Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:
My biggest objection is not to what isn’t true about the claim that the Right is the handmaiden to big business, it’s to what is true. Too many Republicans think being pro-business is the same as being pro-market. They defend the status quo against bad reforms and think they’ve defended economic freedom. The status quo stinks. And the sooner Republicans learn that, the sooner they’ll deserve to win again.
Of course, there are a lot of things they’ll have to learn to deserve to win again.
I doubt they will learn — they’ll need to be replaced individually.
I agree with Titus, which is why I support Range Voting (aka, Score Voting) reform. It’s the only way to ensure that every district can actually be in play every two years. This Congressional lifetime employment is a joke.
It’s always funny when debating with my one or two progressive friends, that they also seem to fall into the pro-market==pro-big-business trap. Unfortunately a lot of big businesses get that way in anti-market manners. They play the political system for favors, and for regulations that hurt their competitors more than them. It’s an interesting trap that even libertarians, let alone conservatives can easily fall into though.
~Jon
Jon, your friends aren’t as “progressive” as they think they are…
>Of course, there are a lot of things they’ll have to learn
> to deserve to win again.
In elections anymore its not about who deserves to win, but about who deserves to lose less.
I was going to put quotes around progressive, but they are my friends, and despite disagreements on many things, I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t put quotes around “classical liberal” or “libertarian” just because I disagree with you on war issues and find your views incompatible with what I think of as classical liberal, after all. 🙂
~Jon
I think there’s a difference, in that the use of the word “liberal,” or “progressive” by leftists is stealing an intellectual base, that goes far beyond whether or not someone who considered themselves those things would agree with them. It is a deliberate deception, and camouflage, just as was the word “Bolshevik,” when they weren’t a majority at all.
But I don’t want to cost you any friends. 😉
The weird thing is: Government is fundamentally “the biggest” business in terms of power.
Why on Earth is taking something from a big business (any big business) and moving it towards a bigger business going to result in less of the thuggish behavior that is being objected to?
Boeing is mighty big in commercial airlines. They do throw their weight around. But government is still powerful enough to slap them hard over fiascoes like the tanker deal.
How could it possibly be better if they were just another branch of NASA? This applies in practically any of the areas of interest – oil, pharma, health care, whatever.
Personally, I think corporate tax rates should be tied directly to the number of direct competitors one has. (Split and pro rated along corporate divisions as needed.) This would be putting at least some disincentive on the “buy out the opposition” method of ensuring permanent corporate profits.
One of the first things they need to do, is learn to read. I suggest the U.S. Constitution as a good place to start. Or right after Dick, Jane and Spot.
There were “socialist” movements before Marxism. I prefer to use the word socialist even with the Marxist connotations usually implied by it, particularly in the USA, because that is what it is. I take this to imply social liberal (equal rights for women, religious freedom, anti-prohibition, democracy, free speech) even if not necessarily market liberal. The Chartism movement predates Marxism even if Marxism largely co-opted it, much like Marxists mostly co-opted the Green movement even if it originally was not created by them.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans are market liberal in the classic sense. It simply is not doable to be like that at this moment in time. Liberalism did not cure the Great Famine at Ireland in the XIXth century. It is not the end all, be all, cure to every ill. Emergency situations require emergency measures. Of course, politicians often like to create emergencies for their own purposes (e.g. global warming).
This reminds me of a joke:
An airplane is falling down. As most of the passengers frantically run and cry in despair, one passenger remains calm and serene.
The flight attendant, noticing the seemingly stoic behavior of the passenger, asks him “how can you remain so calm when the airplane is falling down?”.
“Simple”. The passenger says. “The market demand for parachutes has just gone up. Entrepreneurs will soon flood us with produce. The market shall provide”.
As Brock said, we need Score Voting (aka Range Voting). People need to be able to support a candidate REGARDLESS of whether they think he’s got enough lobbyist money and endorsements to be “electable”. Other systems, like Instant Runoff Voting, don’t solve that problem.
Check out ScoreVoting.net