US Politics: Meet the New Right, same as the Old Right

[Wise Fool]

Yes because my employer willingly pays it. He isn't forced to by the state, it's voluntary on all ends.

The alarmism, emotion and CAPS really don't help your argument. I wasn't making any kind of moral judgement about people in those jobs - I had one not too many years ago. But I didn't delude myself into thinking I was somehow entitled to $15/hour for entry-level monkey work

"Deserve" really has nothing to do with it; it's about what makes practical sense. I can't say who deserves what, but you are equally incapable of such a judgement. As is this clueless Mayor. That's the beauty of a free market - such things naturally work themselves out

Alarmism and emotion seems to come from you too. Listen to you, whining about the employer being forced by the state to pay a minimum wage. The poor dears.

You go on about "deserve"s got nothing to do with it, except then you insist that workers would not be entitled to a minimum wage of 15, which sounds an awful lot like you're saying they don't deserve it but I guess you used a different word so that's totally different.

Since we don't have a free market, talking about how it will naturally work such things out is like saying that hey, just pray to Jesus and everything will be okay. No need to do anything, just wait, problems are solved by magic. Fuck that noise. People like you need to realize we don't live in your anarcho-capitalist utopia, and realize that yes, people DO deserve to work for more than bread crumbs. Since we DO have a minimum wage in this country, it is not unreasonable to raise it. But just whining about how oh, if we didn't have a minimum wage, and oh, if we had a truly free market, everything would be just dandy is completely and totally useless. Except of course from the spiritual standpoint of paying homage to your imaginary god of the invisible hand, which I guess is necessary for your well-being.

[TrueMetis]

"We need government intervention in order to solve the problems caused by government intervention" seems to be begging the question. I don't support most of those assistance programs either

Are you arguing that without welfare these jobs would pay more? Cause that's the only way this line of logic makes sense, and if that's true than increasing the minimum wage is nothing more than putting it to were it should be.

Of course you've also argued that these jobs don't deserve that kind of money so you can't be arguing that without welfare these jobs would pay more. So when you say that government intervention is the cause of these problems you must mean something else. What that would be I'm at a lost to explain.

[Galactus]

Remember, you can have laws, rules, and social norms that govern a society (government) without having a centralized authority or planning bureaucracy (the state). Think of English common law, which was basically a gradual evolution of law from the ground up.

Err... I'd dispute your notions of what makes "government", not to mention your idea of the "common law" (which largely develop in the courts of magistrates appointed by royal authority...)

[Ramsay Gimp]

Alarmism and emotion seems to come from you too. Listen to you, whining about the employer being forced by the state to pay a minimum wage. The poor dears.

You go on about "deserve"s got nothing to do with it, except then you insist that workers would not be entitled to a minimum wage of 15, which sounds an awful lot like you're saying they don't deserve it but I guess you used a different word so that's totally different.

I'm voicing my objections to a new law. I don't think that's alarmist or emotional, but maybe I came off that way to you. The person I was responding to was doing ALL CAPS and saying "why do you deserve any better!!!?" and other personal nonsense. I haven't gotten personal. When a business owners is deciding the proper wage for his employees, is he necessarily making a judgement about their worth as human being? That a bizarre conclusion

But you have to realize that you're in the extremely small minority of people who would willingly ban all social welfare programs. Considering that the scope of current welfare programs will remain more or less at its current level, I think it is in the best interests of just about everyone to make sure that these companies don't game the system to make profits off the largesse of U.S. taxpayers. In many ways, when you take programs such as the EITC into account, you could make the argument that these companies are allowed to pay their employees below the minimum wage, since the American people have determined that everyone who works should have a yearly income of their existing wage + X, where X equals the amount of the earned income credit they receive.

I mean, if I were proclaimed Emperor, there's a lot of shit I would change too, but we have to make policy decision based on how things exist now, not how we wish they would be.

Yes, I realize that I'm in the minority that would scrap the minimum wage and most welfare. My original point was just that raising it to $15 an hour is excessive, and will likely have negative repercussions, but then people brought up a "living wage" (as if it's currently impossible to live on less that) and we ended up with a debate about minimum wage in general. It is possible to support a minimum wage and not support every increase. Especially when it's being raised from the already-highest level in the country by over 50%

[Ramsay Gimp]

Err... I'd dispute your notions of what makes "government", not to mention your idea of the "common law" (which largely develop in the courts of magistrates appointed by royal authority...)

I'm not saying common law developed without any government authority, but that it was not imposed by a central authority. The King may have appointed judges but common law did not come from his decree

[TrackerNeil]

You really think society is (or should be) imposed from the top-down? I'm not sure what this Professor claims, but I find it unlikely that the institution of a state preceded the institution of property. Remember, you can have laws, rules, and social norms that govern a society (government) without having a centralized authority or planning bureaucracy (the state). Think of English common law, which was basically a gradual evolution of law from the ground up.

Whoa there! You're veering towards new topics, and away from the question of markets and government. I said governments create markets and I believe it, and so do others.

As to property...well, that's certainly a notion of society. Property rights aren't something one is born with, like fingers or toes. Human beings collectively recognize property via a set of customs and laws, and one's rights to property are thereby enforced. No society, no property.

[Altherion]

"We need government intervention in order to solve the problems caused by government intervention" seems to be begging the question. I don't support most of those assistance programs either

So what alternative do you propose? Simply getting rid of the government assistance programs is not an option. Do you think the wealthy tolerate them out of the kindness of their hearts? They exist for a reason: if you get rid of them in the current economic environment, you will very shortly hear something along the lines of "Arise, ye workers from your slumber, Arise, ye prisoners of want...".

[Galactus]

I'm not saying common law developed without any

Tgovernment authority, but that it was not imposed by a central authority. The King may have appointed judges but common law did not come from his decree

It did not however arise "Bottom up", and it did to some extent arise due to a centralized authority (someone had to decide which precedents were binding, etc.)

The irony is that by medieval standards british law was remarkably centralized.

[Inigima]

I'm not up on all the details, but I read a Slate article about the Seattle proposal today. Two main takeaways:

1. It's more or less agreed that raising the minimum wage is probably necessary, but there's such a thing as going too fast, and some question about whether $15 is too much.

2. In recognition of that, the proposal *is* to phase it in, a fact frequently underemphasized in the general public perception. Debate about whether it's still too fast is perfectly legitimate, but it's not like this would happen overnight.

Also, my liberal as hell state still just has the federal minimum of $7.25 somehow. :( But I just looked into it and apparently we're raising it to $10.10 over the next 3 years. An improvement, although I would rather it be $10.10 now and talking about any necessary increases from there, or at least tying to inflation. (Tying to inflation is still under discussion here.)

[The Marquis de Leech]

Markets are not "created by government." They can certainly be regulated or manipulated by the government, or by any number of things (such as a voluntary boycott). But markets, in and of themselves, are an expression of spontaneous order. To say that markets would "cease to exist without government" is facially absurd, especially when we have examples of markets (the black market and the gray market) existing wholly outside and independent of the State's monopoly on the use of force to enforce private contracts.

Even black markets exist in the shadow of the state. Take away the state's role in defining and regulating property rights, and you cease to have much in the way of markets beyond "this is mine because I've got a gun".

[The Marquis de Leech]

It did not however arise "Bottom up", and it did to some extent arise due to a centralized authority (someone had to decide which precedents were binding, etc.)

Not to mention that all crimes in the English common law system were crimes not against individuals, but against the King's Peace. That's why English (and Canadian, and Australian, and New Zealand, and anywhere that keeps Liz as the Head of State) criminal cases are "R v. ..." (the R standing for Rex or Regina) - it's the state (i.e. the Crown) going after you. No room for bottom up rule-making there.

The irony is that by medieval standards british law was remarkably centralized.

You mean English law. Scottish law has always been a bit different.

[Summah]

Also, my liberal as hell state still just has the federal minimum of $7.25 somehow. :( But I just looked into it and apparently we're raising it to $10.10 over the next 3 years. An improvement, although I would rather it be $10.10 now and talking about any necessary increases from there, or at least tying to inflation. (Tying to inflation is still under discussion here.)

I don't want to derail this thread too much the laws and ideals don't match. Baltimore and Maryland's housing laws are shockingly landlord tilted for such a liberal state and that, along with Baltimore's wacky theories that the market can solve the affordable housing crisis by selling high rise projects to private developers who eventually get to make them market rent just delaying part of the ongoing housing crisis which is already crazy (8 year section 8 waiting list), I can't defend how poorly Baltimore managed the projects, but private organizations are not the answer unless they're non profits committed to affordable housing. Baltimore has plenty of housing, but a lot of it is trashed, boarded up row houses in neighborhoods no one who is sane and not drug addicted would live if they had any other choice, but if that housing were renovated or since it's often whole blocks torn down and replaced, if not for the money problem, the affordable housing problem could be solved. Ok that doesn't solve the drug problem and lots of other stuff, but I've already derailed this enough, but basically my point was, these conservative laws, along with the poverty and drugs, crime are a large part of what lead to the vacancy problem in the first place.

[ThinkerX]

Ramsay Gimp does not seem to realize that it was policies of the sort he prefers which led to a long string of strikes and the formation of the union movement in the first place most of a century ago.

Either that, or he's looking forward to a new era of major strikes - maybe severe enough to require armed force on a major scale to suppress (which solves absolutely nothing), or

He really wants to see a major revival of some sort of independent union movement, or

he really thinks people are just going to tolerate being turned into corporate serfs, and that even if they object, well that's tough sh*t for them.

I still maintain that when he gets canned from his job and ends up taking minimum wage work to survive, his attitude about all this will undergo a dramatic reversal.

And by the way, I used 'all-caps' for maybe four words in the post you dismissed.

[Ramsay Gimp]

Even black markets exist in the shadow of the state. Take away the state's role in defining and regulating property rights, and you cease to have much in the way of markets beyond "this is mine because I've got a gun".

Ramsay Gimp does not seem to realize that it was policies of the sort he prefers which led to a long string of strikes and the formation of the union movement in the first place most of a century ago.

Either that, or he's looking forward to a new era of major strikes - maybe severe enough to require armed force on a major scale to suppress (which solves absolutely nothing), or

He really wants to see a major revival of some sort of independent union movement, or

he really thinks people are just going to tolerate being turned into corporate serfs, and that even if they object, well that's tough sh*t for them.

I still maintain that when he gets canned from his job and ends up taking minimum wage work to survive, his attitude about all this will undergo a dramatic reversal.

And by the way, I used 'all-caps' for maybe four words in the post you dismissed.

I'm glad to see you've stopped the ALL-CAPS; it's too bad you can't seem to let go of the personal jabs. "When he gets canned from his job" :box: It's immature and does make your posts easy to dismiss.

But regarding the substance of your post, I would love to see the bolded part. I have nothing against unions in theory, I only oppose when they become aggressors or lobby the state for special favor. Which, sadly, is a good amount of what they end up doing. Same with corporations. Widespread strikes would be an effective way for workers to leverage their power, and I would not support the state busting them up, making them return to work, etc. But if they trespassed or started to harass/assault owners, non-union workers, etc. that would be a problem justifying police intervention

[The Undead Martyr]

You really think society is (or should be) imposed from the top-down? I'm not sure what this Professor claims, but I find it unlikely that the institution of a state preceded the institution of property. Remember, you can have laws, rules, and social norms that govern a society (government) without having a centralized authority or planning bureaucracy (the state). Think of English common law, which was basically a gradual evolution of law from the ground up.

The black market is so dangerous, expensive etc because of the state. Nestor's point was that markets can and do exist outside of the state, but black markets are still not "free"

I've never found Hobbes very convincing.

The institution of property and the institution of the state developed concomitantly. "Markets" and their associated state apparatus came into being, per Lockean Contract Theory, because atomistic rational actors recognized that property is a collective enterprise and substituted rule of law for rule by force. Of course, the reality (as anarchists such as myself would posit) is that the state's rule of law is ultimately derived from rule of force; that is a monopoly of violence, and therefore the sole right and responsibility for enforcing property relations- that is, ownership of productive goods and entrenchment of class interests- in the hands of the state, or rather the class that controls the state. The question being to what extent contemporary regimes, "democratic" or otherwise, are contested between conflicting class interests, or- do the lower classes have influence in the state, and thus by extension the socio-economic system? In the Federalist Papers Madison quite bluntly framed the question of republicanism as a method of checking class interests via a political system- factions being the natural outgrowth of competing economic backgrounds.

To pretend then that the state can ever be extricated from economic affairs is disingenuous at best. Whether as currency, the police, the policing of roads and the like, the state both facilitates the economic system and serves as an extension of its discordant sectional interests, and the current Westphalian capitalism is the product of centuries of organic statist centralization. Seriously, the pre-modern era was ludicrously violent and dirty compared to our white-washed 21st Century 1st World- bandits on the road, pirates at sea, no centralized authority, this cut both ways of course- just because e.g. the kings of France and England were fighting didn't mean that the "French" or "English" were in a state of total war and severed all economic or social ties. Indeed the notion of "French" or "English" identity was considerably looser and bound to dynastic politics, and to a lesser extent religion and land ownership. But I digress.

In any event the modern capitalist economy is firmly undergirded by the state and vice versa, not only in the particular cases of i.e. use of currency, infrastructure, the guarantee of contracts, etc. etc. but from the very inception the two are married at the hip. Capitalism came into existence largely as a result of surplus accumulation of capital, i.e. the Imperialism of Spain, France, Britain etc, that is as the interaction of private actors and conscious and coordinated state actions both political and economic in nature. Similarly violent and transformative social upheavals occurred most dramatically in Europe during the 19th Century, such as the enclosures of the commons in England (I recommend Thomas More's Utopia, the first section bears striking resemblance to the Grapes of Wrath) and the forceful commodification of labor- that is the destruction of prior relations of production, be those of feudal serfs, slaves, etc. Contemporaries were quite aware of this process and many reacted quite forcefully against it- as evidenced in for example Jeffersonian Democrats' agrarianism, and various utopian movements emphasizing a Romantic view of "meaningful work" and the dignity of humans as individuals as well as laborers, as opposed to proletarian wage-laborers. The shift to a daily work schedule on the basis of wage labor, as opposed to an agrarian (seasonal, outdoors, and considerably more "natural" or "fulfilling" certainly more diverse/less monotonous) was a wretched and disruptive process that scarred societies and inevitably led to widespread social upheaval- everything from Anarchism, to Marxism, to various strains of commune/egalitarian movements, as well as decisively undermining the staunchly agrarian Russian, Chinese, and Southern Slaveholder regimes.

These tensions were only (incompletely) resolved with the Keynesian statist reforms of the post-Depression era. I find it quite striking to compare modern neoliberals to the tone of i.e. Hoover, who was thoroughly immersed in the classical liberal "Work Ethic" worldview and ideologically incapable of confronting the challenges posed by the credit/consumption imbalance that led to the Depression. In this Marx was quite prescient- the dialectic between the need to produce and the need to make a profit led to a glut of production and "hollow consumption" i.e. a credit/spending mania, as the working classes were underpaid and incapable of buying the massive glut of goods and services produced by the rampant capitalist economy. This pattern repeats itself again and again until the great Depression, and has reemerged in the wake of increasing globalization and neo-liberal resurgence since the 70s/80s. Keynes' solution, which has been undermined and may need to be replaced in the wake of the loss of sovereignty created by global economic integration, was the welfare state model- essentially seeking to level out the boom/bust cycle via stimulating consumption via state expenditures and alleviating/halting the cycle of underconsumption and contraction by propping up the consumer classes with government programs and generally redistributing wealth from the upper brackets in good times to the lower brackets in bust times. At least in theory.

The Tea Party strikes me as in the same vein as the Hooverites, that is the capitalists who in the Marxian sense dig their own graves because their class interests/consciousness has created an ideological viewpoint in direct contrast to the realities of the socio-economic system they are nominally in control of. That is they are at least a century out of date, and even Keynes solutions may prove to be obviated in the 21st century- do states have the same level of agency now as they did in the 1940s, or does the global economy require a global economic initiative? In other words should we emulate past state-level solutions or seek new international or post-state reforms?

[The Marquis de Leech]

RG:

So it's basically a free-for-all then? Unions can strike for any reason and at any time? Employers can lock out for any reason and at any time? Where does this leave the law of contract?

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Sure they are. Government creates infrastructure, establishes the medium of exchange, ensures equal access, guarantees competition, defines the meaning of personal property, enforces contracts, establishes standards etc. You may think this is "facially absurd", but Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton, agrees with me.

Keep in mind that two barbarians who exchange a skin of wine for a wolf pelt have not created a market. They have bartered, which is not the same thing.

"Someone who is a professor agrees with me" is not an argument. It's a logical fallacy - namely, an appeal to authority. You know this (I say, assuming you do, but not being entirely sure). The black market in illicit goods and services is a market despite the government, almost by definition, NOT performing the majority of the functions you've identified. As a matter of historical fact, we have examples of markets operating in situations where there was no acknowledged organization with a monopoly on the use of force to regulate contracts, etc. QED - government is not an necessary prerequisite to the creation of markets.

As to bartering - it's a market activity. The "market" is not the cash nexus.

[Ramsay Gimp]

Even black markets exist in the shadow of the state. Take away the state's role in defining and regulating property rights, and you cease to have much in the way of markets beyond "this is mine because I've got a gun".

Civilization never would have developed if people were as naturally savage as you make them out to be. As Lord Mord and Nestor said, property and markets can exist in the absence of a centralized authority to define/regulate them. Social norms and customs are powerful things

How exactly could the state precede property? How would agriculture have developed in that scenario?

"This is mine because I've got a gun" is actually the state's way of doing things.

[The Undead Martyr]

RG:

So it's basically a free-for-all then? Unions can strike for any reason and at any time? Employers can lock out for any reason and at any time? Where does this leave the law of contract?

Unions, or rather laborers, do not have the same staying power as capitalists/employers- as the employers, generally, have a larger surplus wealth survive upon (if you think of it in terms of siege warfare they have larger food stocks and better walls to hold out) whereas the wage laborers, by nature of the system, live essentially paycheck to paycheck and cannot opt out of wage labor, therefore there is a stark power disparity between employers and laborers, and left to their own devices strike workers are at a distinct disadvantage. This was alleviated, after an inordinate amount of violence and political agitation, by such "socialist" measures as the minimum wage, food stamps, unemployment insurance etc. etc. as well as collective rights to bargain and the like. These being won only after the capitalist class was placed under great duress. The Tea Party types are tame compared to the crap industrialists pulled in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They sicced the army on strikers and their families, among other unpleasant things.

"Someone who is a professor agrees with me" is not an argument. It's a logical fallacy - namely, an appeal to authority. You know this (I say, assuming you do, but not being entirely sure). The black market in illicit goods and services is a market despite the government, almost by definition, NOT performing the majority of the functions you've identified. As a matter of historical fact, we have examples of markets operating in situations where there was no acknowledged organization with a monopoly on the use of force to regulate contracts, etc. QED - government is not an necessary prerequisite to the creation of markets.

As to bartering - it's a market activity. The "market" is not the cash nexus.

Not necessarily. The breadth of human knowledge makes it impossible to personally verify everything an expert claims- which is why we have peer review, so that other experts can fact check each other.

The Black Market exists outside the scope of government oversight but it still exists, literally, on the government's dime, and absent the state-backed legal markets (where the currency is then exchanged) and the massive and all-encompassing edifice that is the economy the black market would not exist.

In the absence of a preexisting central authority i.e. in a failed state or pre-state sedentary society, you presumably have, all else being equal, a tendency towards division of labor and property relations, that eventually spawn currency for the sake of convenience of exchange. Eventually, with enough people and time, you get a state-like system with currency, etc. and once people start producing for exchange on the market rather than immediate use you get commodities, then capitalism, and so on. Unless you stick to feudalism or nomadic pre-agriculture markets and states arise organically. At least that's what's happened so far as we know, and competing modes of production were all but exterminated by the modern era, barring a few remote holdouts.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Even black markets exist in the shadow of the state. Take away the state's role in defining and regulating property rights, and you cease to have much in the way of markets beyond "this is mine because I've got a gun".

You don't need a single organization with a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force to define and regulate property rights. Besides, the vast majority of the black market takes place under circumstances where the State would actively REFUSE to enforce property and contractual claims. You can't take your neighborhood drug dealer to Court for shorting your dime bag.