…declares himself an economic and ethical ignoramus:
“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.
Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.
Well, he can afford to be. The rest of us? Not so much.
If he’s such an avowed Communist why doesn’t he haul ass back to Tibet and live under Communist rule?
Probably because THAT wouldn’t pay nearly as well. He may be a Monk, but he lives a better lifestyle than most of the worlds people. Especially those in his home country of Tibet or those in India where he resides now. Certainly, if he returns to Tibet his lifestyle AND his travel freedoms would certainly change. That would keep me in India. And Paris and D.C. and London and Tokyo and…
A vow of poverty isn’t that hard to live up to, I expect, IF you are catered too and supported by millions of followers and adherents. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I know the Priesthood takes a vow of poverty, but the POPE isn’t really living as someone who is poor either.
But the Pope isn’t claiming to be a Communist either!
If he’d have said this a year or two ago Obama wouldn’t have made him slink in and out of the White House through the servant’s entrance next to the garbage cans.
What an oxymoron. “Ethical Marxism” has been the intended goal each time it has been tried. In each instance the result has been the same. When your premise ignores human nature eventually you are forced to combat human nature. After the first head rolls it becomes easier and easier to justify the losses. In the end each time we lose millions of people to a flawed ideology. It is the height of irony that the man’s own people are suffering because another political group insists on combating he and his people’s human nature.
Well, Marxism is quite a reasonable way to run a monastery. Or family, for that matter. I would say my family is pretty Marxist: it’s got a despot (me) who tells everyone what to do, but who feels obliged to formulate all his decisions to that they benefit everyone, even the slackers and criminals. Very little of the capital and labor exchange is governed by prices on the free market, although every now and then I try to introduce some of that. You want to be picked up at the theater? AND you want me to buy the ticket? OK, what’s that worth to you?
The key threshold seems to be 3000 people.
If you’re above that size, you start losing the ‘recognize everyone’ factor, and you have to start allowing the judging and helping occur more by proxy than directly. And suddenly there’s a system to game.
Marxism, to the extent it works at all, works by exercise of brutal force.
The free market works best in freedom from force between participants.
Which of these is more ethical?
Well, no “-ism” really “works” on its own. It has to be applied with judgment by people living in the real world.
The reason Marxists can say Communism has never really been tried is, the instant you start using judgment to apply it to the real world, you have to throw out 97% of it from the get-go.
Maybe 3K incredibly homogenous people.
Another example of the pattern that leftist thought is based on motives and not actions/results. Sure, I can agree that in the abstract lefty motives sound better than free market ones, in a pollyannaish fashion. “I just want to help people! Everyone should be equal!” But they neglect the reams of evidence that shows that people working from their selfish motives in a free market have done vastly more good than those following left wing economic policies.
Sure, I can agree that in the abstract lefty motives sound better than free market ones
Not at all. Not unless you don’t think things through very much. As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, price is a signal — it tells you the value that other people put on what you have to offer, goods you may have to sell, or labor you may have to put to use doing this or that. To advocate a free market is to want those price signals to dominate the decision-making of workers and capitalists, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how well-connected. That is, to wish for everyone to say I will allocate my capital or labor in the way that everyone else values most, as proved by they’re willingness to pay the highest price for it.
The Marxist is, by contrast, deeply selfish. He says I will allocate my capital and labor the way I think best, regardless of what anyone else thinks, i.e. ignoring the signals the market is sending me of the wishes of the rest of the world.
What stories each tells himself about why he is doing what he’s doing are as generally irrelevant as most human rationalizations. The free marketeer may say he’s selling his labor for the highest possible price because he’s “selfishly” focussed on his own welfare, but that’s like a lover saying he’s working hard to please his wife because he “selfishly” wants her to be true to him and bone him enthusiastically every night. It is essentially selfish only if you’re not thinking clearly.
Simllary, the Marxist may tell himself he’s choosing to ignore the price signals from the rest of the world and allocate his labor differently — working at an unpaid internship for a tyrant seeking to legalize highway robbery, say, instead of working at a high salary growing cheap food or manufacturing airplanes — because he cares about people in general, or in the abstract, but that’s like saying you need to destroy a village to save it, or like the abusive father “teaching” his kid a “lesson” by beating the hell out of him for a disrespectful remark. It’s only “unselfish” if you confuse rationalization for reasoning.
s/they’re/their/.
Maybe 3K incredibly homogenous people.
Yes.
There’s been a fair amount of delving into ‘pure democracy’, the Greek city-states and other historical attempts at “everyone is exactly equal” areas. They all seem to have problems right around the same point. (As you said, they can explode immediately if you’re not most all vested from the start. You can’t get past two without some buy-in :D)
Fundamentally: Because you’re always pulling an Animal Farm moment at that point – you’ve delegated some of your personal authority/clout to someone else, and now “Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.”
If the society itself doesn’t try to acknowledge this and put fundamental checks into the framework itself, it isn’t stable.
If he’d have said this a year or two ago Obama wouldn’t have made him slink in and out of the White House through the servant’s entrance next to the garbage cans.
Actually, he has been saying this for years.
During the Cold War, there were some East European economists who called themselves “socialists” but were basically free-market libertarians. They simply redefined to mean what they they thought it should be, as a rhetorical wedge to criticize their “fellow socialists.”
I wonder if the Dalai Lama is trying to play a similar game. (Not that I think he’s a free-market libertarian, by any stretch of the imagination.)
Titus Quinn Says:
” “The key threshold seems to be 3000 people.”
Maybe 3K incredibly homogenous people.”
It even failed with 1960’s communes of much smaller size
When I read that the Dalai Lama asked other countries to send soldiers to Tibet to drive out the Chinese, I had his number:
clueless hypocrite.
Plymouth Colony was what–100 religious fanatics? They couldn’t make it work.
Having dinner with friends last night I was asked what I’m currently reading. I described the book Martian Summer by Andrew Kessler, and afterwards I briefly mentioned that I’m also listening to Atlas Shrugged on audio book. “What’s Atlas Shrugged?”
There was one other person at the table who knew the work and who’s eyes lit up when I mentioned it.. and people wonder why she married me.
Mass suicide is only “failure” from a certain point of view…
Titus Quinn Says:
” ” It even failed with 1960′s communes of much smaller size”
Mass suicide is only “failure” from a certain point of view…”
hahahaha yeah well I meant hippie communes. They didn’t usually cash out – too tired from all the free s3x. They usually just “Plymouthed” out….
The famed Brook Farm commune was physically capable of housing 3-4 hundred. Don’t know how close it ever came to filling its capacity. It failed, in part because the residents always expected someone else to do the work.
I think they key threshold is seven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilligan%27s_Island
If you actually want to get off the island, it’s six.
Of course, under utilitarian ethics, Gilligan can be slain for the good of the six. As noted pencilhead, Brad DeLong once put it, “deontology is a bitch.” Aye, as long as you’re not deemed the “Gillian” or “joo”, “ni’gra”, etc. In that case, deontology looks mighty fine…
Surely there is a name for someone who praises the ideology of the government that is exterminating his people: capo? Quisling?