Comments by "Itinerant Patriot" (@itinerantpatriot1196) on "Liberty Vault"
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I am very much for civil liberty and limiting the role government plays in our individual lives. It's why I cautioned my friends who were cheering when that abomination called the patriot act was passed. I tried to warn em, it ain't no fun when the rabbit has the gun so be careful what you wish for Dorothy. As John Adams said, liberty lost is gone forever. Once the government starts limiting or outright taking away basic civil liberties they tend to hang on to to the power they have seized.
So that is where I stand on civil rights. My main problem with libertarians, and I have several, is they tend to be secular by default which results in them not really having a core set of principles based on a transcendent morality. Take a guy like dennis prager. I listened to him for a time but his "libertarian sensibilities" left me shaking my head. Like the time he was interviewing a guy who was on the front-line of fighting human trafficking and prager wanted him to draw a distinction between human traffickers and hard-working pimps just trying to make a buck. As I mentioned, he based that on his "libertarian sensibilities." Just like his stance on pornography and a number of issues he sees as victimless crimes. Another example is john stossel who did an expose on the homeless problem in San Francisco and how the crime spree that was a direct result of it was killing residential and business districts. At the end he made sure to include the disclaimer that while junkies leaving needles lying around, holding people up in broad daylight, relieving themselves where they choose, and stealing so much that businesses are shutting down is a problem, we still had to balance that with the junkies right to shoot up where he wished. More libertarian sensibilities at work. And their candidate for president this year? Chase Oliver, a guy who describes himself as "angry and gay."
Okay, fair enough. If all of that is your thing, by all means, have at it. But that is the libertarian party circa 2024 and it will continue to get more fringe as the world gets more crazy because when you adopt a utilitarian "live and let live" attitude in world where the guardrails are being removed at an alarming rate and you're dealing with people who have no intention of letting you "live and let live" well, you do the math. That kind of thinking works fine in a world where everyone is sane and rational and they respect the rights of their neighbor. Unfortunately, that world has never existed, and the idea that if you just made it all legal somehow people would be pacified...well, if you buy that I've got some lakefront property to sell you. It's 10-feet offshore but hey, the view is spectacular.
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@MoonshineH Well okay, the dialectic, dialectic historicism to be more precise, a concept he ripped off from Hagel and then, in Marx's own words; "turned it on its head." And socialism isn't the end of history according to Marx, communism is.
Now, getting back to my original post, communism fails because it's based on the social compact as Rousseau framed it, where man doesn't have a fallen nature and if left to his own devices would have been just fine. It was society and its corrupting influences, including religion which both Rosseau and Marx had a major axe to grind with, that messed him up. In order for a proper course correction, Rousseau argues for the general will to prevail. Marx goes a step further and argues that eventually communism will prevail, that capitalism will fall under its own weight because it is at odds with the general will. The problem of course is, when you make a case like that you have to provide evidence and Marx used notions like the super-structure and the labor theory of value which are based on nothing more than Marx's thoughts.
And what about the ultimate revolution? The rising up of the working class? Workers of the world unite and all that horesh*t? Why did the world-wide revolution not materialize? That's easy. The proletariat decided they wanted to work within the capitalist system instead of tearing it down because it had the best track record for upward mobility. Put more simply, since people are self-interested by nature, not collective-minded, they chose option A, the thesis over the antithesis put forward by Marx and Engel. Marx understood that reality deep down which is why he argued for the need of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, Stalin, and Moa agreed in the authoritarian approach and went one step further, deciding that those peasants and the damn middle class bourgeoisie who just weren't getting on board needed to be properly motivated. So what so you end up with? Re-education camps to adjust their thinking and mass graves for those who won't take the reprogramming no matter how many lashes you gave em. For Marx it would be necessary to overcome the corrupting influence of the super structure. For Locke, you would have to force that kind of thinking on people because they're just not wired for it.
And because you have to force people into it, communism will never be achieved. So much for the Marxist inevitability of history. Socialism fails because of its centralized nature and the tendency for people like the halfwit professors who spout that crap in the classrooms to be put in charge of the means of production. It's a bit like going to the janitor for open heart surgery.
I could go on, but I'll stop there. Marxism can't be boiled down to fortune-cookie wisdom and simple slogans. That much I know. I've read Marx. I just reject him because, well he's wrong. You really should expand on your thoughts a bit more. Maybe not as much I have here, but simply stating a definition isn't exactly defending a position. If you are going to come at someone and say they don't understand something, a well-reasoned argument comes in handy. Just sayin.
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