Comments by "BlackFlagsNRoses" (@blackflagsnroses6013) on "Conservative Commentary Enters A New Era Of Stupid" video.
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@theaeronautical9203 Here’s my take. None of the historical figures of America lived up to the promise of a liberal democratic republic. The patriots that took arms were inspired by the radical liberal society envisaged in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. After the Revolutionary War there was a counter-revolution of Federalists. They sought to consolidate power from the “rabble” and wished to replace the original confederacy with a federal centralized system. This allowed the merchant, and banking elite to consolidate economic social status and privileges. The Southern elite, the slave owners were against the Northern capitalist elites being in control of the Fed government so they opposed. Now Jefferson was a controversial figure. He had a radical liberal streak in the mind, but due to his social status and financial interests he remained a status quo bearer of southern elitism. The ideals of Jeffersonian democracy however are influential to any libertarian and liberal. Among the founders was Thomas Paine, synonymous with radical liberalism and republicanism in his age as Marx is with communism post WW2. After being the most important figure of the revolution, in radicalizing the colonists, he was ostracized by the other founders for being “too radical.” The truth is his support of actual liberal democratic republics threatened the status quo and elite status of most of the founders. He died in relative obscurity after calling for the first social welfare programs in the country (including early SS, and a UBI); and in Agrarian Justice penned the justice and need for a fair land distribution and that so long as there was poverty and social classes true liberty evades society. His work was the root of later Henry George’s economics and LVT.
“When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government” - Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
That’s what a liberal republic needs to strive for. The ideals that never came to fruition in America or elsewhere because of Statists and ruling elite classes. Or in the immortal words of Langston Hughes: “Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed”
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@theaeronautical9203 I beg to differ. Trump’s tax cuts were standard corporate hegemonic, and those of lower classes weren’t permanent, wouldn’t even last a decade last time I checked. The Republicans and Democrats are not interested in a fair taxation. Democrats, I might get flack for this, and progressives believe alleviation comes through tax redistribution and strengthening the social welfare programs. Even as a libertarian socialist I have no problems with welfare today, as many people struggle under this system, though ultimately welfarism isn’t the solution I would advocate. It’s a band aid on the state capitalist system. The best taxes would be Georgist kind. Not only is LVT, and other such taxes on public utilities, economically sound they go along way in limiting the State, and distributing to the citizens. Even a neoliberal economist like Milton Friedman saw the economic genius of an LVT tax. As a socialist I don’t like the notion of involuntary taxes, but a taxation for the privatization of public resources is not only ethical, it is just. So long as we have a State, such taxes wouldn’t be crippling. I hate when workers get taxed their wages, incomes, salaries etc....
Capitalism is a statist system entrenched in the privileged and elite status of property owners. True radical free markets are of a socialist bend. Libertarian socialists support either market socialism, or libertarian communism, both coexisting in a libertarian society. In America there was a strain of libertarian market socialists, known as individualist anarchists, and free market anarchists. Since the 19th century they exposed capitalism for the tyranny it is, and advocated a libertarian enterprise system of market socialism. Free market socialism allows us a better critique of political economy, and to see what really goes on in the “free market” of capitalism. Welfare is minuscule compared to to robbery done by monopolies, and capitalists.
If your resentment is directed downward against the “underclass” and recipients of welfare-for-the-poor, it’s most definitely misdirected.
First, let’s look at the little picture, and consider the net effects of state policy on the actual recipients of welfare. Consider how state policies on behalf of land owners and real estate investors, like the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, drives up rents and closes off access to cheap living space. Consider how licensing schemes and “anti-jitney” laws, zoning laws against operating businesses out of one’s home or out of pushcarts, and regulations that impose needless capital outlays and entry barriers or overhead costs, close off opportunities for self-employment. And consider how zoning restrictions on mixed-use development and other government promotions of sprawl and the car culture increase the basic cost of subsistence. You think the money spent on welfare for the poor equals that drain on the resources of the underclass?
Next, look at the big picture. Consider the total rents extracted from society as a whole by the dominant economic classes: The inflation of land rent and mortgages by the above-mentioned absentee titles to unimproved land; the usurious interest rates resulting from legal tender laws and restraints on competition in the supply of credit; the enormous markups over actual production cost that result from copyrights, patents and trademarks; the oligopoly markup (once estimated by the Nader Group at around 20% of retail price in industries dominated by a handful of firms) in industries cartelized by government regulations and entry barriers …
Now consider, out of this vast ocean of rents extracted by state-connected parasites, the miniscule fraction that trickles back to the most destitute of the destitute, in the form of welfare and food stamps, in just barely large enough quantities to prevent homelessness and starvation from reaching high enough levels to destabilize the political system and threaten the ruling classes’ ability to extract rents from all of us. The state-allied landlords, capitalists and rentiers rob us all with a front-end loader, and then the state — THEIR state — uses a teaspoon to relieve those hardest hit.
Every time in history the state has provided a dole to the poorest of the poor — the distribution of free grain and oil to the proletariat of Rome, the Poor Laws in England, AFDC and TANF since the 1960s — it has occurred against a background of large-scale robbery of the poor by the rich. The Roman proletariat received a dole to prevent bloody revolt after the common lands of the Republic had been engrossed by the nobility and turned into slave-farms. The Poor Laws of England were passed after the landed classes enclosed much of the Open Fields for sheep pasture. The urban American blacks who received AFDC in the 1960s were southern sharecroppers, or their children, who had been tractored off their land (or land that should have been theirs, if they had received the land that was rightfully theirs after Emancipation) after WWII.
As Frances Fox Piven and Andrew Cloward argued in “Regulating the Poor,” the state — which is largely controlled by and mainly serves the interest of the propertied classes — only steps in to provide welfare to the poor when it’s necessary to prevent social destabilization. When it does so, it usually provides the bare minimum necessary. And in the process, it uses the power conferred by distributing the public assistance to enforce a maximum in social discipline on the recipients (as anyone who’s dealt with the humiliation of a human services office, or a visit from a case-worker, can testify).
So don’t resent the folks who get welfare and food stamps. Your real enemies — the ones the state really serves — are above, not below. Trump’s tax cuts and deregulations that only affect corporations were as much a give away to the corporate hegemony and capitalist class as was the abysmal “COVID relief package” concocted by Republicans and passed by Democrats. No surprise as both parties support the corporate hegemony, and are neoliberal capitalist.
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