[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Squink *
**
Thereby depriving farmers of a vital source of income. Oh well done.
[aside, as if much of this thread hasn’t been a collection of asides]
At least, thanks to Liberals pushing for Port-a-Potties in the fields, those tomatoes are less likely to have been shat on by migrant workers. 
[/aside]
The example of the tomato, though prone to send people off on tangents, has been one that has been going through my mind lately as I attempt to reconcile shopping at WalMart or Dollar General with my Liberal beliefs so I am enjoying this debate. As it stands, though, my sense is that a person from outside the US would be hard pressed to understand the differences between American Liberals and Conservatives.
Hey, I resent that remark! I watch “The West Wing”, I know the score…
Excellent point, and why I will usually quit thinking about things like this before my brain freezes pondering the many implications of a single act.
[cheap shot]
Though having a frozen brain does make me a better consumer.
[/cheap shot]
Jenny, I suggest it’s where you DO spend your money, more than where you DON’T spend your money, that has an ethical dimension to it. You’re already not giving 99.99% of merchants your business; the only real difference you make is which merchant you DO decide to give money to.
Daniel
And people say liberals have no sense of humour…
That’s not funny, Jennyrosity.
Daniel
Hey, binarydrone –
We have this transactional system, “money”, or “currency” if you prefer, theoretically a means of keeping track of who is and who is not carrying their share of the proverbial load and encouraging people to do so by tying access to resources to possession of some of these markers and tying possession of the markers to the performance of “work”.
That it doesn’t quite work that way, and that there are major problems of fairness and opportunity intrinsic to the system, are things that I assume you, as a self-described liberal, are quite familiar with.
The problem with liberalism, though, is not that many liberals powerful enough to be decision-makers are rich enough to benefit (unconsciously, even) from the system, or fail to understand, really, the deprivations experienced by impoverished people. The problem with liberalism is that most liberals tend to think of the economic/currency/money system as something that “just is”, like the weather, and those victimized by its intrinsic unfairnesses as akin to folks who lost their housing when Hurricane Andrew hit or lost their farm in the drought or something.
Even the extreme left, i.e., advocates of “pure communism” who are most overt about criticizing capitalism, just attempt to ameliorate the undesirable effects of the money system by redistributing the money. As conservatives have so accurately pointed out, they tend to be oblivious to the fact that in creating omnipotent centralized bureaucracies to do this redistributing they focus power in the hands of a few and subject people to political unfairnesses and severe deprivations of authority and freedom without even successfully eradicating material-distribution inequities. And they speak of “capitalism” as if “capitalism” were an evil system distinguishable from the money system, which they, too, do not directly condemn.
“Capitalism” is not, however, a system distinct from the money system. “Capitalism” is what you get given a free market, an environment in which the rules and practices of the money system are permitted to operate unimpeded. Conservatives understand this far better than liberals, I think, and there is validity to their distrust for sloppy ameliorative and palliative measures proposed by liberals without due consideration for the full effects of the ameliorative and palliative measures themselves. (Kind of like introducing a predator to an ecosystem to get rid of some pests without studying what effects the predator will have aside from eating the pests).
I describe myself as an “anarchist”, rather than “conservative” or “liberal” and I fancy myself to be a “radical”. These are not good terms either, though, since I hope for a system, not a non-system. “Anarchist” brings to mind people burning things and smashing windows, and “radical” similarly implies a readiness to overthrow governments with violent revolutions and such. (I’ve got the nerve but such strategies would be useless. Because of the very nature of violence and military activity there is no way to increase the level of true democracy and egalitarianism we have now in the western world through armed uprising.)
I believe in the possibility of a communications and transactional structure that does not rely on coercion, either the direct coercion of authority backed with force or the indirect coercion whereby some people control others through the parceling out of rewards and compensations as reward (and the denying of them as punishment). I believe the money system to be inherently flawed, in most of the ways that the leftist radicals have pointed out in their condemnations of “capitalism”. I believe we need a different system, one that would serve the same purpose, and do so with at least identical if not superior efficiency. I agree with the conservatives that it cannot be a centrally planned thing, as any such monstrosity would inherently be coercive and massively unequal.
Therefore, by process of elimination as well as by intuition, it would be a decentralized system, as is the money system.
It would have to lack the characteristics of the money system that cause it to concentrate wealth and opportunity (i.e., that it is easy to concentrate further wealth and power if you already have a lot of wealth and power, but difficult to acquire any of it if you do not have some to work with, and damn difficult to acquire it if you have never had it and have not acquired the skills and knowledge of how to work the system that can only be acquired by being adequately placed within the system in the first place).
Anyway, to drift back to where I started – the only way the inherent problems of the money system are going to be addressed is for people who see problems with the unfettered market economy to quit trying to patch it and stick band-aids on it and start doing some abstract thinking about what the money system does for us humans and how else those functions could be addressed without the negative undesirable characteristics of the money system.
It ain’t oxygen or carbon chemistry. It isn’t natural or a built-in characteristic of who we are. It’s just a human-devised way of doing things with each other. It is, admittedly, ancient, and also the only thing we’ve used since barter. But you could say similar things about the habit of having kings prior to the rise of electoral representative democracy. And I will say that it is similar in the sense that, as with, I’d imagine, the typical 14th Century European citizen w/ regards to the possibility of having government without kings (or autocrats by other names), the “money” system is a box outside of which we do not readily think.
Now I’ll give it a go.
I got retired from the computer business, and like a zillion other guys discovered I wasn’t wanted back. Happily for me, I had a little stash and I could get along. I’ve been driving a bus for a few months.
The people I work with, in general, have to live on crummy wages. Also, in general, they spend more than they get. Credit cards are commonly maxed out and gas tanks are rarely full. Life is tedious.
Today I asked a Latino lady I work with, How will you vote? I got an earful that she does not vote because the thieves already take her money and she won’t give them any of her time (time to vote). She despises the lot of them.
Basically, no one with money gives a hoot about people who do not have money. Poor people struggle every damn day to get by, and no politician has ever done squat for them.