The main thing that gets my goad in modern day progressive thought are several curious ideas that continue to fester, the fatal flaws of leftwing thought most pernicious. #1)The persistent hanging on to "The Labor Theory of Value" #2)Post Modern Jurisprudence #3)The Role of Government is to Compensate others at the expense of those deemed "greedy". These are the 3 fatal flaws of Progressive Thinking. These are the 3 fatal flaws that, because our President and his cronies in Congress insist on believing in and following, that our nation cannot climb out of the economic slump that it is in. Progressives claim that if the GOP would just get out of the way and let Obama and the Democrats "do their thing" then the nation could recover. That is patently false. The only thing keeping us from recovering is the adherence to the 3 fatal flaws of progressive thought by Obama and the Democrats and a willingness to trade economic expansion and growth to pander to pitchfork wielding peasants. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287704/obama-s-postmodern-vision-victor-davis-hanson?pg=2
I'll bite on this one. I would agree except for a slight change in the order of the words: An hour of working at Starbucks is not inherently less valuable to our society in terms of how much the worker should be paid than an hour crafting a deal at Goldman Sachs.
But that is a patently false statement. Anyone can pour a mocha. Not just anyone can craft a multi-billion dollar deal for Sachs. Labor has inherent value based upon the rarity of the skills necessary to do the job. It is called The Law of Labor Supply and Demand, it is a scientific law and Government cannot break it.
The fatal flaw of "progressive" thought is that the universe exists without an intelligent creator. In support of you, Silicon Magician, that is the flaw which culminates in the 3 flaws you mentioned. And many others also.
those aren't fatal flaws, those are lively things 1) labors are suppose to be counted by the amount of sweat one drips not by how much production the owner can make a profit from 2) politics is what make laws, laws aren't objective they are subjective to the will of the people there is no other way to view this 3) yes government must take wealth from the rich and powerful and give it to the poor and weak, most people in europe who are not lied by wealthy biased media do not succumb to their minority elite as much as americans do
I don't know a whole lot of people (progressive or otherwise) who view working at Starbucks as being equally worth the value of working at a banking firm. The closest thing I have heard argued is that the Starbucks worker is at least doing something that has immediate value rather than the speculative activities of investment banking. When it comes to more complicated financial instruments, a lot of banking is just moving numbers around rather than actually doing something of value. Under our current banking system, banks essentially create wealth out of thin air, since our currency has no real material basis for its worth and since fractional reserve banking isn't restricted to using funds that exist beforehand. And then when you figure in how the Fed Reserve works, these same banks can just get the government to print more and more money without any real limit, thereby devaluing currency. Overall, the guy making deals for Goldman Sachs actually hurts the economy more than he helps it. At least the Starbucks guy isn't dicking over the economy. I wouldn't consider this concept to be postmodern at all. If anything, the elites always run the system. Our elites just happen to be predominantly male and white. Their race and gender doesn't have any real significance in the matter, but their money does. Every system has its rich and poor, and laws have favored the wealthy ever since Hammurabi's time. That's not postmodern -- that's as old as humanity itself. Distrust for law is connected to distrust of government in general -- something I figure anyone in favor of smaller government can at least halfway appreciate. I can sort of agree with this complaint. Soaking the rich with taxation isn't going to fix things. However, we definitely should close up the various loopholes in our tax system. The only time it made sense to suggest that government should have control over wages involved TARP. When Democrats demanded wage controls on executives, it shouldn't have been surprising, because we had just thrown a lot of public money at these banks. You don't bail someone out without strings attached. That's just stupid. Then again, it was also stupid to bail them out in the first place. Of course, it's patently false. It's false because Obama and Romney play for the same team -- Wall Street. Neither party really has the solution.
This one is especially poisonous because it runs completely contrary to everything this country was founded upon. People that believe this way really need to just move somewhere else because they clearly do not like the American system. And selfishly trying to transform it into their personal utopian fantasy does nothing but (*)(*)(*)(*) off the rest of us. If you do not believe in the idea that the sky is the limit, you do not belong in America. Period.
