I’m not questioning you, but could you elaborate or give a cite on the part I’ve bolded? My first thought was that it related to the Pauls’ affinity for the gold standard, but isn’t that the opposite of nationalizing gold?
Presumably it would involve the government having to back the currency with gold, which would involve increasing the scope of government, since they would probably be the buyer or seller of the vast majority of gold in America. In addition, the last time we had the gold standard, the government practically did nationalize the industry, as there was severe restrictions on private ownership of gold.
Unless I am mistaken, restrictions on private ownership of gold were in place for only forty years at the tail end of the gold-standard era. Also, I’d argue that a gold-based currency means that all transactions are in effect sales of gold, so obviously nearly all such will be between two private parties.
I am mystified by Sam Stone’s claim that products are always increasing in quality, particularly at the low end. As far as I can see, an awful lot of the stuff that poor (and non-poor) people spend their money on is absolute junk, trash when new, not even worth the low price from China. Much of our cheapest food is garbage. Are matters so different in Canada?
[emph. added]
This is why I’m no longer a libertarian. What you’re saying is that order will emerge from chaos, & it doesn’t matter what we do because everything will turn out all right in the end. This is Pollyannaish nonsense, & it has in fact in our era led directly to great environmental ruin.
Going onto the gold standard is just another way of saying that the price of gold will be fixed by government fiat. Saying that one dollar is defined as the value of 1/1000 of an ounce of gold, or whatever, is the same as saying that the price of one ounce of gold shall be 1000 dollars. It doesn’t even matter if the government itself is actually doing the buying and selling, since they’ll be setting the price anyway.
It’s not chaos - it’s the self-directed human action of millions of people, each acting in their own interest.
This isn’t an argument for anarchy. It’s an argument for government acting as minimally as possible while working towards the goal of keeping markets free, ensuring that competitive forces remain strong and that the failures of the market are corrected. But the goal of government should be to create an environment where markets work the best - not to displace markets with central planning and coercion.
It’s also not a fringe belief - the majority of economists agree with it. Including this wacky guy.
So what’s so special about “the market” that humanity should be utterly subservient to it? Why the fetish? Is that born of fear of having to follow the rules of society, rather than nurture Rand-porn fantasies of being the special Achievers who should not have to do anything for Parasites?
Guess what - the rest of us do understand how markets work. We understand how it gets manipulated by those who put their own interests ahead of society’s, and that eliminating controls is exactly the opposite of how to prevent that. So we don’t make this chimera called “the free market” our religion. We know better.
Just what exactly have these evil capitalist manipulators done to harm society? Provide HD color tv’s for $300? Cars that last 300,000 miles with computers that can tell when your tires need air? Satellite television with hundreds of channels for $100 a month or so? Computers for a few hundred bucks? The ability to go to a grocery store and select from multiple brands just about anything you’re looking for?
Just how is it exactly that you’ve been hurt or your life negatively impacted by having the market respond to what people want? And how exactly have these powerful people who “put their own interests ahead of yours” hurt you?
Your post is a perfect example of why conservatives think liberals are fearful.
Insurance that drops customers as soon as they need it, oil companies that keep us involved in the Middle East shedding our blood and wealth so their product remains available, industries of all sorts who ignore safety standards and enable disasters like the BP spill and the Tennessee coal ash spill, plus smaller-scale tragedies to individual workers…
Nope, those capitalists aren’t hurting a thing!
- I have known many people, including myself, who’ve had health care paid for by insurance companies without a bit of trouble. I’ve never known anyone who got dropped as soon as they need it, and doctors are beginning to refuse new patients if they lack insurance. All of this tells me that insurance pays most of the time. This view is further supported by the fact that so many people are afraid of being without it and that they are willing to pay as much as they do for it.
This is not to say there isn’t any misbehavior on the part of insurance companies but to whatever degree it exists, it can be corrected the same way we correct other forms of malfeasance and that is with laws and punishment. Insurance company wrongdoing, to the degree it exists in fact rather than what one hears around here, is not an indictment of the free market, but rather a small part of it annd one that can easily be corrected without abandoning or even modifying the free market itself.
- The free market as a matter of fact is working furiously to find alternative energy sources to free us from dependence on the Middle East for oil.
The idea that we are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan because of oil is ridiculous and I’m not going to bother arguing against it.
- BP? Tennessee? “Small-scale tragedies”?
coughChernobylcoughK-141 Kurskcough
As we can see, even full-scale government control can’t prevent accidents and personal tragedies. SoI don’t see any point in arguing about that either.
So, all in all, all I see is leftie whinging over things that either don’t exist or that can’t be helped anyway, no matter how much government there is.
What do biologists believe? Or climate physicists? Or geographers?
I have to live in the material world, Sam. The oceans are dying, markets can get stuffed.
Since the early seventies I’ve seen the left wholeheartedly embrace and wail to the heavens that the world is running out of trees, out of oil, out of ozone, that an ice age is coming, that global warming is coming, and now apparently the oceans are dying.
Well, we never ran out of trees; we never ran out of oil; we aren’t all dying from holes in the ozone; we aren’t encased in ice; global warming statistics and the methods used to obtain them are in a state of chaos; but now the oceans are dying? The huge, deep oceans that cover 70& of the globe and are impacted by countries ranging from China to Russia to Europe, the Middle-East, India, Australia, etc, are dying? And the U.S. could save them if only it abandoned its free-market economy? :smack:
Again, is it any wonder people think liberals are fearful?
False dichotomy. I don’t think that anyone here (other than Commisar, I suppose, but he’s not even in this thread) has ever argued that the soviet way of doing things was all that great, either.
And the bit about how we didn’t actually run out of ozone or trees is hardly an indication that liberals are fearful. We saw that problems were coming, and so, instead of panicking and burying our heads in the sand, we solved them. We didn’t fear those things, because we knew we could beat them. Admittedly, we didn’t solve the ice age problem, but that’s because there never was an ice age problem, nor did anyone ever think that there was.
We solved them? We solved them? The U.S. single-handedly saved the world from the depletion of trees, oil and ozone by passing a few government regulations on U.S. businesses? Pretty good feat, considering the rest of world by and large didn’t give a shit. I thought liberals didn’t believe in U.S. exceptionalism.
The US hasn’t run out of trees, but that is in large part because you import wood and wood -derived products from places that still practice unsustainable deforrestation. The Amazon continues to shrink, and god knows what will happen when that goes.
We haven’t run out of cheap oil yet, and I’ll grant you that there has been a lot of failed predictions and false doom-mongering on the issue, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious danger. Is your position that it won’t run out or that it won’t fuck everything up when it does?
We aren’t dying of holes in the ozone largely because the world banned CFCs so that we wouldn’t, you know, die from holes in the ozone layer.
The oceans are fucking dying. Besides pollution the human race has eaten everything. Everything. Almost all ficheries are like desserts compared to how they were before the advent of trawl fishing and steam engines.
Only a blinkered, self-centered fool would argue that we shouldn’t be deeply concerned about these issues. If humanity survives the next 100 years without some sort of epic collapse it will because some people cared enough to try and solve the problems instead of just waving them away because they were inconvienient.
Science being wrong once does not make it wrong every time. Cimate science in particular is light-years ahead of where it was in the 70s. This computer has more processing power than the supercomputers they were running their models on then.
Mark me down entirely in the “projection” camp, both from a psychological perspective, and from a Karl-Rovian-calculated-political-manipulation perspective (e.g. if your guy’s military service reeks of elitist avoidance of actual threat, attack the other guy’s more distinguished combat service history).
What always surprises me in these discussions are assertions that psychological, dispositional or constitutional factors or processes shouldn’t be associated with political orientation, or that any given such factor should be associated with either end of the political spectrum equally. I don’t follow the logic there whatsoever. People don’t just stumble into political beliefs. Look at the level of emotion that often goes along with the expression of political beliefs or with debates or discussions on the subject. Clearly how people function emotionally should be related to the political orientation they take.
Empirically, it does appear that dispositional tendencies involving fear and anxiety are associated with conservative political beliefs.
I think I’ve cited Jost et al., (2003) here before, but here’s the bottom line from the abstract:
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339-375.
I don’t believe I’ve cited the following article in previous SDMB discussions of the topic. What’s nice about it is that it is a longitudinal study, allowing for better control of competing explanatory processes and allowing for the examination of developmental change:
Matthews, M., Levin, S. and Sidanius, J. (2009), A Longitudinal Test of the Model of Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Political Psychology, 30: 921–936.
The following is not specific to anxiety, but to sensitivity to disgust, which is itself associated with a disposition to anxiety. I think it illustrates very well the idea that innate dispositional tendencies drive things like political affiliation pretty well. Otherwise, why should one’s disposition towards feeling disgust have any relationship one way or another with political orientation.
Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D. A. & Bloom, P. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Cognition & Emotion, 23(4), 714-725.
Thus, it appears that people develop conservative political beliefs, at least in part, due to innate dispositions towards greater sensitivity to fear and disgust
Some claim it, yes. I wonder about the ‘thinking’ bit.
No, it’s a dog-whistle for
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No longer being able to travel the width and breadth of the country and only have to know English.
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No longer being able to travel in National Parks adjacent to Mexico and not be shot by someone smuggling in either drugs or people
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Watching the Florida aquifers - not to mention the Everglades - dry up because god forbid we should keep other people from coming to the state that is running out of water. The same can be said for California.
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Not being able to find work, and being put on welfare by the nanny state, who have done their best to destroy the economic engine of this country.
Man’s capacity to evolve his thinking at the very last possible minute is astounding. I have always beleived and will continue to beleive until I am proven wrong that science will develope a solution not a second before it would be too late.