Who is your favorite political thinker?

Today's western economic system's are capitalist with a socialist controlling mechanism.

Monopoly laws, taxes, regulations, etc. To curb unfettered capitalism with the goal of maximizing profits and minimizing costs(labor is a cost).
Which is why the south preferred slavery. Lowest cost of labor there is.

 

Joe Biden, he makes me laugh alot..

 

Whether they are divorced or not they should be held financially responsible for their children.

 

If we distinguish between employers and employees we still get two classes whose interests often diverge.

 

Today everyone can voluntarily decide whether they want to be employee or self-employed. This was not so easy during Marx's lifetime.

 

Plato. His concept of a republic makes perfect sense. It has never been tried.

 

Marx wanted everyone in the enterprise to be an owner and worker and for everyone to have similar income. In practice, however, it didn't work out that way. Ownership ended up with the powerful and employees went down hill. The problem is that Marx missed an important fact and that is that people want to better themselves financially.

 

What bar. If the poster is naming DJT as a political philosopher, then there is no bar to speak of Dairyair.

 

There are a lot of women who when married could support their children but are no longer able after a separation.

We have a serious problem when working class people can no longer put a roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their backs and medical care when needed.

 

Marx was no economist or sensible judge of human behavior.

 

Like yourself, I can't pick just one and I tend to place them within the context of their times and/or eras, so here goes:

CLASSICAL/ANCIENT WORLD: Marcus Tullius Cicero, then Aristotle with an Honorable Mention going to Cleisthenes, the Father of Democracy, whose reforms were sheer genius for their time and place.

MIDDLE AGES: William of Ockham, primarily for developing the first individual rights doctrine, but much much more.

RENAISSANCE: Erasmus of Rotterdam

MODERN ERA
17TH CENTURY: (Tie) The English Levellers John Lilburne and Richard Overton (quoted in my signature). Had they prevailed in the Putney Debates England would have established a democratic constitutional republic in the 1650s. Honorable mention to John Locke.

18TH CENTURY: Samuel Adams and John Dickenson. Dickenson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania remains one of the most brilliant political tracts in American history.

19TH CENTURY: Frederick Douglass

20TH CENTURY: Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek

Today, we have a few great political thinkers but I can't say I have a favorite...

 

I know. But it's a delusion to think trump is a philosopher.
A liar, a cheat, a thief, a bully, a child, yes, but it's hilarious to say philosopher. Huuugggllllly and Bigggglllly hilarious. To quote that famous philosopher.

 

Slavery is a dead end game under capitalism because you still have to pay for food clothing and shelter and you also have to maintain the shelter and replace the clothing as it wears out.

 

There's no real opposition of interests between employers and employees (i.e., buyers and sellers of labor), any more than between buyers and sellers of anything else. Marx was just wrong about that. Is there a divergence of interests between a baker and someone who wants a loaf of bread? Obviously, the baker would prefer a higher price and the customer a lower one, but they both agree to deal with each other to mutual benefit at the market price; and they both benefit from the other having their rights respected. That's Smith's Invisible Hand: in a free market, transactions are consensual, and both parties to any given transaction, as well as the community at large, benefit from everyone's pursuit of their own interests.

 

Thomas Paine.

Burke was just a conservative, and Marx was the Anti-economist.

I have read a bit of Burke, and the Manifesto. Couldn't get through even Vol I of Capital, but have read summaries.

Few people today know that the European monarchies felt very threatened by the French Revolution, and attacked France without provocation before Napoleon rose to power.

Burke simply valued the privileges of the privileged above the rights of the oppressed.

That is incorrect. Feudalism happens when private landowning survives the demise of the power that issued and enforced the land titles, and landowners come to discharge some of the functions of government. Feudalism happened in many times and places, not just Western Europe after the fall of Rome. Feudalism in Russia occurred when 90% of the population was rural, and there was no collapse of civilization.

But he didn't understand why. That had to await Henry George and "Progress and Poverty." Marx called George's work, "capitalism's last ditch" -- i.e., its final defense against revolutionary socialism.

This clearly hasn't happened. The Great Depression was far worse than the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The increasing inequality under capitalism results in political and social crises more than economic ones.

 

There is a lot of science on this, and it shows that roughly half the black IQ deficit may be explained by environment factors, but half is genetic. For example, black children adopted into white families at birth have lower IQ scores in high school than white children adopted at birth into black families. East Asian children adopted into white families at birth have higher IQs than white children raised by either their own parents or adoptive East Asian parents.

 

I like Washington the best, though he was more of a doer and talker than a writer. I like Burke, too, and also Locke and Hayek, Marx not so much.

 

That depends on the kind of slavery. In Latin America, the Spanish conquistadors often enslaved local indigenous populations to work in gold and silver mines without owning them as property, and often starved and worked them to death. But chattel slavery such as practiced in the antebellum South was fairly costly; and while slaves were not paid wages, there were significant costs in feeding, housing, and clothing them. In most cases, black American slaves enjoyed a higher standard of living -- better diet, housing, life expectancy, etc. -- than contemporaneous landless European peasants, and the cost of their labor was consequently higher.

It's important to understand why the USA had slavery when Europe did not. In the 17th and 18th century, there was so much good land available in the USA that if landowners treated free workers like slaves, they would just leave and take up some good land of their own. In order for landowners to systematically rob and exploit them, workers had to be forcibly deprived of their liberty rights by enslaving them. In Europe, all the usable land was already privately owned, so landowners could treat landless workers like slaves -- systematically rob and exploit them -- without all the bother of actually owning them.

 

The Romans refuted Plato with a single sentence: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

 

People will always need to eat, house, and clothe. And most workers will want at least that amount in wages and then some for other things.
But with slaves, the only cost by the owners is the price to buy and then keep them alive enough to work. With no extras.

And the slave owners can give just the bare minimums. I never said they were free labor, I said, the lowest cost.

 

But in fact, landless European peasants in first half of the 19th century often had inadequate food, clothing and shelter, and died of starvation or exposure, as did landless peasants in Russia, India, China, Japan, etc. That almost never happened to African chattel slaves in the antebellum South.

Why would landowners care what workers want? The landless's rights to liberty are owned by the landowners, so they have to work for them on whatever terms are available, or starve to death. Death by starvation is very unpleasant, equivalent to torture. Landowners have never objected to torturing people to death for money.

Wrong. It was known at the time that black American slaves had it better than landless European peasants. In fact, that was one argument used by the Southern anti-abolitionists to keep slavery.

Landowners can give less than that, as proved by the starvation deaths of landless peasants throughout history.

And you were incorrect. Read and learn:

"During the [Civil] war I served in a Kentucky regiment in the Federal army. When the war broke out, my father owned sixty slaves. I had not been back to my old Kentucky home for years until a short time ago, when I was met by one of my father's old negroes, who said to me: "Master George, you say you set us free; but before God, I'm worse off than when I belonged to your father." The planters, on the other hand, are contented with the change. They say: "How foolish it was in us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper now than when we owned the slaves." How do they get it cheaper? Why, in the shape of rents they take more of the labor of the negro than they could under slavery, for then they were compelled to return him sufficient food, clothing and medical attendance to keep him well, and were compelled by conscience and public opinion, as well as by law, to keep him when he could no longer work. Now their interest and responsibility cease when they have got all the work out of him they can."
-- from a letter to Henry George by George Jackson, 1885

 

One area where employers and employees have different economic interests is immigration. A high rate of immigration means that there are many people competing for jobs. This enables employers to cut wages. Employees benefit from a well financed public sector of the economy paid for by steeply progressive taxation. Employers benefit from the Republic panacea of "lower taxes, less government."

 

The reforms of the New Deal have reduced the severity of economic downturns.

 

No, because the employers don't get to keep the difference: they have to pay it all to landowners for permission to hire the cheaper labor. Cet. par., any increase in the labor force -- whether through immigration, more births than deaths, increased participation by women, delayed retirement, etc. -- has the effect of increasing land rents and reducing wages. Employers per se do not benefit. This is implied by the Law of Rent, and was demonstrated conclusively by Henry George in "Progress and Poverty."

No, because both the employers and their employees still have to pay landowners full market value just for permission to access any desirable public services and infrastructure. Public services and infrastructure benefit only landowners, not employees, and lower taxes benefit only landowners, not employers.