“The law
creates and protects that bundle of rights called property or the
corporation, and this same law can rearrange that bundle of
rights if it is in the public interest.”
The law creates and protects that bundle of rights called property or the corporation, and this same law can rearrange that bundle of rights if it is in the public interest…"It hardly seems valid to condemn the government for legally rearranging this bundle of rights when it created them in the first place.’
to condemn the government for legally rearranging this bundle
of rights when it created them in the first place.'"
That’s right, your property is nothing but a concession from the State. And if it rearranges things - declares your property to be someone elses - what right do we have to complain? This is the sort of whack-jobs we are expected to ‘ally’ with?
Ralph Nader is not anti-corporatist. He’s anti-corporation. He’s anti-capitalist. He’s a busy-body know-nothing who lives off scare mongering and lies. His kind are the people who built the corporate welfare cartel system to begin with, with their regulations and trust busting. I’d just as soon ally with that crank LaRouche. No offense, Judge Napolitano, but Ralph Nader is an idiot whose political ideas are just as bad, if not worse, as those in the mainstream Republicrats.
Yeah, there was a time when decent men called themselves Progressives and Liberals, as recently as the 1950s. Well, now they call themselves libertarians. What’s left of the Progressives are 99% either psychos or useful idiots.
You don’t have to create an alliance with anybody.
Politics is about the reconciliation of interests. This is impossible. All human interests are diverse, and often not reconciliable. Getting anywhere in the political process also involves dubious alliances and coalitions.
In the end, we two may differ as much between each other as we do with anyone else. Why should alliances matter, even between you and me? What does that do for us? In the world outside politics, our views do not have to divide us and life goes on without a zero sum game. I might like Mac, you a PC, but we can have both in the non-political world. In politics, you always have something to lose.
You don’t have to create an alliance with anybody.
Given that I am apolitical, I realize this. My point is that the Progressive-Libertarian alliance, like all recent libertarian flirtations with leftism, are doomed to end in disaster. All leftism is essentially socialist and moralizing at heart, with vast delusions of reformism that are unmatched in human history. We have tried this before, with the New Left. It’s not going to work, these people are our arch-enemies.
Every decent one like Glenn Greenwald or Gabriel Kolko hates almost the entire rest of the left and is practically libertarian anyways. I don’t even know why they consider themselves leftists.
As long as we don’t ally with the conservatives. They are much worse.
No, they are not. They are stupid and ridiculous in their own way but nothing matches the totalitarian, managerial, busy-body conceit of the left. In history. The left make the Spanish Inquisition look reasonable, and Prussian censorship seem light.
Plus they are merely the “junior partner” in things, and don’t really matter when taking things into consideration as it is a lost cause. That said, it always seemed as if at least certain pockets of Progressives were much less religous, grounded in reality, and consequentialist, than any fringe leftist group.
Plus they are merely the “junior partner” in things, and don’t really matter when taking things into consideration as it is a lost cause. That said, it always seemed as if at least certain pockets of Progressives were much less religous, grounded in reality, and consequentialist, than any fringe leftist group.
Sure. The liberals had their Comte de Tracy, the Progressives had their Flynns and the New Left had their Kolkos. But I would say on a psychological/weltanschauung level these people are basically individualists with strong libertarian leanings and a rather confused education; who have managed to think their way out of nearly the entire leftist paradigm they were raised/indoctrinated into.
You are also correct that classical rightism and conservatism are dead. What we are seeing in the far East and some parts of Europe is a New Right, which is a strange fusion of corporatism and authoritarian traditionalism.
I’d take John Stewart over Huckabee anyday.
Huckabee is basically a Evangelical, which is where leftism comes from. Modern liberalism is atheist Ultracalvinism.
John Stewart is rather more an individualist, though he has a strongly leftist education.
I think he is contradicting himself.
Progressivism relies on rights which are not given, so it must precede the state. In order to be thought and then implemented by the state. This is why progressivism is about the same as liberalism, or individualism, except that it denies the individualism at times and also uses the state to enforce individualism. Even welfare is about the individualism of the recipient (in theory, but not in practice), while denying the individualism of the ‘benefactor’.
Then there is the problem of the state denying rights. For instance, no progressive is going to say that one shouldn’t aught to complain about Jim Crow laws which take away rights. Is he going to say that since the government gave blacks civil rights to be treated equally under the rule of law, that rescinding this right (at least those parts to do with the rule of law and minorities) at present would be no cause for an uproar? That sounds rather strange.
And yet he is saying that the state is everything to do with rights, and that complaining about the state redefining rights – as if the state and not an individual did this – is illogical. To me, he seems to be undermining intellectualism by this appeal to an impersonal force the state which self-evidently makes its own case and self-evidently came into existence. Which seems to suggest laziness.
In my opinion, you either have to go back to the Declaration of Independence for ‘inalienable rights’ argument, or not. You can’t do both.
The wholly modern notion that law is statutory law is a great evil. It is really an exression of the old slogan of absolute European monarchs: Rex Lex - The King is the Law. It is only possible to construct such absurd ideas as that expressed in this Nader quote if one identifies “law” with the dictates of the Prince, whether on his own behalf or through the auspices of a legislature. The whole raison d’etre of the Prince is redistribution of wealth - from his subjects to himself. The ancient pretense (the Romans had grain subsidies for the poor) that redistribution is primarily from one group of subjects to another group of subjects is a childish farce. It is easy to see through the bullshit… welfare is just a thinly veiled attempt to appear selfless and charitable by donating a small portions of the proceeds of plunderous taxation to “the poor and needy.”
Clayton -
What we are seeing in the far East and some parts of Europe is a New Right, which is a strange fusion of corporatism and authoritarian traditionalism.
And even that I would imagine is a pointless thing to consider as worth thinking about, at least in the West. For better or worse, it seems doomed to always be the secondary voice of left wing tropes and causes, moreover it will never be able to function as well in Western style governments and propaganda. The more the West implodes and loses it’s ability to proselytize, the more it may be a major factor in other parts of the world. I just don’t see it ever being anything other than a half entity / half boogey man in the West.
@Clayton
The wholly modern notion that law is statutory law is a great evil.
I agree. In fact I think the concept of fiat law is nonsensical - fiat fails to qualify as law, it is nothing more or less than the system of hegemonic bonds. Even supposedly ‘right’ laws, such as those against murder and theft, are perverse and counter-productive when enforced by the State.
@William
And even that I would imagine is a pointless thing to consider as worth thinking about, at least in the West. For better or worse, it seems doomed to always be the secondary voice of left wing tropes and causes, moreover it will never be able to function as well in Western style governments and propaganda. The more the West implodes and loses it’s ability to proselytize, the more it may be a major factor in other parts of the world. I just don’t see it ever being anything other than a half entity / half boogey man in the West.
Yes, I agree. There is really no chance of it catching on unless the major States collapse into anarchy and give some credence to the law-and-order types; liberalism is too ingrained in our culture. Over in Asia, where it dominates about 2/3rds of the nations, it is rendered externally almost harmless by the deep conservatism and tenuous grip on society that the elites have.