The society can at some point arrive at conclusions too. Like, women are discriminated. (good one). All women are discriminated anywhere they're not in equal numbers with men (absurd ones).
I never placed blame on unions as such. I protested against abuse of the right to withdraw labour. When it transgresses their right to labour, especially more so when it's for an unworthy cause, even worse when it's a tiny minority abusing their strategic position (air traffic controllers), some people can get very very annoyed and vote for someone who promises minimum service.
On the last part, I could agree with you, the problem is that it seems by and large the public is getting fed up with excessive activism from all sides.
My question was quite simple actually: faced with such polarisation, would the society not tend to counter-react by particularly picking leaders and movements which profess moderation, balance, reason, pragmatism ? That was the whole idea of the first blog, not to challenge your ideological position.
The second blog (which no one noticed, but then is that even surprising, I wonder) went further and analysed those situations, where technocrats, experts, bureaucrats tend to impose by claiming themselves from pragmatism.
It was an almost academical reflection (in all humbleness). It became flaming and polarising because of guys like you who claim to recognise the conspiration behind the text and pass to action against the enemy. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
You'll have to come up with better examples of doctrines abusing the humanist/liberal framework.
What's wrong with them?
If obviously off-the-wall insanity like six-day-creation can pass muster in public debate, then what hope do we have of combating superficially plausible-sounding nonsense like the Laffer Curve?
But "society" does not magically arrive at those conclusions ex nihilo. They become socially accepted because they are propagated by individuals and groups within the society.
So if you insist that "society" is the only entity to legitimately impute meaning into the narrative that you claim to be operating according to, then you are essentially saying that you defend the Conventional Wisdom and the status quo.
Which is a perfectly acceptable position. But it's not unideological.
I never placed blame on unions as such. I protested against abuse of the right to withdraw labour. When it transgresses their right to labour,
Emphasis mine.
That is placing blame on the unions. Because the fair and balanced description of the situation is that their employers are abusing their right to lead and distribute the work by hiring people to fill critical positions who are not paid not to strike. That's a case of irresponsible cost cutting, just as surely as not providing emergency brakes or fire extinguishers for the trains. So in this case, employers are entirely to blame for the mess, and expecting the unions to help clean it up is a lot like expecting the taxpayers to foot the bill for bailing out Wall Street.
If an employer decided to hire employees who could quit (and be fired) with a day's notice, we would not blame the employees for quitting, even if it disrupted service - we'd blame the employer for being short-sighted by hiring workers on a contract that allowed them to quit. So blaming the workers for striking when they're employed under a contract that permits them to strike seems entirely out to lunch. The workers aren't responsible for being employed under that contract - in a capitalist economy, it's the employer's prerogative to lead and distribute the work.
I did actually read it, and I substantially agree with your criticisms of technocracy and the illusion of meritocracy. I just reacted to the underlying assumption that technocracy is established because people want to run things in an unideological fashion - far more often, as is presently the case, technocracies are established and enshrined in order to lock a specific ideological position deep into the institutional framework of society.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You can also choose to emphasize the "can" in the conventional wisdom. Instead you add "only". Vicious, vicious debater.
Not placing any blame. Mere constatation that rights sometimes oppose one another. I then said one can choose to ignore it, for a better cause than hanging on to corporative privileges, or if it wasn't just a handful extremists (sometimes even out of union support) blocking the whole airport or railway or television. Otherwise I broadly agreed with no-strike more-pay strategical areas idea. You just keep speaking from an union/worker viewpoint (ideological), picking favourite categories, as if employers would be a necessary evil at best - while I am neutral.
Not because people want to run things unideologically, but that some people or categories promote technical expertise as unideological, impartial and as such the best - obviously not true. It remains that not all economical technocrats are neolibs - many are quite to the left, for that matter. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
You can also choose to emphasize the "can" in the conventional wisdom. Instead you add "only".
Because when anybody other than "society" does it, you call it ideology and denounce it as hopeless utopianism.
You just keep speaking from an union/worker viewpoint (ideological), picking favourite categories, as if employers would be a necessary evil at best - while I am neutral.
No, I'm just telling you what the definition of capitalism says: In a capitalist society, it is the employer's prerogative to lead and distribute the work - and to ensure that staffing is adequate for the task at hand is an obvious corollary to this. And if the employer in question can't find enough qualified work... well then he's just shit outta luck, but that's not the employees' problem. No political school of thought that I'm aware of - left, right or centre - disputes this. Comes with the whole "private ownership of the means of production" thing, which I gather is rather central to capitalist economic models. It's in any PoliSci textbook you might care to name.
Fortunately you are right that not all economic technocrats are neolibs. There are still holdovers from saner times. But far too many have drunk the Reaganomics kool-aid.
Who says that definition ? Prerogative ?... Conferred by...? This all sounds so ideological, I feel itching at almost each word of yours. Political schools of thought - a rational pragmatist's anathema ! "Capitalism" could rather be seen as the natural state of things, rather than an ideology in itself. PoliSci schools remind me of certain economy books indoctrinating students with freemarket doctrines. Yuk. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
It works exceedingly well for science, because in science cheaters are usually caught sooner or later, and then they're run out of town on a rail, covered in tar and feathers and branded with a big, fat sign in the middle of their face saying "liar."
In politics... not so much.
And while capitalism could indeed be seen as the "natural" state of things, so could feudalism, clientism, oligarchy, corporatism, serfdom, tribalism and a host of other more or less undesirable ways of running society. Capitalism is no less artificial than social democracy - if you want a truly "natural" state of affairs, look at tribalism and feudalism; they seem to be the state societies move towards when their citizenry stops paying attention.
Who says that the definition of capitalism is that the employer leads and distributes the work? Well, originally this particular formulation of capitalist principles was taken from an early Danish employers' union manifesto - more specifically from their demands for concessions from the Danish labour movement, in return for ending a major lockout. It was subsequently written into the September Agreement, which you might call the constitution of the Danish labour market.
It's right up there with private property when it comes to defining capitalism.
You're the first person I have ever met who disagrees that the definition of capitalism is private control of the means of production - or at least that capitalism means universal private property rights, to which private control of the means of production is an obvious corollary.
Of course, you can make up your own definition of capitalism if you want, but if you want to substitute some idiosyncratic definition of capitalism, then you have to at least tell us what that definition is.
And I wonder what the "natural state of things" even means. It sounds like more "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know what I mean" speak. What is "natural" about capitalism - under your definition, or the dictionary definition, I don't care which? Why has a system that's "the natural state of things" only existed for two hundred years or so, tops? And why does "the natural state of things" seem to regress towards feudalism when left unattended (a problem that already Adam Smith was aware of when he wrote of the necessity of trust-busting)?
Then you bring people in for work. Becoming an employer changes things, because people are not machines, personal and social problems are posed, which is why there are work laws and statutes to regulate the thing and protect employees.
Still pondering, without relating to any highminded philosophical book, for the moment. Dude :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Well for one, private property is the normal state of things. Always existed, only in danger when no rule of law, or by abuse.
No. You'll have to argue that a bit more than simply stating it. Indeed, one of the first large States, Egypt, had everything owned by the Pharao. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
"Always" is a very long time. And I would point out that in most cultures, the notion of individual private property does not actually exist, because the individual is wholly subsumed in the clan or family.
Additionally, very often in European history, peasants didn't actually own most of their stuff - they rented it from their local nobles.
That's not so much "means of production" but private property you bought with your money. Period.
You can shout that there is no difference between capital goods (means of production) and consumer goods until you go blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of the world makes that distinction.
Land has, throughout most of European history, either been owned communally or held in fief from one's feudal sovereign. Agricultural implements have been variously privately and communally owned, but certainly weren't usually bought and sold on open markets the way they are under full-fledged capitalist systems. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Freemasons), even the proto-capitalist craftsmen in the cities worked in guilds, which communally owned the means of production, and did so essentially since the dissolution of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
(None of which, of course, means that these constructs were in any way egalitarian or remotely similar to what most Marxists would understand when they say "communal ownership" of the means of production. They just weren't capitalist in any sense of the term that my dictionary recognises.)
Employing people to produce goods for third parties is a relatively recent invention - it used to be that most work was done either for oneself (as, e.g., with subsistence farming, an activity that used to take up more than 90 % of all economic activity in pre-capitalist societies) or on commission. This only really changed once industrialisation made mass output of cheap, standardised goods practical.
Well, very often the feudal nobility didn't own their stuff: it was granted by the king, at least in principle?
Things were much more nuanced even then, and often peasants had property of their land and house.
That's only true for the freeholders, which were not the majority in most countries (and in some countries, such as Denmark, for instance, didn't even exist for several centuries).
