every single imaginable theological and political viewpoint; but I do not think he's a fool even though I think he's almost always wrong. When he gives his reasons for believing that global warming is a more imminent threat than nuclear-equipped Islamofascist terrorism, I think he's wrong -- but I can see that he is proceeding from some very fundamental worldviews that I don't happen to share but that would require a herculean effort of self-criticism for him to be able seriously to question, and that given those truths that he holds to be self-evident, his positions (usually) are reasonably coherent and well-thought-out. And when he argues, he argues like a man of good intent and good will, and while I do think that usually I can explain how he's wrong and where he's going logically astray, it usually requires some pretty careful thinking, and I usually learn something from having had to think through what he presented. (This is in contrast to, for example, my Baptist Sunday School teacher who long ago informed me and my fellow eight-year-olds that when Jesus turned the water into "wine," the "wine" didn't have any alcohol in it, because "it couldn't possibly have had any alcohol in it, because it didn't have time to ferment.") So Jim, even though I think he almost always winds up wrong on politics and religion, is a man whom I deeply respect, whom I do not at all consider a fool, and whom I consider myself very lucky to have as a friend and as a constant challenge to my own views and preconceptions.
But when a man resorts at every turn to dishonest tactics of debate (Keynes's shameless misrepresentation of his opponents' views is an obvious example, his obfuscation is another, his constantly equivocal use of the terms he presents as central to his theory is yet another), to gaping holes in logic, to hopelessly inconsistent and even self-contradictory usage of terms -- then that man is a fool. Jim Raffensperger is no fool; but John Shelby Spong, with whom Jim agrees far more often than with me, is a fool of the first order. Indeed, a person who relies on debating tricks and logical fallacies is a fool even if, by sheer blind luck, he happens to have stumbled into a correct opinion through the back door, as it were (I need merely mention one name: Jacques Clouseau). For example, there are a great many very foolish people, who for very foolish reasons, believe that Jesus rose from the dead. The fact that I happen to believe that He did, in fact, rise from the dead, and that therefore they happen to be correct in their conclusion, doesn't change the fact that they believe the truth only by luck (or by God's grace, if you choose to take the quite orthodox Christian view that luck and coincidence are what happens when God plays with us the same kind of game that we play with our kids when Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy leaves them stuff overnight).
To take your own example, there is plenty of room for reasonable people to hold quite opposing views on the wisdom of the Iraq War. I certainly would not say that anybody who opposed it was a fool, nor do I agree with the Ghost that it was foolish to go into the war (though a number of things about the way Bush approached the war struck me as rather head-scratchingly unwise at the time and don't, alas, seem to have worked out in fact; and thus the Ghost and I come closer to agreeing on Bush-in-Iraq than we do on most topics political...which is still not all that close, of course). But that doesn't change the fact that it is also quite possible for the same views to be held by very unreasonable people...in fact, by fools. And you can tell the difference by the arguments fools wield and the argumentative tactics to which fools resort.
3. I'm not particularly interested in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions of laissez-faire, because they do not affect current policies in any very meaningful sense; and as far as the variations of laissez-faire that are viable and active today, you would seem to be taking the extreme, practically anarchist Rothbardian version as being the "standard" version, so to speak. I don't think this is fair to most of the Austrian school, personally, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion. At any rate, the version of laissez-faire that I would personally defend is my own variation of the Austrian analysis, in which I take the view that economically significant human action is primarily that which aims at motivating other persons to assist one in the attainment of one's ends. I would distinguish three ways in which people get other people's assistance. The first is by inducement to willing cooperation for mutual benefit. The second is violence or the threat thereof. The third is fraud (that is, inducement to cooperation, but under false pretence of mutual benefit). I would say that the problem with the anarchist forms of laissez-faire to which you seem to want to reduce the whole spectrum of laissez-faire thought, is that they underestimate the extent to which the natural condition of man is to be practising or being victimized by violence or fraud. Cooperation is not the natural state of society; its dominance in American society, and the robustness and longevity of that dominance, is precisely what makes America the place more people in the world want to move to than any other five countries you could name all put together.
Those who would practice violence, and those who would practice fraud, must be restrained, or else the climate of trust that is a prerequisite for willing cooperation will be destroyed, crippling the societal mechanisms assumed by most proponents of laissez-faire. And such people cannot be restrained by appeals to their better nature or by remonstrance or by offering to cut deals with them; those who practice violence or fraud can only be restrained by violence, and by such forms of fraud as undercover police work or double agents. Which means you have to have a government, before you can hope to have a free market.
But that does NOT mean that most of the regulation that modern America assumes is necessary, is in fact a good idea; nor does it mean that you can very often authorize government violence (which you do every time you pass a law or institute a regulation) without creating unintended side effects and perverse incentives that are likely to cause more harm than the law manages to do good. As P.J. O'Rourke puts it, more or less (I'm going from memory here), the one law that Congress never fails to enact is the law of unintended consequences. Nor does the basic practical necessity of at least minimal government, address the question of justice, which is to say, the fact that from the perspective of right and wrong, an act of violence or fraud may be considered to be prima facie unjust unless it can be shown to have some sort of rationally based excemption from the general ethical prohibition of violence and fraud.
4. It's rather disappointing to see you resort to an ad hominem, which is what you do when you say that neoclassicism "was advanced by proto-capitalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the so-called upward mobility. The fact is that once proponents became established they spent the rest of their days trying to prevent others, at least as many as possible, from becoming upwardly mobile, as they had been." There is absolutely no point in casting aspersions on the motivations and presumed ulterior nastiness of people (a) who have been dead two centuries and thus are very unlikely to be persons whose private motivations you can accurately pass judgment upon, and (b) who did NOT say, "You should believe this because we say so and we're smart" (in which case, since they would have been advancing an argumentum ad auctoritatum in the manner of modern-day global-warming Armageddonists, it would be absolutely incumbent upon their audience to look behind the curtain for potential conflicts of interest). Instead they laid out detailed rational defenses of their position, in books that are still readily available to anybody who lives within convenient range of a half-decent college library. If their logic was valid, their premises well-founded and their terms used with clarity and precision, then I don't care if they were the moral equivalent of Teddy Kennedy -- their position holds, and to impugn their motives is to resort to an ad hominem tactic of distraction. If their logic was fallacious, their premises inaccurate and/or their terms ambiguous and imprecise, then I don't care if they're the moral equivalent of Mother Theresa -- their arguments are worthless and so are their opinions on the subject. But in that latter case, you don't need to impugn their character. You need merely refute their arguments.
As for the immoral greed of the Enron executives and the need (which you appear to be arguing for, though maybe I misunderstand you there) for the government to protect us all from the modern-day "robber barons" (a pretty thoroughly misleading analogy, by the bye, but we'll let that pass for now), this is I think a classic example of the way libertarians (not quite the same thing as laissez-faire economists though there's clearly overlap) think well-intentioned proponents of government "correction of the deficiencies of the free market" would do us all a huge favor by not trying to be so damned helpful. The Enron debacle -- and by the way, a sizable percentage of my own personal good friends are people who got well and truly screwed over in the Enron debacle (I work in the energy industry in Houston, after all), so I hold no affection for Lay or Skilling or any of that bunch -- was seized upon by folks in Washington as evidence that government regulation was necessary in order to "protect" American shareholders and workers. The result was the piece of legislative excrescence known as Sarbanes-Oxley, which every year costs honest American shareholders and businesses and working-class folks far more money than Enronesque corporate fraud could hope to cost us, though it's a boon to the kind of already-privileged (and, since a while back we were talking about how liberals perceive themselves as the Soldiers Of Justice Turning Back The Racist Tide, mostly white) consultants to whom big chunks of corporate payrolls are diverted in order to ensure compliance. Note, by the way, that money spent by corporate America on already well-off white compliance consultant dudes like my delightful friend Mark Winc, is money that corporate American therefore canNOT spend on people like my equally delightful, but quite a bit less privileged, naturalized American friend Luz Montoya. You seem to be upset by how much money Ken Lay made at Enron; well, Richard Breeden is making an obscenely offensive (if you find wealth offensive, that is) $800/hr...by running a "corporate governance" fund to put some sort of control on those nasty corporate excecutives making so much more money than does the common man.
I can agree that shareholder fraud is a problem for which we would like to find a good solution (and you will remember that I think the one truly valid role that government plays is precisely to step in to prevent violence and fraud). But, as tends to be the case when the government arrives on the scene in order to impose solutions, the cure in this particular case has turned out to be worse than the disease. (Granted that Mark Steyn is not necessarily the most objective of observers of the Conrad Black trial, but still, I have yet to see even a remotely competent attempt to refute the points he makes here, which can be summed up by the rhetorical question, "if Conrad Black is the disease, is 'corporate governance' the cure?")
I am not at all intrinsically, philosophically opposed to attempts on the part of the government to control fraud; that is one of the few good reasons, in my mind, for government to exist at all. Thus, unless you insist on talking about some sort of purist, Rothbardian, utopian/anarchist form of laissez-faire, I don't think it's accurate to say that laissez-faire leaves no room for the government to toss into prison executives who lie to and defraud their customers and employees and shareholders. My objection to Sarbanes-Oxley is therefore purely prudential, as opposed to my objection to coercively-funded public education, which is fundamental and philosophical. But that doesn't change the fact that, as in my opinion generally winds up happening, the cure that Congress has managed to come up with is worse than was the original disease, and the American working man whom you are eager for Congress to protect would be considerably better off if Sarbanes and Oxley had followed the example of Bill Clinton and found ways to spend their office time that were, shall we say, professionally (even if not otherwise) unproductive.
Good Lord, it's almost 2:00 a.m....okay, stopping now. More later, I suppose.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 03:01 AM
…that many grow to adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions(me) of so-called "thinking people." Many of these "thinking people" could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.
nofate,
Many of these so-called "thinking people" have arrogated to themselves the position of gods or custodians of knowledge and wisdom and have essentially come to see the rest of the “us” as intellectually passive, since many people have abandoned the responsibility of critical thinking — an essential component of a rational and socially conscious person, because “we” would rather be entertained than challenge absurd and fallacious claims. “We” have in essence become subordinates to these crackpots and pseudo-intellectuals, eagerly accepting every ridiculous claim they present, without question. Considering the frequency of error and the number of times claims have been revised or replaced, I am astounded at the apparent gullibility with which majority of “us” often at “our” own peril accept the nonsense frequently put forward by these so-called “experts”. Kenny’s quotation earlier, of G. K. Chesterton, as saying, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried", perhaps illustrates the situation best.
Sadly but true the world is effectively being amused to death. Checkout Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), by Neil Postman in which he argues that mediums of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death). They are traffickers of lies and deception. Christian philosopher and apologist, Ravi Zacharias, commenting on this social malignancy said:
Unfortunately, the propagation of lies is not restricted to conventional military warfare-it has also been the most insidious weapon in the war of ideas. And what is more, the practice of lying, according to surveys, is at epidemic pro-portions. Assuming, of course, that those surveyed told the truth.
As valuable a commodity as it is and as indispensable as it is to meaningful existence, truth is possibly the most violated concept in our world. This is more so now than ever before in history. The lies that punctuate business transactions; the lies by which trusted relationships have been destroyed-these we are aware of. The greater tragedy is not just that we live with a proliferation of lies, but that this is probably the first time, certainly in western civilization than society at large does not believe in the existence of absolute truth.
This radical step toward moral and metaphysical skepticism, which asserts the very impossibility of knowing the laws by which our individual lives must be governed, is the single greatest indicator of our postmodern mind. What is most surprising is that a disbelief in truth is not restricted to the liberal element; instead truth as a category has been jettisoned even among conservatives.
Posted by: slowtrain | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 03:02 PM
Kenny, since I never actually heard of Keynes before you mentioned him I basically prepared myself for this discussion by thorougly reading this Wikipedia article...
and this article on Keynesian economics...And then I cut and pasted the parts that I liked with some additional comments about why I thought he was a good guy...Then I watched this video by Billy Bragg on You Tube...
!!!So Kenney takes the time to try to explain laissez-faire and gets this in reply:
"Laissez faire is an extremist position. Certainly laissez faire as an absolutist macro economic position will work (though I question whether any economic philosophy can be applied absolutely). However, one has to accept the human condition that obtains from such practices.... good and bad. To genuflect to laissez faire, one has to accept that greed is the quintessential human motivation upon which economic philosophy should be guided..."
Absolutely stunning. Then Kenny: "An hour and a half explaining to Ghost what laissez-faire doctrines actually teach -- which is nothing whatsoever like what she seems to think they teach, though the misconceptions are not in the slightest her fault..."
Kenny, you have got to be the most patient teacher I think I have ever seen. I get so frustrated reading GD's pompous, self-serving, obviously politically motivated tripe, and I do not have the time, the skill, nor the motivation when it comes down to it, that I feel like (hypothetically) throwing something through the computer screen at times. There was a time where I thought GD was on a par with people who truly have a "classical" education, but she keeps letting the cat out of the bag, as in: "I basically prepared myself for this discussion by thorougly reading this Wikipedia article"!
At least she's being honest. I have been following your discussions with GD and slowtrain with interest, and even though I cannot count myself fluent in the theories you are speaking of, I have done some reading that I think has served me well in deciding what has validity and what is dross. And, since GD can do it, here is my "liberal" contribution from Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Annointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, 1995, Basic Books division of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., pp. 1-6:
"Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality....What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane (my emphases- after this, "me"). Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin(me). For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence(me). The benighted (or us poor souls that think there is validity in Hayek, Friedman, laissez-faire, and such) are to be made "aware," to have their "consciousness raised," and the wistful hope is held out that they will "grow." Should the benighted prove recalcitrant, however, then their "mean-spiritedness" must be fought and the "real reasons" behind their arguments and actions exposed. While verbal fashions change, this basic picture of the differential rectitude of the anointed and the benighted has not changed fundamentally in at least two hundred years (author's footnotes omitted).
These are not mere debating tactics. People are never more sincere than when thay assume their own moral superiority. Nor are such attitudes inherent in polemics, as such. Some very strong polemicists have argued that their opponents were well-meaning and even intelligent-but dangerously mistaken on the issue at hand. Some "may do the worst of things, without being the worst of men," Edmund Burke said in the eighteenth century. Similarly, when Malthus attacked a popular vision of his time, exemplified in the writings of William Godwin and Condorcet, he said: "I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor." Yet Godwin's response was quite different. He called Malthus "malignant," questioned "the humanity of the man," and said, "I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made."
More was involved here than mere differences in personal styles of polemics(me). This asymmetry in arguments reflected an asymmetry in visions(me) that has persisted for centuries. When Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serdom attacked the welfare state and socialism in 1944, he characterized his adversaries as "single-minded idealists" and "authors whose sincerity and disinterestedness are above suspicioan," but his own book was treated as something immoral, which some American publichers refused to publish, despite its already demonstrated impact in England. Similarly, a 1993 book, highly critical of liberal social policies, nevertheless credited the proponents of those policies as being people who "want to help" out of "decent and generous motives," even though it concludes that hte net result has been to "keep the poor in their poverty." By contrast, a 1992 bestseller by a proponent of such liberal social policies declared, "conservatives don't really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy."(me) Nor is this demonizing of opponents of the vision(me) ("Laissez faire is an extremist position", anyone? You've lost before you got started, kenny, to a wiki-wiki! My apologies to Dr. Sowell for the interruption.) confined to America or to racial issues. The distinguished French writer Jean-Francois Revel, who has opposed many aspects of the prevailing vision, reports being treated, even in a social setting, as someone with only "residual traces of homos sapiens".
A contemporary writer has summarized the differences between those with the vision of the anointed-the left-and others this way:
"Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wron, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil."
The contemporary anointed and those who follow them make much of their "compassion" for the less fortunate, their "concern" for the environment, and their being "anti-war," for example-as if these were characteristics which distinguish them from people with opposite views on public policy. The very idea that such an opponent of the prevailing vision as Milton Friedman, for example, has jus as much compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged, that he is jus as much appalled by pollution, or as horrified by the sufferings and slaughter imposed by war on millions of innocent men, women, and childre-such an idea would be a very discordant note in the vision of the annointed. If such an idea were fully accepted(me), this would mean that opposing arguments on social policy were arguments about methods, probabilities, and empirical evidence-with compassion, caring and the like being common features on both sides, thus cancelling out and disappearing from the debate. That clearly is not the vision of the anointed.... This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community(me. slowtrain, you may remember that came up in one of our conversations. I apologize for not being able to reply more often, and that I am unable to address any comments directed to me. I am enthusiastically following though.), that many grow to adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions(me) of so-called "thinking people." Many of these "thinking people" could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.
Despite the power of the prevailing veision, some have escaped its gravitational pull. Indeed, most of the leading contemporary opponents of the prevailing vision were themselves formerly within its orbit. Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Edward Banfield, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, (myself),-the list goes on and on-once shared many of the assumptions of those with whom they came ultimately to differ so fundamentally. Even in the realm of practical politics, the most prominent and most successful opponent of the prevailing vision, Ronald Reagan, was once so much a part of it that he belonged to the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action.
In short, few have spent their entire lives outside the vision of the anointed, and virtually no one has been unaffected by it. Understanding that vision, its current impact and its future dangers, is the purpose of this book.
Hopefully, Dr. Sowell will not mind such a long quote, should he chance to run across it, but I felt that his discussion of the "anointed" was apropos to what we see on a daily basis with GD and others. Kenny, I know that people like GD can be brought to the light, but I know it ain't me that has the patience for it. I've despaired of her accepting anything that makes sense if it doesn't fit her political agenda, for a long time now.
Posted by: nofate | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 01:38 PM
Kenny, no one would accuse of “trying to be intellectually intimidating or pompous”, at least, I wouldn’t. Besides, you will fail if you tried. Presumptuousness and pomposity have never really served anyone well, anyway — they frequently end up snaring the one that wields them.
Nevertheless, I don’t see how a passing and inconsequential comment can suddenly become the main topic of discussion, completely eclipsing, no, displacing the real subject, unless we argue for the sake of doing so or it is intended as a diversion. What I had problem with was your dismissal of Don Imus as categorical fool, then further expanding your list of “fools” to include Jimmy Carter and John Maynard Keynes among others. Then for some reason, on the account of Keynes, someone got the idea that the discussion has become the “comparison between socialism and capitalism. This has essentially changed the subject midstream and denied us the opportunity to arrive at some “closure” on the important subject we started out with. In view of this off point discussion that we are now engaged in, which in my opinion is a sheer waste of already scarce time, I therefore, enter this debate reluctantly, because I don’t see how it bears on the real subject. Of course, if it had been the subject, in of itself, I would be more than happy spending time on it, with the hope that it would not be pulled off track because of some inconsequential side comment.
The whole notion of laissez faire or strict free market economic system requiring no intervention is hogwash. It parallels the sort of argument a Darwinist would make about evolution — the notion that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations; an “unplanned” and undirected process leading to very complicated and extremely organized and beneficial systems. In fact, many believe strict laissez faire economic principles to be social Darwinism.
Every human engagement in an organized society is subject to some level of manipulation or a “measure” of external regulation. As far as laissez faire, somebody is always intervening in ways that “regulate” laissez faire; may be under the table, as it were, and not as a government would — somebody always does. Human nature being what it is — prone to greed, it is silly to think that laissez faire applies truthfully; the ends are much too valuable to be left to chance and too tempting to be left to fair play, they figure. The notion that the struggle of individuals competing for personal gain (acquisition of scarce resources) in an unregulated marketplace would produce an ordered, efficient economy is absurd.
I am reminded of the movie Wall Street, where Michael Douglass playing Gekko proclaimed, “Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. Greed drives things forward in nature and in man.” It is interesting that the system is not considered foolish, even though it essentially created Gekko. Well, the reasoning is that the system did not make Gekko do anything — he chose to do what he did; a sign of poor judgment and lack of self control. I am tempted to say that such argument reminds me of the argument against gun control — "guns don't kill people, people kill people", albeit with guns. (Now, I have made the matter worse, as I am sure someone will make this the new topic of discussion.)
In laissez faire, it follows, supposedly, that, even though, nothing is guiding the so-called free market economics; it functions as though there is an ‘invisible’ guiding hand directing it — the invisible guiding hand of self-interest, which ironically is also viewed as an incidental side effect of that ultimate selfish struggle that Gekko alluded to in Wall Street, as if the end is competition in of itself and for the sake of it, and not what is gained for competing or from competition.
Every theory in economics is predicted on the untenable notion of ceteris paribus ("all other things being equal"). In order to formulate economic principles, such as the strict free market economics principles, for predictive purposes, it is usually necessary to rule out factors which interfere with specific relationships with regards to the end. Typically, the ceteris paribus assumption is realized when people can control for all of the independent variables to achieve a sought after effect on the dependent variables. For our purposes, the independent variables would be the means or advantages to create wealth and the dependent variable would be who can participate in wealth creation or the roles and responses of those who lack the means or advantages to create wealth.
The question is how free is the free market economic system anyway? Does anyone really believe that left without any kind of government regulation, that no one would regulate the market? It is simply ludicrous and even disingenuous, to argue that the “free market system” is not being manipulated (“regulated”) by those who have acquired the power (capital and assets) to manipulate the system.
Laissez-faire — the neoclassical economic thought which holds that the free market is best left to its own devices, and will dispense with inefficiencies in a more deliberate and quick manner than any legislating body could, was advanced by proto-capitalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the so-called upward mobility. The fact is that once proponents became established they spent the rest of their days trying to prevent others, at least as many as possible, from becoming upwardly mobile, as they had been. This is not to say that there is no good to found there in.
Nevertheless, some of those seventeenth and eighteenth proto-capitalists are not very different from present day African or South American dictators or corrupt cabinet ministers who embezzled billions of dollars of state funds or Russian Oligarchs who practical stole state assets worth billions of dollars that ultimately end up in fat Swiss Bank accounts or huge blocks of a shares in the stock market acquired by the likes of Ken Lay, Fastow, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernie Ebbers, Joseph Nacchio and others. I suspect that these individuals also would have preferred no government regulation whatsoever, but would have preferred that their actions and the consequences thereof be left to market forces to correct.
The careful regulation, not undue regulation mind you, that was suggested is not necessarily what some economists and West European nations already view as the social market or mixed economy that seeks an equilibrium or middle road between socialism and capitalism, aimed at maintaining a balance between a high rate of economic growth, low inflation, low levels of unemployment, good working conditions, social welfare, and public services, through government intervention. This model would remain essentially respectful of free market. In fact, the social market economy is opposed to both a planned economy and laissez-faire capitalism. It is interesting that Ludwig Erhard once told Friedrich Hayek that the free market economy did not need to be made social but was social in its origin. Recently, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan said "continued economic growth of inequality is a significant threat to our nation's fundamental promise of economic opportunity". What this suggests is that there is an inevitable tipping point in any system by which people are governed or by which they govern themselves, when it is unmanaged or poorly managed. History shows that such tipping points rarely lead to self-correction.
While millions of Americans are experiencing a serious decline in real wages and losing their jobs, astronomical increases in executive compensation have created a new American aristocracy — made up of greedy and dubious corporate executives. These corporate executives, motivated by pure greed are essentially engaging in reckless and buccaneering economic adventures. They are increasingly setting the nation up for a fall . . . by taking shortcuts to attain temporary and unsustainable profits to justify the immoral amount of money they keep for themselves. Their schemes are essentially a house of cards, which soon come tumbling down, leaving millions of Americans hurt and in despair, while they walk away under golden parachutes of millions of dollars of unearned money. This unconscionable practice robs many Americans of the American dream, and is blight to the true ideals of capitalism. I don’t see how their self-interest serves our common interest and I believe this is what Greenspan alluded to.
Keynes is by far my favorite example of the fact that the more brilliantly intelligent a man is, the greater and more destructive a fool he can be -- because wisdom is a function far more of intellectual integrity and honesty than it is of intelligence, and an intelligent man without an honest core can come up with far more ingenious rationalizations for his folly than can a dullard, and can surround those rationalizations with a far more nearly impenetrable series of rhetorical defenses and mazes than can a person of merely average IQ.
Kenny, there is a very long list of “experts” and “expert definitions” that qualify and I suspect that if the argument were reversed you might hesitate to categorize them as fools. Take the military, political and economic calculations that have gone into the Iraqi war. Frankly, considering the arguments that have been made and the way they have been made and if the measures you described above for determining who qualifies as a fool applies, it would be concluded, as many have, that everyone who has played a role in the decision to go to war and the decision to stay to rebuild Iraq, is a “fool”. While this is not necessarily my position, I must say that we should not ourselves, make wild generalizations and then try to cleverly extricate ourselves from the implications of those generalizations by employing or perceived to employ the same tactics we criticize.
People are still arguing the merits of the so-called Reaganomics and what was responsible for the budget surpluses of the Clinton era. In fact, people are still arguing the economics of the great American depression, for crying out aloud, and I don’t believe there will a consensus anytime soon. Frankly, I think both sides are guilty of "obfuscation" at some point in their arguments, because the goal is often to win an argument; not elicit the truth.
If you say that a fool is a very intelligent but self-deceiving individual — a person with an unhealthy propensity for something, for example, self adulation, inclined to arguing or difference just for the sake of it, one with an obsessive-compulsive tendency to excite attention and surprise as is with all shock jocks, I would be willing to agree with you. But only to the extent that such a person consummates such actions in spite of his clear understanding of its peril; after all, considering his high intelligence, he should be able to predict and avoid self-destruction. But when such a person is able to persuade a huge number of people, many of whom are well-meaning, intelligent and not necessarily self-deceiving, in order to effect his viewpoint it then becomes simplistic, in fact, silly to dismiss him as a “fool”, whose actions are of little consequence and should not be taken seriously.
The common application of the phrase “fool” connotes or implies a person lacking in the common ability of understanding. It often describes a person who is lacking in intelligence or skilled use of reason; one who is unable to acquire and apply knowledge appropriately. I don't believe that appropriately describes Don Imus, Jimmy Carter and John Maynard Keynes.
Posted by: slowtrain | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 12:51 PM
Doesn't matter Kenny, nobody understood Greenspan anyway....
In the area of political economics, modern Republicanism is offering us some more absurd history.
Here are a few excerpts from Paul Krugman in the New York Times this morning:
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 04:58 AM
[chuckling] I think there's more of the Ghost than of the Greenspan in that interpretation...
Posted by: Kenny | Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 10:38 PM
If I were to interpret this comment by Greenspan, I would say that he is subtly referring to the Austrian school as an historical anachronism that nonetheless has had an impact on economic thought and policy..... actually quite bastardized by modern Republicanism with its inherent economic philosophy of economic laissez faire used to rationalize its tendencies toward Corporate Plutocracy and Kleptocracy.
The fact is that a thorough delineation and juxtaposition of any and all of these economic approaches is merely a reguritation of an epistimological knife fight between academics in the late 19th Century as the Western world was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, revealing inadequacies of formerly assumed explanatory methods, and more profoundly, revealing the fundamental problem of human activity recursively attempting to analyze itself.... a realization that rippled through the Philosophical substratum of all Social Sciences as they realized that they were engaged in activity categorically and ontologically different than engagement in Natural Sciences.....
Link
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 06:54 PM
Here's what I have on my plate, guys:
1. A defense of Austrian economics against people who have gotten most of their ideas of what the Austrians teach from the Austrians' intellectual opponents, and whose ideas of what the Austrians teach are therefore rather ludicrously false, to the point of being 180 degrees wrong. For example: to hear somebody say that the Austrian laissez-faire school requires one to accept that "greed is the quintessential human motivation upon which economic philosophy should be guided," or that "the profit motive is value against which all other human motivations should be reduced," is an experience very much akin to...well, it's like this. Say that somebody you know is claiming that Martin Luther King was a complete moron. And you ask why, to which he replies, "Why, because he kept insisting that we ought to judge each person by the color of his skin rather than by the content of his character." Wouldn't you be temporarily rather at a loss to know how to respond? And so it is in this case: if there is any school that puts at the very core of its analysis a rejection of the false construct of the homo economicus -- any school that insists very loudly that it is disastrous to try to do economic analysis without taking into account the fact that people are powerfully motivated by a great many things other than the bottom line -- it is the Austrian school of laissez-faire.
And that's just one of several points at which I've seen people recently accuse the Austrians of beliefs and values that even a cursory acquaintance with the breed would be enough to know that those beliefs and values were incompatible with the Austrian analysis.
Thus on this topic my immediate task is not to debate whether the views of the proponents of laissez-faire are rational and useful views. My first task, clearly, is to educate others in the ATB community on what those views are in the first place.
Which is a pretty big task, I have to say.
2. Racism. I'd prefer this topic but it's a doozie and requires an immense amount of clarification. So far my attempts to express my opinions on the topic clearly, here at ATB, have been big-time failures to communicate.
3. Over at another couple of blogs I've gotten into a discussion about global warming that could still use some cleaning up, though my major points are mostly made.
4. On my own blog I still owe "Arnie" two very demanding (but very important) pieces on the proper application of the Golden Rule and on the degree to which I believe many on the American Left consistently fail to grasp the role of uncertainty in government, and particularly its critical role in sound ethical analysis of public policy options. That has to do with a conversation on whether one can "torture" terrorists, and in what circumstances, and with what methods...a conversation that got interrupted several months ago and that I've never been able to get back to.
5. And there's some fun family-news type stuff that I need to get onto my blog for that portion of my blog's readership ("majority" is probably a better word than "portion") that skips, with a rolling of the eyes, over everything that has to do with politics or similar topics, because they're only dropping by to keep up with the family news.
So, um, I can't do it all and do any of it justice. Ghost, slowtrain, are you guys more interested in the racism discussion, or in the economics discussion? I'll do my best to keep engaged on one or the other, but I can't, alas, do both. I'm sorry; I know it's sort of rotten to get you guys all riled up and interested and then bail out on you.
Posted by: Kenny | Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 01:42 PM
Ä╖ÄA█╖e☻♦│ Some interesting excerpts follow:
Kenny, I find that ASCII characters can also sometimes be used as cryptoexplitives if you want.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 06:34 PM
Let me just say again:
#$!#@$!#$!#$@!$!@$!$#@!
Posted by: Kenny | Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 11:30 AM
!@#$!#$#@!$#@!$!#$#!$#@!#@!$#!
An hour and a half explaining to Ghost what laissez-faire doctrines actually teach -- which is nothing whatsoever like what she seems to think they teach, though the misconceptions are not in the slightest her fault -- and then I accidentally hit the detestable button on this damned laptop's keyboard that takes you back to the previous internet page -- and that is, insanely, right next to the right-arrow that you use to back up a few characters...
!#$#@!$#@!$!#$$#!
I've seen lots of stupid engineering ideas in my time, but the stupidity of the guy who thought that key was a good idea is exceeded only by the insanity of the guy who said, "Hey, here's a great place to put it -- right next to the back-arrow."
!@#$!#@$!#@$!#$#!
!#@$!#@$!#@$!#$!#@
I have NEVER, not even ONCE, hit that key on purpose, and I have NEVER, not even ONCE, hit that key and not found myself saying ten seconds later, "Oh, #@!$!#$, I just lost my comment."
!#$!#@$#@!$!#@$#@!$#$#@!$#@!$#@$Q!#$#@!$!#@$!#@$!#$!#@$!@#$@!%$W$#!%
God help that engineer if I ever get my hands around his neck. At least I would do the world a service by rendering it impossible for his genes to propagate themselves.
Oh, wait, he's a computer geek; he isn't breeding anyway...
W#$!$#!#$#@!$#!$!#$!#@$!#@$!#@$#@!$#@!$!@#$!@#$!#$!#@$!@#$!#@$!#@$#@!$!#@$!#@$#!$!#@$!#@$#@!$!#@$!#@$!#$!#$!#$#!$#!$#!$#
I'm exhausted just THINKING about trying to go back and do that all over again.
#!$!#$!#$!##$
I don't think I will. Ghost, you've got the laissez-faire folks upside-down, backwards and all sideways. But I just can't face trying to explain it all over again.
[sigh] I will now go away and pout for awhile -- like, maybe a couple of days -- until emotional equilibrium is restored.
Posted by: Kenny | Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 11:29 AM
Laissez faire is an extremist position. Certainly laissez faire as an absolutist macro economic position will work (though I question whether any economic philosophy can be applied absolutely).
However, one has to accept the human condition that obtains from such practices.... good and bad.
To genuflect to laissez faire, one has to accept that greed is the quintessential human motivation upon which economic philosophy should be guided, that the profit motive is value against which all other human motivations should be reduced, and that the fact that somebody somewhere is making a profit should be the consolation for any human misery endured perhaps peppered by the possibility that somehow, somewhere, someday everybody has the chance to be the "big winner"..... the vision of a human life span as a kind of massive crap shoot.
Certainly economic philosophy before the Great Depression was more laissez faire than anything else, and while proponents are loath to find fault in their own practices, I would, for the sake of discussion, say OK..... "laissez faire practices were not the linear "cause" of the Great Depression"..... though I think they were, and the remedy was subsequent regulation.
The point I'd use to demonstrate is the reaction to the Great Depression by proponents then and now..... the reaction is/was that the Great Depression was an acceptable "correction", and the action for all concerned in power, both government and industry, was essentially to do nothing and allow the self-correcting system to correct itself.
This is where Keynesian insight is useful.... for the proponent of laissez faire, the market is self correcting and ultimately brings all good to society "in the long run".
As Keynes said (paraphrase), "...in the long run we're all dead".
For the technical mind I offer this example.... a sine-wave is modulated along a median line.... the laisse faire proposition is that the amplitude of the sine wave is irrelevant, as long as in the "long run" the modulations average along that median.
This is not acceptable to proponents of other economic philosphies, because extreme, erratic modulations of an economic engine that periodically delivers high-amplitude, destructive bolts of modulation is an unacceptable condtion.
Imagine a power grid where rather than taming power fluctuations that surge over the backbone, we concentrated instead on modifying appliances to accomodate sporadic power surges and accepted a certain high percentage of loss in which appliances are burned-out or otherwise destroyed..... such a system could "work", however it would be chaotic.
Laissez faire conceives of economics like we conceive of the weather..... in an extreme analogy, it would be acceptable for the Amazon Rain Forrest to totally destroyed by fire because "in the long run" it will all grow back, or the macro-atmospherics of earth will shift to accomodate the loss of that ecosystem. While true, the human question would be whether or not mankind could survive the "correction".
To embrace laissez faire is to embrace the conditions that arose during the industrial revolution, carried on ad infinitum.
Extremist economic philosophies (like Communism) that grew out of the economic and social conditions of the industrial revolution were reactionary.... a reaction to socioeconomic conditions that obtained in a "robber baron" world for great masses of humanity.
There utopian theories did not and can not yield anything better than the utopian theory of laissez faire, however the fact they were in reaction to a palpable "down side" to all the good that came of the industrial revolution is undeniable.
The real solution is hybrid, Liberal.... things like Keynesian economics, perhaps not in the technical details of Keynes, but certainly to the degree that an insight such as one realizing that allowing economics to overrum humanity like some sort of uncontrolled wildfire is unacceptable.... should be heeded.
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 06:11 AM
...if you are careful to make sure that it is impossible for anyone to pin down what you mean during the intermediate steps of your logic, then your logic cannot be refuted, because as soon as somebody refutes your logic you can say loftily, "Ah, but you see your refutation is invalid because you have not properly understood what I was saying; how unfortunate that you are insufficiently intelligent to keep up with my brilliance." Thus the people who want to believe your conclusions, can accept them and say, "I must be right because look how brilliant this guy who agrees with me is," while the people who reject your conclusions will have hell's own time pinning you down to a specific, and therefore refutable, thread of reasoning. Which is the whole point of obfuscation...
Are you sure we're not talking about Al Gore?
Posted by: nofate | Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 01:47 AM
Okay, Ghost, thanks, that's helpful.
The biggest problem with your remarks about laissez-faire, my dear Ghost, is that while Keynesianism has been tried enthusiastically and pretty much failed, laissez-faire has never seriously been tried. I know that it is a commonplace "truism" in Democratic circles that the Great Depression was a failure of laissez-faire economics; but this rather grossly misrepresents (a) the degree to which the policies of the American and other governments leading up to the Great Depression (especially American monetary policy throughout the decade of the 'Twenties) contributed to the speculative bubble that set the stage for the Crash, (b) the degree to which the Great Depression was grossly exacerbated by the extremely non-laissez faire policies that were implemented in order to fix it (such as the Federal Bank's contraction of the money supply after the Crash, the passage of Smoot-Hawley, Hoover's campaigning for businesses to keep wages high in the aftermath of the Crash rather than allowing the market to adjust wages to something approaching equilibrium levels followed promptly by Roosevelt's long-running refusal to enforce the laws that would have kept unions from using violence to keep wages from sinking to a level appropriate for the self-correcting mechanisms of the market to kick in -- Keynes is particularly dishonest in his treatment of this effect in the General Theory -- the New Deal, then later the New New Deal...[sigh]), and (c) what sorts of policies are in fact laissez-faire properly so called, supply-side economics being laissez-faire only in the very limited, comparative sense that it wasn't quite as desperately infatuated with government manipulation of the economy as Keynesianism had spent the previous half-century being.
I think the dishonesty of the "history" that claims that the Great Depression was caused by laissez-faire policies is best captured like this:
1. When people talk about the laissez-faire policies that led into the Great Depression, aren't they talking about Herbert Hoover and his policies? If you disagree with this, please raise a flag; otherwise I'll continue on to the next point.
2. But in point of fact, Herbert Hoover was just one more self-impressed ass in that long line of politicians and economists who have thought themselves to be smarter than the free market. He was elected mostly on the strength of his presumed Higher Knowledge Of Economic Secrets (his primary qualification for President was his experience as Secretary of Commerce). And what were these Higher Secrets to which he was privy? Well, it wasn't exactly laissez-faire, keep the government out of the way and let the market do its thing. Instead he trumpeted the notion that the business cycle could be largely eliminated by having the government make its spending go up and down in a cycle opposite to the natural business cycle of the free market, and his economic policy as President was built upon this belief in the need for the wisdom of the self-anointed Prophets of Public Policy -- such as, oh, say, himself -- to improve upon what the free market could do if left to itself (laissez-faire is French for, basically, "leave it alone" -- or, marginally more literally, "allow it to do its thing"). The attempts of Democrats and Keynesians since the time of FDR to blame the Great Depression on laissez-faire are therefore rather highly amusing to those among us who take a dark and cynical pleasure in what one of Richard Lederer's English-mangling high school students once referred to as "the anals of human folly." (But listen, if you can manage to be amused by human folly, then you will never, never, never in a million years suffer a lack of entertainment.)
Or, consider the fact that no depression in American history had come close to lasting as long, or cutting as deeply, as did the Great Depression -- and then ponder the coincidence, if coincidence it was, that the Great Depression was the first depression that struck the country after the invention of that tool of government intervention most adored by all Keynesians: the Federal Reserve.
All in all, the canard that the Great Depression is the result of America's having tried laissez-faire and of laissez-faire's having failed, reminds me very much of G. K. Chesterton's (I think) line that runs something like, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
Posted by: Kenny | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 07:40 PM
Kenny, since I never actually heard of Keynes before you mentioned him I basically prepared myself for this discussion by thorougly reading this Wikipedia article:
Wikipedia Article on KeynesÂ
And this article on Keynesian economics:
Wikipedia Article on Keynesian Economics
And then I cut and pasted the parts that I liked with some additional comments about why I thought he was a good guy.
Then I watched this video by Billy Bragg on You Tube:
Between the WarsÂ
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 07:02 PM
Ghost, slowtrain,
I have a request to make rather diffidently of you guys. I'm not trying to be intellectually intimidating or pompous here -- really I'm not -- it's just that if I'm going to wade into a discussion of the relative merits of different schools of economic thought, or on comparisons between "socialism" and "capitalism" (both of which are terms colloquially used with enormous imprecision so that you're never sure what exactly somebody else means when they toss those terms around), it would be MUCH easier if I had some idea of how much common ground of reference we have. So, would you mind terribly telling me which, if any, of these economists' work you guys have read? I intend no slur at all if you haven't read a single one of them; I can present the important arguments of any of them reasonably accurately, I think, or at least I used to be able to, and you guys are plenty sharp enough to catch up fast... Actually, after some consideration, I have realized that it's been rather longer since my fascination with economics gave way to other interests than I had realized; so I think perhaps I should say that if I were to take the time to refresh my memory, I would remember how to present their important arguments reasonably accurately, with probably the exception of Marshall and Pigou, whom I last read...my God, it's probably fifteen years ago now. Time flies, I guess...
Anyway, it would just be easier to know on which topics we could sort of skip to the interesting part, as it were. So, here are the main economists whose works and ideas I used to have at my fingertips -- my own referential universe, as it were, vis-a-vis economic theory.
John Maynard Keynes, especially (obviously) his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes is by far my favorite example of the fact that the more brilliantly intelligent a man is, the greater and more destructive a fool he can be -- because wisdom is a function far more of intellectual integrity and honesty than it is of intelligence, and an intelligent man without an honest core can come up with far more ingenious rationalizations for his folly than can a dullard, and can surround those rationalizations with a far more nearly impenetrable series of rhetorical defenses and mazes than can a person of merely average IQ. It is, I think, telling that when I was in college Keynes's undergraduate defenders trumpeted the fact that Hayek refused to debate Keynes as proof that Keynes was smarter than Hayek and that Keynes was therefore right and Hayek wrong -- but Hayek's own explanation of his refusal was that it was a waste of time trying to refute an opinion of Keynes because if you refuted it he would simply say that you had refuted something he had stopped believing on his own before you got around to refuting it. In other words, Keynes's supporters thought that saying, "Keynes is smarter than other people," was equivalent to saying, "Keynes was right and other people were wrong," which bespeaks a remarkably naive view, on their part, of human nature and of the human capacity for, and taste for, self-deception. But Hayek himself, as far as I could tell, was at least pretending to emphasize honesty, and seemed to be saying -- I think quite rightly both in general and in the particular case of Keynes himself -- that it's rarely worth the trouble to argue with a fundamentally dishonest man. The contrast between those who think that the core of wisdom is to be found in intelligence, and those who think that it is rather to be found in intellectual integrity, can I think rarely have been more starkly evident. But I have wandered far from my topic and will now reel myself back in...
No, wait, actually I can't help but add one more thing while I'm, even temporarily, on the subject of the General Theory. The rhetorical device to which Keynes, in the General Theory, most often responds in order to mask the cavernous holes in his logic, is obfuscation; I doubt that any book in all of human history has ever been written that would better serve as a textbook for the practical use of this particular species of dishonesty. Thus I have always loved von Hayek's observation, full of studied politeness, that "most of the practical conclusions...are based on a part of the work (Books III and IV) which is so highly technical and complicated that it must for ever remain entirely unintelligible to those who are not experts. But it is this part on which everything else depends. It is here that all the force and all the weakness of the argument are concentrated [personally I think there's plenty of weakness of argument in Books I and II as well -- KP], and it is here that the really original work is set forth. And here, unfortunately, the exposition is so difficult, unsystematic, and obscure, that it is extremely difficult for the fellow economist who disagrees with the conclusions to demonstrate the exact point of disagreement and to state his objections. There are passages [Hayek here very kindly understates their frequency] in which the inconsistent use of terms produces a degree of obscurity which, to anyone acquainted with Mr. Keynes's earlier work, is almost unbelievable. It is only with extreme caution and the greatest reserve that one can attempt to criticize, because one can never be sure whether one has understood Mr. Keynes aright."
If I may express myself with rather less unwillingness to accuse Lord Keynes of willful dishonesty than Hayek displays: if you are careful to make sure that it is impossible for anyone to pin down what you mean during the intermediate steps of your logic, then your logic cannot be refuted, because as soon as somebody refutes your logic you can say loftily, "Ah, but you see your refutation is invalid because you have not properly understood what I was saying; how unfortunate that you are insufficiently intelligent to keep up with my brilliance." Thus the people who want to believe your conclusions, can accept them and say, "I must be right because look how brilliant this guy who agrees with me is," while the people who reject your conclusions will have hell's own time pinning you down to a specific, and therefore refutable, thread of reasoning. Which is the whole point of obfuscation -- which in its turn is a tactic that nobody in all of history has practiced more assiduously than did Keynes in the General Theory.
Do you see my point about when the tactic of obfuscation is effective, and why? If you are trying to defend an opinion that your audience wants to believe, then you don't have to prove your conclusion -- you just have to make it impossible for anybody else to disprove it. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to use lots and lots of big words and mathematical equations, but to use them with constantly shifting and contradictory definitions, and never to allow yourself to specify which definition you're using at any given point, and to never use four clear and simple words to an express an idea that you can instead wrap up inside thirty vague and misty ones. And if you take out every page of the General Theory in which Keynes resorts to this tactic, you are left with a book that is slightly shorter than the present comment.
So I actually spent a few months back in the day, purely for my own amusement, translating the first few chapters of the General Theory out of "Keynesian" into English, just for the hell of it. I still have a copy of that on some hard drive somewhere, I suppose.
Oh, and just because I feel like pointing this out: while Lord Keynes's primary tools of rhetorical bombast and camouflage are obfuscation, deliberate ambiguity of terminology, and deliberate misrepresentation of his opponents' views, his fundamental logical fallacies -- which are his constant companions from the first page of the General Theory to the last -- are the fallacy of hypostasization, the fallacy of composition, and the fallacy of equivocation.
So there.
Okay, back to the list.
Jean-Baptiste Say (just so that you can know what Say's Law really says, rather than the absurd parody that Keynes refutes under the dishonest pretense that he is refuting Say's Law).
Alfred Marshall (again, just so that you can compare what Marshall actually taught with what his student Keynes pretended he taught).
Arther Pigou (partly because he is yet another economist whose views Keynes misrepresented for his own purposes, and partly because I found The Economics of Welfare to be genuinely interesting in its own right.)
Friedrich von Hayek (just about anything).
Milton Friedman (especially, if we're going to discuss the American politics of economic theory, Free to Choose).
Ludwig von Mises, especially his Human Action and -- since there's apparently some question of discussing the question of socialism vs. capitalism -- his devastating Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.
Murray Rothbard, mostly for the sake of seeing what happens when the principles of a generally sound school of thought (which is what I consider the Austrian school of economics to be) are taken to insane extremes.
Again, I don't at all intend to imply anything if you haven't read any of these guys' works. (I suppose it's obvious from that list that American economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith have failed to impress me.)
Posted by: Kenny | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 05:55 PM
Kenny,
I experienced the same problem two weeks ago, my comment ended up posted twice. It probably has to do with network traffic. Give it a couple of hours, it is probably held up in traffic. It could also be database concurrency issues that would resolve itself, given time.
Posted by: slowtrain | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 05:51 PM
Alexandra,
I'm trying to post a comment that doesn't look to me any different from any of the other comments I've posted over the last year, but your comment control software informs me severely, "Your comment has not been posted because we think it might be comment spam. If you believe you have received this message in error, please contact the author of this weblog." Following the link provided, I observe that the link talks at length about how these controls are meant to keep people from spiking their Google ratings by putting links to their pages into other people's blog comments -- but the comment I'm trying to post has no links at all in it. Suggestions?
Posted by: Kenny | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 04:22 PM
But back to economics and the fruits of modern Republicanism and its "supply side" laissez faire", Paul Krugman has an interesting piece on Medicare today in the NYT....
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Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 05:08 AM
Jimmy CarterÂ
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 04:58 AM
Capitalism is a fine economic engine.... like all engines it requires a regulator in order to be useful.
I have to say that there is truth in that, even though it’s a delicate balancing act. By its very nature, capitalism guarantees unequal distribution of wealth and in our time the essence of capitalism appears to be “winner takes all”. Winston Churchill aptly expressed this inequality when he said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” Any such regulation must always recognize this simple fact.
Martin Luther King, Jr., noted that, “Socialism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social.” In my opinion, any society where material things are valued higher than people cannot be altogether healthy and cannot be considered a rational society.
In the game of capitalism there seem to be no consolation prices, but then again, show me any American game that is worth a lot of money where there is. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent problems, capitalism remains the best economic system available. Abe Lincoln once said, “That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.”
Posted by: slowtrain | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 01:27 PM
I think it's quite silly, though, for you to think that the observation that "this man is influential" is a refutation of the proposition that "this man is a fool."
You’re wrong in that thinking Kenny. First of all, this is not the point that was made nor was it the point to be made. Sometimes, analogies distort than clarify, and that is certainly the case in this instance. A response to a statement establishing a real situation is intrinsically lacking in substance when it is only hypothetical or extrapolative and fails to directly and contextually address the statement. You cannot by whatever measure prove to me that Don Imus is a categorical fool.
If you ask me to list the five most towering fools of the twentieth century, both John Maynard Keynes and Jimmy Carter will be high on the list -- and Keynes is probably (and disastrously) the single most influential economist of the century, while Carter, as President of the United States, was certainly in his day one of the most influential and powerful men on earth.
What then would say of the millions of people that these “towering fools” influence; if influence is the emanation of “moral force” — the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command, who is the fool here…the influenced or the one that influences?
Posted by: slowtrain | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 10:33 AM
Reaganomics and laissez-faire (aka Liberal Economics) is perhaps more the product of foolish men.... however, Liberalism realized the flaw in laissez-faire, whereas the proponents wouldn't give it up even when it came collapsing down around their ears in the Great Depression.
Capitalism is a fine economic engine.... like all engines it requires a regulator in order to be useful. Keynes may not have been perfect, but he contributed a fundamental correction to the mythology of laissez-faire.
LinkÂ
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 09:49 PM
slowtrain, you certainly haven't offended me by any of your comments.
I think it's quite silly, though, for you to think that the observation that "this man is influential" is a refutation of the proposition that "this man is a fool." If you ask me to list the five most towering fools of the twentieth century, both John Maynard Keynes and Jimmy Carter will be high on the list -- and Keynes is probably (and disastrously) the single most influential economist of the century, while Carter, as President of the United States, was certainly in his day one of the most influential and powerful men on earth.
But they were still both patently fools.
The rest of your comment deserves more time, care and patience in response than I have this evening, I regret to say. I'll see what I can do later on.
Posted by: Kenny | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 09:27 PM
the miracle of love
Posted by: Ghost Dansing | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 09:22 PM
Finally, slowtrain, while you are correct to point out that I am not the most formally educated person on this site, and the expression of my thoughts may be a little colloquial for your tastes, I also do not generally form my opinions nor guide my intellectual learning experiences using the man on the street method. That's one of the reasons I was on this site, able to have a conversation with you, in the first place. This site is an educational experience.
Nofate,
I never said that and would never say that. Perhaps, you should go back and read what I wrote. What I said was in the context of your comment with regards to African Americans in general.
As far as I am concerned most comments here could have been made by a Harvard or Princeton graduate or PhD holder, that is how good some of the comments are, including some of yours, in my opinion. But even the Harvard or Princeton graduate or PhD holder can’t be right all the time. You probably have more formal education than I can “boast” of and you are probably smarter than I am. But you don’t expect me to accept everything you say and neither do I expect you to agree with everything I say. I don’t think that is what we are doing here, nor should it be.
I have agreed with you more than I have disagreed, same goes for everyone else, Kenny is my witness…right Kenny. That ought to tell you that I don’t attack you or anyone else personally. If I offended you by my comments I apologize. I did not intend to do so and it profits me nothing to do so.
However, you have to remember that African Americans came from all over the content of Africa. In Nigeria alone, there are 2000 dialects and all translate into distinct cultures. Now, extrapolate that for the entire continent. Kwanzaa, a phrase that derives from East African language of Swahili — predominantly spoken in Zimbabwe, Tanzania Mozambique and a few others. You see most African Americans have West African ancestry that don’t have the same cultures as the culture Kwanzaa was taken from and don’t celebrate it. I have the same problem when people generalize about Europeans and occidental cultures, in a way that suggests monolithism, association and collective responsibility.
Posted by: slowtrain | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 07:12 PM
And, going back to the "I'm a victim" group du jour, how is it that this simple white guy, whose southern parents taught him to respect all people according to their character, is a racist simply by virtue of being white, but a simple black guy who comes up and (hypothetically) punches me in the nose because his ancestors were slaves, is not?
Nofate, hypothetically or not, no “simple black guy” can come up and punch you in the nose because his ancestors were slaves, and get away with it. You will knock him out cold, even with eyes closed or he will land in jail faster than he can throw a punch. LOL
In any case don’t forget what Kenny said. Just because someone calls you a bad name does not mean that you are bad, even if that is how society viewed you or how you view yourself. As Abraham Lincoln said, “It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”
Posted by: slowtrain | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 06:16 PM