Does anyone have any good examples, articles, books, etc. that show how capitalism and the free market promote social progress (i.e. women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, general tolerance, equality, etc.)?
I’m particularly interested in how Austrian/libertarian economics can be shown to be the most effective form of feminist economics.
Here’s a few links that may be of some interest to you:
Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?
Hope this helps!
Creative Destruction is about how capitalism changes culture (and why this can help society progress).
Cultural Marxism isn’t progress. In fact, it’s a house of cards that, like classical Marxism, is propped up by a coercive state.
What exactly do you mean by women’s/minority/gay rights &c.? That the members of these groups should have some rights in addition to the ones that I, white male 18-49, should have; or that their rights qua individuals are not being fully respected (in which case the terms are superfluous)?
And I don’t even want to know what “feminist economics” is.
Spot on. I love the word progress since you can never reach your goals because the goalposts keep shifting. Once we have an “equal” society we can progress to natural hierarchy but that wouldn’t be progress in there eyes.
The best feminist economics is feminist economics. The school of economics that would do the most to advance everyone’s utility and property rights would be the Austrian school.
Segregation and whatnot has never been a widespread problem among free people who choose to associate with each other. If people wish to segregate themselves by race or gender, there is nothing wrong about that. But if government steps in and imposes segregation, that is wrong. In the long run, racism, sexism, nationalism, and other destructive “isms” are done away with in a free market because people realize it is in their own personal interest to mix with people.
But then again, who are you to judge the values of others? If I personally want to live in an all white neighborhood, send my children to an all white school, and associate only with whites, nobody should stand in my way to force me to do otherwise.
I think that it’s definitely a straw man, coming from a very obvious traditionalist conservative bias, to assume that anyone who supports those causes in any way must be a cultural marxist. Would you be willing to accuse Roderick Long and Wendy McElroy of being marxists? Or, perhaps for good reason, would you be willing to grant that these causes haven’t always been statist or socialist causes? Or do you genuinely think that pluralism as such is essentially marxism? By the way, I know of quite a few white nationalists who are 100% in line with this viewpoint: “cultural marxism” is the ultimate enemy, and they see it everywhere. Allegedly simply not being a downright racist or a theocrat or a paternalist makes one a “cultural marxist”.
I recently wrote about precisely this problem. While the marxists are wrong in essentially attributing all inequalities to nurture while more or less ignoring nature, traditionalist conservatives such as yourself engage in the opposite error by essentially portraying all inequalities as “natural”, as if it’s in a vacuum and detached from political and cultural influences. In this view, the status quo and existing inequities can be legitimized and defended as “the natural order”, while all proposals for meaningful changes can be brushed off as utopian before even being given a chance to be explored. This is an erroneous and dangerous worldview that breeds stagnation and regress. Progress (in real terms) is not possible without deviation from the norm.
Milton Friedman addresses this question in Free To Choose. He gives a simple analysis that even laymen can understand, but it is strong in it’s argument.
In short, I see no reason why having some degree of sympathy for those causes and being a pluralist automatically makes one a cultural marxist. To my knowledge, cultural marxists believe that literally all existing inequalities between races, classes and genders can be attributed to oppression and various nurture factors. I don’t think one has to believe that to support the listed causes, at least understood in context. Cultural marxism is an extreme position, the opposite of the extreme of traditionalist conservatism which essentially proclaims all existing inequalities between said groups to be “natural”. Personally, I reject both views as naive.
Agreed. Opposing racism, sexism, and general intolerance is hardly Marxist.
I don’t think I have ever justified all current inequalities. I argued in the Cultural Conservatives We Need a New Word thread that I support an immutable framework of the family and judeo-christian morailty from which everything else can change- giving foundations for continual progress.
Of those wonderfull isms that mean pratically nothing. Before anyone actually wants to argue about racism read this I wrote on my blog (the-eclectic-rambler.blogspot.com)
With all the Ron Paul racism allegations it prompted me to think would be a cogent definition of racism. dictionary reference defines racism as :
| 1. | a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others. |
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| 2. | a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination. |
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| 3. | hatred or intolerance of another race or other races. |
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Normally it is argued that if you discriminate on the basis of race this means your racist. So they give the example if you have two candidates for a job and the black one is “more highly qualified” than the white one and you choose the latter you are racist. Yet the more highly qualified statement, normally based on paper qualifications, doesn’t hold since there are many other factors determining whether you’ll be good at the job. So if the employer by economising information costs believes that the black man is more likely to be hard work, not fit in with the firm and more likely to go off sick then this is an entirely justified action. It is a similar mechanism that one uses of people from certain backgrounds or places do x or y. It is merely economising on information costs since information is expensive to acquire; if they make mistakes though they will be punished by the market. This also explains why when most people say " I dislike immigrants because…" it is about behaviour and what’s associated with immigrant behaviour not them just being an immigrant. What this comes down to is culture; not race but is associated with it. And I think it is clear that an anarchist legal system is better than a statist one thus the former is a superior culture. But suppose the latter is associated with whites and the former with blacks and a white man says “I hate blacks because they’re anarchist” is a cultural rather than race based statement. So no racism here.
Supposing though that the employer believed that the two candidates for the job were identical but chose the white man over the black. Is this racist? Well not necessarily. Is giving preferential treatment to your children and family racist? It is an inherently discriminatory act but no one ever calls this racist. But as is obvious races are merely an extrapolation of the family so it thus makes sense you will prefer the one more like you than less. So no racism here either.
Suppose that you are employing people in Saharan Africa and you have a policy of employing only blacks since they are more likely to have sickle cell anaemia than whites and thus not susceptible to malaria (I think I remember this correctly but it makes the point). This is now a decision solely based on race but again is not necessarily racist. It would be the same as appointing an able bodied man over a guy in a wheel chair to be in your rugby team because there physical attributes are going to determine how good they are. This of course leaves open to debated whether certain races are more intelligent than others in the same way that Negroes are in general stronger than whites- look at athletics. So no racism here.
The only possible cogent definition of racism is that one believes that another race is morally inferior to another. So one believes that another race is ontologically inferior and deserves to live less than his own race. So examples of this would be those of the eugenics movement who saw blacks as less evolved than whites and so were not to be afforded the same (legal) rights as whites.
Interestingly enough most of the eugenics victims in the US were poor white folks who were ‘talked into it’ by Progressive womenfolk who roamed the countryside preying on them.
Their goal was to end poverty by making sure the poor couldn’t breed a new generation of poor kids because there was some imagined link between poverty and genetics.
I heard an interview on the public radio about the forced sterilization programs that were enacted in the US a while back.
Your point is well-taken, but I’ve never seen this position end up anywhere but at the following: As soon as sexual deviants and unassimilable ethnic minorities start showing up on the short end of the stick for housing and employment, the anarchists join with their Marxist cousins in crying, “Coercion!,” and call for the levelling of the social order. This is a permanent process, given that inequality is a fact of nature. The practical result is shelves upon shelves of laws enforcing “rights” for politically connected victim groups.
And also, what “proposals for meaningful change” are you talking about? Affirmative action? All such anti-market remedies are inherently coercive.
If the rights you speak of in the question are really private property rights, right of self ownership, right to own property, right to conduct exchanges of property with others without the threat of coersion or violence then Capitalism is the ONLY system that promotes these rights as capitalism is optimal for consumers. Consumers have ultimate control over the functioning of society. Suppliers must live in the discipline of the market place. Note that these suppliers can conduct exchanges of property with whom ever they wish as well.
If by right you mean that some benevolent group enforces extra privileges incorrectly called rights using violence or coersion on others then Capitalism DOES NOT support this and you need to go to the socialists to get these priviliges. Keep in mind that this is no longer efficient as suppliers and consumers are prohibited from acting in their own interest and are forced through threat of loss of property initially and later violence into behaving a certain way. Of course the ultimate environment is Communism where all control of suppliers and consumers was done through the state in the name of rights with disasterous consequences.
Nobody said anything about coercion.
The fact remains that racism and sexism are widely-held views. There is nothing illegal (nothing against the natural law) about this, but it is certainly unvirtuous and immoral. A free society would reduce the effects of racism and sexism, but it would not always remove the root cause. The state IS NOT the only evil in today’s society.
Ah, I see. You prefer to take the strategy of basically argueing racism out of existance, I.E. essentially denying its existance or at least that it presents any threat to liberty.
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