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Chris
07-25-2013, 11:07 AM
This topic comes up often enough to merit a closer look, recently in discussion with nic34. It usually comes up when some Progressive accuses free markets as driven by social Darwinism. The following will demonstrate how politically, economically, that is a misrepresentation.

Let's start with Social Darwinism and Social Justice (http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/07/social-darwinism-and-social-justice/):


...Both of these men [,William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer,] today are remembered mostly as social Darwinists who celebrated laissez-faire and excoriated socialism and charity in the name of the “survival of the fittest.”...

Since Spencer and Sumner have the reputation of being more strongly against aid to the poor than just about any other libertarian of whom I’ve heard, I figure their arguments are worth taking a very close look at.

...But this leads directly to my second reason for being interested in these two figures – to see if and to what extent their reputation matches up with the reality of their views. Every libertarian I know is used to having their position misrepresented and vilified in the most uncharitable light. I’ve seen this happen enough times to people whose work I know well enough to spot the smear. So when people vilify Spencer and Sumner as “social Darwinists,” I want to look at their work first-hand before making up my mind one way or another.

Unfortunately, people who use the term “social Darwinism” aren’t terribly careful about providing a clear definition of the term, so my first essay is devoted largely to figuring out what it is supposed to mean....

So let's break there and look at the first essay, the definition:


...How can one prove that Sumner was not a Social Darwinist if no one who thinks he is will tell you what that phrase even means?

The best we can do in this respect is to make some reasonable assumptions about what the phrase was intended to mean, based upon the way in which it was used. On this basis, the core ideas of social Darwinism seem to be that human society is marked by the same sort of “struggle for existence” that characterizes the animal world, and that the victors of this struggle emerge according to the rule of “survival of the fittest.” Economic competition is one aspect of this struggle, and so a policy of strict laissez-faire is necessary in order to ensure the fitness of the individuals who constitute society. Interference with laissez-faire in the form of coercive redistribution or even (perhaps) charitable giving to the weak, would retard the evolutionary pressures leading to greater and greater fitness, and must therefore be opposed. Economic success is a inevitable product of virtue and fitness, and economic failure is a telltale sign of vice and unfitness. That which has might, is necessarily right, and that which is weak may be trodden upon with impunity, nay ... with righteousness!

...For the social Darwinist, then, the law of capitalism and the law of the jungle are one and the same.

But if this is what social Darwinism means, then neither Spencer nor Sumner were social Darwinists. I refer readers to Leonard’s essay above, or to our own George Smith’s classic piece, for a refutation of the charge as applied to Spencer....

OK, so now we have some sense of what a Progressive means by it, and a rejection that Spencer nor Sumner were social Darwinists, and, as we'll see, nor is free market capitalism.

Back to the initial essay, where he refers to another essay, but convenient to me, cites a portion...


The second essay argues that William Graham Sumner was not, in fact, a social Darwinist. He was a laissez-faire liberal who was a fierce opponent of militarism, protectionism, and plutocracy. Far from being a champion of the strong against the weak, he was a champion of the common man against both the socialists who would exploit his labor for the benefit of the masses, and the plutocrats who would exploit him for the benefit of the privileged few.

It’s a long essay, and I hope you’ll have the patience to read the whole thing. But to entice you, and to give you just a sense of why the charge of social Darwinism misfires, here’s one of my favorite passages from Sumner’s excellent anti-imperialist lecture, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”


There are plenty of people in the United States today who regard Negroes as human beings, perhaps, but of a different order from white men, so that the ideas and social arrangements of white men cannot be applied to them with propriety. Others feel the same way about Indians. This attitude of mind, wherever you meet with it, is what causes tyranny and cruelty. It is this disposition to decide off-hand that some people are not fit for liberty and self-government which gives relative truth to the doctrine that all men are equal, and inasmuch as the history of mankind has been one long story of the abuse of some by others, who, of course, smoothed over their tyranny by some beautiful doctrines of religion, or ethics, or political philosophy, which proved that it was all for the best good of the oppressed, therefore the doctrine that all men are equal has come to stand as one of the corner-stones of the temple of justice and truth. It was set up as a bar to just this notion that we are so much better than others that it is liberty for them to be governed by us.

That libertarian/free market view is the opposite of social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism was in fact used by Progressive to impost statist policies of euthanasia shortly after the time of Sumner and Spencer, see: [url=http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/14640-Eugenics-and-Progressives]Eugenics and Progressives (][/url).

nic34
07-25-2013, 11:47 AM
I only have time to reply to all that by posting a view of libertarianism that closely reflects my own, since that’s what this is thread is all about, tear down the opposition and replace it with a, well….. a void.


Who needs facts?

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.

Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green (http://www.wepin.com/store/freetech/products/zp01/property.html):

This concept of property originated in some of those primitive tribes when individuals claimed possessions for themselves as against the collective ownership of their groups. Based on individual initiative, labor, and innovation, some were successful at establishing a separate, private ownership role for themselves. [...]

Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.

The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.

Thanks to my essay on taxes (http://www.zompist.com/richtax.htm), I routinely get mail featuring impassioned harangues which never once mention a real-world fact-- or which simply make up the statistics they want.

This sort of balls-out aggressivity probably wins points at parties, where no one is going to take down an almanac and check their figures; but to me it's a cardinal sin. If someone has an answer for everything, advocates changes which have never been tried, and presents dishonest evidence, he's a crackpot. If a man has no doubts, it's because his hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.


Pre-New Deal America

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons (http://www.zompist.com/rants.html#56), monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.

The New Deal (http://www.zompist.com/rants05.html#5) itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn't much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi's land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.

Don't think, by the way, that if governments don't provide gunboats, no one else will. Corporations will build their own military if necessary: the East Indies Company did; Leopold did in the Congo; management did when fighting with labor.


Welcoming your new overlords

The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.

If you were part of the World War II generation, the reality was that you had access to subsidized education and housing, you lived better every year, and you were almost unimaginably better off than your parents.

We were a middle-class nation, perhaps the first nation in history where the majority of the people were comfortable. This infuriated the communists (this wasn't supposed to happen). The primeval libertarians who cranky about it as well, but the rich had little reason to complain-- they were better off than ever before, too.

Conservatives-- nurtured by libertarian ideas-- have managed to change all that. When productivity rises, the rich now keep the gains; the middle class barely stays where it is; the poor get poorer. We have a ways to go before we become a Third World country, but the model is clear. The goal is an impoverished majority, and a super-rich minority with no effective limitations on its power or earnings. We'll exchange the prosperity of 1950s America for that of 1980s Brazil.


http://www.zompist.com/libertos.html

Chris
07-25-2013, 11:53 AM
The topic is social Darwinism, nic, something you brought up yesterday.

Not really interested in the first fact-free opinionated BS you found on the Internet about libertarianism.

nic34
07-25-2013, 12:40 PM
This is BS:


That libertarian/free market view is the opposite of social Darwinism.

Chris
07-25-2013, 01:13 PM
This is BS:

If you accept the description of social darwinism and that Sumner and Spencer were not social Darwinists but free marketers, then I'l be glad to change to your topic and discuss it.

nic34
07-25-2013, 01:34 PM
OK, so let's leave our so called "first fact-free opinionated BS" sources out of it then.

First this:


Social Darwinism was in fact used by Progressive to impost statist policies of euthanasia shortly after the time of Sumner and Spencer, see: Eugenics and Progressives.
I keep seeing this and I keep reminding folks that this kind of "guilt by history" is as dishonest as comparing a republican of 1865 to G.W. Bush, likewise a democrat of 1860 of the same philosophy as John Kennedy.

Second, and my comment on your post:

Sumner said in his social-Darwinian classic of 1883 “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

Could there be a better summary of what today’s regressive Republicans/Lib-tarians believe?

Mister D
07-25-2013, 01:38 PM
OK, so let's leave our so called "first fact-free opinionated BS" sources out of it then.

First this:


I keep seeing this and I keep reminding folks that this kind of "guilt by history" is as dishonest as comparing a republican of 1865 to G.W. Bush, likewise a democrat of 1860 of the same philosophy as John Kennedy.

Second, and my comment on your post:

Sumner said in his social-Darwinian classic of 1883 “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

Could there be a better summary of what today’s regressive Republicans/Lib-tarians believe?

Could you point to a single Republican or libertarian who beliEves that? No, not another one of your "but that's what he really means" spin fests. A real example.

Chris
07-25-2013, 01:42 PM
OK, so let's leave our so called "first fact-free opinionated BS" sources out of it then.

First this:


I keep seeing this and I keep reminding folks that this kind of "guilt by history" is as dishonest as comparing a republican of 1865 to G.W. Bush, likewise a democrat of 1860 of the same philosophy as John Kennedy.

Second, and my comment on your post:

Sumner said in his social-Darwinian classic of 1883 “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

Could there be a better summary of what today’s regressive Republicans/Lib-tarians believe?

In a minute, busy right now.

But my source was not fact free in his analysis of how Progressives defined Social Darwinism and how Sumner and Spencer diametrically opposed that by citing the work of all three parties.

Back in a bit...

GrassrootsConservative
07-25-2013, 01:43 PM
OK, so let's leave our so called "first fact-free opinionated BS" sources out of it then.

First this:


I keep seeing this and I keep reminding folks that this kind of "guilt by history" is as dishonest as comparing a republican of 1865 to G.W. Bush, likewise a democrat of 1860 of the same philosophy as John Kennedy.

Second, and my comment on your post:

Sumner said in his social-Darwinian classic of 1883 “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

Could there be a better summary of what today’s regressive Republicans/Lib-tarians believe?



So do I when you tell us what "lib-Rals" think......... :smiley_ROFLMAO:

http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/14874-The-Me-Generation-Isn-t-Too-Keen-On-Family-Bibles?p=333965&viewfull=1#post333965

HYPOCRITE!

nic34
07-25-2013, 01:59 PM
http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/14874-The-Me-Generation-Isn-t-Too-Keen-On-Family-Bibles?p=333965&viewfull=1#post333965

HYPOCRITE!

It would only be "hypocritical" if I objected to it. But I only agreed and said I "laughed" too.

Nice work tho....

Chris
07-25-2013, 01:59 PM
OK, so let's leave our so called "first fact-free opinionated BS" sources out of it then.

First this:


I keep seeing this and I keep reminding folks that this kind of "guilt by history" is as dishonest as comparing a republican of 1865 to G.W. Bush, likewise a democrat of 1860 of the same philosophy as John Kennedy.

Second, and my comment on your post:

Sumner said in his social-Darwinian classic of 1883 “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

Could there be a better summary of what today’s regressive Republicans/Lib-tarians believe?

Thing is, nic, that statement is true. It is documented in the annals of history.

It is now still true. Not sure. The eugenics movement was adopted by the Nazis to create their version of superman, and thus it has been demonized. But I do still hear here and there an angry liberal spout some version of it.

But the "guilt by history" is coming from you, nic, not me. You sound defensive. But attacking libertarians doesn't defend your progressivism.


As for Sumner, that was explained by my source, which you have deemed unworthy of reading. I will only add that his meaning was not that of Progressives. His understanding, and Spencer's, of evolution was that of an unguided, undesigned process. The Progressive view was, and still is, I think, one trying to use, misuse, I might add, evolutionary theory as a means to re-engineer man and society to this day. Hope and change is the culmination of that view, the vision, as Sowell put it, of the anointed, as Hayek put it, the fatal conceit.

nic34
07-25-2013, 02:45 PM
I think if you refrained from always looking toward Koch bros. funded ALEC, Cato, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and others for information there might be some possible common ground someday. We realize they have a financial agenda as any large corporation would, that we don't necessarily share. However you do yourself a disservice by doing the same yourself.... attacking progressivism to defend libertarian ideas.

The main obstacle preventing progressives and libertarians from uniting to oppose this drift toward corporate-dictatorship is the partisan right-wing libertarian groupthink. Like the idea that the left wants to "re-engineer society", and the proof of it was 100 years ago. That's an old argument that does nothing but poison the well. This is today. Not the FDR 30's, not the LBJ 60's, and not the Reagan 80"s.

Thus, it is entirely up to libertarians to start communicating with Progressives. Leftists have very open minds, and listen when you talk economics to them. We can mingle now, or wait until we are all behind the same razor wire.

Chris
07-25-2013, 02:53 PM
I think if you refrained from always looking toward Koch bros. funded ALEC, Cato, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and others for information there might be some possible common ground someday. We realize they have a financial agenda as any large corporation would, that we don't necessarily share. However you do yourself a disservice by doing the same yourself.... attacking progressivism to defend libertarian ideas.

The main obstacle preventing progressives and libertarians from uniting to oppose this drift toward corporate-dictatorship is the partisan right-wing libertarian groupthink. Like the idea that the left wants to "re-engineer society", and the proof of it was 100 years ago. That's an old argument that does nothing but poison the well. This is today. Not the FDR 30's, not the LBJ 60's, and not the Reagan 80"s.

Thus, it is entirely up to libertarians to start communicating with Progressives. Leftists have very open minds, and listen when you talk economics to them. We can mingle now, or wait until we are all behind the same razor wire.

I don't, nic. Perhaps you do? OK, but don't project.


And you change topic again...


The main obstacle preventing progressives and libertarians from uniting to oppose this drift toward corporate-dictatorship is the partisan right-wing libertarian groupthink.

It's government-corporate collusion, crony capitalism, nic, and you know full well I oppose that. It's a standard libertarian position. Libertarianism is not right-wing, nic, it can be right- or left-wind, but is centered above that horizontal axis on the vertical axis:

http://i.snag.gy/Y3KLQ.jpg

Progressives, btw, are at the bottom.



Generally speaking, the difference between socialism and libertarianism is public vs private property. The difference between progressivism and libertarianism, in the pursuit of happiness or the common good, is government-provided rights (entitlements) vs government-protected rights (responsibilities).

The Sage of Main Street
08-11-2013, 04:47 PM
[QUOTE=nic34;333885]I only have time to reply to all that by posting a view of libertarianism that closely reflects my own,
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You miss the most important fact: inheritance and other birth privileges. Even if the plutocrat earned his money, his heirs didn't earn a dime of it. But their unearned wealth puts them in lucrative or influential positions in society that they have no special talent for, causing economic and political failure. The focus should be on society, not on the selfish desires of the plutocrats.


This guillotine-fodder's overdemanding privileges have nothing to with incentive. If they believe this hubristic claim, they must have extracted their own wealth through luck and cheating, so who needs people like that to overpower us? Their bootlickers who claim that the rich would not work very hard if they couldn't pass on their positions to their brats are slavish peasants and traitors to society who hate their own fathers for not getting rich and spoiling them. Libretardians are stuck in that immature fixation and should be exposed for what they are really after and what they really are.

Chris
08-11-2013, 05:16 PM
[QUOTE=nic34;333885]I only have time to reply to all that by posting a view of libertarianism that closely reflects my own,
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You miss the most important fact: inheritance and other birth privileges. Even if the plutocrat earned his money, his heirs didn't earn a dime of it. But their unearned wealth puts them in lucrative or influential positions in society that they have no special talent for, causing economic and political failure. The focus should be on society, not on the selfish desires of the plutocrats.


This guillotine-fodder's overdemanding privileges have nothing to with incentive. If they believe this hubristic claim, they must have extracted their own wealth through luck and cheating, so who needs people like that to overpower us? Their bootlickers who claim that the rich would not work very hard if they couldn't pass on their positions to their brats are slavish peasants and traitors to society who hate their own fathers for not getting rich and spoiling them. Libretardians are stuck in that immature fixation and should be exposed for what they are really after and what they really are.

Got to love how socialists redefine everything to fit their views, inventing straw men to attack, as if it justifies their socialism.