all actions are economic.
Yes, but not all policies are economic.
Yes, but not all policies are economic.
All policies refer to constraint on the individuals actions with scarce resources, either controlling scarce resources which do exist or enforcing an artificial scarcity upon non-scarce commodities. All policies are economic.
the term liberal is meaningless. all movements in history claimed to be on side of freedom. likewise ive never seen a politician who claims to be for the capitalists and against workers.
the term liberal is meaningless. all movements in history claimed to be on side of freedom. likewise ive never seen a politician who claims to be for the capitalists and against workers.
I would not call the term liberal ‘worthless’. It is refer to a set of related ideologies arising from religious dissentors, republican humanist and post-mercantalist political economy. You are, however, correct that virtually every political ideology claims some form of freedom or another. One could define words in such a way as to make Marxism pro-freedom and libertarianism authoritarian (absolute rule of property by property owners!); it is useless, I think, to argue about who is for or against ‘freedom’ for this reason. We should instead articulate exactly what we are for and what we are against in substantive, and not rhetorical, terms.
“We should instead articulate exactly what we are for and what we are against in substantive, and not rhetorical, terms.”
this reminds me when conservatives mouth the moronic line about “too much freedom”. nazis had too much freedom in putting people in concentration camps, we should regulate them, and not let markets and people run wild.
Since you appear to be surprised, I’ll explain further. If you don’t believe/trust me, feel free to double check it.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ became political indicators based upon the French parliament, where Bastiat was a member of. He sat on the left side and was generally considered a leftist, just as the socialists. This was because ‘the left’ argued against privileges and for freedom, and the ‘right’ where the conservatives who argued for the ancien regime, privileges and the right of the king.
Both the idea of liberalism and the idea of socialism have a concept of anti-privilege and pro-freedom in what you could call their meta-rhetoric. Liberalism would argue that the socialist idea is wrong and vice versa; but both have a rhetoric of freedom and equality. Liberalism was a ‘left’ idea.
Socialists weren’t ‘the left’, but ‘the other left’
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ became political indicators based upon the French parliament, where Bastiat was a member of. He sat on the left side and was generally considered a leftist, just as the socialists.
This old saw is irrelevant. It has no connexion with modern political ideologies or any substantive questions. Libertarianism is not classical liberalism. It is not ‘left’ or ‘right’. It is not about ‘freedom’. It is about a property and contract society, and it is utterly new.
I would say that there is no problem in you thinking that it is irrelevant, that doesn’t mean it is and it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Please learn the difference between interventionism and a planned economy that keeps nominal ‘private property’. Fascisms refers to the second, not to interventionism. Corporatism could be fascist, but it could also be categorized as a kind of interventionism. To define fascism as ‘state engineering of a propertarian society’ is to broad.
The USA and the Western world live in an interventionist economy, not in a fascist.
Please learn the difference between interventionism and a planned economy that keeps nominal ‘private property’. Fascisms refers to the second, not to interventionism. Corporatism could be fascist, but it could also be categorized as a kind of interventionism. To define fascism as ‘state engineering of a propertarian society’ is to broad.
This is false. You are conflating National Socialism (socialism on the ‘German’ or ‘Hindenberg’ pattern) with Fascism. Fascism is not National Socialism. NS has much more in common with Stalinism. The Italian Fascist state was not any more interventionist than the liberal-democratic government that preceeded it, it had no coherent economic policy. The elements which libertarians ascribe as ‘fascistic’ in the American economy are in fact not ‘fascistic’, they are liberal-Progressive. Fascists copied liberal policies. Although fascists spoke of the total state it was mere rhetoric, and even then they never had any totalitarian interventionist schemes; their ideas were thoughs of communalist corporatavism - which is interventionist, guild-like and not a total state on the German or Russian pattern.
The USA and the Western world live in an interventionist economy, not in a fascist.
The Fascists lived in a liberal interventionist economy. Neither of which is the same as National Socialism. You are using the word ‘fascist’ in the same way the Bolsheviks did, as a general smear word without any historical connexion to actual fascism.
Do you have proof to support any of these statements?
Several of the talks Paul Gottfried has given at the Mises Institute, such as thisone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrF9–MUSg
This is also well documented. The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy were identical to the previous government in virtually every way, the corporatives he set up never did much of anything and, in any case, were not intended to be total-regulatory agencies. If anything Mussolini actually liberalized the economy by shutting down the Communist and bandit gangs that had paralyzed Italian industry in the city and trade in the country-side.
That’s a subjective viewpoint; most progressive liberals would disagree.
Yep, but I never said they were liberals or that that was social liberalism.
That’s a subjective viewpoint
No, it is not, it is an objective one. All human action involves the allocation of scarce resources; one can not have a ‘free press’ unless one has paper and ink and offices. If the State controls the allocation of resources, either directly on the Soviet model or indirectly by manipulating the capital market, then people are restricted in their freedom. There can be no serious disagreement with this, only ignorance and obfuscation.
most progressive liberals would disagree.
They are wrong.
You don’t agree with the definition that many Austrians use, that fascism is a planned economy with nominal private property? But rather that it’s just an inter-war phenomenon without a coherent economic policy?
Yes. Theoretically, fascism was somewhat like guild interventionism; practically it was slapdash interventionism copied from Progressive and left-liberal states. There is no reason, other than leftist rhetoric, to call anyone but the Italian Fascists and a couple of small, related groups fascist. There was less in common between Francisco Franco and Adolph Hitler than between Hitler and Roosevelt.
Yeah, I agree. Even if that use of the term “fascism” was accurate, you effectively can’t use it for meaningful communication because most people have some hugely different understanding of the term.
I wonder though, why do you say that progressivism is liberal? For example “The elements which libertarians ascribe as ‘fascistic’ in the American economy are in fact not ‘fascistic’, they are liberal-Progressive”. How can progressivism be liberal? I take it you are referring to liberalism in the real libertarian sense. As I understand it, the progressive era was pretty much a movement against classical liberalism. Elements which the fascists copied from the progressives were specifically anti-liberal. As such, a progressive is someone distinguished from a liberal.
Progressivism is a species of liberalism. It, and modern liberalism, have as much a claim to the term as libertarianism does. It is a different development of the principles and ideas of liberalism; which are in essence a combination of Enlightenment philosophy and religious dissenters. We represent an extreme propertarianism, which is (rhetoric aside) not committed to ‘freedom’ in the abstract but to the particular legal sense of liberty which is more Germanic than liberal. The mainline of liberals and Progressives (two related, but different, groups with their own sub-factions) developed along the more Humanistic, radical republican lines inherent in classical liberalism. By the late 19th century it has become clear that liberals and libertarians are not the same thing anymore; Herbert Spencer was correct to point that modern liberals had become infatuated with power and reversed many gains for the classical liberals; but what he ought to have seen is that a quasi-anarchist hypercapitalist like himself had just as little in common with classical liberals as he did with Pietistic liberalism of his day.