Media and Refugees

I read an article from Der Spiegel today which claimed Angela Merkel has gambled away her power with her compassion for refugees. (They do not deserve a link) Only compassionate policies receive this type of hatred from the press and calls for referenda. I never heard people call for a referendum when the US invaded Iraq, when Southern Europe was devastated by austerity (which performed exactly as all economic theory predicts), or to push anti-gay laws in Eastern Europe onto the ballot. Only policies which try to make the world a better place get such attention. The way the media talks about such issues makes it sound like refugees from Syria in Europe or Mexico in the USA are causing all of our problems, when any accurate analysis proves that this is not true, and in fact a majority of Germans approve of these actions. 40% is a majority according to the media when the policy which has 60% approval makes the world a better place.

Europe has the resources to help the refugees from the Middle East, and frankly Europe owes it to the Middle East after standing idly by as religious extremists have destroyed Middle Eastern Culture in the Arab states after colonizing the world, particularly Britain. Germany didn't have colonies in the region, but Germany has the resources (and need for labor) to help people from the Middle East. If we show compassion towards those whose homes have been destroyed we could build a better world where all people see our common heritage as humankind to build a more peaceful world. Instead of punishing 4 year old girls whose homes have been bombed out by Wahabbi extremists and teach them to never trust the West (a lesson which fascists have taught them far too many times) by sending them back to the meat grinder we should show them compassion and give them a sense that we are good people and grow trust between our lands. This will reduce the threat of terrorism across the world for mutual benefit. If we choose instead to send them back to the meat grinder of Syria and continue invasions of their homelands what little trust and respect there is between our peoples will be eroded even further, and we will continue to see repetitions of the Crusades of the Middle Ages.

The media needs to stop making it sound like 10 year old boys are trying to kill everybody, and be more accurate in their reporting. We are seeing the media manufacture consent over this issue, and it is killing innocent people every day. The same media which makes it sound like 10 year olds are going to bomb the Kölnerdom then turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's abuse of women, the genocide in Darfur, Apartheid, the chaos in Israel/Palestine, and actual real problems which create the animosity and hatred which destroyed the Twin Towers, Pentagon and almost destroyed the Capital Building. I believe they want liberalism to fail.

There is a better path than this. It isn't hard if you try.

Deutsche Welle

Schools Of Thought In Modern Politics: Part 3: Understanding the theoretical roots of economic policy

In my final post about different schools of thought and modern politics, a central question is how do we determine whether countries are more liberal or socialist in their policies while still maintaining the academic meaning of those words, which I have already defined by analyzing the views of the people who founded these schools of thought.

Before determining which school of thought dominates the country's economic policies, we first must construct a test to determine which school it most represents.

1. Does this country have price controls? How ubiquitous are they? (Price controls are a feature of mercantilism and socialism. Liberals oppose price controls.)
2. What percentage of manufacturing does your country control? (Control of manufacturing by the government is a feature of socialism. It can be a feature of mercantilism. Liberals favor private industry in competitive markets, but generally support intervention in monopolies.)
3. Does your government protect businesses from competition? (Mercantilists and Socialists oppose the free market. Liberals favor low barriers to entry to the market.)
4. Where do parties stand on interracial issues, if interracial issues exist in your country? (Liberals are concerned about ending such inequalities, Fascists are opposed to minorities, Socialists believe the real division is between classes)
5. How much influence does the average person have in government? (This determines how much corruption there is in government, Corruption Perceptions Index is a good metric)

Some questions are not defining features of any major school of thought and only controversial in sub-branches. The regulation of monopolies has been favored by most liberal economists since Adam Smith for example, and public education was a prominent feature of John Stuart Mill's extremely liberal writings, so I have omitted such issues. These four questions aim towards the root differences in today's world.

If we were then to analyze different country's policies, and more importantly the difference between different parties domestically and international, we can get a general idea of the ideological leanings of the major world players.

In the United States, each party is ambiguous about price controls. Democrats generally push for policies which will push prices down for the poor, but this is a completely separate and very liberal mechanism. Republicans do not support price controls, so this makes them look liberal. The second question also puts both parties as liberal. The third question however is where the picture gets more complicated. A number of politicians will support reforms like minimum wages, but minimum wages have disadvantages like other price controls, which is normally seen in a surplus of labor from our basic supply and demand graph. The other word for this surplus is unemployment. Another form of price controls we frequently see is in agriculture. The government keeps the supply of food low to keep the price high enough to support farmers profit yields. This is definitely not a neoliberal policy (who would generally support no price controls) and creates inefficiencies, while there are other issues with agriculture like food security that makes it a much more complicated issue.

When it comes to having a more open or closed market, this is similarly ambiguous.
In conclusion for the series. Today's politics has seen a  rapid reduction in true socialists who would call for the collectivization of production.

When it comes to racial inequality, we start to see some divergence between parties on ethnic questions. Democrats are far more likely to support human rights legislation than the Republican party, and most Republicans view such legislation which reaches out to minorities as being "bailouts" or other disparaging terms. Fascism still has some influence in terms of immigration policy in the US and Europe, and how different regions respond to issues like police shootings which have a massive racial component.

The other major issue today which we observe with the influence of the average person in government is widely apparent with far more Democrats supporting campaign finance reform than Republicans. This is one wedge issue which paints a difference in access to government between our two parties. This wedge pits politicians who support a government which works for all and is based in liberty against politicians who exist to serve their higher-ups and are corrupt. It definitely is not a guarantee that a member of either party will fit cleanly in the organization, but is a trend which makes them clearly different from each other to close observers.

This conflict between liberty and corruption is the true ideological conflict between parties in American and European politics today. The idea of access to the economy and government for all people is a fundamental distinction between the two major parties. There is still some role for fascist vs. liberal thought in modern politics as a significant driver, but this does not extend to the questions of campaign finance and how the government spends most of its money.

Schools Of Thought In Modern Politics: Part 1: Defining and understanding the modern schools

A question I have been wondering for a while now is how to defend liberalism in a logical way vs. the two other major modern schools of thought which are fascism and communism. the major schools I am going to analyze are liberalism. socialism/communism, fascism, and mercantilism because all four have substantial influence in modern politics.

First, definitions. I am trying to make these the most basic possible, and each of these schools are very diverse, but each idea has basic tenants in common which unite them, primarily the idea of who the primary actor of society is which is a fundamental assertion of all of these major schools of political thought and an easy way of discerning between competing branches.

Liberalism is going to be understood as being focused on the individual as the primary actor in history and is focused on expanding individual rights. Different liberals will interpret this differently (Mill's utilitarianism and Rawls' Justice as Fairness for example) but they all agree on those basic tenants. Liberal economics proposes a system which emphasizes individual liberty balanced with a role for the state (which almost all liberals from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes base it on to different levels). The solution to economic justice then is a system where people are able to trade freely (with some exceptions) and social justice where you cannot be restrained from doing actions which do not harm others. In this way almost all liberals focus on justice more than freedom. Most liberals also are not primarily opposed to government intervention. Liberals going back as far as Adam Smith advocated for government intervention in the maintenance of monopolies, and 70 years later Mill argued for public education and other public services which were become more important as capital grew in importance and the labor theory of value was insufficient to explain economic growth (as it mostly was during Smith's time). Liberalism is like a ninja (as one of my teachers likes to say) in that it has substantially evolved over time, but liberals continue to agree with who the primary actor of society is and generally that we should work with market forces and have a generally free market.

Marx is focused on economic classes as the primary drivers of history and history is seen by him as being a conflict between the bourgeois and proletariat. The bourgeois take advantage of the proletariat and the solution is for the proletariat to supplant the bourgeois and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxism must be understood as an evolution of the economy through various stages beyond the current form of capitalism.

1. The economy would be centrally controlled by this dictatorship of the proletariat. the example used by Joseph Weydemeyer is that of Oliver Cromwell in England (who as any Irishman knows was far from benign) and the French leadership which succeeded the French Revolution in 1791 (also known as the Reign of Terror). As a sidenote, next time you are constructing a school of thought, don't use the Reign of Terror as an example of what your theory will recreate, however briefly. The states where the proletariat take over the means of production then should expand their rule to spread the dictatorship of the proletariat to other nations.
2. As society progresses (according to Marxist thought) the dictatorship will then turn into a society where everyone is completely equal in their ownership of the means of production in what Marx called a socialist society. socialism is a society where the means of production are owned directly through the people jointly or indirectly through a government, where all decisions will ultimately be made by the workers.
3. As the socialism progresses all people will become equal and then the society will evolve into a communist society. This communist society is where everyone will have equal ownership over the means of production and there will be no government and no social classes. In the countries where the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established it has failed to progress to a completely communist society in all of the places which have attempted it. The transition will now be complete and everyone will be equal.

Fascists view races as the primary drivers of history and history is the struggle between ethnicities. The way to make peace is make your ethnic group the most superior of all which is the philosophical background to the classic fascist states of history. Race is a socially constructed phenomenon based on how power relates to people's heritage. A system where all ethnic groups are equal, such as Bavarians and Berliners are politically equal, would then be of the same race, while a system where Bavarians and Berliners are fighting between each other would have the Bavarian Race and Berliner Race. Race is in this way completely unnatural and a fully social construction. The way we see the history of the Irish in America for instance confirms this interpretation. Any time you hear a politician make an argument against an ethnic group or argue that people from different ethnic groups cannot cooperate their argument has its roots in fascism.

The fourth major school of Economic thought is that of Mercantilism. Mercantilists are all about protecting the businesses of the state from foreign and domestic competition, and believe that trade represents weakness because they argue it makes you vulnerable to invasion from the countries with which you trade. First of all, I must point out there is scant to no evidence the economy actually functions this way, and economists today almost unanimously agree that this is a way to reduce growth and increase inequality and it is really hard to get economists to agree on anything. I include Mercantilism on this list because it is the school of thought which impacts policies regarding agriculture, laws which prohibit imports in an attempt to boost domestic industry (see the protections against foreign auto manufacturers which were scrapped in the early 1990s) and rigorous multivariable research on the impacts of these policies almost universally agrees that these policies end up hurting the economy in the end. I really have nothing good to say about mercantilism, but it continues to pay an important role in economic policy around the world.

For me I am definitely a liberal. The best reason is what is when a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat or Fascist state is established the response then is the class or race which is supplanted to then supplant the new master race (literally meaning the race of masters) or upper class. They lack balance of power which leads to a concentration which breeds corruption. There is no solution ever in these and a constant cycle of one group fighting another. Turning a dictatorship into a democracy is a long and arduous process, and it has never been done overnight.

Liberalism on the other hand doesn't have such a problem. Since we live in a world where nobody is 100% from one continent or another according to DNA evidence there is no biological background to the concept of a race except one that includes all humanities, except as a purely social construction. We are all people, so fascism makes no sense. When it comes to Marxism we see the development of Marxist states such as the Soviet Union and China see only the creation of a new bourgeois class supplanting the old bourgeois class, while most people remain proletariat.  We have no example in history where a dictatorship has ever voluntarily given up its power. There is no solution in Marxism and the classes are not natural nor inevitable.

A truly liberal world would on the other hand recognize the humanity of all people and build a world where everyone has the same political rights as everyone else. More liberal states are closer to such an ideal than others and don't see a contradiction with an upper or lower class compared to Marxist or Fascist states. If someone were to create a society where people would be unequal, they would not be following the basic overarching concept that unites all liberals, and would stop being a liberal. For me this represents a strength of liberalism which the other schools fail to succeed in. Truly liberal states (such as Scandinavia, New Zealand, Post-WWII West Germany, Pre-Thatcher Britain) have had generally liberal economic policies and saw the largest decreases in income inequality the world has ever seen. Countries which tried the central planning approach failed to reach these levels of personal freedom and material well-being which are two major factors in determining quality of life.

The final defense of liberalism must be that the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher are not liberal. Liberal economics, if we are going to use the term as political theorists use it regards a market where firms can freely enter and exit, the government does not pick winners or losers, and everyone has a level playing field with equality of opportunity. this is what was written by Adam Smith, added onto by John Stuart Mill (who advocated for equality of education and other leveling factors) and then with John Maynard Keynes who of course advocated for government to be involved more heavily in recessions and less in times of expansion in countercyclical policy. All of these three major liberal thinkers agreed however that the government should generally be uninvolved in the day to day operation of the economy besides the basic necessities and natural monopolies, as opposed to the interventionist policies of Marxists and Mercantilists. the policies of Thatcher and Reagan (etc.) led to the reduction in private competition by favoring certain businesses over others, which is opposed to everything that the great liberal economic thinkers proposed. The policies they did which favored some businesses over others (tying into the idea of that the government should not pick winners and losers) led to a less competitive economy and is actually mercantilist, which is exactly the school of though which liberalism was founded in order to oppose. I take their actions more seriously than their words (as I do for every political leader) and given how this was their approach I must say they fit closer to the Mercantilist camp. Their policies to break public organizing is opposed to liberalism (especially the works of Mill) because it was the government intervening in the economy to regulate how workers can and cannot act to protect one class over another which was exactly the picking winners and losers liberals love to hate and mercantilists advocate.

So, in conclusion of this first installment in what has rapidly become a series of three articles, the modern Republican Party and other similar parties across the world is not a liberal party. Also, liberalism is the only major ideology in the world which does not contradict itself in major ways. Because of these reasons, we should base our economic policies on liberal ideas.

Liberalism and Racism

In response to: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/how-liberalism-and-racism-are-wed/?_r=0

The first thing is that the author is confusing liberalism as a philosophical concept of Locke, Mill, and Rawls with the reality of the United States' law enforcement system. The act of stereotyping people based on their color of their skin is not a liberal idea, and the act of the stereotyping that these groups do is not condoned but actually condemned in the writings of these great philosophers.

The call for equality and universal protection for all is an ideal, and is something that social activists (myself included) have pushed for for hundreds of years. The beauty of this ideology is that opposed to the major alternatives (particularly Marxism, and Realism in International Relations) it sees a possibility of a world where people can work together and cooperate as opposed to fight by becoming more dependent on one another so they want other people to do better.

In a classroom setting, let's take the two fundamentally opposed views. In the liberal view there will be different students working together in order to learn the material. If one student doesn't understand the material they will help their classmates with the concept so that everyone in the classroom can learn together and when one individual falls behind the rest of the class can lift that person back up to where the others are, and then if that individual moves ahead in an area they can then help their classmates again understand the concept so that their overall average knowledge will be better than the alternatives. This is the view proposed by Locke, Mill, and Rawls among other great liberals.

Marxism is the major alternative. Marxism, put very simply is the theory that history can be defined as the conflict between two different classes (when Marx was writing there was no middle class) stretching back to the beginning of agriculture. In the same classroom example we will see the students who pick concepts up easiest and understand the material better are the bourgeoise and the other students are the proletariat. Marx's diagnosis then is not for the bourgeoise to lift up the proletariat but for the proletariat to start a revolution and tear down the bourgeoise students, an example of which in the real world is the vicious bullying that can occur in classrooms at all ages.

In this way, local police departments that are acting are seen as not acting within the framework of liberalism but within the framework of Marxism which sees that there must always be conflict between the two classes! Liberalism and Marxism should be seen as ideals, and the systems which claim to be one or the other may have certain aspects in places but not others of these very large schools of thought.

Another common mistake that this individual in this article is making is reading everything that the authors say as being literal. I am working through Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan right now (I finished the first book and am slowly working through the second among all the other things I am working on and reading) as a hobby and at some point through the book the way he was talking about what he was saying I realized that it is not a literal work but actually sarcastic. The parts of The Prince I have read as part of some classes has made it clear to me as well that Macchiavelli was writing in a time where outright saying "Liberty for all mankind" as Locke would do 200 years later would have gotten him killed. But living under the de Medici family who allowed more expressive art than any other state in Europe at the time gave him the freedom he needed to write in a sarcastic manner saying everything that a tyrant would do that careful readers will realize through important snippets is an act in absurdity. Today with modern liberal philosophers starting with Thomas Paine and further expanding with John Stuart Mill we see these philosophers take these ideas which were manifesting under Locke and bring out the central premise of these three earlier philosopher and bring them to their natural conclusion.

One cannot read moral philosophy of this era as literal and must be careful to look for sarcasm and particular turns of phrase which are there to disguise their heretical work (for the era) from the intellectually and morally impoverished minds of the monarchs of the era but the true meaning of these texts are written to come out to intellectuals so their ideas can expand in those circles. This is the case until American Independence.

When it comes to John Locke's authorship of the Fundamentals of the Constitutions of Carolina were written in 1669 when he was 37 years old. He didn't start writing his great philosophical tracts until 1689, a full 20 years later. To me this shows that in 20 years he grew as a philosopher and seeing the contradictions between his earlier views and later views that he appears to have changed his mind. This can also be seen in his religious views which started in Calvinism when he was young but by the 1690s he was clearly a deist or Arian. Locke's life (as this author should know) did not live a stagnant life where he was born and by the age of 18 had all of his liberal views figured out and never changed, but evolved substantially over his adult life. Would John Locke have written that Constitution as it was with his major change of moral and religious opinions if it had been done in the 1690s? Given his complete turnaround of almost every issue I suspect he wouldn't have.
Was he racist as a 37 year old? Yes. Was he racist in his 60s? His writings heavily suggest that he grew out of it.

In short, I found this article to be extremely flawed in numerous aspects as I have outlined and doesn't have the type of philosophical underpinnings in the writings (with the one exception of a writing Locke wrote 20 years before he started his philosophical work) needed to condemn an entire school of thought. Reading later liberal philosophers, the most important of which she completely ignores shows that this is a very weak case and a misrepresentation of a major school of thought.

Beware the pigs

In the 1880s the British South Africa Company moved into what is modern day Zimbabwe and got a concession from the King for mining rights in the region in 1888. The British started to enslave Zimbabweans and established settlements of Englishmen. The natives no longer had any sovereignty and over the next 60 years until the 1950s they were in a feudal system. The colonial era saw the resources of the people of Africa be stolen by the colonial powers. This ended when the Africans grew tired of their colonial oppressors and formed independence movements to have more rights. In 1963 Rhodesia gained independence along with other African nations in that era, after which they were led by Ian Smith until 1979. Rhodesia was set up so there were separate voter rolls for people based on property (not indifferent from the United States when we were founded where you had to own land to vote) which effectively gave the landed white settlers most of the political power despite being a minority. In this era the government reserved a majority of seats in Parliament for whites and made it almost impossible for African political parties to get enough power to represent the majority. The way Rhodesia was set up was being decreed as racist by the rest of the world. (Source: Wikipedia) Of course, we can't blame Ian Smith completely because he was merely a figurehead of a massive governmental organization which was nominally democratic for those who had land, and was outspoken on supporting Mandela while the United States and Israel maintained good relations with the Apartheid regime, and he had started to work to try to bring majority rule to Rhodesia before 1979. It is easy to demonize him given that he was president of a country with minority rule (and while I started writing this article I found myself falling into the same trap given similarities between him and other African leaders who led for such long periods of time) but it is important to look at an individual with the context of his time and place and the power dynamics at play to diagnose the entire system as being racist and not blaming everything on the head of state when there is a congress or parliament with considerable power.

In 1979 however Mugabe came to power, under the guise of freeing Zimbabweans from their white oppressors. He promised progress and change, but his economic reforms quickly turned the country into one of the poorest and most backwards in the entire world. He has established a one-party rule where anyone who speaks against his regime is arrested or killed, frequently landing near the bottom of the rankings of all freedom indexes. He did not become as so many hoped a figure for freedom for all Africans and has frequently committed crimes against other tribes, and the white minority who are for the most part disenfranchised and have left Zimbabwe as refugees. He tries to portray himself as black empowerment and given how Africans have been abused for so many generations many see this as a good thing, but no one chooses the color of their skin and even though it isn't in the order we usually think of when it comes to racist regimes Mugabe is indeed a racist and continues to pursue policies which have made Zimbabwe a backwards state for all Zimbabweans, including targeting certain tribes of natives disspelling any notion of him being a freedom fighter for Africans.

This is in comparison to South Africa where after the truly brutal racist regime that lasted almost 50 years Nelson Mandela rose to lead South Africa to become the most economically advanced nation in Africa whose speed of economic development is close to that of China. He did this not by looking at it in terms of an us vs. them mentality but as a real liberal tried to bring all South Africans to a place where they could leave peacefully without creating a refugee crisis. They are now the freest nation in Africa for native Africans and all people compared to all other nations on the continent. The rights of people in nations in Africa where they didn't look for a multilateral liberty-based approach but instead a Marxist relativist approach where it is seen as a conflict between different classes (which were deeply aligned with people's ancestry being either European or African for the most part) have not improved since decolonization and their standard of living is the worst in the world.

When trying to advance rights for one group of people, be it Africans in Africa, women across the world, homosexuals, transsexuals, and other groups it is paramount to not turn it into an us vs. them mentality but attempt to make the value of all men being created equal a reality. A rising tide raises all boats.

Freedom in the world does not have a limited quantity and the amount of freedom in a society goes up and down over time. When one person gets the ability to speak freely this does not mean another person cannot publish their thoughts as much. My writing this blog without my government cracking down on me if I say something they do not like does not prevent another person from writing a blog of their own. This is how the world works and the great thinkers of liberalism, John Locke, America's founding fathers, and John Stuart Mill all understood this. When Europe passed the Schengen treaty the average amount of freedom in the world increased, but the amount of freedom that Americans had did not decrease because the border between Germany and Poland was opened. This is also of course what happened in Animal Farm by George Orwell who noticed this in the USSR and ended with one of the greatest quotes of modern literature, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." which is applicable in Zimbabwe.

When expanding the rights of one group we need to ensure that we don't also make it harder for one group to have what they deserve. When we continue to expand rights for African Americans across the United States so that those who live in poor communities (because not all African Americans are poor) have police services that respect them we need to deal with the problem directly by implementing laws that hold police accountable for their actions so that they keep their actions within the law which doesn't always happen which is a great shame on our entire nation. Decreasing the quality of police in majority-white areas will not make people in majority-African American areas more free, in fact I would expect it would have the opposite effect. We need to write laws that directly address the issue along with caveats which will inevitably occur so that we can have programs that work effectively.

If we don't we will end up being no better than Robert Mugabe who talked about a Zimbabwe where Africans would be free only to turn back on his progress and make it worse for all Zimbabweans. We must be true liberals and focus on the rights as the end goal and divorce ourselves from the notion of one group always being the oppressor and one group always being the oppressed, because roles can and at times have switched in brutal fashion. When we realize this we can have freedom.