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Figure I'd drop this primer here on what money is and how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx_5PuLIzc
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Nov 24, 2012 04:40
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Also gonna drop Commanding Heights, a great introductory to modern economics in an easy to understand video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYKEA-ds8p0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9pn3iQU02w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KubaKsWmiNY
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Nov 24, 2012 04:42
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twodot posted:I'm not sure which posts you felt were ignored, and in the spirit of this thread, I'm limiting this to posts where I think you failed to actually debate something and ignoring posts that I just disagreed with...  Edit: I feel like my point that consent to sex was not necessarily consent to pregnancy was ignored, not by the first person I said it to, but by the second and third. Edit 2: Here's some content for the thread, a critique of Robert George's anti-same-sex-marriage arguments in What is Marriage?. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and he was one of the authors of the Manhattan Declaration; the New York Times called him America’s “most influential conservative Christian thinker." What is Marriage? itself was published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. So heavy poo poo, at least at first glance. These critiques aim to demonstrate (among other things) that, while George presents his argument as secular, it depends on some very specific religious lines of thought which go completely unexamined; I think they do a pretty good job. The link might be useful if you're arguing against a social conservative who is anti-same-sex-marriage but does not share these specific views. Oldest is on the bottom, newest on the top. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/category/george-what-is-marriage/page/2/ HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Nov 24, 2012 |
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Nov 24, 2012 06:46
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Pedrophile posted:Also gonna drop Commanding Heights, a great introductory to modern economics in an easy to understand video: Take it with a giant grain of salt.
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Nov 24, 2012 13:26
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HEGEL SMOKE A J posted:Edit: I feel like my point that consent to sex was not necessarily consent to pregnancy was ignored, not by the first person I said it to, but by the second and third. edit: I'm not saying Saeix isn't stupid, just that saying that saying people are stupid is not conducive to discussion. twodot fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Nov 24, 2012 |
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Nov 24, 2012 18:45
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Quick! I need that quote used to point out the hypocrisy of tea party types, which goes something along the lines of "every morning I drive down roads maintained by..eat food inspected by the FDA..." etc. TIA
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Nov 24, 2012 20:03
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CruJones posted:Quick! I need that quote used to point out the hypocrisy of tea party types, which goes something along the lines of "every morning I drive down roads maintained by..eat food inspected by the FDA..." etc. TIA quote:This morning I was awakened by my alarm clock which is powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water which is provided by my municipal water utility. Or as it's known on my harddrive, "shitheel.txt"
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Nov 24, 2012 20:10
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The problem is a Tea Party type will totally agree with that and not only see nothing hypocritical but may even rally around it, as a demonstration of the constant and pervasive influence of STATISM and SOCIALISM even in their lives.
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Nov 24, 2012 23:24
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:The problem is a Tea Party type will totally agree with that and not only see nothing hypocritical but may even rally around it, as a demonstration of the constant and pervasive influence of STATISM and SOCIALISM even in their lives. Also they have gripes against most of the things they cited in that story. For instance, Fox and its ilk have been after the National Weather Service for a long time with fantastic scare stories because they want to promote the private firm AccuWeather. Other things they hate, gathered from osmosis due to living in the deep south all my life:
All of these I have heard argued in some form or another by people in my town 
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Nov 24, 2012 23:49
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twodot posted:I don't think this line was a bad line, except that with at least the first person you spent more time telling Saeix he was stupid and didn't understand words then you spent explaining why consent to an action implies consent to foreseeable consequences leads to untenable situations. How do you avoid just giving up, though? If this were a face-to-face discussion, either someone else would have jumped in (hopefully) to support me or I could just tell Saeix to gently caress off.
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Nov 25, 2012 00:05
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Other things they hate, gathered from osmosis due to living in the deep south all my life: This one is doubly great because UPS and FedEx both rely on the USPS heavily, and vice versa.
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Nov 25, 2012 02:28
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HEGEL SMOKE A J posted:How do you avoid just giving up, though? If this were a face-to-face discussion, either someone else would have jumped in (hopefully) to support me or I could just tell Saeix to gently caress off.
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Nov 25, 2012 18:58
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I'm writing a research paper on how the Patriot Act infringes on our privacy, civil rights, and how we don't even know how much infringement is even going on. I was wondering if any of you guys had some good articles that I could use as research?
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Nov 25, 2012 19:48
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twodot posted:Sorry, I don't understand this question. In a face to face discussion there is very little likelihood of a random stranger jumping in to back you up, and even if they did, a random stranger is about as likely to back up Saeix. Your ability to tell Saeix to gently caress off is equal in both face to face discussions and online discussions. As far as the backing up went, I meant like in a seminar or something. And I can't just tell him/her to gently caress off online, at least here, since it's rude and I'd get probated. quote:If you are asking "How do I not call someone stupid repeatedly in the middle of a reasoned discussion?" I can only really answer, don't do that, or at least be funny or interesting when you do.
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Nov 26, 2012 00:21
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I'm arguing with my right-wing uncle about the U.S. Postal Service, specifically the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. At first I understood that it was passed by lame-duck Republicans after the 2006 election, but I've done some quick research into it and I found out that the bill was co-sponsored by Democrats, mainly not-Blue-Dog Henry Waxman, and also that the Senate passed it unanimously by consent. I can't find anything to answer why that bill coasted by so easily when it contained the 75 years of pension funding over 10 years provision and also made it harder for the USPS to change rates. It's an issue that's near and dear to my heart because my dad works for the USPS and if they get completely hosed, my family gets completely hosed. 
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Nov 27, 2012 05:19
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For anyone interested there is a (free!) class on coursera just starting titled "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue". https://www.coursera.org/course/thinkagain
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Nov 27, 2012 09:19
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dorkasaurus_rex posted:
It's not as if Israel does those things because they are caring. Palestinian's can only take their boats three miles out to sea and most of the arable land is off limits as an Israeli security buffer. So as to not be fully responsible for a famine along with the bonus of being able to spin themselves as benevolent to a thankless terrorist horde, Israel imports food and medicines which Gaza cannot import or produce due to the blockade/occupation. As for the electricity bit, remember when Israel bombed Gaza's power station? I'm not sure how well things hold up with the sorties, occasional invasions and economic stranglehold that inhibit basic maintenance of Gazan infrastructure. It's pretty sad to see that kind of propaganda you've come across. Sad people uncritically assess and unreservedly support it.
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Nov 28, 2012 06:05
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Can anyone suggest references on micro finance? I recall reading somewhere that it may actually hurt the people being loaned to. Any information about whether it has a net positive or negative effect would be appreciated.
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Nov 28, 2012 07:23
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buttcoin smuggler posted:Can anyone suggest references on micro finance? I recall reading somewhere that it may actually hurt the people being loaned to. Any information about whether it has a net positive or negative effect would be appreciated. It's not definitive but GiveWell have a useful overview. They use empiric metrics as far as possible in ranking charities so I'd give their views some weight.
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Nov 28, 2012 13:49
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Rip Testes posted:It's not as if Israel does those things because they are caring. Palestinian's can only take their boats three miles out to sea and most of the arable land is off limits as an Israeli security buffer. So as to not be fully responsible for a famine along with the bonus of being able to spin themselves as benevolent to a thankless terrorist horde, Israel imports food and medicines which Gaza cannot import or produce due to the blockade/occupation. As for the electricity bit, remember when Israel bombed Gaza's power station? I'm not sure how well things hold up with the sorties, occasional invasions and economic stranglehold that inhibit basic maintenance of Gazan infrastructure. It's pretty sad to see that kind of propaganda you've come across. Sad people uncritically assess and unreservedly support it. Pretty sure that picture came from here, the official Tumblr of the IDF, which does nothing but pump out propaganda for the west to gobble up. I hate reading that thing though, it just makes me depressed
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Nov 28, 2012 13:53
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buttcoin smuggler posted:Can anyone suggest references on micro finance? I recall reading somewhere that it may actually hurt the people being loaned to. Any information about whether it has a net positive or negative effect would be appreciated. Here is a paper coauthored by the brilliant economist Ha-Joon Chang: Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years From the abstract: quote:The contemporary model of microfinance has its roots in a small local experiment in Bangladesh in the early 1970s undertaken by Dr Muhammad Yunus, the US-educated Bangladeshi economist and future 2006 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient. Yunus’s idea of supporting tiny informal microenterprises and self- employment as the solution to widespread poverty rapidly caught on, and by the 1990s the concept of microfinance was the international development community’s highest-profile and most generously funded poverty reduction policy. Neoclassical economic theorists and neoliberal policy-makers both fully concurred with the microfinance model’s celebration of self-help and the individual entrepreneur, and its implicit antipathy to any form of state intervention. The immense feel-good appeal of microfinance is essentially based on the widespread assumption that simply ‘reaching the poor’ with a tiny microcredit will automatically establish a sustainable economic and social development trajectory, a trajectory animated by the poor themselves acting as micro-entrepreneurs getting involving in tiny income- generating activities. We reject this view, however. We argue that while the microfinance model may well generate some narrow positive short run outcomes for a few lucky individuals, these positive outcomes are very limited in number and anyway swamped by much wider longer run downsides and opportunity costs at the community and national level. Our view is that microfinance actually constitutes a powerful institutional and political barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and so also to poverty reduction. Finally, we suggest that continued support for microfinance in international development policy circles cannot be divorced from its supreme serviceability to the neoliberal/globalisation agenda. The full article can be downloaded as a PDF. More generally I would say that if you are interested in those kinds of questions then the website that hosts that article, the World Economic Review, is really worth paying attention to. Its part of an extremely important trend amongst social scientists to start organizing themselves and advocating for more a more sensible approach to economics.
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Nov 29, 2012 21:00
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Rip Testes posted:It's not as if Israel does those things because they are caring. Palestinian's can only take their boats three miles out to sea and most of the arable land is off limits as an Israeli security buffer. So as to not be fully responsible for a famine along with the bonus of being able to spin themselves as benevolent to a thankless terrorist horde, Israel imports food and medicines which Gaza cannot import or produce due to the blockade/occupation. As for the electricity bit, remember when Israel bombed Gaza's power station? I'm not sure how well things hold up with the sorties, occasional invasions and economic stranglehold that inhibit basic maintenance of Gazan infrastructure. It's pretty sad to see that kind of propaganda you've come across. Sad people uncritically assess and unreservedly support it. It's worth mentioning also that Hamas actually are involved in charity/social work. I mean, say they're bastards, say it's done for false pretenses, whatever -- the point is that poster is part of a more general attempt to paint the ascent of Hamas as obvious proof of the brutal and hysterical reactionary tendencies of people Israel is just so beneficent to. It's not 'oh, they're victims of an uncaring Hamas and we're the good guys' it's 'they support their own ultimate destruction (Hamas) in order to spite their benefactors (us).' You should always be worried about anyone who says 'we keep helping these people and somehow they're just devoted to their own annihilation, it's not our fault!'
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Nov 29, 2012 22:24
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Is there anything I can read up on the idea that if we tax the Rich, they'll leave America, and that's why we should never tax them? Edit: Articles against that line of thinking, I mean. Automata 10 Pack fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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Dec 1, 2012 05:04
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I'd very much like to know more about that too, what with the recent story of British millionaires bailing. I've been writing up something about how the very existence of private property demands that welfare be paid by the owners. I'd like to paste it here for comment before I throw it to the wolves on Facebook; am I making any logical errors here? quote:Imagine a time before property, when there were too few people for it to matter. People could hunt, and gather, and share as they liked and eat what they obtained. If someone was unable to hunt or gather, the village would likely sustain them, either out of charity or family (a grandparent, a crippled person) or because they were able to supply other goods, like crafting. If someone was lazy, the village would not sustain them, but this was not a death sentence - eventually, the lazy have to work. No one is truly so lazy they simply waste away.
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Dec 1, 2012 06:57
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Golbez posted:I'd very much like to know more about that too, what with the recent story of British millionaires bailing. Sounds pretty similar to this argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c
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Dec 1, 2012 09:13
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The general idea is covered in great detail in Marx's Capital Vol. 1, in "Part VIII: So-Called Primitive Accumulation" (the last few chapters). G.A. is a Communist, and and he's pretty heavily drawing from that. Long story short, and to quote Marx himself:Karl Marx posted:"newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their owns means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements [...] the history of their expropriation is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." I don't think anyone need be a pinko to acknowledge this is basically true. You'll appreciate this Globez: even Murray Rothbard explicitly accepts this. His critique of Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia calls bullshit from the start because for exactly Marx's point: the history of expropriation, not just of the Feudal commons but also of colonisation up to even the establishment of despotisms, are basically long histories of outrageous crimes. For Rothbard it's just an obvious fact and no fanciful history is going to change that (you see why I have some perverse respect for him, because he's crazy but in an almost-illuminated way). I tend to think we just have to acknowledge it. Right towards the end of the video Cohen moves onto 'well gently caress it we're here now and there's no so-called natural state, no Eden to return to,' which is obviously a totally different argument altogether (though let's face it, there really is no 'natural' state). re: tax and (m/b)illionaires you can't really argue against that in any a priori way. Businesses and wealthy individuals quite obviously arrange themselves in all sorts of ways to take advantage of international laws. I tend to find a lot of rightists make categorical statements about tax and so on that isn't strictly wrong but is so hopelessly universal there's nowhere intellectually to go. Even if we imagine companies or individuals are totally free to immediately transfer everything, no fuss, to take advantage of another regime they're still going to run into costing issues with local labour pools and infrastructure. You're not going to want to move your trucking company to a country where roads aren't maintained, and you're not going to want to move your IT company somewhere where there's not strong education and so on. You cannot move mineral operations, though of course you may be able to pursue projects elsewhere. You can't talk about financial policy in a totally general way, it's insane.
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Dec 1, 2012 11:09
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Golbez posted:I'd very much like to know more about that too, what with the recent story of British millionaires bailing. I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence to back this up but I've often felt that you could make a much better case for safety-nets by tarring the rich as opposed to sympathizing with the poor. Victim-blaming is a species of cognitive dissonance and it's one of the most insidious and entrenched impairments to sound reasoning you can come up against as a speaker. I mean, lazy-hungry vs. clever-innovative is a moral argument that basically loses itself. Just looking at your hypothetical, I don't detect any logical errors but it's worth pointing out that all the entrepreneur has achieved in this case is to institutionalize his own personal system of welfare. For every X funbucks that come in, he gets Y out of it, for no other reason than to service a kind of legal fiction that no sane person would agree to if given a real say in the matter. He's the parasite, not the slacker. The challenge, of course, is finding the right way to say that, but I mean you could do worse than to look to Marx because that's basically the sort of argument you're circling around at this point. People already hate their own incompetent boss who isn't as smart or as hardworking as they are and just sits on his fat rear end all day playing solitaire, it can't be that difficult to find a rhetorical strategy for turning that hate into something political. Woozy fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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Dec 1, 2012 12:45
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The real problem is, I can get most libertarians I know to agree to a property tax, for the right and old reasons of appropriating something from the rest of mankind. They stumble, however, on income taxation. Sales taxation is fine; they are, of course, in favor of the Fairtax, no matter how much I show them how it's unjust, because to them, taking money through income taxation is slavery, and thus injust. It's more slavery than other taxation because it's directly on labor, I suppose, and we can't choose not to work.
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Dec 1, 2012 17:25
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Can if you're rich.
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Dec 1, 2012 18:42
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Golbez posted:Sales taxation is fine; they are, of course, in favor of the Fairtax, no matter how much I show them how it's unjust, because to them, taking money through income taxation is slavery, and thus injust. It's more slavery than other taxation because it's directly on labor, I suppose, and we can't choose not to work. Had someone tell me yesterday that the "Fair Tax" is currently in place and working well in several countries. True or insane? And what's a good resource to learn more about it; I'm aware it's a regressive scheme and problematic for that reason, but I don't know a lot.
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Dec 1, 2012 19:14
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This Fairtax thing has me wondering: What's a good way to discuss taxing money versus taxing people? That seems to be the central issue for a lot of Libertarian thinking.
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Dec 1, 2012 19:19
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Golbez posted:The real problem is, I can get most libertarians I know to agree to a property tax, for the right and old reasons of appropriating something from the rest of mankind. They stumble, however, on income taxation. Sales taxation is fine; they are, of course, in favor of the Fairtax, no matter how much I show them how it's unjust, because to them, taking money through income taxation is slavery, and thus injust. It's more slavery than other taxation because it's directly on labor, I suppose, and we can't choose not to work. Is the special hatred reserved for income taxation something specific to American libertarianism? I don't mean the arguments against government and taxation in general, which all strains of libertarianism and classical liberalism have in common. As for understanding the distinction some libertarians make between different forms of taxation, maybe you'll find this informative. Frank Chodorov posted:Indirect taxes are mere money raisers; there is nothing in the character of these taxes that involves any other purpose. In levying them, the government does not call on any principle other than that the citizen must pay for the upkeep of his government, in proportion to the amount of goods he consumes. … The government does not question the right of the citizen to his property. The citizen need not pay these taxes; he can go without. From: http://mises.org/etexts/rootofevil.asp Beyond that, I guess there are also the arguments from mainstream economics (income taxes make people work less) and right wing moralism (income taxation punishes high achievers). But none of these say anything about slavery.
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Dec 1, 2012 20:28
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Sakarja posted:Is the special hatred reserved for income taxation something specific to American libertarianism? I don't mean the arguments against government and taxation in general, which all strains of libertarianism and classical liberalism have in common. As for understanding the distinction some libertarians make between different forms of taxation, maybe you'll find this informative.
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Dec 1, 2012 23:52
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Golbez posted:It could be. My pulling-poo poo-out-of-my-rear end explanation is, we have two things that are in relatively recent memory: A time before a federal income tax, and slavery. Thus, you can equate something to slavery in the U.S. and it carries far more weight than it might in another first-world country. And for some people, drawing the line (confiscation of labor) is very easy, yet they come so very close to completing the line (capitalism is confiscation of labor). I think there's much to be said for that analysis, just looking at the text I quoted earlier there're constant references to slavery. To put it briefly: a myth of a land of rugged, freedom-loving individualists that are somehow corrupted and ultimately enslaved by the uniquely malevolent federal government. Frank Chodorov posted:When an "evil" becomes customary, it tends to lose the negative value put on it and in men’s minds tends to become a "good." And so, we hear much these days in praise of the very kind of government which the Founding Fathers tried to prevent by their blueprint; that is, of a paternalistic establishment ruling for and over a subject people. A virtue has been made of what was once considered a vice. This transmutation of political values has been accompanied by a transmutation of moral values, as a matter of necessity; people who have no rights are presumably without free will; at least, there is no call for the exercise of free will (as in the case of a slave) when a paternalistic government assumes the obligations of living. As for your last sentence, I find it interesting that libertarians so often seem argue along more or less the same lines as Marxists (as opposed to, say, neoliberals or conservatives) and yet always come to the exact opposite conclusion.
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Dec 2, 2012 00:38
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Golbez posted:The real problem is, I can get most libertarians I know to agree to a property tax, for the right and old reasons of appropriating something from the rest of mankind. They stumble, however, on income taxation. Sales taxation is fine; they are, of course, in favor of the Fairtax, no matter how much I show them how it's unjust, because to them, taking money through income taxation is slavery, and thus injust. It's more slavery than other taxation because it's directly on labor, I suppose, and we can't choose not to work. The main difference of viewpoints seems to boil down to one thing in my discussions with a variety of libertarians here and elsewhere: do individuals sometimes bear burdens of responsibility that are not explicit contractual agreements, but rather implied duties? Allow me to explain the course such discussions normally follow to bring me to that difference of opinions. The view that taxation is theft or akin to slavery hinges on the assumption that the fruit of ones labors is due solely to oneself; the reasoning behind this is that the individual made no voluntary contract to pay taxes. A voluntary agreement would be arranged between two parties for a given amount, and taxation is a law applied by the state and the will of the people, not a voluntary contract. Many would argue at this point that they are implicitly part of the social contract and if they wanted to refuse the contract they are free to leave the country, but I think this is a mistake because it ignores the fact that external factors can be coercive (something that libertarians in my experience also tend to ignore, so it shouldn't be the basis of support for your own argument if you intend to point it out later). What this means is that it is a large burden for an individual to move out of a country into another one (assuming you could find one without taxation that was livable), and thus it is not a choice truly freely available to them. Instead, I would argue that humans have duties that are not a result of explicit contracts; these implicit duties are still owed. A good example of this is familial bonds. If your mother and a woman you don't know were drowning and you only had the ability to save one of them, whom would you save? I expect most everyone would save their mother first, because we are bound more tightly to family than to strangers or even most friends. But people don't make such duties into explicit contractual agreements; no one picks the family they are born into, yet the duty remains. One could view that as recompense for their efforts raising you, but what about sisters, cousins, nephews? I would help my family before my friends, and I expect that's a fairly broadly acceptable order of duties owed without a voluntary explicit contract. Taxes are another such implicit contract. It doesn't matter that you never signed a legal agreement or that there is very real coercion from the difficulty of moving preventing you from freely choosing to leave the country. You have an implicit duty to contribute to the benefit of society when you make use of the contributions of others in society to survive and flourish. Taxation isn't theft because the money wasn't yours to begin with: it's money owed to society as recompense for creating an environment within which you could earn your own money to begin with. I haven't really heard or read any particularly strong rebuttals to that line of thinking yet, but being as I take a pretty Rawlsian view of things even the notion of deserving earnings to begin with is shaky to me. This is as convincing of an argument as I have been able to craft without relying on the notion of Rawls that moral dessert isn't actually something that is worth considering in questioning how to structure society, and at that point I won't likely find any common ground with libertarians.
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Dec 2, 2012 00:52
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Sakarja posted:I think there's much to be said for that analysis, just looking at the text I quoted earlier there're constant references to slavery. To put it briefly: a myth of a land of rugged, freedom-loving individualists that are somehow corrupted and ultimately enslaved by the uniquely malevolent federal government. quote:As for your last sentence, I find it interesting that libertarians so often seem argue along more or less the same lines as Marxists (as opposed to, say, neoliberals or conservatives) and yet always come to the exact opposite conclusion. Many are really close without realizing just how close they are. I just happened to finally jump. Of course, I'd always been teetering - even at my strongest, most vehemently anarcho-capitalist, I figured such a model would eventually mean that worker's cooperatives would be the dominant model, and the only reason they weren't prevalent now was because of the state. There's also another very important ingredient in the American experience at play here - For decades up to at least my generation (was 9 when the wall fell), we were brought up to distrust, fear, and hate Socialism. Not just the Soviets, but socialism in general, regardless of if anyone actually knew the definition of the term. So many things can be labelled "socialism" that, in reality, are common sense or a possible natural consequence of free market capitalism, like unions. So maybe the true hope lies with people born after the wall fell, who were just able to vote in their first election - and most did for the vile socialist, in part either because they saw through the stupidity of labeling him a "socialist" or they didn't mind. Golbez fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Dec 2, 2012 |
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Dec 2, 2012 02:35
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Sakarja posted:"Suppose the freedom of disposition is taken away from you entirely. That is, you become a slave; you have no right of property. Whatever you produce is taken by somebody else, and though a good part of it is returned to you, in the way of sustenance, medical care, housing, you cannot under the law dispose of your output; if you try to, you become the legal "robber." Your concern in production wanes and you develop an attitude toward laboring that is called a "slave" psychology" Took me a while, and reading the rest, before I realize he wasn't talking about wage slavery. How could be so close yet so far away? Of course, people will say "but you chose to work for those wages," but as my exercise above point out, no, I didn't, I was forced to work for the capitalist class. Therefore the negotiation is necessarily stilted in their favor.
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Dec 2, 2012 03:19
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Golbez posted:Took me a while, and reading the rest, before I realize he wasn't talking about wage slavery. How could be so close yet so far away? You really have to hammer home the equivalency between their idea of coercion and natural coercions like hunger, need for shelter, and children to take care of. Capitalism uses those as tools as much as anything else to fuel itself.
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Dec 2, 2012 03:57
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Golbez posted:The funny thing is, they tend to take a warped (either deliberately or by accident) view of the founding fathers, thinking that they were rebelling against taxation and thus taxation is a blight upon the federal government. They conveniently leave out the "without representation" part of that. It's going to take awhile for socialism to stop being a dirty word in American society. From elementary school they start trying to teach us that it's inherently bad, and as long as it's in our textbooks that capitalism=freedom there's going to be a large group of people who carry that belief with them into adulthood. I want to dig up my 10th grade history book now. Marx was given an entire chapter, and the entire thing was about how wrong he was, finishing off with "the worker revolution he predicted never came  "e:Ironically, those of us in my class who were fortunate enough to have had parents who valued critical thinking ending up looking further into Marx and socialism after this, and we ended up thinking "Wait, what's the big deal?" I guess the real issue is that critical thinking isn't a skill everyone has the luck to be taught. 
Pomp fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Dec 2, 2012 |
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Dec 2, 2012 07:35
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The other thing is that even if you don't agree with Marx/Marxists on the subject of economics, a large part of the fields of sociology and social critique in general have been influenced by Marx and his successors. If you have a knee-jerk reaction to refuse to read anything left of liberal then you might never pick up, say, Gramsci, whose idea of hegemony could honestly be quite applicable to many different political orientations. This is why I continue to be wary of libertarians' outright distrust for "mainstream" academics and push their own revisionist hacks in their place. I could never cut myself off from that much literature simply because of a childish hateboner for Marx.
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Dec 2, 2012 15:04
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