"OH, A BS ARTIST!"
Posted on 11/12/2015 12:23:37 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
A market economy is a tool for securing human welfare and promoting human freedom. It may or may not be effective at those things, but either way, that's what it is: a tool. Sadly, the contemporary Republican Party has elevated that tool into a religion, bowing before it and disparaging those who don't.
We need some philosophers to scrutinize that religion's dogmas, and we need some welders to help dismantle its gaudy temples.
Last night, as I listened to the Republican debate, I was surprised to hear my own profession called out by name. I am a professor of philosophy. Accordingly, I was taken aback when I heard Marco Rubio's assertion that welders make more than philosophers. This claim is false.
But even if it were true, it would not show, as Rubio seems to think it does, that our country needs more welders and fewer philosophers. For that supposes that the social worth of a profession tracks the market price it commands in the current economy. And this too is false.
It is false for at least two reasons. First, it is false because current market prices are distorted by a wide range of diseconomies that have funneled virtually all gains from the recovery into the pockets of the wealthiest Americans. The US economy shovels massive externalities - costs and risks that fall on those who don't incur them - onto working people, future generations, and the natural environment, while the wealthy few hoard the benefits. One particularly important case is carbon pollution. Because market prices do not reflect these externalities, all prices in the economy are distorted, including the price of labor and the prices of the machines that replace human labor. So there is no reason to think that the price my labor commands in the current economy is the price my labor would command in an actual market - an economy where costs were internalized, that is, paid by those who produce them. The day I hear Republicans talk about making polluters pay is the day I'll begin to believe that they care about genuinely free markets.
But even if we made it so that rich people could not offload costs onto poor people, it would still not be the case that the social worth of a profession would be determined by the price its members could command on a market. Market prices reflect supply and demand. If there is a glut of X and a shortage of Y, the price of X goes down and that of Y goes up. It has nothing to do with the social worth of either thing. Worth is a completely different issue; English teachers, social workers, poets, and of course, Republican presidential candidates, are currently in higher supply than demand; this diminishes their wages and employment opportunities in these fields, but it says nothing at all about their social role or value.
It works in the other direction, too. "Avatar" was not the best film ever, even though it was the highest-grossing. Of the 10 biggest team payrolls in Major League Baseball, six failed to make the playoffs; neither team in the World Series was higher than 16th. Nor was "casino mogul and reality TV star" the most socially worthwhile profession represented on last night's stage, but Donald Trump was indeed the wealthiest person up there. Carly Fiorina - incidentally, a philosophy major - was the second, but many HP investors doubt her business acumen. Parking lot attendants earn about the same wage as childcare workers, but even Marco Rubio would not think that cars are as valuable as children.
Why would anyone confuse these obviously different things - market value and social worth? What kind of person would assume without justification or explanation that an endeavor (or a person's) value, derives solely from the amount of money it can make?
A market economy is a tool for securing human welfare and promoting human freedom. It may or may not be effective at those things, but either way, that's what it is: a tool. Sadly, the contemporary Republican Party has elevated that tool into a religion, bowing before it and disparaging those who don't.
We need some philosophers to scrutinize that religion's dogmas, and we need some welders to help dismantle its gaudy temples.
And we need to pay both the philosophers and the welders a living wage.
This is the sort of "philosophy" being subsidized by the taxpayers - one completely soaked in envirnomentalism and class warfare.
Welders do productive work and I'm sure that with a shortage of welders overtime pays very well - these "educator-philosphers" demand tenure.
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Oh and there's this from NPR:
Amid A Shortage Of Welders, Some Prisons Offer Training
"America needs more welders - and soon. Baby boomers with the skill are retiring and not enough young people are replacing them.
In the '80s, when Flashdance brought us Alex the welding woman who really wanted to be a ballet dancer, America had well over half a million welders. Welding was hot. Today, there are about 40 percent fewer welders.
The American Welding Society estimates there will be a shortage of nearly 300,000 welding-related positions by 2020.
Jeremy Worley, who teaches welding at a technical college in north Georgia, says the demand for welders is at a level that is growing "quicker than we can get them out."
So Worley will teach welding to anyone at any age, anywhere, including inside Walker State Prison. As part of its ongoing prison reform, Georgia decided to give inmates access to heavy tools and blowtorches so they can get a welding certificate...."
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Maybe the "philosopher-educators" are responsible for prisons bulging at the seams - they sure are nurturing and importing antisocial elements at Missouri University.
I say the positive contribution of welders is much more than "philosophers" like Avery Kolers and that we need to rethink what is being pushed on society at these institutions.
Love those liberals .... so cocksure .... so .... so .... right.
Actuallly, doc, your premise about what market economies are supposed to do looks a little bit unexamined. You might want to rethink that one.
And oh, by the way, free-market capitalism isn't a religion. That title belongs to your liberalism.
"OH, A BS ARTIST!"
Whatever my issues with Rubio, this was a fine moment on his part in the debate.
As I read this ignorant and sophomoric screed, I was struck again by how academic types are almost universally oblivious to the unintended irony in what they write.
Here we are provided a clear and unambiguous example of why welders are held in higher regard, both economically and personally, than “philosophers,” most of whom are undeserving of the name, since they love neither knowledge nor the life of the mind. Most are simply infatuated with the gaseous bubbling of their own thoughts.
The day I hear Republicans talk about making polluters pay is the day I'll begin to believe that they care about genuinely free markets.Just when you thought you had the free market thing all figured out... "Making" people pay is not a "genuine" free market.
“.......The Democrats and their media friends learned well the lesson of 1980 and 1994: When its Left vs. Right on questions of public policy, the Right wins more often than it loses. For a generation, the Left has been trying to change the subject from what kinds of policies Republicans seek to enact to what kinds of people Republicans are. The answer is, depending on the need of the moment: racist, poisonously elitist, disastrously anti-elitist, the party of Wall Street gazillionaires, the party of toothless hillbillies, godless capitalists, Christian fanatics - anything you might not want to be, that’s what they’d have you believe the Republicans are......”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426927/ben-carson-hillary-clinton-pyramids-new-age
I got slimed by Marco RubioNo, you were slime way before that.
“.....Mrs. Clinton’s brand of crazy is, as those of you who remember the 1990s know, some next-level stuff. She purported to hold policy conversations with the long-dead Eleanor Roosevelt; her apologists now attempt to present those as mere exercises in imagination, but Mrs. Clinton brought in assistance in the form of Jean Houston, a deeply nutty New Age figure who found her way into mysticism via research involving LSD and who is associated with the so-called human-potential movement: think Esalen, Aldous Huxley, and all that rubbish. You know that cult at Big Sur where Don Draper ends up at the end of Mad Men? We’re talking about those guys. But there’s no Democrat-succoring juice to be had from Herself’s excursions into the odd, so that weirdness has never been presented as a real challenge to her fitness for office.......
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426927/ben-carson-hillary-clinton-pyramids-new-age
Welders put things together, taking simple shapes, and fusing them together. Watching a man use a TIG welder is watching an artist. To look at a well laid bead, is beauty in steel, and to know that he is improving the world is humbling.
Tell me again how this life support system for a dry hole has made the world better.
https://louisville.edu/philosophy/faculty-staff/faculty-profile-pages/avery-kolers
Prof. Kolers specializes in social & political philosophy and applied ethics. He frequently teaches Political Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Ethics, and Metaphysics. In addition, Prof. Kolers coaches the UofL Ethics Bowl team and will be offering a course linked to team participation in fall 2014 (PHIL 505-01 Ethics Bowl). For the Bioethics MA program he teaches a course in Justice and Health Care. He is available to supervise theses and serve on committees broadly in areas of ethics and social & political philosophy.
Prof. Kolers’ particular research interests include issues surrounding territorial rights and solidarity. These highly “applied” issues touch on a wide range of problems, but also raise hard questions about how to navigate deep diversity in a shared world. His 2009 book Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press) won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize. More recently, his 2012 article “Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands” received the Journal of Applied Philosophy prize, awarded for “the best article published in the year’s volume.?
Currently, Prof. Kolers is working on a book on solidarity and further articles on territorial rights. He has initiated a research project on the emergence of a discourse of indigenous title in the 16th-century Spanish Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas as they grappled with the moral and political implications of the Encounter with the “new world.”
Avery Kolers is a whiner. Has she ever had to fend for herself in the private sector?
Reading the comments at Salon is a glimpse into an alternate universe, a truly dark and vile place.
Sounds like someone’s panties are in a wad because Rubio told the dead-on truth that occupational specialties have become de-emphasized in this country. We have far more than enough self-styled philosophers.
This guy can’t write, sounds like a drug induced rage
I was born in the darkest days of World War II of middle-class parents who had somehow survived the Great Depression and managed to move up from farming and minor railroad executive of their parents into the professional class. They and the whole world were born and raised in scarcity. I was born on the cusp of the New Age in which there would be plenty for Americans; we would be able to indulge "conspicuous consumption" which so enraged philosophically inclined liberals.
It was not a time of such abundance even for Americans that we could be profligate with our resources, personal or national. Life was not as easy as it is now, indeed, I would have died as a young child had it not been for penicillin and it was only by the narrowest of margins that I survived.
My parents operated in the system which allocated goods and services according to a free market, or at least a market much freer than the one we operate under today. They worked a postwar economic miracle and whole demographics moved out of a life of misery and want into a leafy suburban world of relative plenty.
When I got to college in the 1960s as part of an honors program we were assigned The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, a favorite of the left and a favorite of John Kennedy. The thesis of the book was that our society was miss -allocating its resources the evidence of which was ornamental but useless fins and chrome on automobiles in a world of failing schools. This evidence was adduced to support the proposition that people were too stupid to be permitted to allocate resources for themselves, they must be guided by those who could see the greater good.
When one reads this philosopher/author we are struck by the same argument, we are too stupid to allocate our own resources, he and his elite colleagues know far better than we do that our money should be spent on the environment, for example. Elizabeth Warren tells us "we did not build that" and Barack Obama echoes her. Obviously they are smarter than we are and they know better than we do what we should do with our money.
Too bad we are not as smart as my parents who allocated the money according to their own judgments and built the greatest economy, the freest society, and the strongest nation on earth. Every time they spent a dollar they were casting a vote. If they voted to have a Cadillac, which my father upon attaining a certain income level did acquire, the nation somehow survived all that chrome. I remember the children of our neighborhood coming over to see our new car which if you push this lever up the Windows automatically went up and if you push this lever down the Windows magically went down. You would think my parents would have been smart enough not to waste money on electric windows when they could have had the old crank variety.
It is only when society attains a certain level of abundance, sometime after my birth in the time of scarcity, that we can have philosophers spawning everywhere and occupying perches in the eyrie heights of ivory towers, lofty perches from which they can tell us how we should vote with our dollars.
The left is always trying to change the predicate so they can get to their answer. Our system used to work brilliantly but they have had their way to a great degree and the free market has been grossly distorted with baleful results by the left, many of whom are the spiritual grandchildren of John Kenneth Galbreath. The more they distort the free market, the more they intervene to correct the distortions they have created. All the while preaching from their heights about how our resources should be allocated, indeed, denying us the right to allocate them ourselves and sometimes denying us access to our own resources.
There is a definition for a philosopher: God Player.
In fact hubris is the cardinal characteristic of leftists. It is why they are so aggressive in their politics, because political power offers them the broadest scope for of their egos. Give me an ivory tower high enough, and the philosophy convoluted enough and I can transform the world.
He’s a SJW - “social justice warrior,” check out bio in post 11.
These people aren’t teachers, they’re anti-American, socialist activists.
“....... The left is always trying to change the predicate so they can get to their answer. ........”
Great truth - great post.
November 12, 2015 - Victor Davis Hanson:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426920/dan-rather-truth-progressive-noble-lies
“.....The myth of supposed religious and racial bigotry thwarting a young, modern-day Alexander Graham Bell proved more powerful than the banal trick of repackaging a cheap clock.
Subsequent fact-finding does not seem to dispel these untruths. Instead, what could or should have happened must have happened, given that the noble ends of social justice are thought to justify the means deemed necessary to achieve them.
The 60 Minutes memos about Bush’s Air National Guard service were never authenticated. Everyone now rejects the myth that the Benghazi attack was a result of a video. Investigators proved that Michael Brown was not executed by Officer Wilson. Ahmed was neither a young prodigy nor a victim of bias.
But the legends are created and persist because they further progressive agendas - and the thousands of prestigious and lucrative careers invested in them.”....
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24376
June 22, 2000 - David Horowitz:
“...If you were active in the so-called “peace” movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren’t really a “peace activist,” except in the sense that you were against America’s war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves “peace activists,” you didn’t oppose the Communists’ war, and were gratified when America’s enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American “imperialism” and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America’s democracy, which you knew to be a “sham” because it was controlled by money in the end. That’s why you wanted to “Bring the Troops Home,” as your slogan said. Because if America’s troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.
But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.
Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren’t really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.
It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left’s anti-American, but “progressive” agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.
Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)...
.......They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your “reactionary” commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left - by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.”
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