Posted on 01/11/2019 8:13:59 AM PST by ek_hornbeck
One aspect of this that deserves more attention is the financialization of the economy. In the past, there was a strong connection between how well Wall Street and Main Street were doing, because stock trading led to investment capital - and ultimately jobs + consumer goods. Today's financial markets are increasingly driven by short-term, zero sum futures/derivates trading rather than long-term investment. This, together with offshoring, means that Wall Street can be doing great while Main Street is in an economic rut (and vice-versa).
“Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.”
Actually, until the Bush Family arrived on the scene, American involvement in big foreign wars was consistently initiated by Democrats.
WWI - Wilson
WWII - FDR
Korea - Truman
Vietnam - JFK / LBJ
Thus Bob Dole’s famous line back in 1976: “If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be ... enough to fill the city of Detroit.”
Very true, and it's no accident that the Republican Party's turn from realism and anti-interventionism to "nation building" was fueled by former Democrats and (Anti-Soviet) Leftists who started joining the party in the 1960's - 1980's. Even GHW Bush still had some comparatively sane foreign policy realists (Eagleburger, Baker) on board, it wasn't until George W's administration that the neoconservatives were fully in control.
The fundamental problem is that the business elites are shielded from the worst aspects of this cultural rot. Case in point: to the residents of elite gated communities, an illegal immigrant is someone who will mow their lawn for pennies, as opposed to someone who will break into their car or house.
Two things happened to separate Wall Street's interests from Main Streets. The first is the financialization of the economy: investment has become replaced by short-term, zero sum speculation on futures. The second is the internationalization of the economy, where "American" corporations can rake in huge profits by offshoring while generating no production or jobs in the US as such.
The institutions of free market capitalism are compatible with the epistemology of reason, the ethics of rationality, and the politics of limited government and God-given natural rights.
Capitalism is the only moral economic system and the only practical economic system. It is the only moral system, because when life is the standard of morality, capitalism is the most beneficial system to life proper to a rational being.
Capitalism is the only practical economic system because it is the only system that properly increases the division of labor, which increases productivity of labor, which increases economic progress, which increases mass prosperity. Increased productivity of labor also increases average real wage rates and the standard of living of the average workers.
Inequality of wealth is beneficial in the context of capitalism, and is necessary for capitalism. Its abolition is tantamount to the destruction of the law causality in receipt of income. Also, the division of labor depends on inequality. The condemnation of inequality is the result of envy and resentment against achievement, and is based on emotionalism, not reason.
Godless Capitalism is as bad as Godless Communism.
Its not something that many on our side want to hear.
Who ever said the ruling class were capitalists? Simply because they have loads of money and maybe businesses?
“Or did Vox just not add the ‘sarcasm tag’?”
_
Nope,Tucker was VERY serious——a great monologue IMHO.
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“I thought it was great monologue, and I agree with him.
Part of the reason this country has gone downhill is because of people whose only goal in life is to collect as much money as possible before they pass away. Consequently, just about everything we buy these days is cheap garbage and our quality of life has deteriorated a LOT in the last half century.”
I too thought Tucker’s monologue spoke a great truth. Bankers, Corporate CEOs & Wall Street types, plus the politicians they control, don’t give a damn about the disappearing middle class or their useful idiots who tend to be poorer and brainwashed to look the other way.
And no. I’m not, nor do I believe Tucker is, advocating abolishing capitalism or implementing it’s failed opposite socialism/communism. I’d like to see fairness within the law and fiscal conservatism within the government return to our Nation.
Globalist monopolies are destroying America’s middle class of all races, not just the white middle class.
The black and Latino middle class has been declining.
Lobbyist, rent seeking, connections, monopolies and other favored groups has destroyed the idea of capitalism here.
That's why I don't defend 'capitalism'. We simply don't have it. That is why people like aoc and sanders have a leg up talking about it. The 'capitalism' we have now simply isn't worth fighting for.
I want to hear it. I speak it.
The Founding Fathers made it clear that acknowledging a Creator of unalienable rights, and requiring attendant moral attributes from the citizenry, were essential to the government they were forming. Essential.
Fiscal conservatism is not conservatism at all: It is self-serving greed, and it leads to decadence just as much as communism.
Anyone who endorses so-called fiscal conservatism, devoid of godliness (read: Neoconservatism), is either ignorant or deceitful.
This nation was not founded upon amoral self interest. It absolutely was not.
Take God out, and you have no unalienable rights - so anyone can abuse you any way he likes, and “good” for him. To argue otherwise is pure sophistry.
This has been degrading the country for decades. Rush Limbaugh has told how the elite phoney conservatives in the RNC (there is no longer a GOP) would pull him aside back in the early 1990s, telling him to do something about shutting up the so-called religious right.
This, by the bye, is the great failing of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, despite the many good points she makes.
Your main point is that capitalism divorced from morality is inimical to conservatism. I would add that capitalism divorced from national and cultural loyalty and identity is equally inimical to conservatism. Koch Brothers-style “libertarianism” and the neoconservatism of Bill Kristol and his allies have in the long run done as much harm to the US as liberal Democrats.
I agree with both of you.
Both made very good points.
I would add that I really don’t like the term Capitalism. It was coined by Karl Marx.
I prefer “Free Market” which is related to freedom.
Capitalism is too often Bank, Finance and insiders making money by manipulating markets and skimming money from the economy without providing anything of value. (and hurting normal people in the process).
Bfl
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