Comments
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Rhetoric and PropagandaThat favor is confined to a limited amount of people or can it also be applief for the multitude? — rhudehssolf
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Rhetoric and PropagandaCan a disrinction be made between rhetoric and propaganda ? — rhudehssolf
Yes. -
Was Jesus born with Original Sin?What's funny is that Christians and atheists would both answer 'No'.
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How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'What it does suggest strongly is that you have to imagine something completely different from all common examples of states and market economies to drive a wedge between them.
A consequence of this difference is that reading the real world in terms of whatever notion of state and market you have is a category error; it's simply not relevant to the intertwined nature of states and markets that we have today. You can't have your cake and eat it too. — fdrake
The distinction I have made is simply that between human activity which involves the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and that which is peaceful, involving no such activity. This maps onto Oppenheimer's distinction between the 'economic means' and the 'political means'. If I understand your argument, you seem to be saying that, because the markets of our acquaintance are all Statist, whatever market would exist in the absence of the State would be so different from the things we usually call 'markets' that it is inappropriate to describe it as a market at all.
I don't see any reason to agree with this, since economists do speak of markets independently of the State (David Friedman, for instance, examines how the Stateless market for law would operate), and the way economists define 'markets' tends to be quite straightforward and non-stipulative. There is little more to markets than what I have drawn attention to: they are just exchange processes between buyers and sellers of goods and services.
But, even if you are correct, and the definition of 'market' somehow incorporates a State implicitly, this is more of a semantic issue than a substantial philosophical one. Choose a noun which you think appropriately designates a process of exchanges in the absence of a State, and we could use that word instead. Creating a Stateless 'market' is not the primary libertarian goal: the goal is to oppose and prevent the initiation of force and the invasion of property. There is no 'structural vision' which the libertarian is seeking to usher in, beyond this.
This is an invalid argument.
(1) X depends upon Y for its existence.
(2) Therefore Y does not have its own behaviour. — fdrake
Granted. But this is not the argument I presented. I pointed out that there are properties of my heart which do not trace to me unqualifiedly. And yet, I still exist, and engage in actions of my own. My point is that the kinds of things that are predicated of human collectives are not really proper to human collectives, but are really proper to persons. Countries per se do not mourn.
Some examples of emergence in this sense, in addition to the previous ones: people negotiating (you can't negotiate with just one person), wars (This would never happen "New story just coming in, Chad declares war on America is equivalent to a Chad government official having a sudden desire to kill all American tourists due to an obnoxious tourist over the age of 40 wearing a cap backwards"). — fdrake
But this argument - about what you would be likely to hear on the news - is only a linguistic convention. It doesn't have any ontological bearing. It is conventional to speak of human collectives as though they have their own independent agency; this does not mean that they really do. What is 'Chad'? If it includes all the country's citizens, then it is untrue that 'Chad' has literally declared war. 'Declaration' is an act of a purposeful agent, a person. Rocks, trees, planets and photons cannot 'declare'. Persons declare. Can multiple persons all engage in an act of 'declaration' together, in concert and for a common purpose? Certainly. But this does not produce a 'macro agent', hovering over and above the individual members. To say 'the football team is drinking beer' does not imply the literal, concrete, ontological reality of a twelfth agent called 'the team', on top of the eleven players. 'Drinking' requires a mouth, a gullet, and so on. Individual persons are the only things which have these. Just so for any kind of purposeful activity. Such requires a mind, which is proper to persons only. The non-literal predication of conscious activity to human collectives does not imply that there is a subsistent entity, with its own agency.
The examples you give of collective action are ultimately reducible to actions of individual persons. We just don't describe them in this way because it is inconvenient. It is easier to speak of a country mourning than it is to enumerate every individual who is mourning; even though, really, individuals are the only things that can mourn.
When someone writes "Will America declare war on Iran?" what this means is that will the political authorities of America mandate violence against the people of Iran. Then this entails that American soldiers will take action against the individuals of Iran. — fdrake
Yes, this is exactly it: if you want to know in what the truth of 'America declares war on Iran' concretely and literally consists, you must translate it into the actions of persons. America, here, does not mean a country, a landmass, a citizenry, which is what 'America' is usually intended to mean. It refers to the actions of particular persons, the soldiers. The soldiers are fighting with 'Iran'. What does this mean? Are they fighting with every Iranian citizen? With the soil, the sand, the buildings? No: they fight with persons. The truth of these statements of collective action consists in the actions of individual persons. Note that this does not mean that every man is an island, a floating wraith, whose actions can be analysed apart from everything else in the world. But it does mean that only individuals are the agents of purposeful action, and the language of collective action which we use to describe this reality is a poetic and non-literal abstraction.
And a firm has no responsibility for firing workers attempting to unionise to stick up for their interests? Weird huh? — fdrake
Why should any person be obliged to continue to employ another person, if she doesn't wish to? The right to freedom of association by which workers are allowed to unionise is the self-same right that is being invoked when I decide that I no longer wish to employ someone. If you have the right to decide whom you wish to associate with, and whom not to associate with, and under what terms, then so do I.
A village starves to death. — fdrake
Not the point here, I know, but this is a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon I am talking about. A village starves? Not really, obviously. Starving is something which happens to an organism, like the individual members of the village. There isn't literally a 'starving village'. A perfectly acceptable way of speaking, but we ought not to exaggerate what this commits us to, ontologically.
Scarcity is better defined as insufficient access to a good for a purpose or group. How a social form distributes goods (partially) determines who has access to what. — fdrake
Why 'better'? It is certainly a less helpful definition in economics, since the entire discipline is addressed towards scarcity in the sense I spelled out above. Moreover, economics is a wertfrei discipline, and I am doubtful that 'insufficient' can be spelled out in a wertfrei way. Besides, we have other concepts like 'shortage' which may put in work in expressing what you are wanting to express.
Artificial scarcity - if a good is scarce not because of being unavailable (like water in a draught), but because of how access and distribution work and are constrained in a social form. — fdrake
This certainly will do not do. Because we live in a world of scarcity, and because virtually all consumer goods are the result of production, all such resources exist in the quantities they do precisely because that is the amount that has been produced. For any such good, more or less of it might conceivably be produced. On your definition, all produced consumer goods are artificially scarce, because it is always possible to produce more. 'Labour' would be artificially scarce, because as we speak I am choosing not to enter into the labour market. It is a much too permissive definition.
But I really don't want to discuss this. These terms mean what they mean in economics, and I don't see anything wrong with them.
Fuck me, air is scarce? I'll start stockpiling. — fdrake
Absolutely - if air were non-scarce, then it would be possible for everyone to use the air for whatever purpose they see fit, without denying anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. This clearly is not true. If air were truly non-scarce, we would have no fear of air pollution, and it would not be necessary to take an oxygen tank with you when you go deep-sea diving. There are all sorts of ways in which air must be rationed, which speaks to its scarcity. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'
Just write like a human being. English is not my first language, and I'm not going to take the time to read something that's purposefully obscure. But ultimately you can do what you want. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Eat the rich. — Noah Te Stroete
Lol. You’d better hope the State never dissolves because it’s what is standing between you and your property and the unwashed masses armed with their rage and AR-15s. — Noah Te Stroete
Do you do any philosophy here, or do you just say things like this? -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Any condition where people cooperate instead of fighting each other is a "state" of a kind. — Valentinus
This is not correct. A State is a particular kind of human association, one which holds a monopoly on physical force over a given territory. It is not helpful to describe any peaceful state of affairs between persons as a ‘State’, because this does not bear any resemblance to the things which we ordinarily designate ‘States’. States are precisely non-peaceful and non-cooperative: they endure by initiating force, invading property, and benefiting special interests at the expense of others. Their very existence is a predatory existence.
How this condition is brought about is not a product of "roughly equal" participants. There is no equality in the state of nature. Inequality and equality only make sense in the context of some kind of social contract. — Valentinus
The equality which Hobbes speaks of is a roughly equal equality in physical capacities. The point is that, if you were to imagine a person who is uniquely adapted to living in the war of all against all – supremely strong, quick, cunning, and so on – even he would be in perpetual danger in such a world, for he may be ambushed at any time, or may simply get unlucky in one of his twice-daily fights to the death. The work that this does in Hobbes’s argument is that it shows that we are all better off for escaping the state of nature, and thus better off for handing absolute authority to the State. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'I feel that the way you use the term the "state" is very unhelpful for the topic being discussed here. — Judaka
I have defined ‘State’ in a way that is quite conventional in political theory. There are alternative definitions, but they don’t alter my analysis in any important respect.
Just look at the US, if use your terminology, wouldn't it be fair to say that the "state" is trying to impeach the "state" right now? You say that the "state" wants to become more totalitarian but in fact - in democracies - most of the state is terrified of the state becoming more totalitarian. — Judaka
To be sure, the State is a collective entity, a composite of persons, and these persons may have differing purposes, intents and goals. So it is simplistic to speak of ‘the interests of the State’ unqualifiedly. But I haven’t done this; I have spoken of the State’s incentive structure qualifiedly. I have drawn attention to the separation of powers, and that it may sometimes be the case that the regulatory influence of one branch of government is exercised over another. But I have also argued that, in general, it benefits a given branch of government to grow in power and influence if it has the ability to do so, and that all three branches of government have a common interest in this respect. Why should the State fear its own increased influence? I don’t see why this should be.
This kind of thinking is a symptom of the problem of talking about the "state" as a single political entity. — Judaka
This is why I have made qualifications like these:
(note that, when I speak of the State ‘acting’, I refer to the actions of those persons who comprise it, for collectives do not of themselves have the capacity to act).
Branches of the government are not co-equal, they are neither competitive nor collaborative. — Judaka
The branches of government are service-providers (law-producers, law-interpreters, law-enforcers), and they are indeed economically complementary in the sense that I outlined above.
What motivates those who hold power isn't primarily acquiring more power but rather the preservation of their power, status, wellbeing, wealth and so on. — Judaka
This seems completely arbitrary to me. Is power attractive, or isn’t it? If it is, then why should one seek merely to maintain power, but not to gain more of it? In fact the government in the US has grown in power enormously since its inception. Its history is one of periodic power-grabs. I doubt the founding fathers could have envisioned the monster that their originally libertarian project has created.
If you really believe that the State does not have an interest in growing in power, and that it even fears such, why are checks and balances even necessary at all? Should we even be concerned about the possibility of totalitarianism? -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'In the complete absence of a state, I don't think currency would function as it does. — fdrake
Currency certainly would not function as it does now, in the world of central banks, fiat currencies and periodic financial crises. But this does not imply that it would not work simpliciter. Legal tender laws exist for the purpose of extracting taxation, and are totally unnecessary beyond this. Good monies are good monies precisely because they exemplify properties which make them marketable as monies (divisibility, portability, and so on); there does not need to be (and should not be) a law which compels people to settle debts in any kind of currency in particular.
In these kinds of discussions, there always seems to be the assumption that the way goods and services are provided under Statism is the ‘correct’ way, and the burden is on the free-marketeer (who, I believe, ought also to be an anti-Statist, as I am) to answer the challenge of how they would hope to ‘match’ the State’s performance. But why think this way? In fact, the State is truly miserable in all that it does. There is just no reason to think that an association of persons who have a monopoly on force are going to provide any service remotely competently.
The historical record weighs quite heavily against this; economies that rely on currencies have (always to my knowledge) regulative bodies (states/governments/social institutions) that deal with the currency and the legal structure surrounding production, property rights and individual rights. While this doesn't make it impossible that a market cannot operate without a state, it makes it implausible that such coincidences of markets will not occur. — fdrake
With respect, I don’t think this argument amounts to much. The mere fact that currency-based markets have (always or nearly) always been Statist societies does not imply that a currency-based market is dependent upon a State. In fact, the history of money is a history of depreciation, as governments have involved themselves more and more in monetary systems. See Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? https://cdn.mises.org/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money_3.pdf
When you envision extraction rights as bestowed by the state, and that extraction rights in your stateless imaginings do not have exclusive ownership, what do you imagine actually happens? Two oil companies have equal designs on an oil field, the oil field is public property; the transition from public property to making private property on it (granting access rights) ultimately is consistent with the laws of the state (in ideal circumstances), but without that transition; it could only be private property. The two oil companies both really want it, what happens? — fdrake
What happens is ultimately determined by whose property the oil field is. If the oil field belongs to one of the oil companies, then that company may extract oil from it, and sell it, without anyone’s permission. If the field is owned by someone else, then they may choose to grant the oil company permission to extract oil, for a price, or it may choose not to. If the field is owned by a community of persons, then the field’s fate is determined collectively by the co-owners. None of this requires the instrumentality of the State.
Another thing you are eliding is a market's natural tendency towards the concentration of wealth and power. If a business succeeds, it gets more money, if it gets more money, it gets easier to make more money; to employ workers and buy infrastructure to capitalise on investments, to use its money as leverage in lobbying, bribery and lawmaking. — fdrake
It is true that a successful company (that is, one which has satisfied consumer preferences successfully) now has more money than its competitors. This money then allows it to make still more money, but only by continually satisfying consumers. To invade this process, however benevolently, is ultimately a paternalistic act, for the effect is to deny consumers goods and services which they would otherwise have voluntarily purchased. You are correct that this accrued capital may then be used for corrupt ends, which serve to entrench its privileged position through lobbying and law-making. But it seems to me that it is precisely the State which presents these opportunities, and which makes them profitable.
Just as with patents and franchises, these are government-granted privileges. If the problem is that these firms have excessive political influence, then the surest antidote is surely the abolition of the very institution which they use as their instrument for such! In the minds of many, the answer to corporate corruption is to afford even more power to the State, but this is a movement in precisely the wrong direction. The reason why private firms and the State have the kind of corrupt relationship they do – and this relationship is one of which you are clearly aware – is because it is so profitable for both of them. Affording more power to the State is not going to change the incentive structure. As long as the State exists, those who are most able to benefit from it are going to continue to do so.
You artificially limit the operation of power by constraining it to violating a property right! — fdrake
There is a rationale for this, though it takes us rather far afield, as it leads into a positive defence of libertarian anarchism, which is not what I intended to do here. Fundamentally, all rights are really just property rights; to engage in any activity in particular is just to make use of certain scarce resources in such a way that deprives others of their full use. A full philosophical justification for this commitment would take excessive space, but the best defence of this idea may be found in Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights, or his shorter article, ‘The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights’. A less rigorous but more accessible defence may be found in Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, ch. 15: https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty%2020191108.pdf
This thesis is one which I consider to be very much in keeping with old liberalism, which saw a close connection between the exercise of individual liberty and private property rights. If I am right about this, and I believe it is right, then the power structures we see in firms are entirely justified, because they are the product of peaceful, consensual relations between persons, exercising their right of ownership over their resources and over their own selves. The obligations which are placed on employees are voluntarily assumed; they undertake obligations in return for their wage, to which they are not entitled otherwise, and they are better off having entered into the arrangement than not. The power structures are justified, in other words, because firms are not essentially coercive institutions.
An aside: in terms of basic necessities, most resources are not scarce now. — fdrake
I am using ‘scarce’ in the sense in which economists use the term. ‘Scarce’ does not mean ‘short’ or ‘not plentiful’. They are merely rationing phenomena. Rather, ‘scarcity’ is concerned with the capacity of a good to satisfy human wants. Suppose there is a resource, which is such that it may be exploited endlessly by as many people as you care to stipulate, without exhausting it. This would be a non-scarce resource. ‘Ideas’ would be an example of such. Unfortunately, the vast majority of goods are scarce. Everything (as far as I can think of) that occupies a physical location is scarce. There may well be enough productive power to feed the world twice over, but this does not render food non-scarce; the resource ‘food’ is not such that everybody may consume as much of it as they like, without depriving anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. The reason is that food is the result of production, and the production process itself involves the use of scarce resources, including time and labour. A resource does not become non-scarce merely because there is enough going around.
Markets in this regard create a global situation of artificial scarcity. — fdrake
‘Artificial scarcity’ also has a precise technical definition, and I don’t believe you are using it accurately. A resource is ‘artificially scarce’ if it is non-rivalrous and excludable. This means that my exploiting the resource does not deprive anybody else from exploiting it, and yet it is still possible to prevent people from having access to it. Examples would be pay-for-view television, cosmetic ‘skins’ for video game characters, software updates, etc. Once the technology is in place to make it available to one person, it can be made available to all people boundlessly, with no additional investment. Food and housing, however, do not satisfy the definition of artificial scarcity. They are just scarce in the ordinary sense (which, as I mentioned, does not mean that there is not enough going around).
Take the example of a law. Establishing a law of a country is not a predication of the aggregate on the basis of its individuals, it is an intervention which may only ever be applied to an aggregate of people; citizens, immigrants, business owners etc. IE with a logical gloss, is a relation of an aggregate to another aggregate, and can only be thought in those terms. Most of our "rights and freedoms", even constitutional ones, apply to denizens of a country in the aggregate. Person of type X has status Y (citizen has this rights, Schengen zone passport member can do this... Firm must do this...).
When someone changes or introduces a law, it affects the aggregate. If someone changes the corporate tax rate in a country, it effects firms, then it effects people. The causal arrows go law change -> firm change -> individual change. You simply can't interpret this kind of thing without appealing to emergent properties of aggregates, and the ability of aggregates to act on aggregates. — fdrake
Laws are essentially threats, threats of incarceration or worse, issued by human associations. Rights and freedoms are proper to persons, for persons are the agents of action. There’s no doubt about the fact that events can occur which affect many people, and it may affect them in virtue of a common, unifying characteristic, like being citizens of a country or members of a corporation. But that does not mean that there is a kind of emergent entity which hovers over the world of persons, with a mind and purposes and an agency of its own. There is no such thing as that.
Check this paper out for a thorough demonstration that aggregate properties (macro behaviour/macroeconomic properties) are relatively insensitive to broad classes of individual behaviour (read: microeconomics underdetermines macroeconomics). Emergence in general is a thing. — fdrake
I am not taking issue with the fact that it might sometimes be appropriate to engage in macro-level analysis. But I am not talking about methodology here, I am talking about ontology. Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only.
In similar vocabulary to what you used, interacting parts can have wholes which have properties (and activities) which those parts don't have. Gas molecules don't have pressure. Only aggregates of gas molecules do. Gas molecules don't have temperatures; only aggregates of gas molecules do. — fdrake
That’s fine. To be sure, there are things that are proper to a part that are not proper to the whole, and vice versa. My heart pumps blood around my body, I do not. I stand in a field, my heart does not. The problem is that the kinds of things that are predicated of a human collective are not proper to it, but are really proper to individuals. Any kind of purposeful action, desire, intent, any kind of activity or psychological state at all, are predicated of a collective improperly, because they are proper to persons, and collectives are not persons. ‘The country is in mourning’, etc.
I think you parsed the example I gave as an emotional appeal, which it was in part, but it shows that the interests of the company can greatly diverge from the interests of their workers. — fdrake
But the interests coincided with the interests of consumers. Who decides what makes money, and what doesn’t? Consumers decide. If a less profitable business closes and is replaced with one that is more profitable, this is only because the latter more effectively satisfies a consumer’s wants. The firm exists to make money, and it does this most effectively when it is most effective at satisfying consumers. Why should the interests of the workers be paramount? Why should that trump all other considerations? A worker may feel dissatisfied with his job, but he is certainly better off for bread and milk being as cheap as they are. As a consumer, he wants things to be as cheap as possible. But we cannot have it both ways. The fact that they are cheap is owing the very same market processes which have seen him hired, and which have placed him in the conditions in which he works. There is nothing stopping 'ethical' businesses from cropping up organically, which pay their workers a living wage, see to it that they are placed in adequate working conditions, etc.; nothing, that is, except the consumer. If only the consumer were prepared to pay more, such that 'ethical' businesses were profitable, then there would be no impediment to their existing. But that is not what the consumer wants (I would be delighted to be proved wrong about this).
This is before you start to consider so called "externalities" like climate change and tobacco's influence on health. Stakeholders often care very much about things like having breathable air (choking smogs in industrial London or the current ones in Beijing), knowing whether their purchases are slowly killing them and a living wage, ability to spend a lot of time with their families. Firms don't always (read: usually have to be forced tooth and nail to) care about these things, and sometimes benefit from the immiseration of their workers. If there's no social safety net, firing creates destitution, which makes the uh... labour market very liquid, eh? In these circumstances, it doesn't matter so much how you treat your workers because you'll find someone who will do the work because they need to.
"Work here in terrible conditions or have your family starve" is not in any worker's interests. A rational utility maximiser (being tongue in cheek; we don't behave like that at all) would organise with their co workers and make a union, funny that these get beaten down and undermined as much as possible. "Have a global climate and production policy that non-negligibly risks ecological and humanitarian catastrophes" is in no one's best interests; no stakeholder's. But for the firms who profit from such replaceable labour or by maximising their short term profit rates? Yeah, works for them. — fdrake
Forgive me, I’m still struggling to tease an argument out of all this. There is so much packed in here. Governments produce their own externality problems, some of which I talk about in my other discussion, and which David Friedman discusses here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg&t=1112s
In a Stateless society, workers would be perfectly within their rights to unionise. Indeed, voluntary collectives would be commonplace, as they were before the State became involved in the provision of Welfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jug_AcVjeAM
It just doesn’t ring true that firms are coercive institutions because they tell their workers that they must ‘work or starve’. When a State demands ‘your money or your freedom’, as it does when it taxes you, the State itself is the source of this destructive dilemma. The threat of having to hand over your property is provided by the State, and the threat of incarceration (or worse) is provided by the State, too. The State is precisely an invader of the lives and the property of their citizens (and, when it wages wars, the citizens of other countries as well). They are functionally indistinguishable from a protection racket in this respect (which do actually provide you with the service of protection). This is categorically different from being faced with the dilemma of working or starving. As you correctly point out, we must work in order to eat. One might say ‘I should not have to work in order to feed myself’, but obviously this is impossible to universalise, since at least somebody must work, or else everybody starves. The fact that you must engage in resource-gathering in order to survive is simply a fact of nature; firms are not the source of this ‘threat’. So, when the firm offers you the means of employment, which you would not have had otherwise, it is quite skewed to understand this as the firm providing you with a destructive dilemma. They are offering you a means of escape from starvation (indeed, the most effective means that the world has ever known). -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Well, your characterisation of a market is quite limited there. You stipulate under what conditions a market is free, without considering what a market is! — fdrake
Well, it’s not true that I have not considered what a market is; I just wasn’t certain exactly what you intended by your question. One reason for this is that I do not offer, and should not be thought as offering, a structural vision, or a set of principles for ‘social organisation’. I may make predications about what a market might look like in the absence of the State (I strongly suspect that there would be currency, for example), but it is not my place to dictate what the aggregation of peaceful activity between persons ought to look like. That would be quite illiberal of me, and therefore contrary to my own principles.
If you're going to treat markets as independent of states, this is a bit bizarre if states are required for certain market organisations - especially the one we have now globally, no? Markets like ours need banks and laws governing the banks. Markets like ours need trade laws to interface with social institutions. State and market entwine, and have a revolving door staffing policy (at least in the UK and US), firms form alliances with dictators. More on this later... — fdrake
If there is some way that a market might work, such that it is dependent upon the existence of the State in order to work that way, then obviously it would not work in that way in the absence of the State. But I don’t see this as particularly problematic. It’s true that the markets of our acquaintance are intimitely involved with the State, but that does not imply that a market is eo ipso dependent upon the existence of a State – which it is not.
I wonder why you leave access control to goods out of the definition of a free market? — fdrake
I do, mainly because the ingredients of a market – private property, exchange, prices, and so on – are, in part, rationing mechanisms, and the reason why such mechanisms are necessary is because we live in a world of scarce resources. It is precisely this fact of scarcity which means that there cannot be an unqualified right of ‘access’ to such a resource. ‘Freedom’, like so many of the foundational concepts in political philosophy, is rather nebulous and can potentially mean almost anything. What would ‘free access’ to a scarce resource even look like? If the resource is scarce, then it is literally impossible for everyone to have unbounded access to it. Not that you are suggesting such a thing. But this does mean that the ‘freedom’ of a ‘free’ market must be tied to something rather more definitive; namely, private property rights. Hence why the ‘freedom’ of the market consists in the non-invasion of property.
(EG, a company owns an IP on a necessary invention or has exclusive extraction rights on a natural resource). — fdrake
Does IP mean intellectual property? If so, I would point out that ideas – the stuff of intellectual property – are non-scarce resources, and treating them as though they need to be rationed is a Statist phenomenon. Patents are, in effect, government-granted monopoly licences, not free-market phenomena. Also, exclusive extraction rights – rights bestowed by whom? Again, this sounds like we are talking about a State franchise. As I mentioned, the State is the pre-eminent bestower of monopoly privilege.
If I understand you, you are arguing that a service-provider is (softly) coercive, if it is practically difficult to patronise a competitor. I suppose the problematic issue is the vagueness of ‘soft coercion’. Either the firm is invading your property, or it isn’t. If you believe that you have an unconditional claim to, e.g., oil, then the firm is violating your property rights by neglecting to furnish you with it. If, more plausibly, you do not have an unconditional claim to the oil, then your having to pay the price they want for it is not coercive. Since one cannot have an unconditional right to a scarce resource (for this would imply that everyone be able to exploit endlessly a resource which literally cannot be exploited endlessly), private firms, I suggest, are straightforwardly non-coercive.
This is just wrong; real companies can and do have institutional powers not reducible to the individual powers of their agents (only an aggregate can have laws). — fdrake
Our sticking point seems to be an ontological one: whether collectives of persons have their own inherent agency, above and beyond the agency of the individual persons which comprise them. Quite simply, individuals are persons; groups are not. Sometimes, we might speak of groups as though they were an organism with their own inherent capacity to act, but this is non-literal. The Greeks called this linguistic phenomenon synecdoche, the improper predication of a property of a part to the whole. We do this in sport, when we say ‘Portugal has scored a goal’ when in fact it is not true that a country has kicked a ball into a net. Or we might say of a woman that she is ‘blonde’, when in fact it is only a principal part, her hair, that is blonde (her entire body is not simply and unqualifiedly blonde). And we do this with human collectives, too: ‘Germany is in talks with Spain’ (this might be two people talking in a room), ‘The country is mourning the death of its monarch’ (persons mourn, countries do not).
The examples you provide are not counter-instances to this ontological insight. Certainly, multiple persons might act jointly, and their actions might affect lots of other persons. But this does not imply that a collective is a subsistent entity in its own right. To illustrate, my scrabble club has 4 members (one day we will take over the world), but every Wednesday we engage in collective, collaborate activity with one another (playing scrabble). So we may say, ‘That scrabble club is playing scrabble’. And this is true, in a sense. But the thing we designate as a ‘scrabble club’ is not some fifth thing, subsisting, acting, desiring, intending, over and above the four members.
So, this, which is true . . .
Also in the real world, people must work otherwise we don't eat. In general, this involves selling one's labour to a company in exchange for a wage. Obeying the dictates of the company becomes a necessity for getting food in your mouth and a roof over your head. — fdrake
. . . does not logically imply this, which is not . . .
Companies have a real existence and interests separate from their workers, separate from their shareholders and especially different from their stakeholders and staff — fdrake
You might think differently if you were on another end of the supply chain — fdrake
Perhaps I would; but, then again, this is not really an argument. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'I'm appreciative of your comments.
General question: what kind of markets do you think can exist without governments, and why? — fdrake
I'm not entirely certain what you mean by 'kinds' of markets. I understand a 'market' to be a process, in which the participants are buyers and sellers of goods and services. I understand markets to be 'free' just in case the exchanges take place by way of peaceful voluntarism rather than by threat or use of force (as in the case of theft, extortion, and so on). If the initiation of force and the invasion of private property are objectionable - and I believe that they are - then the non-existence of the State is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of a free market. So the only way I can think to answer your question is that the kind of market which would exist in the State's absence is, I hope, a free one, in the sense that voluntary exchanges are not interrupted and invaded by an aggressor, however benevolent.
The same analysis would hold for firms. As does this apt (though repurposed) description of firms attempting to obtain and keep market control: — fdrake
First - and I do not offer this as a rebuttal, but merely as a principle to bear in mind - we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'States', 'firms', 'corporations' or 'markets' subsist. These are aggregations of individual persons, and it is only these persons who are the real actors, the conscious agents. Neither States nor firms have their own inherent agency. So, ultimately, there are only individuals in act, and these individuals may act with and against one another in two ways: either they may treat with one another peacefully, or else they may initiate force against one another and invade the other's property. Franz Oppenheimer distinguishes these as the two different ways of acquiring resources: the former is the 'economic means' and the latter is the 'political means'. What distinguishes them is that the former leads to mutual benefit, and can, in principle, be multiplied endlessly, whereas the latter is predatory, and benefits the aggressor only at the expense of the aggressed-against.
Do firms, like States, have an incentive to increase their own power and influence? And, if so, does this mean that firms are fundamentally like States in an important sense? Yes and yes, but only in the sense that firms, like States, are composed of persons, and it is natural for persons to want to increase their own power and influence. It is not as though there is some thing called a State, and some other thing called a firm, and it turns out that these two things are somehow related, like one genus is to another. In the world of purposeful action and incentives, there are only persons, and the similar incentives of the State and of the firm are a function of their being composed of persons.
So what is the difference between a State and a firm? A State is an agency of monopolised coercion, and a firm is not. To be a Statist is to believe that there is a certain class of persons who may engage in activities which are impermissible for non-governmental agents, and which non-governmental agents ought to be punished for engaging in. Governmental activity has most in common with the activities of those whom we recognise as criminals and criminal organisations. As Murray Rothbard has it, there really are no 'governments'; there are only certain associations of persons who act in a manner that we recognise at 'governmental'. And if we judged their actions as non-governmental, we would see them as criminal.
Firms, on the other hand, are composed of persons who are subject to the same rules as the rest of us (barring governmental privilege). The firm (the persons comprising it) are making an offer of goods and services, and the consumer may choose whether or not to enter into an exchange with a given firm. To allow the existence of a firm is not to allow that there is a class of persons who may aggress against other persons with impunity. Firms exist (in whatever sense they may be said to exist) on the same continuum of peaceful voluntarism as other behaviours which people ought to have the right to engage in. This is what Robert Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain thought-experiment is intended to illustrate.
And the latter description of the state also applies to a firm which already has disproportionate influence: — fdrake
Firms (some of them) certainly have undue influence in a Statist society. But a firm's 'power' may derive from only two sources: the consumer, and the State. In the absence of the State, the firm must continually serve the wants of consumers in order to survive. There is no question - and this is a point on which Marxists and right-libertarians ought to agree - that there is an unholy and totally corrupting alliance between private industry and the State. The market leaders in a given industry benefit far more from the regulatory power of the State than they would from its absence; the net effect of government regulation is to preserve and entrench the position of the market leaders, by imposing costs which the market leader's competitors are much less equipped to bear. States are the monopolists and bestowers of monopoly privilege par excellence. As I pointed out in my analysis, it is only competition which separates powers.
The war you so aptly characterise between the people and the state is actually fought between the people and state + firms. — fdrake
So, there is some truth in the above statement, in that those who are in a position to benefit from illicit government privileges have every reason to do so. But I cannot see how firms in general are at war with me. I benefit from the goods and services which they sell me, and they benefit from my patronage. Unless I believe that the goods and services which I purchase are such that I should be furnished with them unconditionally - and I see no reason why that should be the case - there is no war to speak of, here. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Let us hope, that all those in observance of this exchange of ours can appreciate the great irony which underlies it. — Vessuvius
Hold not thy breath. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'This is truest when it is acknowledged that to express oneself in such a fashion, seldom lends itself to clarity, as perceived by another. — Vessuvius
Verily! -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'
Why are you writing like you're 400 years old? Are you trying to sound like Thomas Hobbes? -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'
No, you must do your own hard work. Formulate your objections clearly and thoroughly, if you want them responded to (which I am happy to do). At least do me that respect - my piece was 4,000 words, and you have taken issue with part of a sentence from its introduction, which is, as I pointed out, a reconstruction of Hobbes. You have suggested that my argument confuses 'authority' with 'authoritarianism', but you have not substantiated this claim. In fact, what I have said is:
My claim is not that all States are totalitarian, but that there is a tendency towards totalitarianism, such that the checks and balances, to which such confident appeal is typically made, are shown to be unfit for purpose. — Virgo Avalytikh
If you have an objection to this thesis, by all means make it. Maybe I really am ignorant, but it is not yet clear what objection you are trying to make. Please hold your own writing to the same standard that you are holding mine, as is right. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'And using the (agreed, but for different reasons) falsity of Hobbes' (supposed) two theses to justify anarchism or limited government as alternatives to totalitarianism.
Then dispensing with the limited government ("non-totalitarian Statist") alternative, because its proponents' reasons for rejecting Hobbes' second thesis are inadequate. — Galuchat
Yes, that is what I have done. I have argued that the protections which the non-totalitarian Statist believes constrain the State's power are unfit for purpose.
My point remains unaddressed. — Galuchat
Perhaps you can formulate more clearly what your objection is, in relation to the arguments I have presented. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Granting authority doesn't necessarily entail the exercise of "absolute power" (authoritarianism). — Galuchat
That's fine. But Hobbes does speak of the authority that is granted to the State as being absolute (which is why I have described Hobbes as a totalitarian). As I mentioned, I am re-constructing Hobbes's own position. -
Is Never Having Come into Existence the same as Death?What is the subject of the non-existence?
Suppose you say 'Socrates dies'. This means that there exists a thing, Socrates, which dies. But we cannot understand 'Socrates has not come into existence' in this way. If 'has not come into existence' naturally implies 'does not exist', then we cannot say that there exists a thing, Socrates, which does not exist.
We cannot speak of denying something its existence because, if it does not exist, then there is no thing, no subject, to which existence is being denied.
(This is just a metaphysical observation; I don't think it has much purchase in a debate on abortion.) -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'The OP seems to conflate authority and authoritarianism. — Galuchat
An odd observation. I don't believe I ever use the word 'authoritarianism'. In the phrase you quote, I am attempting to reconstruct Hobbes's position. In the story Hobbes tells, the people do hand over authority to the State. Remember, Hobbes does believe that the State is legitimate, precisely for this reason. So this would be in line with how you would define 'authority'. Whether Hobbes's story is convincing is obviously another issue. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Would every person be required to construct their own road? — Wayfarer
Roads, just as with all other goods and services (including rights-enforcement, dispute-resolution, military defence and money) would be produced privately by competing agencies.
Would there be no public property? — Wayfarer
It depends on what you mean by 'public property'. If you simply mean 'property owned and controlled by the government', then no, there would be no such thing. If you mean 'a patch of land that is owned jointly by more than one person', then there is no reason, in principle, why such could not come about under anarchy. But if you mean 'property that is non-private' - i.e. property from which nobody in the world was excluded - then I doubt it, because scarce resources are such that everybody may not use them at once. So at least some exclusion must take place (I take 'exclusion' to be the defining hallmark of private ownership).
It seems to me that anarchy is simply the social manifestation of chaos — Wayfarer
With respect, this is precisely wrong. The absence of a human association which holds a monopoly on physical force is not chaos. Nor is the existence of such an association 'order'. My very argument is that it is the State which tends towards totalitarianism, regardless of what controls are set in place to prevent this from happening (including the democratic process itself). You are essentially in agreement with Hobbes in what I have identified as his 'thesis 1':
'In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.'
But, as I pointed out, game-theoretic reconstructions of this state of affairs shows that rational egoists tend towards peaceful order spontaneously. Not because they suddenly become good and benevolent people or because they develop a conscience, but because it is a winning strategy.
The democratic state is not a monopolistic agency, but a contract between free individuals to manage their affairs in the most mutually beneficial manner. — Wayfarer
States are monopolistic agencies, by nature. They claim prerogatives which they forcibly prevent other persons from engaging in. If I were to 'tax' someone, or raise an army, or place paternalistic bans on other people's recreational behaviour, I would be forcibly subdued and incarcerated. If you acted like a government, you would be in jail. States are criminal organisation on a vast scale. They are essentially tax-farms, which perdure by continually aggressing against peaceful, productive people.
Moreover, there is no contract such as you speak of. It does not exist. Certainly, no one has signed such a contract explicitly, but even if you were to claim that citizens consent to being governed implicitly by residing within an arbitrary territory, this would only hold true if you have some system for determining who owns the territory. Certainly, it cannot be said that the State owns the territory (that would be circular, since the social contract is being invoked so as to justify the existence of the State). So perhaps the territory is owned jointly by all the citizens. But why? Why these persons in particular, and only these persons? The only reason we recognise the 'citizens' to be who they are is because of (a) their legal status as such and (b) the arbitrary lines of a governed territory. But, we derive both of these things from the State itself, which is, once again, circular.
I have never encountered a social contract theory that is not formally question-begging, in that it must take the legitimacy of the State for granted as a premise, in order to go on and try to prove that very thing. For this reason, it is not surprising that ordinary social contract theories have been largely replaced by 'hypothetical' social contract theories; i.e. arguments to the effect that, even though there really is no social contract, it would still be rational for everyone to sign a social contract, and this is where the State derives its legitimacy (note that Hobbes was a hypothetical social contract theorist; he did not believe in the factual reality of a literal social contract). But such arguments are just as ineffectual. I cannot reasonably hold you to contractual obligations if you have not formally consented, regardless of how rational I think you would be to do so.
Finally, it is simply beyond the power of the State to provide 'mutual benefit'. It is not in the State's gift to do so. Only voluntary trade can achieve this. The State exists by continually initiating force and invading the property of its 'citizens'. This, as I mentioned, is a purely predatory activity, which benefits one party at another's expense. Confiscationary levies, wars, paternalistic bans on recreational or life-saving drugs, the prison- and military-industrial complexes, the poverty industry (Welfare State), tariffs and embargos are not mutually beneficial. They benefit special interest groups at the expense of most other people. -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'have you by any chance encountered the dialectics of the Enlightenment? — Wayfarer
I know of a book by that name, but I have not read it.
Have you read Robert Axelrod's book which I mentioned, The Evolution of Cooperation? -
How confident should we be about government? An examination of 'checks and balances'Thank you for your comments. I just have one or two thoughts.
That is one of the reasons why I say that political theory has to be underwritten by Christianity, or something like it. — Wayfarer
One problem with this, if we are taking incentives seriously, is: How do you make it such that everybody lives their life in such a way that is underwritten by a particular set of values? If everybody lived their life meek and mild, a government would not be necessary. But this only throws us back upon the question from which I begin: How do you guarantee that the government itself is going to adhere to such values? How people should behave is, of course, an important question, and I have my own views on this. But my emphasis has been focused more on incentives, how people realistically will behave.
As I pointed out when I brought in Axelrod et al., there is a tendency towards peaceful cooperation which is not dependent upon the existence of an institution of monopolised coercion. What is more, this tendency is not dependent upon cultivating or instilling a particular set of values in oneself or one's children. What is remarkable (but true nonetheless) is that this peaceful cooperation occurs spontaneously in an environment of rational egoists (as game theory assumes people to be). If some people are not rational egoists, but meek Christian saints, this only serves to improve matters, but this is not necessary in order to achieve stable peace.
So you are right to say:
There has to be some rationale for treating others as one would treat oneself, if it is not to be something other than a wishful platitude - a real philosophical rationale, with some sense of binding power. — Wayfarer
But the rationale need not consist in an adherence to a particular set of values, however noble. The rationale is the one which is illustrated by the iterated prisoner's dilemma: successful strategies are those which can work well with other strategies, and this is why rational egoists will tend, counter-intuitively, towards peaceful cooperation.
Overall, I'm in agreement with Churchill's gloomy prognostication - that democracy has many dreadful shortcomings, but that it's the least evil of the possible alternatives. — Wayfarer
Given the argument I have presented - that democracy, in the long run, does not serve as an effective defence against totalitarianism - I see no reason why Statism in any form is preferable to anarchy, both on moral and pragmatic grounds. As I pointed out, the State is a monopolistic agency. Part of what this means is that the State may engage in activities which others are prohibited (by the State) from engaging in. This implies that certain human beings are subject to a different set of restrictions from everyone else. I, for one, see no non-arbitrary justification for this. -
Transgenderism and SportsMaybe it is because I perceive this from a non-Western perspective, but the entire issue strikes me as a storm in a teacup from the start. Why are there separate divisions for men and for women in sport? Because men (adult human males) and women (adult human females) are different physically. A women's sports division is effectively a handicap division, just as the junior divisions are. If you were to do away with such divisions, and throw everyone into a common pot, then women would find it much harder - impossible, depending on the sport - to compete at the highest level. In tennis, for instance, which is one of the few sports I follow, if you eliminated the divisions between men and women at Wimbledon, there would be no women competing at Wimbledon. So the very existence of a women's division is a one-sided concession on behalf of those who would not otherwise be able to compete at the highest level.
The only complication - and it is only a complication because it has been allowed to be a complication - is that there appear to be some individuals who are keen to have 'man' and 'woman' designate something other than the adult males and adult females of our species, respectively. Beyond this, I don't pretend to understand the motivation. All I would say is, if one is intent on doing so, the only reasonable course of action is to do away with divisions and throw everyone into the same pot, competitively. Or else, depending on the sport, have something like body-mass divisions, as has been suggested. But these kinds of distinctions would only be applicable for certain sports (what would the tennis equivalent be?) But, in any case, you would be doing women's sport no favours, if you were so intent.
So, either you have your AHM and AHF divisions (and then perhaps junior and wheelchair/blind/deaf divisions besides), on the understanding that everything besides the former is a handicap concession, or else you unleash everyone against everyone else, and have males dominate. The second possibility is highly unlikely to obtain, since it does not seem to make much commercial sense. -
Roger Scruton 1944 – 2020As much as I disagreed with him, I am appreciative of his work and his legacy. Rest in peace.
-
Native Americans as true Christians?I assume I’m much richer than the rich man that Jesus told to give up his possessions. I’m sure he didn’t have indoor plumbing. Lol — Noah Te Stroete
That's right, and the beggar to whom I give a coin is richer than the beggar who has no coin. So I suppose the coined beggar is now 'rich', and thereby barred from salvation by Jesus's own words. Unless, of course, we contrive an arbitrary and anachronistic wealth-threshold totally unknown to Jesus, with no philosophical justification. -
Native Americans as true Christians?
My question, again, is: if, as you insist, being wealthy definitively bars one from salvation, and that this is what is implied by Jesus's own words, how do you know that this threshold lies precisely where you insist that it does? Especially since the concepts you invoke - 'middle class' and 'first-world country' - were unknown to Jesus himself, and were never mentioned by him? Is there not just the slightest chance that you are engaging in anachronism here? -
Native Americans as true Christians?Anyone in the middle to upper classes in a First World country is wealthy. — Noah Te Stroete
Ok: why? -
Native Americans as true Christians?
Well, grace is not 'garnered'; that is why it is grace.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast (Eph. 2:8-9)
It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy (Rom. 9:16).
So, you will not provide us with the threshold so as to determine the rich from the non-rich, on which the whole question of salvation apparently turns. -
Native Americans as true Christians?Jesus literally said that it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Hence, wealthy people don’t get into Heaven. — Noah Te Stroete
Logically, this actually does not follow. Jesus did not say that the wealthy certainly do not go to heaven, only that it is difficult for them to do so, which is not in dispute. There is no question, money can be a curse, and it is to many people. But what does it mean to be 'rich'? 'Rich' is, of course, a relative judgement. Suppose I pass a beggar on the street and give him a coin. He may now be a coin richer than the beggar on the parallel street, whom I have not so graced. Is my beggar now 'rich', and barred from entering the kingdom of heaven? Jesus himself was clothed. Was he the parable's 'rich man', compared with the naked? You are very confident that you have understood the spirit of Jesus's words here, but it is very doubtful that you have.
Jesus commands a particular individual, not everyone for all time, to sell of his possessions. Why? The pericope itself tells us: he was excessively attached to his wealth, and this served as an impediment to discipleship. Others may find different spiritual impediments, but this was his. This ought not to be overblown into a universal imperative, which it isn't.
Perhaps you can furnish us with a non-arbitrary threshold, biblically informed, as to when rich-status kicks in. Otherwise, I think one is well within one's intellectual rights in considering Jesus's preoccupation to be with the excessive love of money, to the detriment of helping one's fellow human being, as is consistent with the tenor of the rest of the NT. -
Native Americans as true Christians?I don’t even know how to respond to your raving histrionics. I could argue that personal property is theft, and keeping people from sharing the land is a form of slavery. I don’t actually believe this, but this is what you sound like. The State is formed through a social contract, I might argue, and thus protects the people rather than coercing them. Taxes are the cost of civil society. Rich people who want to horde their wealth and not pay for the commons and infrastructure that they benefit more from than anyone else is the true outrage I might argue. — Noah Te Stroete
You could argue all of that, of course, but that doesn't make it plausible.
Furthermore, you are not aware of the several councils the Church held to set dogma and the format of the modern Bible? — Noah Te Stroete
The canon was already long established at Nicaea 325, the first of the ecumenical councils.
When all's said and done, you have asserted some sort of incompatibility between capitalism and a Christian ethic, and I have requested (not demanded) an argument to that affect. You have declined to furnish us with such, instead engaging in ad hominem attacks, and from a position of ignorance to boot. What are we to make of this? -
Native Americans as true Christians?I’m not being political. — Noah Te Stroete
Taxation is not political? You are bemoaning capitlaism, are you not? Invasions of capitalism (by which I mean the 'free market', the peaceful exchange of goods and services) are necessarily either criminal or political (which is just legitimised criminality), for they must involve the invasion of justly held property.
I was being descriptive of contemporary society, and you bring in some far right-wing Murray Rothbard nonsense about the coercive State and how taxes are theft. — Noah Te Stroete
I didn't mention Rothbard. But the State is a coercive monopoly and taxation is a confiscationary levy. These are just definitions.
Max Weber on the State, whose definition is the most widely acknowledged: a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.
Oxford Dictionary of Economics definition of 'tax': A payment compulsorily collected from individuals or firms by a government . . .
You’re defensive about your wealth and privilege. — Noah Te Stroete
Ad hominem, and also irrelevant. Unless you are the worst-off person to have ever lived, everyone is privileged to some degree. Privilege is not a social problem to be solved. This is kind of knee-jerk egalitarianism that is as subject now to the levelling-down objection as it always has been.
Biblical commentary? What in any way does that have to do with what Jesus said? — Noah Te Stroete
Because we have no knowledge of Jesus's words outside of the testimony of the canonical gospels (note that Thomas et al. date to the mid-second century at the earliest, and are rightly considered pseudopigraphical).
Do you even realize that the Bible’s various books from Genesis to Revelation were set by the corrupt, self-serving Roman Catholic Church? And now all denominations use it. — Noah Te Stroete
'Set'? Are you referring to the formation of the canon? In fact, there is evidence from as early as the 2nd century that the NT canon was established very early, and not by a central authority (see the Diatessaron and the Muratorian fragment). The best historical treatments of this are Michael Krueger's three books on the formation of the canon. -
Native Americans as true Christians?Do you even know what you are talking about? I’m not talking about religious dogma taken from the Bible that was sanctioned by the corrupt Roman Catholic Church that all Christian church denominations also use as their sacred text. Dogmatic bullshit is what it is full of.
Neither am I. As I mentioned, I am discussing the biblical text. I am not a Roman Catholic.
— Noah Te StroeteI strongly suspect you’re so defensive because you yourself love your wealth and privilege. I’m sorry Jesus has condemned you, but ease your mind in knowing that He condemns all those who do not repent, myself included. Also, I’m not religious. — Noah Te Stroete
You know virtually zero about me. Why are you being personal? This is a philosophy forum.
Jesus literally said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” He was talking about paying taxes. :razz: — Noah Te Stroete
Careless eisegesis. This is not a proof-text for Jesus's moral approval of confiscationary levies, and the NT commentary tradition agrees with me on this point. The point here, as it is at Jesus's trial, is that Jesus's kingdom is not of this world. It is a spiritual, not political revolution. -
Native Americans as true Christians?Is your suggestion that self-professed Christians do not engage in charity work?
In any case, although Christians are called to give alms, that is not what makes one a Christian. What makes one a Christian is not the observance of a particular ethic (the Native Americans did not even identify themselves as Christians), but being in a particular relationship to the risen Christ, one of faith. I am speaking biblically here. Certainly, faith without works is dead, as James says in his epistle, but this is a comment about the nature of an authentic, saving faith.
In any case, there does seem to be a leap being made. Why should living in a (partially) capitalistic, materialistic, or wealthy society be in tension with a Christian ethic? It is not money, after all, but the love of money which is the root of all evil. I'm not exactly sure what the argument is supposed to be here.
There are all sorts of ways in which the non-capitalistic elements of (the way government coercively invades) society are in tension with a Christian ethic. The welfare state, for one, gives rise to the worst kind of atomised individualism, where 'alms' (taxes) are 'given' (confiscated), not in such a way that is motivated by helping those who need it most in the way that they most need it, but in such a way that creates a class of permanent dependants, and exempts the tax-payer from any further charitable action. 'I support these insitutions with my taxes,' they will say, 'I have already done my part'. Charity has to remain charity, and that is why capitalism has to remain capitalism.
This might be interesting to some:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP7RgdpSyMw -
Schopenhauer versus Aquinas
Yes, in classical Christian theism there is a fundamental, ontological distinction between God and creatures (including angelic beings), which maps onto the creator-creature distinction. Everything other than God is derived, dependent, conditioned, and so on. God himself is none of these things, hence subsistent being itself.
One thing I am not sure about in your analysis is the idea that Scotus's doctrine of univocity is somehow a step away from the idea of a 'great chain of being'. As I understand it, the great chain of being, with God at the top, just is ontological univocism. Everything that exists belongs to a common ontological order, with God as the most pre-eminent instantiation. It is precisely the analogia entis, associated with Aquinas, which places God and creatures in an entirely different ontological order (uncreated and created, respectively). So, in both Scotus and Aquinas, both in univocism and an analogy of being, there is a hierarchy. It's just that, in the one case, it is a hierarchy within a common order of being, and in the other, it is a superiority of the divine order of being over the creaturely.
You are absolutely right that it is precisely the notion of different orders of being which allows for the idea of a 'necessary being'; or in Aquinas's language, a being whose existence is nothing other than his essence. This is certainly something that is undermined once ontological univocism is embraced.
As a side note, Richard Cross, possibly the smartest living analytic philosophical theologian who works with the medievals, believes that the whole 'univocity/analogy' split between Scotus and Aquinas is totally exaggerated and overblown in the literature. According to him, it really is not so fundamental an ontological chasm as it is often made out to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XGI_TVSu6o
It's somewhere in there. -
Conspiracy theoriesFrom Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty:
It is also particularly important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable: even if its reign is disliked, as it often is, it will then be met with the passive resignation expressed in the familiar coupling of “death and taxes.” One method is to bring to its side historical determinism: if X-State rules us, then this has been inevitably decreed for us by the Inexorable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces), and nothing that any puny individuals may do can change the inevitable. It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping of what is now called “a conspiracy theory of history.” For a search for “conspiracies,” as misguided as the results often are, means a search for motives, and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites. If, however, any tyranny or venality or aggressive war imposed by the State was brought about not by particular State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world—or if, in some way, everyone was guilty (“We are all murderers,” proclaims a common slogan), then there is no point in anyone’s becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, a discrediting of “conspiracy theories”—or indeed, of anything smacking of “economic determinism”—will make the subjects more likely to believe the “general welfare” reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern State for engaging in any aggressive actions. -
Schopenhauer versus Aquinas
Whether or not that is the case, Aquinas is clear and systematic, at the very least. Whatever else he may be, he is not an obscurantist. When he is wrong, as he sometimes is, it is not at all difficult to isolate the misstep in his argument. If only more philosophers wrote in this style.
If you want to read someone like Aquinas but with rather more subtlety, I would suggest Duns Scotus.
Virgo Avalytikh
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