How can anyone honestly oppose the American Judeo-Christian Capitalist model?

Let's get something straight right now, punk. You don't fly anywhere near the altitude of my intellect.

Cheap abuse?

You'll get nothin' but contempt from me and the back of my hand.

Do I have an argument?

What in the hell are you talking about?

I've already made my argument, my case, chapter and verse, backed by original scholarly works for which I have provided links.

When I said that I'd never heard of contrat social (by the way, Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), I was being sarcastic. LOL! I already listed the title of Rousseau's work in English.

My point flew right over your head, apparently, so let me spell it out to you and to those you think to deceive.

Locke's works on natural law and contract theory precedes Rousseau's banal tripe by almost one-hundred years, and the former most certainly is not contingent or akin to the predominately collectivistic political thought sported by the Continental Europeans of the Enlightenment.

The political thought of the Enlightenment was not monolithic.

Shut up!

The facts: http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-new-math-of-american-history-and.html

Your post is a barely coherent rash of strawmen, red herrings and non sequiturs—including ideas and claims attributed to me that I've never thought, never uttered, never wrote, you lunatic. Your insinuation, for example, that I don't understand that contract theory, i.e, the transition from the law of the jungle to the rule of law, necessarily entails the assimilation of the collective body politic and, therefore, the necessity to forsake absolute liberty, is ridiculous. There's nothing profound about that at all.

Your observation is mundane, trite.

Worse, you dizzy fool, you're arguing that collectivism = social contract.

Shut up!

And clearly I'm making a distinction that goes to the essence of the social contract agreed upon, not the fundamental, philosophically neutral imperatives and processes of assimilation, you nitwit.

But never mind. You're a liar, another two-bit-punk leftist blathering nonsense.

Go on pretending that the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism is not distinct from the collectivist claptrap of the likes of Rousseau . . . you imbecile, as if there weren't an obvious and dramatic difference between Rousseau's collectivist democratic theory and that of the early French, English and America proponents of laissez-faire; as if there weren't an obvious and dramatic difference between the emphasis of Locke and the Founders on negative rights (individualism) as opposed to the emphasis of that statist imbecile Rousseau on positive rights (collectivism); as if there weren't an obvious and dramatic difference between contemporary American conservatives and libertarians (classical liberals of the Lockean, Anglo-American tradition ) and leftist punks like you in American, Canada, Europe and elsewhere . . . as if there weren't an obvious and dramatic difference between A SOCIAL CONTRACT THAT HOLDS GOD TO BE THE SOURCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND ONE THAT HOLDS THE STATE TO BE THE SOURCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

Shut up!

The following trash requires special treatment:

Yes, he was a solid social contract man. They all were! But once again, you ninny, collectivism and contract theory's inherent imperatives of assimilation are not synonymous. The classical liberal and the collectivist are not synonymous. And moreover, you braying, Canadian jackass: Montesquieu, Locke and the Founders of the Republic of the United States of America, as opposed to the Noble Savages Rousseau and the Jacobins, did not stupidly or naively believe that human nature was anything but utterly corrupt and self-serving. Hence, their disdain for majoritarianism and collectivism. Hence, their emphasis on limited government, separated powers, checks and balances and the unbridgeable rights of individual liberty, free association and private property.

Once again, you revisionist, lying-ass whore, Locke extrapolated his rendition of the social contract from the socio-political and -economic ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's moral system of thought, a tradition of natural law that goes back to Augustine, not to any pagan or secularist or collectivist or statist. Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government, as anyone who has actually read them knows, are replete with scriptural arguments and citations.

Burke was a Lockean, and Locke most emphatically did assert the fundamental premise of classical liberalism: the corruption of human nature and the correlative principle of immorality and tyranny.

But more to the point, anyone with an IQ above that of gnat can readily reason from first principles and recognize from history that widespread immorality invariably gives way to governmental tyranny and atrocity.

Shut up!

Further, you Canadian know-nothing, however ill-advised, many of the Tea Party members are acolytes of Paine's political sentiments, as many of them are secular libertarians, unwittingly collectivist on social issues . . . just like Paine who stupidly embraced the French Jacobins and failed to anticipate the ultimate outcomes of much of his political thinking as driven by his sophomoric theological biases. American conservatives who know better don't embrace Paine beyond the contribution his Commonsense made to the cause of independence.

http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2012/10/objectivism-uninspired-religion-of.html

http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2012/10/abortion-on-demand-homosexual-marriage.html

Aside from that, make no mistake about it, pound-for-pound, the bulk of the membership of the Tea Party faithfully reflect the political theory of the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism. They are Lockeans, defenders of America’s founding ethos. They're true patriots after the heart of the Founders of the Republic and the Framers of the Constitution.

And you can have Paine. Just like most of the Founders, who came to revile him for a fool, I’ve got nothin' but contempt for him.

The authority of the works on my blog are self-evident.

You're just another leftist blowhard.
________________

As for the rest of your crap, the silliness that conservatives gave leftists the label they proudly embrace ("progressive"), the idiocy that conservatives reject political or technological progress, your feverish, incoherent blather about Baal, idolatry, Aquinas, the Magna Carta and the like, I have neither the time nor the inclination to address, let alone unravel, any of that stupidity.

BTW, you braying jackass, idolatry and polytheism are not necessarily synonymous, and we've known for decades from archeology that polytheism did not necessarily precede monotheism as once thought. That now falsified theory was predicated on the greater antiquity of polytheism's written traditions. But we now know what the Bible and biblical scholars have held all along: the oral traditions of nomadic monotheism actually precede the religious traditions of city-dwelling polytheists.

Like I said before . . . shut up.

 

You've really lost it haven't you? Reduced to swivel eyed raving and rabid abuse. Incredible. A lot of plagiarized nonsense littered with insults. Did you get off on that? An incredible loss of face. I'll leave you to wallow in your misery.

 

Dr. Sowell is one of my favorites... and it's a short list. Nice post. I have never been able to separate freedom from capitalism. And God or conscience is so crucial to freedom that without it as our governance we'd become nothing but a nation of psychopaths.

 

Precisely.

 

Plagiarized?! Plagiarized from whom, from what?

Name the work; show the passage.

What did you say: collectivism = social contract?!



Not with bang, but a whimper. . . .

Plagiarism is serious matter, a serious offense! Like I said before, you’re a fraud, a lunatic and a liar. Anyone reading you or taking you seriously is a damn fool.

 

Hey buddy you've overstepped the mark. Go and shout at someone else. If you did this in a bar you'd have no front teeth so you do it on the internet where you hide behind your keyboard. It's childish, cowardly and boring. I'm not interested.

You accused me of being a fraud and then poured on the insults. Regurgitating paragraph after paragraph of paraphrased and vulgarized philosophy does not an argument make. You have to engage with the other persons argument, and show interest in it, even when you polemicise against it, even if only to make fun of it or deride it.

Interpreting what I wrote as social contract = collectivism is a pathetic jibe. Of course it isn't accurate. But more, it isn't funny. It isn't clever. Is it suppose to be ironic? It's pathetic. It's as crude as shouting "shut up". The boorishness of your posts and your cynicism is all that comes across. You are engaged in a monologue and a tedious ranting one at that. I tried to engage with you, tried to describe where I thought you were coming from to find a touch point where we could debate, but all I get are ravings and abuse. I can only conclude that you prefer to yell abuse than conduct discussion. I don't know if that makes you a fraud or a troll. I'll leave those slurs for you to make. I don't care. I gave it a good go. Threw out a few invitations for an interesting discussion and it didn't work. I'll get over it.

After all, who can refute a sneer?

 

An interesting book to read is "On God's Side What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn't Learned About Serving the Common Good" by Jim Wallis. The Judeo-Christian Capitalist model has strayed too far from Mathew 25 and Christian concern for the "least of these".

The preference for a capitalist healthcare system with 25-30% overhead as opposed to a government healthcare system with a 2-3% overhead is bad economics. A processed food industry that promotes salt, sugar and fat to boost private profits at the expense of the nation's health is hardly beneficial. "American" companies that close factories in the U.S. to move jobs overseas to boost shareholder profits is hardly patriotic. Companies that pollute the public drinking water to gain a small illegal and unethical economic advantage is hardly Christlike.

The simple fact is that capitalist corporations make good servants but very bad masters. Capitalists need regulation to control their greed and protect the majority from their excesses. And when greed-motivated capitalists can purchase governments so as to receive special favors the free markets for us all suffer. Even Ayn Rand opposes corporate welfare and special treatment through political involvement.

 

Serious persons would benefit from a fine piece on the internet. Well worth reading.

"What is Fascism" by James Miller.

 

Some Roman aqueducts and roads are still in use today.

 

Adam Smith, the father of capitalist economics, continuoulsy warned against monopoly and collusion between capitalists. He was the first to explicitly articulate the view that capitalists working to accumulate more capital by exploiting labour for value, was the best way to drive innovation and development in society. He argued impressively that persons acting out of self love, in their self inetrest, would most efficiently benefit society and allocate scarce resources most effectively through an invisible hand. He argued that no government (and he referred not to socialist planning but the military control of mercantilism) could do this effectively.

But Smith warned over an over against cartels, believing that once capitalists stopped competing and started to act collectively, this was the greatest evil that could befall an economy. It is this question that concerns those who run liberal democracies. Smith knew that public goods, such as roads, and a system of law and order, had to be run by the State. Early Enlightenment thinkers (ie capitalists) always looked upon equality fio opportunity (as opposed to the socialist equality of outcome) as their political objectives and thus education in the nineteenth century became a "pubic good" for the benefit of society (and it is clear that universal literacy and the like is good for outr economy).

As society has modernized since the eighteenth century and we have seen public health through common water supplies, electricity provision and other public goods we see instances where free markets do not apply, much more than in Smith's day. Because the barriers to entry are too high these industries tend towards monoploy or a cartel of oligolopists. Thus it is entirely appropriate for liberal capitalists to find different forms of managing these industries and this tends to be by a combination of private enterprise and public regulation. This does not allocate resources or drive efficiency as much as a free market but given that a free market is unattanable, it is utterly superior to a de facto monopoly which would atrophy in much the same way that monopolies do in communist planned economies.

Even health comes into this equation. There is simply no evidence that health care is more efficient in an unregulated market than in a regulated one (like say France or Germany). Despite the drivel talked by American conservatives European socialized medicine - a system where competition does exist but within a regulated framework set by the State - innovates constantly. Just as the State (ie the people who elect the government) decides that it wants water, energy and edcuation to be public goods, it also determines that healthcare should be the same. Thus outcomes for medical treatments are to be democratized and not determined by the ability to pay. Strange things happen to the "self-love" driver identified by Smith. Some doctors behave altruistically and work for lower salaries in a State sector than a private one. Others - often the best in the world in their field - combine working in public health with a small amount of provate work, which enables them to get richer and serve the public good.

So Europeans tend to look for mixed models - selling clothes according to pure free market pirinciples, but regulating "public goods" more like health and education. As no system for public goods (ie pure supply and demand) works according to the Adam Smith rules, there is a constants earch for the right model. It is pretty clear to most people in the world that when it comes to healthcare you are much better off to be born European than American. Outcomes are better and the cost is significantly cheaper. But the most effective model is still being sought and debated over.

What is absurd, stupid, infantile and ultimately an act of hooliganism, is the description of this European ssytem as "socialism". "Socialism" is the ownership of the means of production by the State, the practice of economic planning in place of liberal markets where supply and demand operate, the abolition of both private property on any scale and non governmental organizations (like the ones that run the health systems in France and Germany). We Europeans know this becauise we have seen the devastation caused by socialism in Eastern Europe. We are not impressed by been nowhere, done nothing college kids screaming slogans on internet forums.

 

Reminds me of the old Clark Gable movie where he's in a drinking contest with 4 NKVD agents. "To Boris Valchenko, inventor of Vodka", then, "To..uh...Grigori Pidkin....inventor of the potato."

 

funny, coming from someone who soo clearly hates Jews.

 

It has to do with values. Since muzzies only hate, their is no mention of them.