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.

The Return of Mercantilism

The Electronic Freedom Foundation posted about the real reason that the United States and European Union are pushing for a Free Trade Agreement, and it has nothing to do with freedom, but about copyright control.

Copyright today is out of control. Copyright was originally supposed to create a gain for the artist or inventor that invented the product for 25 years, to encourage creativity by making it profitable for those with ideas to work on them, making society better. When an artist makes something, he/she needs to eat as well, and that means that he/she needs to get paid. Copyright was the mechanism that made sure this happened, by giving the artist exclusive rights to his/her work.

Unfortunately, since 1976 copyright has lasted the entire length of the artist's (by artist I don't just mean paintings, but all forms of art, music, film, books, paintings etc.) life and then an arbitrary amount of time after that, or a set length of time, whichever is longer (typically). Copyright is not owned by the artist, but instead is owned by the corporation that will live forever owning that piece of art that can be a significant part of a culture (like Mickey Mouse or Rhapsody in Blue). I am in favor of copyright, lasting the life of the artist and no longer, but the way copyright is done today does not encourage art, it discourages it by giving exclusive rights to spin-offs to a faceless corporation that doesn't have any real allegiance to any country or anyone (since it can be sold and last forever).

The current trade agreement with the European Union is not about free trade, it is about unfree trade in that it is to restrict the creativity and ingenuity of people at the expense of marginally higher profits for ancient corporations. It won't have a significant effect anyways because people will continue to pirate and get away with it.

I support true free trade, which would meant the free movement of goods and ideas, with reasonable LIMITED protections on pieces of art and technology that will allow future artists and inventors to expand on such important parts of culture. Unfortunately greed and shortsightedness has taken over the minds of our leaders that does not encourage competition, ingenuity, or any other truly capitalist principal.

Let me say it:
I am a capitalist.

I am in favor of a free market that allows the free exchange of ideas and goods across a large area within a reasonable level of safety where people can get what they want and work freely. I am in favor of people being allowed to organize into unions to bargain with their employers, instead of everyone bargaining on their own because unions are the only way to have close to equal ground, which is to have a position of power, and higher wages increase productivity by raising the demand curve for goods and services which improves the state of the larger economy. Capitalism is when there is a civil right to set up a legal business to improve the founders' lives and offer a better service at a better price, and there is a right to fail as well as succeed regardless of size, because new businesses will fill the void of old unstable companies if they fail. The right to fail is a very important part of long-term and short term efficiency. If there is no risk to fail there is no incentive to stay stable. I am in favor of short-term copyrights so that there are real incentives to people inventing and creating, but limited so that other people can build off of their ideas once their potential fortunes have been built. I am opposed to people using regulations to increase their personal gain at the expense of all others because it hurts all other people, and hurts the overall economy's efficiency. Capitalism is when opportunity to succeed is offered, and people have the opportunity to take it if they choose to.

Mercantilism is a wholly different system. Mercanitislim is a restricted market where the transfer of ideas and goods are regulated past the point of reason that increases prices and creates inefficient monopolies. Mercantilism is when people cannot move normal goods across borders, creating radically different prices in different nations before taxes, a hallmark of Mercantilist inefficiency (compare the cost of living in Austria and Germany despite free movement of people and goods between those countries, free trade in Europe clearly isn't so free). Mercantilism is where people cannot organize and people cannot get a living wage which decreases the demand curve in the interest of short term profits which makes the economy inefficient and makes an imbalanced society, and any physicist will tell you that when there is imbalance in a system (density, pressure, etc.) it will balance itself eventually or at least try to. Economics is the same, and this system hurts long-term profits for everyone (see the modern Tsar of Russia... oh wait). Mercantilism is when setting up a business to compete is difficult to impossible for the average person which pushes prices up, wages down, and creativity down. Mercantilism is when established companies that bribe politicians will have the government bail them out. Mercantilism is when a corporation owns aspects of culture that are close to or over 100 years old, meaning those corporations make billions and don't need to create anything for decades. (which at the current rate American copyright will be 100 years in 2023 when the next extension bill comes up) Mercantilism is when there are regulations that benefit the minority at the expense of the majority.

Too make it clear, Communism is simply where everything is owned by the government and the people have no direct way to change the government. Freedom is non-existant, and it is one of the worst systems.

Out of these three major schools of thought, the economy of the United States today is not and has not been truly capitalist since 1976 at the latest, and one can see it in our efficiency and distribution of wealth.