Comments on: Wouldn’t Know It If It Bit Them on the Nose

By: madmax

madmax — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 04:09:49 +0000

Things economic are always granted less legal protections than things non-economic. Take for example political speech vs “commercial” speech. If it is commercial it is materialistic and therefore of lesser value. My guess is that this line of reasoning goes back to Christianity and its Platonic conception of the good. The good is an essence in a perfect, ideal realm. This earth is just a flawed reflection of the ideal or, in the Christian version, its outright base and depraved. Therefor anything material, like capitalism, can never be really good or moral. That’s reserved for things which are abstract and “transcendent”, things supposedly noble.

I think this is why Conservatives can never really defend capitalism. As Christians (or Judeo-Christian sympathizers) they can never defend this lowly earth. Christianity’s (and Plato’s) dual metaphysics is killing mankind. In ways I don’t fully understand as yet, this attitude was secularized and has been adopted by the Left. Even if the Left would reject the mystical version, they still accept the essence of the belief that this earth is wicked.

By: Jim May

Jim May — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:24:30 +0000

I agree, despite the fact that “capitalism” appears to have originated as the first anti-concept, coined by the 19th century Marxists in order to derogate “the system of natural liberty” by reducing its meaning from the all-encompassing “system of natural liberty” to merely an economic system. The goal was to introduce the false dichotomy between “economic” and “political” freedom, so that they could then attack the Enlightenment politics at its weakest point — property rights — while still posing as defenders of “political” freedom.

I think it is crucial, in the defense of freedom, to insist that freedom is indivisible. Capitalism == freedom; one is the other. They are not merely corollaries, or interdependent, or interconnected — they are the same damn thing.

Freedom is not contingent upon whether a particular choice or action is deemed “economic”. Individual rights do not cease to exist when a dollar changes hands.

It is my as yet unresearched expectation that ALL of so-called political “science” and most economic theories, exist for the sole purpose of rationalizing government intervention into economic matters — and that the false distinction between “economic” and “political” freedom is the linchpin, without which they all fall down.

By: Burgess Laughlin

Burgess Laughlin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:58:02 +0000

I applaud your definition of capitalism as a political system that protects individual rights. That is the cause. The effect is a free market.

Your definition is a definition by essential (causal) characteristics.

Being able to and desiring to define concepts objectively is even more rare than a proper definition of capitalism. Learning better thinking skills must come before political change can come. There is a long road ahead for changing the culture.