House of Eratosthenes

One or two other sensibly-minded gadflies are joining with my fine self on an experiment, to find out what happens to lefties who use their “let me further persuade you to my point of view with my dismissive attitude” technique — when it doesn’t work. The result, so far, is: What started as a left-winger bitching about the bad press Obama was getting over skipping the Boy Scout centennial, has popcorned into a thread just shy of eighty comments about all sorts of stuff.

The persuasive-dismissive-attitude thing is being retried and retried. It’s developed into something of a nervous tic for them.

Socialism isn’t bad at all. It has worked quite well in a number of other places. Why? Well, because when and where it has worked, it has been restrained by the best impulses of Capitalism. The all or nothing meme is getting really worn out.

Here in the United States, I would posit that Capitalism works best. But only when it is restrained by Socialistic impulses. That’s why our Capitalist system worked, more or less, swimmingly from 1945 to the early 1980’s. There were economic ups and downs, but no cataclysm. The only clusterphucks we’ve known economically have come in 1929 and since deregulation in the 1980’s. Why? It’s not because the Gilded Age Presidents or Ronald Reagan were pure evil. Liberals who talk that way presume these men WANTED to destroy America. And that’s just nonsense. They meant well, were sincere and were, clearly, sincerely wrong.

Socialism is no evil, unless it us unbridled. In North Korea and the old Soviet Union, it was unbridled. Capitalism is no evil. In fact, it is pregnant with the potential for great good. When it is bridled. Since Ronald Reagan (and in fairness, I should note that some deregulation was championed by the supposedly liberal Jimmy Carter), we have had nothing but a succession of extreme Capitalists as Presidents. Barack Obama is simply a Capitalist, but not an extremist. If nationalizing Willard “Mitt” Romney’s health care reform plan is Socialism, then Billy Sunday’s tent revivals were Roman Catholic masses.

Socialistic restraints have kept capitalism bridled. Our messy capitalistic-socialist hodgepodge is the best of both worlds, or something.

I guess when I see socialism making these big messes, like the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac situation, and blame them on capitalism…that’s just the wonderfulness oozing out.

So I replied:

Capitalism places the opposite participant in a transaction (seller, if you’re the buyer; buyer, if you’re the seller) in the same position of authority that socialism invests in some centralized dictator who is far less interested in the outcome, knows a whole lot less about the nature of it, and is consistently an asshole.

Capitalism has no need to be bridled. It is self-bridling. It is equally risible to talk about bridled & non-bridled socialism; it is inherently unbridled. Any & all charter documents that seek to place limits on power, socialism labors to undermine. Once the ruling party gets it in their head they want to do something, anything standing in the way is exactly that and nothing more. Just an obstacle to be defeated.

And the socialism-isn’t-bad guy came back with:

Capitalism is self-bridling? OMG. Morgan, that is possibly the most clueless thing I have ever heard any intelligent person say.

Tell that to the people in Anniston, Alabama; Mossville, Louisiana; and Lima, Ohio. Tell that to the families of the miners killed in West Virginia or the workers killed on the BP Oil rig.

Unbridled Capitalism is no different than unbridled Socialism. Both lead to negligent homicide.

This orgy of deregulation must be stopped, just as the orgy of oppression in the old USSR had to be stopped.

Heaven help me, it’s the dreaded OMG retort. It’s been the juggernaut of arguments since the debates that took place in ancient Athens.

What is this guy, twelve?

Yes Jim. Self-bridling. Capitalism has its restraints built in. They may be disappointing to a pipe-dreamer who’s come up with a vision, unenforced by reality, of what the self-restraints ought to be (socialistic governments are absolutely NOT self-bridling). But they’re there.

You sell something, the buyer has to agree to the price and the terms. Otherwise you go out of business. You buy something, the seller must agree or you go home empty handed.

Government does something like, oh…regulate BP? BP writes in the answers to the audit in pencil, the auditor traces over it in pen. The mentally flaccid will say “Aha! See? That’s a failure of capitalism!” But it isn’t. “Regulatory oversight” was put in place, and it was found not to work.

Hey wouldn’t it be sweet to have a job like that? You’re supposed to do something…and when you use the time to stare at porn all day instead of doing your job, it’s the other guy’s fault.

You want unbridled? Look at Obama or any other leftwing dictator asshole. The rules say He can’t do something, and whatever that rule is it’s just a minor irritant, nothing more. That’s what I call unbridled.

Or if you insist on something in the private sector, look to the businesses that employ illegal aliens. There’s your “unbridled.”

Capitalism is self-bridling. Obama makes it a lot more expensive to hire people, and in keeping with the law, the corporations lay people off. And then this is supposed to be the fault of capitalism somehow.

But I never said the bridling had to be comfortable for everyone. Businesses that want to operate out in the light, do what must be done in order to stay legal. And then it’s their fault, even though the leftist government comes up with the policies. Often, in contravention to the Constitution and other laws.

Obama shakes down BP, has the “audacity” to pick up the phone and order them to put billions of dollars in a pot. Hey, is that your idea of self bridling? Just curious.

No reply posted as of yet. There are other dialogues going on in this thing…so I expect to see this particular train of thought Cheesecake-Nazi’d out. Ooh, bright shiny object.

But this theory of mixing together…oh my, how I’d love to set the cross-hairs of a .50 cal. upon it. This is an idea that needs to die. It is toxic. It ranks high on the list of things that have diminished the opportunities of the generations of Americans, now to levels beneath that enjoyed by their parents. It’s killing the country, this “epoxy theory.” Socialism, capitalism. Mix ’em together, shake the bag a few times, and what you get is twice as good as either one by itself.

Over and over again, we see that is not what you get. Whatever the effort is, whatever the industry is, the results are the same: The productive are strapped to a sort of gurney, and the non-productive figure out they can attain a higher lifestyle by being dicks. Then they gather around the bloated succulent victim, bare their fangs and suck like the craven vampires they are. The next generation is taught to be vampires, not bloated succulent gurney-meat; and can you blame them? Real jobs are for losers.

…oh my, how I’d love to set the cross-hairs of a .50 cal. upon it.

See, now, if you’d been involved in Boy Scout, or other venue, NRA shooting program in your youth, you’d be saying “set the iron or peep sights…”
SEE: Appleseed Project, as well as the mandatory knee-jerk vapors of “AAAAAAAAGH, right wing plot for militant assault on fellow useful idiots” criticisms.
- CaptDMO | 08/04/2010 @ 06:41
Socialism is like alcohol, a little bit of it is good for you(interstate highways),but once you have any it’s easy for it to expand into to much(compulsory charity).Easy to find yourself blotto when you only meant to party.Maybe the root problem is too many people who make themselves feel important by ordering other people around,or is it too many expecting to get something for nothing,or these two groups feeding on each other.
- kermitt | 08/04/2010 @ 06:55
First Class, Troop 47, 1976-1980.

Never fired a .50 though. That would be a cool merit badge.
- mkfreeberg | 08/04/2010 @ 07:00
Naturally, there is no poverty and there are no mining disasters in Socialist countries.
- philmon | 08/04/2010 @ 07:50
The way I look at collectivist things having a place in our society is this:

We should be looking at any expansion of government with a skeptical eye in the spirit of our Limited Government Founders’ vision.

If it’s something we all have to agree on or it just won’t work at all, like Interstate Highways or National Parks … then we should (somewhat grudgingly, knowing the habit is a bad one) cede power in that area.

When it comes to forcing people to buy something (or pay a fine if they don’t) … We have an obligation to put our (pardon the expression) collective feet down (individually! That means you get off your butt and go vote.)
- philmon | 08/04/2010 @ 07:55
What really flummoxes me, is this:

Every single socialist citadel, toppled or not, has this upper-crust aristocracy of beknighteds who make all the important decisions.

That is precisely what it’s there to get rid of. The whole “equality” agenda & all that.
- mkfreeberg | 08/04/2010 @ 08:01
The most detrimental outcome of the citizens’s repugnance to economic problems is a readiness to back a program of compromise. As he is not prepared to appraise the arguments advanced by each party he thinks it fair to end the dispute by amicable arrangement, each claimant having part of his claim. There should be neither full capitalism nor full socialism but something in between, a third way–
von Mises
The combination of wine and sewage is sewage–
American maxim
It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government–
Eleanor Roosevelt
All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it–
Dr. Johnson
Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one’s wishes–
Krushchev
Man cannot foresee his own advance. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. The astonishing fact revealed by economics and biology is that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive–
von Hayek
The shivering ghost that now inhabits the words laissez faire was once an unconquerable fighting spirit. It did not belong to capitalism. It belonged to liberty; and to this day its association with capitalism is valid only insofar as capitalism represents liberty. By its very nature private capitalism limits government.
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalist–
Garet Garrett
All progress depends on the unreasonable man–
G B Shaw
One of the great peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned its hope on the organization of factions against one another, rather than the default position of man–good versus bad–
Thomas Sowell
Capitalism was not designed. It came not from thinking but from doing. In the beginning and for a long time it had no more theory about itself than a tree; like a tree it grew, and its only laws were remembered experience. When the writers of political economy began to provide it with a theory they had first of all to study it to find out how it worked. Many capitalist were innocent of its existence. What could theorist tell them about what they were doing every day?–
Garet Garrett
The extended order, capitalism, is transcendent–that which far surpasses the reach of our understanding, wishes and purposes, and sense of perception. It incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual brain and no single organization could posses or invent.
To extend human cooperation beyond the limits of human awareness requires being governed not by shared purposes, but abstract rules of conduct.
Powerful instinctual and rationalistic impulses rebel against the learned rules and institutions that capitalism requires–
von Hayek

In other words, what is called socialism is natural to us; liberty is not. That is why even experience can never drive it very far away.

Each generation must learn for itself and when it has learned it is ready to die–
Garet Garrett
- jamzw | 08/04/2010 @ 09:56
The reason socialists never see what you’re talking about is because they’re entranced by abstractions. That’s the whole reason why they’re socialists, and why “intellectual” is nowadays synonymous with “doofy leftwinger.” They don’t realize that “the rich” don’t think of themselves as “the rich” — they’re just a bunch of individual guys who want to live a certain way, and are willing to do what it takes to attain that lifestyle. Similarly, lefties don’t see that “the poor” or “the working class” don’t primarily think of themselves as a collective, and they certainly don’t see that their own endlessly trumpeted virtue depends on “the poor” remaining poor, so that the left can exercise all their wonderful we-are-the-world benevolence upon them.

It’s also one of the greatest instances of projection I’ve ever seen. Lefties think “individual liberty” is a ruthless Hobbesian mandate to screw over, trample down, and dominate everyone else, precisely because that’s what they themselves would do if given the levers of power, and what they in fact do do whenever we’re foolish enough to elect them. That’s why “deregulation” is one of their biggest bugaboos — they neither know nor care which specific regulations they want put back in place; they just know that “deregulation” gives people a mandate to act the way liberals wish they could.
- Severian | 08/04/2010 @ 10:45
I think Severian has nailed it. They want to act like dictators, all the way down to muzzling critics and dragging them off to concentration camps. So they assume that’s exactly what the Right wants to do to them.

Witness all the hand-wringing about upcoming “theocracy” during the Bush years. Because they’re in a big hurry to push a sort of secular theocracy on us.

They don’t understand the idea of freely giving one’s time and money in the name of a religious cause, so they assume the church is corrupt, and the parishioners either blind or “in cahoots.”

They would probably shoot someone they didn’t like on a whim, so they assume that’s what all gun owners would do.

And so on..
- cylarz | 08/06/2010 @ 23:39

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“Socialism Isn’t Bad at All”Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

“Socialism Isn’t Bad at All”
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010