The Two-Minute Capitalist

[RedScare]

http://twominutecapitalist.com/menu.html


Most of it easily picked apart, although I'm far too lazy to bother on the internet. I thought you guys might get a quick chuckle out of how badly-constructed and simplistic the arguments are.

[IcarusAngel]

Seems like straight forward Free-Market propaganda. The left needs to work on getting straight-forward, leftist info out there, that explains why capitalism is exploitative, why capitalist economics is a failure, why capitalism allows the government to exploit us and why Libertarian rhetoric offers the working class false dichotomies and choices.

[Axle]

"Lesson #1: Taxing the Rich Hurts the Poor."

So I think to myself...this sounds really stupid, but let's see what they've got to say.

"Taxing the rich almost never hurts the rich. It always hurts the people trying to get rich."

And then I decided to stop reading.

[Drace]

LOL
Once I read this shit I looked back to see if the person who posted it was a restricted member.
I felt bad that any socialist would argue like this.


Poor? Americans? But we have cell phones and plasma t.v.'s, and we get fatter every year. But we don't
have something that our parents and grandparents had: time with our families. Over 40% of our income goes
to funding the direct and hidden costs of government that have metastasized over the last 2 generations. That
means that both spouses must work full time: one spouse to pay for 4 million federal employees and
annuitants, for Grandma's social security and Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, Disability, Unemployment, pet
projects, and capitalizing interest on all of it. Many of these things sound honorable, but we were able to care
for each other on one income before government got involved. What? lol

[Havet]

"Socialism is Anti-Social"

:lol:

[Drace]

"Socialism is Anti-Social"

:lol:

The funniest thing about capitalist arguments are their inconsistencies.
For one point socialism can't work because people are supposedly not social beings and yet at another they socialism isn't even social.

They will call communists "Bloody Red scums" and yet "Pinkie hippie commies"

[Havet]

The funniest thing about capitalist arguments are their inconsistencies.
For one point socialism can't work because people are supposedly not social beings and yet at another they socialism isn't even social.

They will call communists "Bloody Red scums" and yet "Pinkie hippie commies"

Exactly.

Yet they ignore that human beings ARE social beings (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all).

The whole problem with their arguments, IMO, is that they conflate the outcome of previous "communist" revolutions with stateless socialism.

[Bankotsu]

Now I will put on the board something with which former students are familiar. I always call it the levels of culture, the aspects of a society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual.

Those are your basic human needs. The interesting thing about them is that they are arranged in evolutionary sequence. Millions of years ago, even before men became human, they had a need for defense of the group, because it is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups.

They can satisfy their needs only by cooperating within a group. But I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment: Men will not become men unless they grow up in communities. We will come back to that because it is the basis of my lecture tonight.

If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders; that's military. Before men came out of the trees they had that need. If your needs are to be satisfied within some kind of group, you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments, and reconciling individual problems within the group; that's political. You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs, food, clothing, shelter: that's economic.

Then came two which have been largely been destroyed or frustrated in the last thousand years of Western Civilization. Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved. They have a need to be noticed. Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because no one had ever noticed him and he was determined that, from now on, someone would know he existed.

In fact, most of these "motiveless" assassinations are of this type. Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas tower and shot something like seventeen people before they caught him. That was because no one had ever noticed him. People need other people. That's the social need. The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.

The next is emotional need. Men must have emotional experiences. This is obtained in two ways that I can see: moment to moment relationships with other people and moment to moment relationships with nature. Our society has so cluttered up our lives with artifacts -- TV sets or automobiles or whatever -- and organizational structures that moment to moment relationships with nature are almost impossible. Most people don't even know what the weather outside is like.

Someone said recently that until September we had a great drought here in Washington, and four or five people standing there said, "That's ridiculous." We had a shortage of about eight inches of rain. Because people now are in buildings, it doesn't matter to them whether it's raining or not.


The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and, with humility, they will admit they do not understand. When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.

Then, on the intellectual level: people have intellectual needs. I used to tell students that Marilyn Monroe had profound intellectual needs. And when no one would treat her as an intellect or even as a potential intellect, for obvious reasons, she was starved for intellectual experience. That's why she married a man like Arthur Miller: she thought he was an intellectual. All right, those are human needs.

Power is the ability to satisfy those needs. And someone who says that power is organized force, or that power is the outcome of an election, or that power is the ability to cut off our oil supply, has a completely inadequate way of looking at it.

My experience and study of the destruction of civilizations and of the collapse of great empires has convinced me that empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels. The Roman army never met an army that was better than it was. But the Roman army could not be sustained when all these things had collapsed and no one cared. No one wanted to serve, no one wanted to pay taxes, no one cared.

The other part of this will require you to put these things together to some extent. Persons, personalities if you wish, can be made only in communities. A community is made up of intimate relationships among diverse types of individuals -- a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized.

He may grow up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life.

In our society today, we have attempted to throw the whole burden of socializing our population upon the school system, to which the individual arrives only at the age of four or five. A few years ago they had big programs to take children to school for a few hours at age two and three and four, but that will not socialize them.

The first two years are very important. The way a child is treated in the first two days is of vital importance. He has to be loved, above all he has to be talked to. A state of individuals, such as we have now reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires which do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm (http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm)

[Drace]

The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and, with humility, they will admit they do not understand. When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.

I skimmed through that and this made me laugh.

Just what makes it a fact that human beings need religion?
And historically religion has been becoming less and less of an importance in daily life.

[Robert]

they conflate the outcome of previous "communist" revolutions with stateless socialism.

Uh, no. They are, we are, merely dubious of naive claims that socialism can arise without a coercive authority of some sort, i.e., a state.

[Plagueround]

I skimmed through that and this made me laugh.

Just what makes it a fact that human beings need religion?
And historically religion has been becoming less and less of an importance in daily life.


After reading Julian Jaynes, I tend to agree that current humans are somewhat stuck in their ability to express things outside of metaphors and expressions originally founded in religion (or the original bicameral consciousness if you believe Jayne's theory 100%), and do have a tendency to found "religion" in their mind, no matter how "secular or scientific" it may appear. We are learning I think, but I don't think most people are there yet. I will honestly say I think most Marxists fall into this category, as do almost all of the "free-market" types I've ever encountered, especially the Randroids and Miseans.

[Bankotsu]

To us today, who shove religion off into a corner and insist that it must have nothing to do with politics or business or many other things, it may be hard to grasp that one of the most potent things in establishing the structure of the state in any civilization has always been men's ideas of the nature of deity. I will not take time to give you my paradigm for that; I'll simply point out to you something which should be obvious.

The deity -- God -- has many different attributes. He is creator; he is masculine; he is transcendental, that is, he is outside of the world of space and time -- that was established by 500 B.C. Eventually, he is one; that is what Muhammad insisted on. And then he is omnipotent, all-powerful. I stop at this point; Providential Empires never got further than this.

The next development in our ideas of deity in Western Civilization was that God is good. That was established by the prophets of the desert by the fifth century B.C. Then came the Christian message, God is love, and by the year 1250 A.D., the scholastic inference that God is pure reason. If God is good, he cannot do everything; he can only do things that are good. And if he can do only good, and cannot do evil, then there is something higher than God: the rules of ethics. Thus the great contribution, even before Christ, to the Western idea of deity, was the idea of Transcendental Ethical Monotheism...

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Communities-AD-976-1576.htm


When I speak of Western ideology I refer specifically to religion - - Christianity - - to such things as the scientific outlook; and to a third thing, which I will call the liberal outlook.

It may not be clear to you as I speak, because in all of this I am oversimplifying most drastically; I hope you will understand that.

But it would seem to me that there is a common element to all three of these--the Christian outlook, the scientific outlook, and the liberal outlook--and to sum it up, rather briefly the outlook is this:

All three believe that there is a truth somewhere. They all believe that it is worthwhile seeking that truth. They all believe that the process by which we seek that truth is a process in which we approach it in time; that is, truth is something which unfolds in time. Therefore we must constantly work and strive and discuss in order to get closer and closer and closer to the truth, which we perhaps never reach. This is why scientists don't stop work today in the smug idea that they have the truth; but they have to go on struggling, because what they have today is simply an approximation of the truth.

Another characteristic of all three of these is that the unfolding of truth in time results from a cooperative effort. That is, it's a social effort. It arises from discussion, criticism, and so forth; and from that emerges a kind of consensus, which is closer to the truth than would be the point of view of any single individual. So thus we have that there is a truth. This is not a skeptical outlook. It is not a dogmatic outlook because nobody now has the truth. It puts great emphasis on chronological development. It puts great emphasis upon social cooperation. Some of this may not seem convincing to you, and I imagine that the field in which it will not seem convincing is perhaps the field of religion. But the Christian religion basically does have this outlook.

It believes that religious truth has been unfolded in time. That is, we had a whole series of revelations and prophets. We have the Old Testament, that was not replaced but supplemented by the New Testament, and the New Testament has been interpreted and unfolded in the course of time to reveal additional truth. And the process of religious appreciation still goes on. Am I right?

Now, one other thing that I should emphasize about the Western ideology and particularly the Christian ideology is this: It is not a dualistic ideology...

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/compartive_national_cultures_part1.htm


The history of ideas in Western civilization cannot be understood by anyone who is not familiar with Western religion, and the Catholic version of it, from the inside.

Yet all the widely read "authorities" on this subject are non-Catholic, generally non-Christian, and often anti-Catholic. As a result, they cannot understand what has happened or even organize the subject (except on a biographical basis).

The history of these subjects has been distorted for years by anti-Catholic bias, but the task of straightening out these errors has been left to places like Harvard, instead of being done, as could have been more easily done, by Catholic campuses.

Fifty years ago, the Protestant version of the rise of modern science as a reaction against medieval obscurantism was being corrected by a remarkable group of Catholic historians of science like Duhem and Tannery.

Their work was never finished, because it was abandoned by Catholic scholars, until it had to be taken up by non-Catholics like Marshal Clagett, who had been trained at Harvard by George Sarton.

The whole Whig interpretation of British history has to be re-written along lines which were sketched out, in a very unscholarly way, by Catholics like Christopher Hollis...

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Is-Georgetown-University-Comitting-Suicide.htm



The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and of religion by ideologies and by science.

It is hardly possible to discuss the problems of the historical past without running up against Marxist interpretations. I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened, and this, to me, is a fatal defect.

The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken.

Science is a method for investigating experience, and religion is something quite different. Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values....

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm (http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm)


The third aspect of the social level to which we might turn our attention is concerned with changes in social classes.

Each of the stages in the development of economic organization was accompanied by the rise to prominence of a new social class. The medieval system had provided the feudal nobility based on the manorial agrarian system.

The growth of commercial capitalism (in two stages) gave a new class of commercial bourgeoisie.

The growth of industrial capitalism gave rise to two new classes, the industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial workers (or proletariat, as they were sometimes called in Europe).

The development of financial and monopoly capitalism provided a new group of managerial technicians.

The distinction between industrial bourgeoisie and managers essentially rests on the fact that the former control industry and possess power because they are owners, while managers control industry (and also government or labor unions or public opinion) because they are skilled or trained in certain techniques.

As we shall see later, the shift from one to the other was associated with a separation of control from ownership in economic life.

The shift was also associated with what we might call a change from a two-class society to a middle-class society. Under industrial capitalism and the early part of financial capitalism, society began to develop into a polarized two-class society in which an entrenched bourgeoisie stood opposed to a mass proletariat.

It was on the basis of this development that Karl Marx, about 1850, formed his ideas of an inevitable class struggle in which the group of owners would become fewer and fewer and richer and richer while the mass of workers became poorer and poorer but more and more numerous, until finally the mass would rise up and take ownership and control from the privileged minority.

By 1900 social developments took a direction so different from that expected by Marx that his analysis became almost worthless, and his system had to be imposed by force in a most backward industrial country (Russia) instead of occurring inevitably in the most advanced industrial country as he had expected.

The social developments which made Marx's theories obsolete were the result of technological and economic developments which Marx had not foreseen.

The energy for production was derived more and more from inanimate sources of power and less and less from human labor.

As a result, mass production required less labor. But mass production required mass consumption so that the products of the new technology had to be distributed to the working groups as well as to others so that rising standards of living for the masses made the proletariat fewer and fewer and richer and richer.

At the same time, the need for managerial and white-collar workers of the middle levels of the economic system raised the proletariat into the middle class in large numbers.

The spread of the corporate form of industrial enterprise allowed control to be separated from ownership and allowed the latter to be dispersed over a much wider group, so that, in effect, owners became more and more numerous and poorer and poorer.

And, finally, control shifted from owners to managers. The result was that the polarized two-class society envisaged by Marx was, after 1900, increasingly replaced by a mass middle-class society, with fewer poor and, if not fewer rich, at least a more numerous group of rich who were relatively less rich than in an earlier period.

This process of leveling up the poor and leveling down the rich originated in economic forces but was speeded up and extended by governmental policies in regard to taxation and social welfare, especially after 1945.

http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/02.html#6

[Demogorgon]

After reading Julian Jaynes, I tend to agree that current humans are somewhat stuck in their ability to express things outside of metaphors and expressions originally founded in religion (or the original bicameral consciousness if you believe Jayne's theory 100%), and do have a tendency to found "religion" in their mind, no matter how "secular or scientific" it may appear. We are learning I think, but I don't think most people are there yet. I will honestly say I think most Marxists fall into this category, as do almost all of the "free-market" types I've ever encountered, especially the Randroids and Miseans.
Yeah I have remarked on this on several occasions. Miseans who are often atheists and Randroids who are almost always non believers likewise turn their views into a kind of religion. You can see it clearly in both when they elevate their theories above the real world (see Olaf claiming only yesterday that empirical evidence can mean anything and you need a theory to prove anything) and particularly with the Randroids, many of whom have their deity (Rand), the apostate from heaven (Nathaniel Branden) and so on. Many, including those with very similar views, have remarked that Objectivism is a cult in essentially all respects.

Of course we should be careful to cast stones ourselves. Marxism should be entirely rational and not caught up in that kind of rubbish, but there are plenty of people who do quite the opposite. Including many here, I might add, who are obviously using it as a surrogate religion.

[Bankotsu]

Yeah I have remarked on this on several occasions. Miseans who are often atheists and Randroids who are almost always non believers likewise turn their views into a kind of religion.

particularly with the Randroids, many of whom have their deity (Rand), the apostate from heaven (Nathaniel Branden) and so on. Many, including those with very similar views, have remarked that Objectivism is a cult in essentially all respects.



The next is the religious.

It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion.

But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs.

They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and, with humility, they will admit they do not understand.

When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism.

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm (http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm)

[Skooma Addict]

Yeah I have remarked on this on several occasions. Miseans who are often atheists and Randroids who are almost always non believers likewise turn their views into a kind of religion. You can see it clearly in both when they elevate their theories above the real world (see Olaf claiming only yesterday that empirical evidence can mean anything and you need a theory to prove anything) and particularly with the Randroids, many of whom have their deity (Rand), the apostate from heaven (Nathaniel Branden) and so on. Many, including those with very similar views, have remarked that Objectivism is a cult in essentially all respects.

Of course we should be careful to cast stones ourselves. Marxism should be entirely rational and not caught up in that kind of rubbish, but there are plenty of people who do quite the opposite. Including many here, I might add, who are obviously using it as a surrogate religion.

Its funny that Communists of all people would be criticizing others of turning their views into a kind of a religion. Maybe you will have a point when Misesians start doing stuff like this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzXEXjZ5sYg

Also, my claim was that you need a theory to make sense of empirical observations. You attempting to brand me as someone who turns their views into a religion is pathetic.

[IcarusAngel]

Libertarians remind me of the "party" in 1984: revising history (such as releasing copies of WoN with his criticisms of the division of labor and of the rich taken out), stating opinion as fact with no evidence, absolutism, simple-minded nonsense, pathological science.

They are basically people who are ignorant. The left has actually done a good job not falling into dogmatism. The problem with the left is that they generally have too many internal disputes over the most abstract nonsense imaginable that has no real effect on any kind of reforms happening now.

[Bankotsu]

After reading Julian Jaynes, I tend to agree that current humans are somewhat stuck in their ability to express things outside of metaphors and expressions originally founded in religion

For anyone interested in Julian Jaynes' fanstastic bicamerial mind theory, another less fanstastic interpretation of his findings can be found here:



"Background on Rites That Now Surround Us"

It is now becoming clear that the great change, even reversal, in the history of our traditions occurred about 500 B.C. when Greek two-valued logic and ethical monotheism appeared, inaugurating a revolutionary break in the development of our traditions and creating a gap which has made it increasingly difficult for us, on this side of the gap, to comprehend the actions, symbols, explanations, and values of our cultural ancestors on the earlier side of that gap.

http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/Background-on-Rites-That-Now-Surround-Us.htm (http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/Background-on-Rites-That-Now-Surround-Us.htm)




In his 1976 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes proposed that human brains existed in a bicameral state until as recently as 3000 years ago. Jaynes builds a case for this hypothesis by citing evidence from many diverse sources including historical literature. He took an interdisciplinary approach, drawing data from many different fields.

Jaynes asserts that until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, Jaynes argued that the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external "gods"—the commands which were so often recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts; these commands were however emanating from individuals' own minds.

This is exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology which "sang" the poems: Jaynes argues that while later interpretations see the muses as a simple personification of creative inspiration, the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org (http://www.julianjaynes.org/)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29)