Posted on 06/06/2003 10:10:47 AM PDT by presidio9
Explains a lot why our domestic "consumer economy" is in a downward spiral.
Unfortunately, Robert Zoellick and Juanterm Bush have virtually abandoned efforts to decrease the federal regulatory bureaucracy that restricts access to our productive resources. Instead, they have focused on undermining our domestic efforts by transferring wealth-creating activities overseas.The Road to Productive Wealth
The only true key to wealth lies in production. While you can increase your own wealth at the expense of others, we all become wealthier when productive resources are increased. Greater wealth for our economy lies in increasing the quantity or quality of productive resources -- labor, capital, and natural resources. This is done by investing in education, capital goods, research and development, and technology.
What works for our economy, can also work for each of us. You can acquire wealth by education, buying productive capital goods, inventing a new product, and assorted other improvements in productive resources.
Your liberal counterparts have their hero too.
Man, I must have slept through that part of my Econ degree (cum laude, Claremont McKenna College). I do recall the part about the economic value people place on altruism, maximizing profits, supply curves, demand curves and Giffen goods. But the above theory never made it to our classroom.
Happiness, I believe, was discussed in Western Civ, Religion and perhaps Psych, but not in the hallowed halls of Economics.
It never enters the economists mind? Every economic course I took in college would use the phrase ceteris paribus, "all other things being equal" when they introduced a case like this. The guy should have done his homework on this one.
What is significant, according to the Austrian school, is not the rationality or irrationality of individual economic decisions made by consumers but their multiplicity. You can decide between product A or product B or not to purchase at all based on any durn thing you want, and it doesn't matter what. This is far from unrecognized by economists, it's a bedrock principle of most working schools of economics.
I'm glad that someone's finally admitting that sentiment, folly, and plain old human orneriness play just as much a role in economics as do supply and demand. People simply don't act "rationally" (in the Reason Magazine sense) when it comes to matters of money.
Maybe Chesterton was on to something. Now that the folly of communism has gone to its well-deserved grave, perhaps it's time we tried capitalism with a human face.
It's been tried. That path always led to subversion of freedom and lower economic standards.
That path was usually advocated by people who, much as you indicate, have failed to understand what economics says and does not say, feel frustrated with the misunderstood present as a result, and start dreaming of a better society.
You can do better than that by just two steps: (i) get a tutor in economics, and (ii) stop calling yourself a conservative (having a gun and being against illegal immigration does not make you one).
You assume that wealth and freedom are the primary values of the conservative philosophy. This is false. The primary values for a true conservative are Tradition (culture, faith, and custom), the Family (father, mother, children), and private Property (family ownership of capital). Wealth and Freedom are the primary values of the libertarian, not the conservatve. I am not a libertarian. I am a conservative.
When exactly was "capitalism with a human face" tried?
That path was usually advocated by people who, much as you indicate, have failed to understand what economics says and does not say, feel frustrated with the misunderstood present as a result, and start dreaming of a better society.
Ad hominem, so I'll skip it.
You can do better than that by just two steps: (i) get a tutor in economics, and (ii) stop calling yourself a conservative (having a gun and being against illegal immigration does not make you one).
You're right. Gun ownership and the desire for secure borders are not the criteria for being conservative. A true conservative advocates the preservation of tradition, family, and property as they have been known in the West. Laissez-faire libertarian capitalism is not a conservative philiosophy, since it rests on the existence of a propertyless working class and tends to weaken both the family unit and our Western cultural and religious tradition.
Unfortunately, in much the same way, the socialists have won the minds of people: even those, such as you seem to be, who are conservative culturally have no clue about the economic system that made this country what it is. Which is what prompted my previous remark.
The above-given comparison indicates how dangerous it is to be conservative only culturally. The second remark, which I made preciously and by which I stand, is that intellectual honesty dictates to withdraw judgement before available evidence is gathered, whereas you are anti-capitalist without even a clue about economics, the subject of the matter. (And no, it is not an ad hominem: I address your actions, not your person).
Sorry, no. To be a conservative means to be conservative across the board, to be an inhabitant of a conservative Weltanschauung. One cannot promote respect for tradition, family, and property in one area of life and advocate the destruction of tradition, family and property in another. "Cafeteria conservatism" is no conservatism at all.
Nazis, for instance, were conservative culturally and Leftist-socialist economically.
Sorry, no. Despite Hitler's kitsch affection for Volk and Kultur, the Nazi program was anything but socially conservative. Hitler hated traditional German culture, with its reserve, piety, and sentimental affectations; he saw it as the means by which the cosmopolitan Jews and their bourgeois allies kept the people weak and their true Volkisch genius (e.g., his own) in check. Hitler had nothing but disdain for traditionalism in art, architecture, and music, and despised the bourgeois family unit (ever hear of the Bund Deutscher Madel?) As for his attitide towards private property:
“Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background...Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value...On one occassion, in the midst of World war II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.'“ —Richard Pipes (1999), Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 220Naziism was a philosophy of tearing down, not preserving; an attempt to create a new society (there's a reason der Führer called his Nazi state the New Order) rather than preserve the old.
Unfortunately, in much the same way, the socialists have won the minds of people: even those, such as you seem to be, who are conservative culturally have no clue about the economic system that made this country what it is.
Which one? Chattel slavery? Child labor? Coolies? Monopoly control of oil, steel, banking, and railroads? "No Irish Need Apply"? Margin investing? Tarriffs? Fiat currency? Company towns? America has never had one sole economic system; our economic history is a mishmash of state socialism, robber-baron capitalism, and everything in between. Obviously, something other than economics is reponsible for the greatness of America.
The above-given comparison indicates how dangerous it is to be conservative only culturally.
Our economic system did not make this country the greatest on Earth -- our Judeo-Christian culture did. At the root of our success is our underlying devotion to the Christian God and the sanctity of the individual human life. That is why the true patriot is more concerned with preserving the culture of our nation than with any mere economic policy.
The second remark, which I made preciously and by which I stand, is that intellectual honesty dictates to withdraw judgement before available evidence is gathered, whereas you are anti-capitalist without even a clue about economics, the subject of the matter.
The fact that my conclusions of the subject of economics differ from your own do not necessarily mean that those conclusions are incorrect. After all, as Richard Nixon pointed out to Nikita Kruschev, "You don't know everything."
I'm not anti-capitalist. I simply think everybody ought to own and control enough private-property capital to generate a living income for themselves and their families. As for being anti-monopoly and anti-proletarian, I plead gulity. Wage-slavery = slavery.
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