Kraichgauer wrote:
There has never, ever been a time when every citizen in business has played fair or honest with everyone else.
Well, who said there was? That is why we have laws against fraud.
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Plus, all that talk of investing privately is often better said than done - some people are irresponsible (I probably more often than not fall into that category), but other people face financial calamity in their lives making it impossible, while others never are gainfully employed to the extent of saving significantly.
Then they can seek
voluntary charity. Are you so revolting, that nobody would
willingly help you?
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And labor laws and consumer protection is the work of big business lobbies to quash competition? I'm sorry, but in most cases, no.
Apology accepted. In most cases, yes. Remember the proposal, a while back, that all Internet retailers be made to pay the state and local taxes wherever a buyer lived? It would have killed off millions of little outfits which couldn't afford herds of tax lawyers and accountants, and it was billed as 'protecting the consumer.' You know who was behind it? Amazon. Cherchez l'argent.
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And even so, such laws still protect ordinary citizens.
I'm an ordinary citizen, and I'm capable of deciding for myself if I want to buy raw milk, or hire a freelance taxi online, or any of a million other things which Other People have taken upon themselves to decide for me.
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As for arming yourself against a threat that never comes - if you're addressing the threat of majorities tyrannizing over minorities, all I have to ask is... what? Surely you know about racist and homophobic lynch mobs, and discriminatory laws to put unpopular minorities in their place, which is underfoot.
Lynch mobs would be an initiation of force – which, unlike you, I consistently oppose. Fortunately there are ordinary laws against assault.
Seriously, suppose all laws against private racial discrimination were struck down. Do you really believe that there are millions of business owners large and small who are just itching to fire all of their minority employees and put up Whites Only signs? Why would they do this?
How would it profit them?Quote:
And really? You're trying to say that the Nazis were anywhere near being progressive?
Actually, I would say that the Nazis were
collectivist. Unfortunately the "progressive" movement also has a strong collectivist strain.
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It should be mentioned that the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party in 1920 was a far cry from the party by the time they had taken power. Originally, they were an unworkable coalition of the nationalist right, and the socialist left. The right won out. The last real struggle between these competing factions in the Nazi party occurred with the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler allowed the left wing of his party, led by Ernst Rohm of the Brown Shirts, to be purged by the right, led by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhardt Heydrich of the SS, on the trumped up charge that the Brown Shirts were plotting a coup against the Third Reich.
Yeah, I took a class on it. Obviously once in power they dropped the parts about nationalizing business, ending war profiteering, etc. But they enacted the rest of it. With which of the above articles do you disagree?
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But seriously, if you're going to give us a damning example of "progressive coercion," please use an American source, as no one in this country had ever wanted to emulate Hitler, save for the right prior to Pearl Harbor.
I really don't think you want to go there. Plenty of New Dealers admired what was going on in Europe. I found this in about thirty seconds:
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The dream of a planned society infected both right and left. Ernst Jünger, an influential right-wing militarist in Germany, reported his reaction to the Soviet Union: “I told myself: granted, they have no constitution, but they do have a plan. This may be an excellent thing.” As early as 1912, FDR himself praised the Prussian-German model: “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people,” he said in an address to the People’s Forum of Troy, New York.
American Progressives studied at German universities, Schivelbusch writes, and “came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles.” The pragmatist philosopher William James’ influential 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” stressed the importance of order, discipline, and planning.
Intellectuals worried about inequality, the poverty of the working class, and the commercial culture created by mass production. (They didn’t seem to notice the tension between the last complaint and the first two.) Liberalism seemed inadequate to deal with such problems. When economic crisis hit — in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression — the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived.
In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, “If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere.” She added that if she were younger, she’d like to lead “the Fascist Movement in the United States.” At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
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"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission – which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." – Ayn Rand
04 Aug 2015, 12:49 am
