← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Texas Dissident
Thread ID: 13314 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2004-04-24
2004-04-24 21:06 | User Profile
[url=http://www.littlegeneva.com/mt/archives/000261.html]Epistemology of Economics[/url] by Harry Seabrook / Little Geneva
The Jacobin roots of the present crisis are clear, but conservatives are divided on economic issues. There was an attempt with Jew Frank Meyer's "fusionism" to wed "social" conservatism and classical liberalism, but it fizzled and died. We at Little Geneva chalk it up to another attempt at Judeochristian syncretism. Tom DiLorenzo makes good points in favor of free trade, and Pat Buchanan makes better points against it, but here I am primarily concerned with the epistemology.
Capitalism, as we know it, was born with Adam Smith, and generations have imbibed his ideas, as well as the ideas of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. But are these ideas Christian in nature? Our age has seen the rise of the libertarian, the Economic Man, who can reduce all matters to a monetary figure. Economic reductionism has never been clearer than in this quote (I don't know who said it): "To get a firm grasp on profit and its counterpart, loss, you might want to consider the Biblical quotation, 'What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?' For an economist, the correct way to answer this question would be to calculate the revenues received from gaining the whole world and subtract the costs incurred by losing one's soul. If the difference (known as 'the bottom line') is a positive number, you have a profit."
The first question we should ask in determining the value of libertarians is whether their view of liberty comports with tradition and Scripture. In other words, as with the issues of race, contraception, feminism, etc., how likely is it that our generation has something new to teach the world, which has turned for so many generations without us? People bought and sold before Adam Smith was born. Did they have an individualistic conception of liberty? The answer is a resounding No.
I said that political terms like "Right" and "Left" are meaningless in the scope of history, and this is one reason why. Regardless of the political party today, almost everyone accepts an individualistic definition of liberty based on Adam Smith's idea of the "invisible hand," or the idea that the whole is helped by each individual making selfish decisions. Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II, "...every individual...intends only his own gain, and he is...led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." This is absolutely satanic and the most effective way to destroy civilization. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, butfrom their regard to their own interest." It should be obvious to my compatriots that this is an implicit rejection of "the one and the many." There is no such thing as individual liberty untethered from group loyalty. Freedom is secured for individuals by the group to which they belong, or not at all. The foolish ideas of Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, and Rawls about the Social Contract (initiated by individuals) should be laughed out of civilized society. Dabney (and David Hume before him) so soundly denounced them over a hundred years ago that I won't bother doing it today. The individual is unable to know what is best for himself until he first knows what is best for his group. (Replace the word "group" with "race" to be more accurate.) Since no individual preserves his own liberty, it is not surprising that there never has been and never will be a libertarian society. It is the exclusive domain of wire-rimmed college professors.
Once again, Tom Fleming is correct: "A man might call himself anything and claim to be a Jewish Nazi, but in adopting Nazism, he forfeits the right to be considered a Jew, and in adopting the abstract and self-centered morality of [Adam] Smith (I am thinking especially of the Theory of Moral Sentiments) and Mises, we cease to be Christian. On that point, Ayn Rand was right... People loved liberty, even economic liberty, long before Adam Smith (much less Ludwig von Mises) ever propounded his fallacies... Rather than taking up actual transactions between real human beings, liberals take their stand on abstract concepts like the Market, Freedom, and Value. 'Freedom to do what?' we ask. 'Freedom to choose,' answers Professor [Milton] Friedman. 'Choose what?' we persist, like rude children. 'Whatever you like,' they answer... What really mattered was Mises? singleminded commitment to eliminate all objective judgments of value. This is the opposite of what all Christians and traditional conservatives believe, and it is by no means unfair to Mises to point out that his principles are entirely inconsistent with Christianity. When Russell Kirk complained that the Mt. Pèlerin Society, whose central figure was Mises? student Friedrich Hayek, taught dogmatic liberalism and opposed Christianity, the best that its defenders (George Stigler among them) could do was to cite the presence of several Christians in the group."
Russell Kirk taught that "Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit. Men cannot exist without proper community, as Aristotle knew; and when they have been denied community of spirit, they turn unreasoningly to community of goods... The grand scheme of God is inscrutable; the object of life is virtue, not pleasure; and obedience, not liberty, is the means of its attainment." Kirk, who opposed Marx and Mises equally, was able to steer many Americans away from bourgeois Lockean philosophy and towards a somewhat aristocratic Burkean philosophy. Burke knew that "when ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us." That's conservatism, folks, and don't be fooled by imitations.
You can drink deep from the antithesis at LewRockwell.com., which is connected with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. According to Mises, "Ethical doctrines...intent upon establishing scales of value...claim for themselves the vocation of telling right from wrong." No, really? This just won't do in the value-free system desired by libertarians. Mises' greatest student was Friedrich Hayek, who writes: "There can be no doubt that moral and religious beliefs can destroy a civilization and that when such doctrines prevail not only the most cherished beliefs but also the most revered moral leaders may become a grave danger... we can protect ourselves only by subjecting our dearest desires to ruthless rational dissection."
Steven Yates, who understands perfectly well that liberty is not license, that true liberty requires control on the actions of individuals, once wrote that "Libertarianism is rooted in a philosophy of natural rights that inhere in individuals, not groups," such as the family. Andrew Sandlin no longer writes for Lew Rockwell, but he too used to carry on about his distaste for coercion and preference for persuasion. This is nothing more than Americanized You-and-Me-God Christianity. Baptists say precisely the same thing about membership in the covenant. Notice the clever contortions of Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty: "a successful free society will always in large measure be a tradition-bound society... We...are able to act successfully on our plans [involving others] because most of the time members of our civilization...show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion...but of firmly established habits and traditions." Yates adds that "History has shown us no better source for these traditions and habits than the Christian faith," but one does not logically connect with the other. Rather, the tinkerers are using Christianity as a cover. Yates insists that Christians should oppose homosexuality, but "What Christians should not do is advocate force to be used against homosexuals." That would be so coercive! I'll reuse my adjective "satanic" to describe this, because it is the exact opposite of what we read in holy Scripture.
Here Hayek describes liberalism as "the position which I hold." Why can't his followers do the same? Why lengthen a perfectly good word to "libertarian"?
Murray Rothbard was a libertarian beloved of paleoconservatives, but he was yet one more who held to the doctrine of devils: "It is true that libertarians would allow each individual to choose his values and to act upon them, and would in short accord every person the right to be either moral or immoral as he saw fit. Libertarianism is strongly opposed to enforcing any moral creed on any person or group by the use of violence ? except, of course, the moral prohibition against aggressive violence itself." Elsewhere he argues that "the natural rights statement of the libertarian position is [based on] the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to 'own' his or her body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference." The Bible tells a different story. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Cor. 6: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body." And in the very next chapter: "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does."
The "Southern Revolution of 1861," writes George Fitzhugh, was a "solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality, and the social contracts as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say and Tom Paine and the rest of the infidel, political economists..."
2004-04-25 01:14 | User Profile
It's been a while since I have seen so many garbage arguments all in one place. Libertarians don't believe in 'ethical systems'? Right, sure, whatever. The invisible hand is 'satanic' and involves whole-sale rejection of group identities? Obviously--and that's all in Smith, do doubt about it.
I particularly like the part where the author makes fun of the concept of 'coercion.' Yes, please, more un-justified violence! Isn't terrible how libertarians are just so close-minded when it comes to that kind of thing?
Anti-libertarian conservatives inevitably use the same old tired arguments. They look around and discover that people who respond favorably to capitalist arguments are also often people who lack a proper conception of group identity. They then blame this on Smith and Locke, mysteriously finding anti-group, 'atomitist' setiments between the lines of Two Treatises on government or what have you. Case made, and then let's move on to the glories of Catholicism! What a bunch of tired old Mary's. Never mind that they would probably still be dying of rotten teath and tuberculosis if it had not been for the Protestant reformation and its recognition of the value of the person.
2004-04-25 07:39 | User Profile
[QUOTE][darkstar]It's been a while since I have seen so many garbage arguments all in one place. Libertarians don't believe in 'ethical systems'? Right, sure, whatever. The invisible hand is 'satanic' and involves whole-sale rejection of group identities? Obviously--and that's all in Smith, do doubt about it.[/QUOTE]
I think I know where you're coming from. I used to be a libertarian.
But I've come to see that my libertarianism was really a group-defense mechanism. I instinctively understood that the Racial Extortion Coaliton was waging war against me and mine because we were white. But I couldn't admit that to myself because I was soooo afraid of being called "racist", so I bought into libertarian nostrums because they allowed a strong defense of my interests as a white man without having to pay the social price of forthrightly admitting my racial motivations. I could cloak my racial defense against a racist atteck behind universalist slogans.
Charles Rangel said something a while back to the effect that "it used to be that white racists dressed in sheets and burned crosses, and now they just try to cut federal welfare spending." That's exactly right. Note that Rangel has no problems recognizing the net racial transfers inherent in welfare spending. Whites get taxed to support blacks, at the margins. We're the ones who have been cowed into not recognizing that obvious fact.
So, in PeeCee terms I "deconstructed" my libertarianism. I saw that it was really just a set of universalist slogans for my instinctive and very justifiable desire to defend my racial group from being sucked dry by parasitic out-groups.
As to the Reformation, Smith et al., I agree that the emphasis on individual dignity and freedom was an important corrective to the Middle Ages, but I see this in the context of the group, which precedes and supercedes the individual.
My reading of sociobiology convinced me that human groups are in fact separate organisms. We're more like beehives in that our group identities are real things. There really is a collective mind. The individual can be understood only in terms of the group, and it follows that the group's interests prevail over those of the individual.
But there's something of a paradox here. The priority of the group over the individual doesn't mean that the human group functions best under strict regimentation. Quite to the contrary: it is an empirical fact that human groups function best when a broad range of free action is guaranteed to the individual, allowing the specialization according to ability that lies at the very heart of Adam Smith's theory. Smith's theory, after all, extended the scientific discovery that more is produced overall when functions are broken down into small specialized tasks (that is, the modern notion of factory organization developed in the 1700's) to the international arena. Just as it's best to have one man mill the cart spokes and another place it in the wheel frame, so too it makes sense to have one nation like England make the woolens and another like Spain make the wine.
I think that our understanding of "regression to the mean" comports completely with classic Liberalism's fight against the "dead hand". Strong inherited privilege tends to be bad for the group, because the offspring of the strong and talented who took power tend to much more average than their illustrious ancestors. Limiting inherited privilege and encouraging Jefferson's "natural aristocracy" of the talented and virtuous to emerge on a continual basis merely recognizes this fact of nature, and allows the group's ruling class to demote the average among the scoin of the wealthy while elevating the talented among the toiling classes. Again, the group is paramount, but that which we call individual liberty can only be understood properly in that context.
The error of libertarians lies in severing this discovery from its grounding in group functioning. Individual human freedom is not so much an end in itself, but rather a way of maximizing group health.
Here are a couple of links for you to consider:
[URL=http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.htm]Atlantic Monthly [/URL] article on computer modeling of societies, that proves to my satisfaction that a collective "mind" in fact exists (Yggdrasil links to this):
[QUOTE]"There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987. "There are individual men and women, and there are families." If all she meant was that in a liberal democracy the individual is sovereign, then she was right. But if she also meant that, as some conservatives believe, the notion of a capital-S Society is a collectivist fiction or a sneaky euphemism for the nanny state, then it appears that she was demonstrably wrong; and the artificial societies I have shown you are the demonstrations. They are, it is true, almost laughably simple by comparison with real people and real societies, but that is exactly the point. If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies. Intuition tells us that it is meaningful to speak of Society as something greater than and distinct from the sum of individuals and families, just as it is meaningful to speak of the mind as something greater than and distinct from the sum of brain cells. Intuition appears to be correct.[/QUOTE]
[URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226901351/qid=1082878616/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-8337633-4311251?v=glance&s=books&n=507846]Darwin's Cathedral [/URL] is a truly fine book urged upon us by our own mwdallas, which makes a very strong case for the existence of the group mind, I highly recommend it.
The main thing is to return human freedom to the group context. We humans are profoundly social animals, and our individual lives and freedom cannot be understood outside the context of the societies that gave us birth.
By the way, this view IMHO corresponds completely with the Catholic view of salvation, which has a distinctly "national" flavour (at least officially), see Articles 56-58 of the Catechism.
[QUOTE]
56. "After the unity of the human race was shattered by sin God at once sought to save humanity part by part. The covenant with Noah after the flood gives expression to the principle of the divine economy toward the 'nations', in other words, towards men grouped 'in their lands, each with (its) own language, by their families, in their nations'.[Gen 10:5 ; cf. Gen 9:9-10, 16 ; Gen 10:20-31 .]"
"This state of division into many nations, each entrusted by divine providence to the guardianship of angels, is at once cosmic, social and religious. It is intended to limit the pride of fallen humanity [Cf. Acts 17:26-27 ; Dt 4:19 ; Dt 32:8 vLXX.] united only in its perverse ambition to forge its own unity as at Babel.[Cf. Wis 10:5 ; Gen 11:4-6 .] But, because of sin, both polytheism and the idolatry of the nation and of its rulers constantly threaten this provisional economy with the perversion of paganism.[Cf. Rom 1:18-25 .]"
"The covenant with Noah remains in force during the times of the Gentiles, until the universal proclamation of the Gospel.[Cf. Gen 9:16 ; Lk 21:24 ; DV 3.] The Bible venerates several great figures among the Gentiles: Abel the just, the king-priest Melchisedek - a figure of Christ - and the upright 'Noah, Daniel, and Job'.[Cf. Gen 14:18 ; Heb 7:3 ; Ezek 14:14 .] Scripture thus expresses the heights of sanctity that can be reached by those who live according to the covenant of Noah, waiting for Christ to 'gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad'.[Jn 11:52 .]"[/QUOTE]
2004-04-25 16:10 | User Profile
Libertarianism involves doctrines concerned with providing a framework for the peaceful co-existence of differing persons. Thus there need not be some kind of supression of racial instinct involved in supporting libertarian ideals. One may see that differences among humans is inevitable, with race happening to be a central area of difference. From here, one may reject attempts to base core policy in collectivist goals, recognizing that these will inevitably involve an un-stable, immoral relationship of opressor and opressed. Libertarianism provides the only comprehensive ideal that both allows for white flourishing and allows for peace with other races--goals, I would argue, that are inexorable intertwined. This is so whether there are 'collective minds' or not.
I was a libertarian when younger, but then moved toward various leftist, racialist ideals ('fight globalism,' that sort of thing), then toward a pragmatic Christian conservatism, then--after I realized that not all libertarians were open-border nuts, and that practically speaking there was no way to get the government to fund mostly useful programs--back to libertarianism.
The freewheeling nature of non-libertarian, 'conservative' thought is un-tenable. Political conservatives assemble a ramshackle collection of policies and wants, pretending that 'the tradition' or 'the Pope,' will somehow provide coherence, when in fact feeding this sort of assemblage into the political process makes only pork and crusades. There is no way to proceed except by embracing libertarian ideals, and then perhaps recognizing the need to sacrifice some these ideals to some extent due to the pressing demands racial bonds.
2004-04-26 10:24 | User Profile
We're probably not so far apart.
My problem with libertarianism is that, at least in its popular form, rejects the existence of the human collective as a matter of dogma. Perhaps the best known proponent of that position was the protaganist in Ayn Rand's (Alisa Rosenberg's) "Fountainhead", who proclaimed to the jury that the issue all comes down to the simple scientific fact that there is no collective brain. But I've come to believe that this is simply not the case, and that the existence of a "hive mind" in human groups has been proven (see links above) beyond reasonable dispute.
I suggest that you check out Distributism, which to my mind pulls it all together. This is basically Catholic social teaching that takes a whole-cloth approach to economics, marriage and family, social structures, and nation building.
Regards,
Walter
2004-04-27 00:57 | User Profile
No doubt there are a lot of crazy libertarians outs there, and there is always the possibility of some defining libertarianism in crude, anti-group terms. Someone times I have wondered if it better to abandon the label entirely, but it seems to capture the heart of things. Today, when Lewrockwell.com regularly features anti-immigration and conservative Catholic viewpoints, and the LP front runner emphasizes border control, things are looking up rather a lot.