Domain: theamericanconservative.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to theamericanconservative.com.
Comments · 53
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Re:Really?
Since most material wealth is now created through machines that need fairly little maintenance, and most intellectual wealth has historically been created as a labor of love by voluntary community interactions and in any case we now have so much of it, your whole point is obsolete (if it was ever really true). See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CreditAlso, remember that most land is "owned" by people who got it through some chain that eventually arrives at either finders-keepers or might-makes-right policies. Even Manhattan Island, the literal bedrock of US capitalism, was essentially purchased from people who did not own it in any sense (a neighboring tribe who probably though the whole thing a good joke). A logical system of saying who gets the fruits of the land is problematical when there really is not a-priori reasonable way to say that some people are more privileged to have access to the land for mining, farming, recreation, or whatever.
See also:
"Marxism of the Right"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ -
Re:How is this not illegal?
You make some interesting points, and it is true the government at all levels can indeed do various bad things for all sorts of reasons, but the problem is that coordination of some sort is so darn useful. For example, what are you going to do when someone pollutes your groundwater? Call the EPA? Who is going to prevent endless feuding between your neighbors with guns? The Justice Department? (At least, in places that still have a reasonable level of economic order.) Who is going to maintain the roads? Who is going to support really basic long-term research (under our current economic paradigm without a basic income)? Who is going to redistribute wealth to account for the fact that "the rich get richer"? Who is going to make sure that markets take in account externalities like pollution, local risks, and systemic risk?
Yes, in theory one can come up with less formal social organizations to do these things. But there is still some organization. And probably one then has voting or key decision makers with permissions, or people who defer to other people for various reasons and so on. Perhaps the best sci-fi story about such an alternative is James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear, but even he admits that the story took it too far from what probably could be made to work in practice (but it's still an inspirational story you'd probably like).
So, one way or another, you end up with something like a "government" when you try to build a real society. Different forms of government may work better or worse for different cultures, times, situations, or personalities, but we still need some form of organization and agreement.
Something on the theory:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."Something on the practice:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. "And health and community are important to happiness (but a US conservative typically might not want to admit that...)
The fact that some parts of governments in the USA may be doing a bad job, and may be captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate, does not mean all government is bad. Several European governments (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden) are doing better in many respects. We may need a more general paradigm shift in our socioeconomics though before our government can start working well again. But in general, the most thriving societies have both good government and a dynamic business exchange sector.
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Re:Oy Vey!Passenger rail doesn't make much money, but there is an unhappy reason for this. Folks on the political right often like to point to rail as one of the grand failures of government. What they do not recognize is that one of the reasons passenger rail doesn't make money in this country is because the highway system is so heavily subsidized. The failure of rail isn't an example of fair competition, it is an example of a heavily lobbied government choosing one form of transportation at the cost of either choice or market requirements. Consider this:
The director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, William S. Lind, agrees that America’s love affair with subsidized interstates made private passenger rail unviable. Lind points out that even in 1921 the federal government spent $1.4 billion on highways, and by 1960 the outlay was $11.5 billion. By 2006, 47,000 miles of interstates had been built at a cost of $425 billion.
When critics of passenger-rail subsidies, such as Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, suggest that the highway costs are mostly covered by the gas tax, Lind counters with figures from a 2008 Federal Highway Administration paper: the FHA reports that highway user fees, including gas taxes, only cover 51 percent of costs. By contrast, Amtrak in 2010 covered 67 percent of its operating costs from ticket fares and other revenue.
"A Nation Derailed", Lewis McCrary
The above quote was written by a conservative arguing for rail. Your "Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!" line is, I'm afraid, very often accurate. It is sad that so many on the right are so ready to defend the federal highway systems and automobiles against all other alternatives. Certainly, there are many things to recommend cars and good highways, but currently the funding of these systems is a subsidy for corporations who rely on externalizing the cost (on taxpayers) of long distance transportation, e.g. Wal-Mart, to the detriment of local businesses and small competitors. I call this sad because conservatives, and on this account I will accept the appellation myself, claim to favor traditional patterns of life and to be skeptical of the kind of federal subsidies which support business models which might otherwise fail. The loss of rail and the rise of cars was a blow to small town civic life. Thereafter, the bypass ("It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses!") and the big box stores, always by externalizing their costs and frequently with the help of imminent domain laws, further eroded civic life and economy.