Socialist States of America still not learning the lessons

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Skybird:


I think you have defined it quite well here.

Cannot claim the score for myself, I admit. Others were earlier.

[August]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Skybird:


I think you have defined it quite well here.

He starts out well enough but then goes off on some unworkable utopian tangent of self sustainable communities that totally ignores both human nature and history.

[yubba]

I thought it would be fun to channell Marget Thatcher through Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a socialist if,,,,You believe in Santa Claus more than hardwork,, you might be a socialist if you believe that your neighbor isn't paying his fare share into your retirement. or you wanted to join the occupy movement but was too lazy to get off the couch..

[Tchocky]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Result: every politician winning elections and claiming governmental power and influential positions, abuses his power as best as he can in the time he is being given.

And that is why you should not trust in these political entities that they could cure an amok-running banking system by regulating it. They have no inrest to do so, since you cannot differ between private enterprise and its lobbies and politicians anymore.

Cynicism is healthy to an extent. What's unhealthy is a pathological mistrust in everything, rooted in blind faith of the general horridness of people.

Worse is that, as somebody pout it, our states are no longer run by the law, but by lawyers, with some imagination and open mindedness one can easily imagine what is meant.

No, that's a lazy and meaningless parrallelism that ignores reality in order to sound clever. Our societies are numerous and complex. Law by it's definition is always going to be as complex as those who are governed by that law. Hence lawyers. I don't see "lawyer" as a dirty word, I see it as a profession that serves a purpose.

As is no secret anymore, I assume , this is why I conclude that the existence of governments and democratic states is the real problem. With democracy, thing shave become worse than they were in feudalism before, nevertheless, feudalism also means abuse of the power and forms a territorial monopolist with the power to make laws (to which the kings often were more bound than governments are today), its just that the dimension of the abuse was smaller than it became under democratic reign.

If you keep throwing these absolutes around you'll do yourself an injury.

[Skybird]

Someone reacting sensible to me slaughtering the golden cow, hm? Democracy? Law and order?

Don't worry about me injuring myself, last year I dived into the work of Carl Menger and Murray Rothbard, also Hans Herrmann Hoppe, just recently I embarked on the works by von Mises, von Bawerk and earlier this year Kühnelt-Leddhin und Roland Baader, so I am in very good and prominent company and have plenty of intellectual support in arguments and reasoning.

Thus my views on democracy being anything but a favourable form of government (a view widespread and almost commonly agreed on until just 100-130 years ago), and my critical view of our law-and-order system having been terribly perverted, abused, hijacked and thus: failing. when in the US the number of regulations from the early 90s to the first decade of this millenia multiply by a factor of almost 200, then this can hardly be explained by "reflecting complx needs of the real world". It simply is a system that runs amok. The EU and Euro history also are prime examples for it: a series of betrayals, treaty violations, law violations, intentionally misleading lies, ignored criterions and arbitrary decisions made for reason of ultra-short-sighted opportunism without any strategic perspective. All legal rules designed for and during the Euro to design and regulate it: ALL of them have been broken until now. ALL of them. Not much better the relation of the EU bodies to the national states and parliaments, and the power accumulation and the way it is being enforced.

Why politicians do so, and have no reason to act any different, the above mentioned authors explain reasonably, logically and rationally. It is ion their ver yown most prominent interest to act irresponsibly and short-sighted. And history proves these authors right. Beside that, it makes sense and is perfectly rational and reasonable what they say. It is in perfect congruence with reality.

I have summarised it, at least tried to, several times now in postings of the past 3 or 4 weeks. Many have ridiculed the reasons and arguments, laughed about them.

Just being able to actually prove them wrong - nobody was. The golden cow democracy is untouchable. It must not be rechecked. It must not have questions asked about it. It must stand untouchable. Ha! Me - not touching something claimed holy but falling in paralysis in reverence, allowing to get awestruck...? You met the wrong man, brother. I shatter what is claimed holy and then search the pieces for what makes it holy. Never found anything, though.

I recommend to pick some books by the authors above. Of course, my favourite is Hoppe, since he includes the others and founds on their works - and then goes beyond them and leads it even further.

I could also give links for essays, but as to be expected, I prefer to read stuff in German, so German essays linked en masse probably are not welcomed here. So just three links to two German and one English collections of materials.

http://wertewirtschaft.org/analysen/ (German)
Here I especially point out Rahim Tagizadeghan, who has become a favourite scholar of mine recently. Especially his piece on the historical origins of democracy should be an eye-opener for everybody thinking of it as the the best, the greatest, the finest. It isn't.

http://www.misesde.org/?page_id=3064 (German)
Here I recommend the works of Baader, Hoppe, Hülsmann, Mises, Rothbard, and again Tagizadeghan.

http://mises.org/Literature/Authors (English)
The names already mentioned, and probably many more - I have looked in this collection only those names I already knew. As I said, of course I prefer to read in German.

Edit 15-04-2012:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe-arch.html
Another collection of links to mostkly shorter, English essays and articles by Hoppe

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by yubba

I thought it would be fun to channell Marget Thatcher through Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a socialist if,,,,You believe in Santa Claus more than hardwork,, you might be a socialist if you believe that your neighbor isn't paying his fare share into your retirement. or you wanted to join the occupy movement but was too lazy to get off the couch..

[yubba]

Originally Posted by Oberon

that's funny Howed I miss that,,,?? I got too get out more.

[Skybird]

This just to add another link to a collection of - mostly shorter - English articles and essays by Hoppe:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe-arch.html

[Hitman]

Thus my views on democracy being anything but a favourable form of government (a view widespread and almost commonly agreed on until just 100-130 years ago), and my critical view of our law-and-order system having been terribly perverted, abused, hijacked and thus: failing. when in the US the number of regulations from the early 90s to the first decade of this millenia multiply by a factor of almost 200, then this can hardly be explained by "reflecting complx needs of the real world". It simply is a system that runs amok. The EU and Euro history also are prime examples for it: a series of betrayals, treaty violations, law violations, intentionally misleading lies, ignored criterions and arbitrary decisions made for reason of ultra-short-sighted opportunism without any strategic perspective. All legal rules designed for and during the Euro to design and regulate it: ALL of them have been broken until now. ALL of them. Not much better the relation of the EU bodies to the national states and parliaments, and the power accumulation and the way it is being enforced.

I'm actually surprised that anyone has ever thought that democracy (No matter what you think of the concept itself) has ever even existed. It never has, it has always been a curtain hiding different ways of the same economic/politic powers to hide and disguise themselves. Many people have been tricked by the illusion that powerful people come and go (Blue blooded are no longer powerful, bankers now are, etc) but ignore the fact that there is ALWAYS a concentration of power in a small club, exercised in his own benefit and to the detriment of the vast majority. Not that the majority is always in a position to really know what is best for them, but in any case the governing elites are also not interested in that.

Democracy is the disguise the elite uses in our days to preserve itself and give ordinary people the illusion of being free. Mortgages have replaced feudal servitude as retaining chain, and you can vote each four years the color of the marionettes the elites put to protect them. But that's all.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Skybird

.

I have summarised it, at least tried to, several times now in postings of the past 3 or 4 weeks. Many have ridiculed the reasons and arguments, laughed about them.

Just being able to actually prove them wrong - nobody was. The golden cow democracy is untouchable. It must not be rechecked. It must not have questions asked about it. It must stand untouchable. Ha! Me - not touching something claimed holy but falling in paralysis in reverence, allowing to get awestruck...? You met the wrong man, brother. I shatter what is claimed holy and then search the pieces for what makes it holy. Never found anything, though.

I recommend to pick some books by the authors above. Of course, my favourite is Hoppe, since he includes the others and founds on their works - and then goes beyond them and leads it even further.

That is not really the issue, the liberal-democratic State which currently exist in USA, Canada, UK, Germany, et al. are far from perfect, but there is no practical alternative.

Hoppe's theories are utopic.

[Skybird]

@ Hitman & BilgeRat,

Hoppe'S criticism of democracy is very specific, and I challenge anyone to prove wrong the reasonable principles and the logic in his thinking. That I want to see!

Also, his is no arguing that democracy is hijacked (that can be additionally the case, but it plays no role). He nails down very precisely (and one could say: without mercy) why democracy even in the most ideal incarnation of it must and will fail, and that is not due to a distortion, or a hijacking, but that is due to the very basic principles by which it is running. The very design if flawed from the starting line on, and rewards the worst politics and politicians, while making it almost impossible for those of higher human(e) qualities to come to power and infleunce. Of use it can be only in the smallest of imaginable communal contexts. And we do not even talk of a communal context the size of a city with thousands of people living there - smaller! Beyond that scaling, democracy is a mess, and always must be a mess. Like an orb always is round.

The good name for democracy is a relatively new thing, and for most of history back until the ancient Greek it was despised and warned of - the Greeks deeply struggled to avoid it. Even the founding fathers of the US did not want it, and not before the civil war it was nevertheless enforced - with all the negative consequences from it that had been feared in the centuries before - and that indeed then became all true.

Show the basic reasoning in Hoppe's very precise arguments being wrong. Just saying a common place like "we have nothing better", is not good enough. There is a reason why he is seen as a forthinker who has gone even beyond the great names of modern real libertarianism, Mises and Rothbard. I can see all his points and arguments being perfectly and flawlessly illustrated by the way in which the EU behaves and unfolds, and the US as well. His points are being shown true. They illustrate point by point how right he is.

I recommend to read his main work, "Democracy-The god that never was". Or to pick the many essays and articles that I have linked to here and in other threads over the past 2 or 3 weeks. The book is 14 chapters, each saying in principle the same, but every one concentrating on a slightly different focus and point of interest. So, while it repeats certain basics several times, you nevertheless can easily learn them that way right because they are repeated. The chapters in principle form independent essays that could also be given one by one, each one for itself, well, at leats most of them. That is why it is like this.

Whether his offered alternative model would and could work, is open for discussion, and I am cautious on that aspect of his work. So is Hoppe himself: he says in the book at at least two occasions, and in open words, that he sees no reason to be optimistic and that he thinks it all will go down the drain, democratically of course. The man is no dreamer.

On the German book market, recently authors from sometimes very different fields and directions support Hoppe's basic logic, and illustrate it with a plethora of examples from contemporary reality, sometimes from fields close to politics and economics, sometimes from some greater distance or from arguing in wider cultural contexts. Recently published names to mention would be Thomas Rietzschel, Frank Karsten and Karel Baumann , Christian Ortner, Roland Baader, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rahim Taghizadegan.

As I see it today, democracy is the biggest self-deception the ordinary people, we all allow us to reign our fates. It is the illusion of that we are reasonable and make reasonable decision that reflect both the immediate moment and the distant future. By that illusion we try to ennoble ourselves as mentally sane, reasonable beings. But in democracy, not only are their bad politicians, there is also the crowd that brings them to power. There are no victims, there are only accomplices in crime. And we all want to have a party while it lasts, and we do not care that we destroy the future over it. That is all what democracy is about. It encourages and brings out the worst in man. One can see that when having become familiar with the reasoning behind Hoppe's arguments. Democracy allows people to demand more than the community can afford, and it always leads to socialism and in the end communism. It necessarily must lead into total and complete collapse, inevitably.

We see it happening right now. For exactly the outlaid reasons. That the process takes years and decades, does only mean that it is slow for our perception . For history, it goes quite fast.

Hoppes's criticism of democracy is complete and utter garbage. It rest entirely on the premise that everyone is more stupid or deluded than Hoppe. Though it may well be true in some cases (yours), it clearly isn't the general rule - I for one can see vacuous utopian drivel when I see it. Find another forum to promote this loon.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

(yours)...Find another forum to promote this loon.

The rest of your post was fine, but direct insults and telling people to "take it somewhere else" are strictly not allowed. Call this an informal warning.

[Armistead]

Democracy is a great 3/4 mile race horse on a 1 mile track..

[Hitman]

The very design if flawed from the starting line on, and rewards the worst politics and politicians, while making it almost impossible for those of higher human(e) qualities to come to power and infleunce

I agree with with that mostly, though I'd complete it with an idea that the greeks already suggested: A democracy is only as good or as bad as the society that enforces it. If you have the average society with a majority of idiots, uneducated, irrespectful, etc, then the resulting democracy is at that level. Of course a democracy composed of a handful of intellectual and reasonable people would work marvels, but that will not happen. It won't because sadly societies are not like that because of a basic antropologic reason, namely in social groups of animals there is hierarchy and a majority must be idiot to be manipulated and sacrificed in benefit of the continuity of the species (Think of any animal species organized in communities and you will see hierarchy and some dying for the others). Nature ensures thus that there is ample supply of idiots, and the clever/powerful elite do the rest by using it for their own convenience. Giving theoretical equal power of decission to the idiots is of course a flawed way of handling things, but it seems to be the only one that will keep them happy and cheated to continue being sacrificed and working instead of mounting guillotines in he champs Eliseès.

Further (short) reading on what the greeks diagnosed already centuries ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos