Political Philosophy

[Socrates]

[quote name='dentarthurdent95' timestamp='1284341521' post='2172468']
I think the two party system is the one of the worst ideas this country has ever had, other that the stock market. However, since I am about three years away from being able to vote, it doesn't really mater what my political views are for now. I do know that I will register Independent. I believe in conservative values and know that there is a difference between being conservative and being republican. I feel as though people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have done more damage to the Republican party that people who bash it like Jon Stewart, of who I am surprisingly a fan.
[/quote]
It's the Republican politicians themselves that have done the most damage to the party (mostly by being politicians).

Interestingly, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts used to be commonly blamed by liberals for Republican gains in congress, and seen as a force which needed to be reigned in or counteracted (notoriously by the proposeing implementation of the "fairness doctrine" aka "Hush Rush bill").

It's been fashionable lately to bash right-wing media people, but it seems largely a technique to distract from the real issues in Washington.

[dairygirl4u2c]

the two party system isn't good but it's not as bad as people say. there's essentially, almost, a 'all goes' election during the primary, where all kinds of people get up on stage. that's similar to the 'who ever wants to join' approach. the downside, is that when im voting for a side, id also want a say in who the other side elects too, and i have no power in that. to be sure, who would win in a 'just primaries', is different than who'd win in the election at large. eg, mccain coulda got 32 million votes in the primary, and obama only 5 million, and yet obama came out in the general election. just numbers to make a point, it's got its own unique twist to it, not that im sure it's a good thing. at least with this system thoughy, i have a say to choose the 'other side' if the person i elect in the primary doesn't make it out of hte primary. that's a pretty good point.
might just be a matter of 'pros and cons'.

[Era Might]

I'm not big on attaching myself to labels. For me, community is the basis of my politics. I don't have much in common with the various American political camps, so I'm not sure how to "translate" my political philosophy into a label. Perhaps my political philosophy doesn't exist in action yet...or perhaps it can only exist on the margins, outside the major power structures that dominate politics in our world.

Edited September 18, 2010 by Era Might

[Era Might]

By the way, it's funny to look at the people who responded to this thread when it was first created. A lot of names there I haven't seen in years.

[MIKolbe]

[quote name='Era Might' timestamp='1284831579' post='2174282']
I'm not big on attaching myself to labels. For me, community is the basis of my politics. I don't have much in common with the various American political camps, so I'm not sure how to "translate" my political philosophy into a label. Perhaps my political philosophy doesn't exist in action yet...or perhaps it can only exist on the margins, outside the major power structures that dominate politics in our world.
[/quote]
they call that "hippie".

[Era Might]

[quote name='MIkolbe' timestamp='1284832591' post='2174284']
they call that "hippie".
[/quote]
Cool. So I know I have at least one person who shares my politics (L_D).

[un.privileged]

[quote name='Socrates' timestamp='1283447097' post='2167017']
In reality, with no central authority (or "state"), competing "private defense agencies" would be an inevitability. You'd essentially have gang warfare, as most people wouldn't simply roll over to the decisions of a "PDA" to redistribute their property against their will. That's human nature, like it or not.[/quote]
Saying that gang warfare is human nature is like saying massacres is human nature. A State does not stop gang warfares, it amplifies it a million time. We have amplified gang warfares, war, which weapons are funded through pure physical coercion. Who created all the weapons for the most violent gang warfares? Dangerous weapons would not exist without a monopoly as it would not be funded through theft of a grand scale (taxation).

[quote]
Likewise, if you truly had an anarchy, your court system would have no actual power or authority. Without some central authority (a "state" by any other name) to enforce the court's rulings, the court rulings would have no power, and thus be meaningless and disregarded.[/quote]
It does when it breaks the contract.

The capitalist contract system (where owners are separated from labour, and labour are subordinated to capital), are dominant because it is favoured and subsidized by the State. Our central banking system is a cartelizing device for Capitalist machines, such as big banks and large Corporations. It perpetuates the dominance of this form of contract, it coercion systematically oppress institutions with decent contract relation that encourages voluntary cooperation such as credit unions and worker co-operatives. Even Archbishop Fulton Sheen favoured this model of Co-operative ownership.

Actually-existing-Capitalism was born through Corporatism and maintained through Corporatism.

[quote]The reality is, that if your system were somehow implemented, you'd have either endless (and likely bloody) fighting over who has a right to what land, or some central "private defense agency" would come to dominate and become in essence a state (whatever else you might choose to call it) with the power to redistribute private property as it sees fit.
Most likely it would be the former, followed by the latter.[/quote]
We have endless bloodier wars. Throughout the history of State, the more advanced the State has become the more bloodier it has been, and more terrible acts of evil have been brought.

[quote]When courts have the power to redistribute privately-owned land as they see fit, you get socialist tyranny. [/quote]
In anarchy, nobody and no organization would have the power to redistribute land without the consent of the legitimate owners. Ownership has a social function, if it is not recognized by the society, e.g. taken and maintain by pure force (not by homesteading/labour), then it has become tyranny by the minority.

[quote]And making the claim that everything in your proposed society will be by mutual consent and that nobody will be forced to act against his will is a cop-out, and blatantly ignores the reality of human nature. If court decisions cannot be enforced, the courts have no teeth, and their decisions will be meaningless. If they [i]can[/i] be enforced, you have a socialist state with the power to redistribute land as they see fit (regardless of how much you may deny this).[/quote]
I did not say that an act of aggressive coercion would not exist, that's like saying sin would disappear, but in a free society aggressive coercion will be illegitimate. The State is a legalized organization based on aggressive coercion.


[quote]In a free society, landowners are free to sell or donate their land as they see fit. No court can force them to do otherwise. If some other body makes them do so, it's no longer a free market, but socialism.[/quote]
Of course legitimate landowners are free to do this. Illegitimate owners, who claim and maintain their ownership based purely on physical aggression, without any mutual agreement, is an impostor.


G.K. Chesterton spoke of land ownerships and made a comparison of Capitalism to poligamous relationship.
[i]One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; [b]because they are enemies of their own limitations[/b]. They do not want their own land; but other people's. When they remove their neighbor's landmark, they also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.[/i]


By the way, what is your concept of "free society"? You keep mentioning this but you fail to see the State as the exploiter of (true) landowners. It perpetually enslave (true) landowners by taking and redistributing it to the whole (your understanding of Socialism). It's a total contradiction.

[quote]Who's to determine whether "labour" is being sufficiently "mixed" for someone to own a piece of land? [/quote]
Through mutual agreement. Remember, that anarchy is participatory. Nobody would be forced to believe a certain concept of private property. I would argue that the concept of absolute private property would naturally not be a popular system, as it only benefits the interest of the few and by few individuals with most power of physical aggression. Who would want to work for a landlord when everybody can be self-employed and own their own piece of land that can be legitimately gained and maintained through labour? The prominent agorist, Brad Spangler wrote in his introduction to[i] [/i]Agorist Class Theory[i], a radical Austrian free market theory, [/i]which I consider more consistent then the Austrian themselves.
[i]
State Capitalism, which most confuse with a free market, is most properly understood as a form of Socialism in a Hayekian sense of statist control. That is to say, it is banditry under guise of law. It would also be economically accurate to label it Fascism, Mercantilism, or Corporate Statism. Conversely, a truly free market (or Capitalism in the Randian sense of non-aggression minus Rand's own personal fetish for Big Business) would, I[b] maintain, bear a striking similarity to the vision of anti-state socialists and distributists.[/b][/i][i][b]
[/b]
[/i]

Edited September 28, 2010 by un.privileged

[un.privileged]

[quote]
Whether privately-owned land is being "properly utilized" and whether the owner can keep it is not the place of the state, nor of a "private defense agency" to decide.



If there's only voluntary agreement, no outside courts or "PDA"s are necessary to make the landowner's decisions about what to do with his land for him.[/quote]
This is true, I've never said otherwise.

[quote]Would a PDA be allowed to use force against a landowner who uses force to remove unwanted squatters? If so, then the PDA has become the state.[/quote]
Depends on how he claim his land ownership? If it is purely gained and maintained through purely physical coercion (whether by his own power or by trading security by an external third party), if so the landowner is the State. Currently the biggest "landowner" is the State. The State has no right to use force to remove "unwanted squatters" on the State's claim of the land.

[quote]You labeled yourself a "libertarian socialist" (or some similar contradiction). Are you a socialist or not? Make up your mind.[/quote]
Libertarian Socialism is the complete opposite of Authoritarian Socialism such as Marxist-Leninism or Marxist-Stalinism or any form of Socialism which promote centralization of the power of the State.
So I'm not a Socialist in the sense of your limited historical understanding of Socialism. Non-marxist socialists such as the Proudhonian, Warrenites, or Tuckerites are against centralized political power. Stalinist, Maoist and Trotskyist form of Socialism explicitly promotes and practices centralization of power in their agenda.

Libertarian Socialism is only oxymoron under your blind historical understand of [i]Socialism [/i]as the whole. Even though I do not advocate Democratic Socialism, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) actually considered it as "was and is close to Catholic social doctrine, and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness. "

[quote]Giving courts and "personal defense agencies" (or other "non-state" authoritative bodies) the power to redistribute privately-owned land is indeed socialism.[/quote]
This is straw man. Where did I even say that any individual or institutions has the right and power to redistribute privately-owned land?

[quote]"Utopia" means "nowhere." I'm living in the real world, with all its sins, flaws, and injustices. I never claimed the present situation is ideal. I just don't think a system in which courts (even if you declare them "private" and "non-state") can redistribute land from its owner on arbitrary decisions about whether the land "serves labor" will fix anything.[/quote]
It will greatly reduced and abolish the ultimate machinery of theft, State and Corporations (the modern Corporations, which are largely subsidized and favoured by the State without any mutual agreement by third parties).

[quote]The worst mass murders in human history were socialist states, who, of course, justified their violence in the name of protecting the "workers" from the evil capitalist land-owners.[/quote]
The worst mass murders in human history were extremely centralized and advanced States who uses propaganda to commit their evils. The two major effective propaganda was "empowering workers" (Russian Communism) and "protecting private property"(German Nazism). Hitler absolutely insisted on protecting private property.

[quote]Your system flatly ignores the human tendency to violence and other evils, which has been around since Cain and Abel, and can't just be wished away. Nor will it be done away with simply by doing away with "the state" or "capitalism" or "unjust land ownership" or fill-in-the-blank. Every movement which has tried to do this has created a tyranny worse than the one it sought to overthrow.
[/quote]
Those movements are those that explicitly promoted whatever what they promoted through [i]centralization[/i] of political power. The Catholic Worker Movement, Josiah Warren Communities, Tolstoyan Communities, both advocates and practices a radical decentralization of political power.

Edited September 28, 2010 by un.privileged

[Winchester]

If warfare weren't human nature, it wouldn't he such a problem.

[Socrates]

[quote name='Winchester' timestamp='1285673495' post='2176418']
If warfare weren't human nature, it wouldn't he such a problem.
[/quote]
The various socialist and "anarchist" utopian ideologies all depend on the blatant denial of fallen human nature, and the workings of the real world.

Once the awful Capitalist Amerikan State is dissolved (which will miraculously occur through the magic action of anarchists Not Voting), everyone will magically become nice and non-agressive, and universal Peace 'n' Luv will prevail.

Arguing with anarchists is about as productive a use of one's time as arguing with those who think that the law of gravity can be wished away if we all just ignore it, and we all will fly like Peter Pan.

[un.privileged]

[quote]The various socialist and "anarchist" utopian ideologies all depend on the blatant denial of fallen human nature, and the workings of the real world.[/quote]
Anarchists don't have an official position regarding human nature. Whether it's true or not that human nature is inherently violent, it does not justify an act of violence to the non-violent.

[quote]
Once the awful Capitalist Amerikan State is dissolved (which will miraculously occur through the magic action of anarchists Not Voting),

everyone will magically become nice and non-agressive, and universal Peace 'n' Luv will prevail.

Arguing with anarchists is about as productive a use of one's time as arguing with those who think that the law of gravity can be wished away if we all just ignore it, and we all will fly like Peter Pan.
[/quote]
No anarchists believe in this. We simply believe that authoritarian relationship is a great obstruction towards peace. The total abolition of evil is impossible, but all of us should be working towards it, not to defend or promote it.

And there you said it, State Capitalism[i] is[/i] truly awful.