Posted on 05/13/2003 6:02:52 AM PDT by A. Pole
Some material to ponder for our free market/free trade fundamentalists
Initial quote about Thomas Malthus, a disciple of Adam Smith:
"[...] In order to have a supply of labor exceeding demand -- thereby keeping labor costs low -- Malthus was a profound enemy of birth control. The more children these poor engender, the larger is the supply of cheap labor. In order that these masses of children do not constitute a drain on welfare dollars, Malthus proposes to just let the sick, little blighters die. He defends these deaths by saying that it is really to the benefit of the working class to do away with so many little ones. That way the labor pool would diminish and labor could demand a higher wage. It all follows the simple law of supply and demand. Human life is commercial commodity![...]"
The whole article:
For most of recorded history, the vast majority of humankind has not been well served by prevailing economic systems. Forever and a day, a few avaricious alphas amassed obscene assets while most people had a hard time keeping body and soul together. Getting people to submit to such injustice and discrimination required a belief system embraced by most individuals. From dim historical recesses until about the 1800s, religions provided the anesthetic that made most people accept an economic system benefiting only a few. The cant was that God ordained everyone's station in life. Kings ruled by divine right. God appointed clergy to proclaim God's absolute truths. God himself assigned slaves, serfs, and workers to their lowly rungs on life's ladder. However, if they behaved in accordance with the Church's doctrines, they would be assured of a heavenly hereafter complete with robes, wings, and harps. Most people swallowed that bait hook, line, and sinker.
In the late 1700s, there was an awakening of the people. They got tired of being shafted. The American Revolution proved that King George III did not rule by divine right. The French Revolution guillotined masses of aristocrats who had hidden their shameful distain for the lower classes under the guise of God's will. A breath of freedom, a sense of equity, and promises of a new order permeated the air. Perchance the time had come for a new world order. But it was not to be. A new dogma, in a sense a new religion, was birthed. It did not rely on supernatural manifestations of the divine but proved just as repressive for the vast majority of humankind as did the rule of the gods. The people were duped into a system appearing to have the stamp of rationality imprinted upon it.
The human brain has the uncanny ability to vindicate the unreasonable, to justify the unjustifiable, and to defend the indefensible. This capability is not limited to people of low estate and/or moderate intellectual capabilities. Some of the most brilliant people in the world's history have been guilty of the most crass self-deceptions. Plato saddled the world with a belief in the absolute nature of God. He established the rationale providing religious, political, and every other kind of pundit with the authority to shroud their pronouncements with the mantle of absolute truth. Belief in polar absolutes is probably as responsible as any other single factor, except the behavioral imprints in the human reptilian brain, for the murderous behavior of our species. Believing our ideas to be absolutely correct and backed by stacks of holy scriptures, pronouncements of assemblies meeting in God's name, and having been prayed over, we bash in anyone's head who does not agree with the words we issue in the name of our god. The brilliant Newton lent his significant scientific reputation to authenticate the nonsense of belief in absolute polarities.
Over time, belief in God's absolute power to predestine every action in our universe diminished. This was also the beginning of the industrial era. As these two forces merged, someone very smart had to come up with some highfaluting reasons allowing perpetuation of the economic ravishing of the masses. That someone was the admired, esteemed, and highly respected saint of the American economy, Adam Smith. While trained as a moral philosopher, he shed almost all of his morals in the development of the new religion flying under the banner of capitalism. A curia consisting of most CEOs, Deans of Schools of Business, and a coterie of politicians are the administrators of the Articles of Religion of the New Faith. In essence, only the names, dates, and places have changed since our species believed in the divine right of kings. The new kings think of themselves as no less divine than Egyptian Pharaohs. What is this hoax that has become the altar at which we worship the new god? What is the phantasmagoria providing the equivalent of a new theology continuing the enslavement of most of the world's people?
The new illusion contains only two major Articles of Faith. Volumes have been written in the worship of these twins keeping bread from the mouths of babes, perpetuating a consistent sense of uncertainty about a workingman's ability to provide for his family, and causing the world to descend into periodic economic depressions and major wars. Yet, the little people of the western world have swallowed this poison depriving them of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "The king is dead. Long live the king." Nothing new has happened. The old tyranny has simply been baptized with a new name. The substance remained the same.
The first Article of Faith of this new religion is found in Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 2.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,Smith admits that humans, as distinct from all other animals, need each other in order to meet their needs. They use barter and trade to find satisfaction of their wants. In effecting this exchange, Smith continues,
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their (that is the baker's, the butcher's, the candlestick maker's) humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their own advantage.Smith posits utter selfishness as the reason for commerce, trade, and business. This, of course, is the mantra that encourages companies like Enron to hide the actual state of their business in offshore companies. It is the Declaration of the New Ethics that causes high and mighty executives of Arthur Anderson to shred documents. The new economic faith established self-interest as the only "raison d'etre" for the conduct of business. Human selfishness lies at the heart of bartering and trading.
However, Smith, having a background as a moral philosopher, probably had a twinge of conscience when he realized that he simply gave a new name to the old "dog eat dog" philosophy. What to do? So, the second Article of Faith was developed. In book 4, chapter 2, Smith writes,
...by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he (our butcher, baker, and candlestick maker) intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.So now we are back to angels and seraphim, gods and, perchance, aliens landing in UFOs looking out for the good of society. Smith advocates the most crass sort of self-centered greed and then trusts some invisible hand making sure that no one gets hurt. Holy cow! I could have sold that guy the Brooklyn Bridge! Pretty naïve, isn't he? Of course there is no unseen hand looking after anybody. There was no such hand when kings ruled by divine right and there isn't one now that the magnates of industry continue their rule of greed.
I must be honest and admit that it is possible in the early stages of a business to achieve public benefits that are not its direct intent. When, for instance, a man decides to build gas stations, his primary interest is to sell gas so he can make a profit. The people benefit from such a self-centered goal. They now have a convenient place to obtain gas. However, selfishness being what it is, our good merchant will combine with other sellers of gas and, eventually, there will be price-fixing. Then self-interest dictates that our good merchant obtains a share in the production of crude oil, its refining process, and its distribution system. Working interest in drilling companies, oilfield service companies, manufacturing of compressors and drilling rigs are the natural results of the new economic order. With monopolistic tendencies, engendered by selfishness, sooner or later our good merchants will gain control of the government. Then war is declared against those nations possessing the largest known oil reserves. While some initial good results from our paragon's selfishness, the ultimate end is body bags and worldwide upheaval. In my book, that is not a desirable Article of Faith.
Thomas Malthus, a disciple of Smith's "new" economic order, is best known for his proposition that populations increase in geometric proportions whereas food supply follows an arithmetic growth curve. It is not so well known that Malthus looked upon the poor of England -- and, by implication, any society --as being nothing more than an increment of the economic pie. Concern for humane values does not exist in this new order. In order to have a supply of labor exceeding demand -- thereby keeping labor costs low -- Malthus was a profound enemy of birth control. The more children these poor engender, the larger is the supply of cheap labor. In order that these masses of children do not constitute a drain on welfare dollars, Malthus proposes to just let the sick, little blighters die. He defends these deaths by saying that it is really to the benefit of the working class to do away with so many little ones. That way the labor pool would diminish and labor could demand a higher wage. It all follows the simple law of supply and demand. Human life is commercial commodity!
Malthus even wrote that infants are of little value because as soon as one dies, another one takes its place. Somehow, the invisible hand will take care of everything. Is it any wonder that unrest and malcontent undermine the foundations of our society?
Now comes the real sleeper in this august form of economics. Malthus suggests that it is evil for governments to impose any restrictions whatsoever on what is essentially a license to practice unlimited greed. However, it seems to be quite all right for the government to enact legislation granting special rights and privileges to large, moneyed interests. Smithian religion approves what America's dot.coms did. Deceit and fraud is not only right, it is the most supreme form of worship to the Golden Calf of Mammon. Congress made sure that chicanery, deceit, and fraud were legal.
Well, it's a rotten system, hell-bent on destroying the vast majority of people both in America and elsewhere. Such a system must come to an end. If human life means anything at all, then this nefarious economic theory must be dismembered and tossed overboard. If the mighty and all-powerful captains of industry do not heed the call of an abused humanity, then the wheels of history grinding slowly but consistently will produce the antithesis that will annihilate the present system.
Whether the new system will place world-wide dominance into a few hands -- with its concomitant results of continuous sabotage, terrorism, and riots -- or whether our species shall put in place a just and equitable system of distribution of goods remains to be seen.
Sooner or later the present appetite for power by the few will evolve into something like the man-eating plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. Even the moguls will be devoured by what they created. The Hegelian dialectic is alive and well. Can't we figure out a system providing a synthesis based on equity and justice and thereby prove Hegel wrong?
[John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of "Shaking the Foundations."]
I'll answer this only when you tell me if you've stopped beating your wife.
Let's see: I refuse to use artificial means to prevent my children from ever existing in the first place.
If I'm so solicitous for my children to be born and enjoy the gift of life, why would I not use all means possible to improve and extend their lives?
If you don't understand what natural law is, I recommend reading Right and Reason by Austin Fagothey.
There seems to be a real gap in your philosophical education which this book might help to remedy.
I would also recommend The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard Weaver.
"All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. . . . Therefore . . . we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague, In the country, we should build our villages near stag- nant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should repro- bate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders."
Pretty much is being done with the way hedonistic lifestyles are promoted today...
And I also suspect that you're unaware that public subsidies for healthcare exist primarily to provide jobs for political cronies.
I hope the spread of SARS teaches us that publicly subsidized healthcare - like that of Communist China - is wholly inadequate to the task of dealing with such diseases.
Before long, effective SARS treatments will be developed by the free market and the free market will once again alleviate suffering with an efficiency inconceivable in a government-run system.
What it is is admitting failure to respond creatively to nature.
To say we are unable to provide for the natural complement of children God gives us is to exhibit a lack of imagination and the squandering of the brains we are given.
Every sperm is sacred
Everything that God creates is sacred. Creation is a holy thing. Our ability to cooperate with God in the furtherance and expansion of His creation, even to the extent of assisting to bring new immortal souls into the world, is an incredibly sacred gift.
If we feel that we are emotionally too immature to use that gift, then we should admit it, rather than warping the gift itself to please ourselves.
Some may choose Monty Python as their exemplar of moral philosophy. I feel that Cleese & Co., while excellent choreographers of fish-slapping, are not really consistent or reliable sources for an integral view of morality.
<SARCASM> Or even better - "before long" the SARS epidemics might run its course like the Black Death did and the god of free market will not have to bother. Anyway the obstacle of socialized medicine should be removed so it will not interfere with the invisible hand.</SARCASM>
We have publically funded fire departments. Private fire companies were tried. The problem was that you might have coverage from one company, and another company might cover your neighbor on one side, and the other neighbor might have no coverage. When the neighbor who has no coverage has a fire, the fire companies will not respond. But then the fire spreads to your house. If your fire company is already tied up elsewhere, you are out of luck. The fire companies sometimes did have cross company coverage (we'll cover your customers if you cover ours) -- but there was still a communication and response time issue. So it was determined that the needs of the whole municipality were better covered by government funded fire coverage. You don't have the choice not to pay. But you get protected from cheap fire hazard neighbors. And this is why fire departments nationwide, in thousands upon thousands of municipalities, are government funded rather than privately funded. So lets look at health care.
At the low end, it is better for all of us if we have publically funded prenatal care. Prenatal care is very cheap overall - mostly making sure the mothers get and take vitamins, and are told not to take drugs or alchol (you would think that is obvious but remember you are dealing with the low end of the bell curve here.) Babies with prenatal care, and coverage for the 1st few years after birth (getting vaccinated) protect all of us from having mentally retarded, birth defected, disease carrying members of our population. Thus it is in our interests to protect ourselves by ensuring there is a certain amount of targeted health care. Just as we don't want our neighbor who has no fire coverage to have a fire that spreads to our own house just at the time our own private fire company is otherwise occupied, we don't want a little non-vaccinated, immune depressed toddler in the same Sunday school class or preschool as our little kids. Thus the argument in favor of a certain level of targeted publically funded healthcare.
OF COURSE, the key is to limit this. We don't want general publically funded health care covering cancer care, heart surgery, and various other and sundry expensive medical procedures that reward lazy people with bad habits at the expense of your pocketbook. So the key for public healthcare is -- does funding the care for other people protect you and your family? Where it does, it makes sense. Where it does not, it doesn't. Thus clearly rather than banning it outright, this simple rule can be applied to determine where healthcare can be funded by tax dollars and where it should not be funded. And of course, this rule indicates that the funding should be far below where it is now. For example, public funding of the elderly for drugs is not advantageous and should be terminated (like that will ever happen!)
You are very generous. The author of this piece knows less than nothing about the 18th century, the French, English and Scottish Enlightenments, the worldview of the Founders and ... I could go on at length. I say less than nothing, because his head is filled with misconceptions so great and conflated that it is useless to engage them. To him, I say, Get Thee to a Bookstore and Purchase R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution (both volumes) and read them carefully!
Healthcare was an extremely underdeveloped area in the 14th century, mostly because it was so highly regulated. Clergy were forbidden from studying medicine, so the most learned segment of society was automatically excluded from medical research. The apothecaries who were the effective healthcare industry at that time were heavily regulated and unionized into guilds - they were burdened by speacial taxes, restricted in their membership, etc.
Had it not been for heavily interventionist government, who knows what advances in medical technology might have been made prior to the Black Death?
And socialized medicine is indeed an obstacle - are you saying that the decision of the socialized medical system of China to conceal the incidence and spread of SARS from the world medical community for months was helpful?
I doubt that you are quite that unintelligent.
Yet that is the incentive inherent in socialized medicine - to pass the buck and dodge accounatbility rather than to take risks and innovate.
Polio was an epidemic in the 1950s. Did the Soviets find a cure? Did Red China find a cure? Or did the largely unregulated US healthcare industry and the medical entrepreneur Jonas Salk find a cure? His research was supported by private industry and his tests were performed on volunteers. No coercive state health regime was able to achieve anything - but one scientist, taking advantage of the free market's institutions, saved millions of lives. In 1954, the year polio was cured, the Soviets were still lying about the true incidence of the disease in Russia.
I wonder if you can name one epidemic disease ever cured by a state-run health regime.
Of course you can't: you carp at the market, but you can't point to a socialist regime that is anything other than an abject failure and a factory of human misery.
But how do they become the "mighty and all-powerful captains of industry" ?
Unless you change the system fundamentally, a new all-powerful captain will emerge.
This whole theory is based on mainly un-educated manual labor - remember Thomas Malthus died in 1834 -
A more interesting question might be just what an employer is supposed to provide besides an acceptable paycheck ?
It ends when you decide that you have the right to kill an individual or to prevent an individual from existing in order to satisfy your whim.
The moral obligation to help other people in distress has absolutely nothing to do with preventing them from existing.
I don't see how the two could be related in your mind.
The obvious Scriptural reference is the narrative of Onan. In addition to this very explicit and specific reference, if the entirety of the Scripture is read in context, it can be seen that fertility is celebrated and infertility is mourned as an extreme misfortune, children are considered God's blessing upon a family, the oppression of orphans is among the most strongly condemned activities in Scripture, etc.
And, parenthetically, even if the state wherein you reside permitted sodomites to crudely ape Christian marriage, you still wouldn't have a wife.
I personally think, that the best systems are mixed/hybrid systems which utilise the best from each type.
Is quarantine compatible with the free market?
The lack of innovation?
The lack of accountability?
The inefficiency?
The encouragement of substandard work performance?
The use of health as a political football?
In order for your statement to be sense instead of obvious nonsense, you would have to demonstrate that voluntary human acts requiring large amounts of analytical thought and planning are identical to an ant lion's instincts; and you would have to demonstrate that sand and the building blocks of human life are of identical moral value.
One might as well say that manipulations on molecules guided by human intelligence, instantiated by a mugger manipulating the molecules of steve-b's skull with a crowbar, is every bit as "natural" as an antlion's instinctual manipulations of sand.
In other words, why are there even laws or codes of behavior if all activity of any kind is simply a merely procedural, valueless manipulation?
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