dagblog - Comments for "Beliefs (Or, the Ghost of Christmas Present)"

Thanks for all the comments,

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:18:45 +0000

In reply to Beliefs (Or, the Ghost of Christmas Present)

Thanks for all the comments, gang, and I hope you all enjoyed the official national holiday as much as I did (or more). And thanks for the thoughts.

Let me say a few words to Obey, from up-thread. It's true, that demonizing other folks is not healthy (and at odds with my self-described Christianity). So let me clarify a few things.

I did place my beliefs above proof or disproof, but I also labeled them as beliefs and thus placed them below any use as evidence. No one has to be convinced.

Hunger, cold, and human misery, and the enormous amounts of those social ills, are not beliefs. They are facts. They are real and they are empiricial and they are out there whether you believe in them or not. Anyone who denies their existence simply denies reality.

My belief that hunger, cold, and human misery require attention and compassion (and especially the treat-everyone-as-you-would-treat-Jesus formulation), is simply a belief. I feel that to be true but cannot prove it.

If someone wants to rebut me by simply saying, "No," I have no comeback. If someone were to say to me, "Other people have their suffering and I have mine, and I am going to take care of myself," that's a perfectly rational position and I don't have an answer for it.

But somehow people don't feel comfortable making that claim. Instead, they tend to come back with an argument that taking care of themselves is the moral and righteous thing to do. They need to dress up common everyday self-interest as justice and moral principle.The suffering deserve to suffer. The poor are poor because of their moral failure. The injustice isn't letting people starve on the street. The true injustice is collecting taxes to feed and shelter those people.

This is what I am attacking. You can Take Care of Number One, or you can take the moral high ground. You can almost never do both.

There's a difference between believing in the existence of free markets, which have certain useful and certain intractable properties, and believing in the Free Market Fairy. One is a description of observable facts. The other is an imposition of certain moral or ideological values. When you describe free markets as always producing the just outcome or even the best or "optimal" outcome, you are no longer describing economic realities, but promulgating a quasi-religious belief. I believe that there is a market. I do not believe it expresses any values except prices, and I do not propose adopting it as a moral or philosophical guide to anything.

I'm not against capitalism. I'm against the claim that unfettered "free market" capitalism creates justice or rewards the righteous. That is what belief in the Free Market Fairy means. That needs to be examined as a belief, which it is. It's no more factual or "realist" than my beliefs are, and it's considerably dumber.

Ach! you are soooo welcome,

we are stardust — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 02:17:57 +0000

In reply to Thanks, We are Stardust...

Ach! you are soooo welcome, Edger. I also linked to the solnit piece at MyFDL at Rusty's piece; he is the bard of FDL. Didn't credit you, as I was in a tear trying to get ready for Christmas (it sorta took a backseat this year). But I loved to hear some counter-intuitive thought and hope presented, and it was down to you that I did. We need to harness those of us who care enough to...er...do good deeds in the face of the Holes of governmental disrespect and calumny. Bless you, Edger.

http://my.firedoglake.com/rusty1776/2010/12/24/raise-raise-a-song-on-high/

Thanks, We are Stardust...

Edger — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 01:44:35 +0000

In reply to Hey, Doc. I’m glad you

Thanks, We are Stardust...

HA! You've been punk'd by

Elusive Trope — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:24:59 +0000

In reply to A Magic Man in the sky and a

HA! You've been punk'd by Loki.

That may have been old-style

we are stardust — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:19:07 +0000

In reply to But isn't capitalism defended

That may have been old-style thinking about capitalism, but now it seems people look at the wealthy and say, "See; they were smart enough and clecer enough to get rich; they deserve our respect; let them do the thinking (see: Obama's directors of finance); they make money to give us jobs." American Royalty are the uber-wealthy, we must pay them obeisance. And tithe to them. ;o)

Predestination doesn't just

Elusive Trope — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:14:05 +0000

In reply to I don't find that persuasive

Predestination doesn't just entail determinism, it is determinism. But in your previous post you did not mention free will. You mention meritocracy - that you advance based on your merits of achievements, talents, and skills (as opposed to other factors like who you know or what family you were born into). In the world of determinism, the talents one has, the skills one acquires, the achievements one is able to accomplish which allows one to "move up in the world" can be a product of fate (as can be such things as being born into the right family so one is able to get into the best colleges, etc). Or they can you say be seen as a product of free will and choice.

In predestination, the virtuous make virtuous choices because it is their fate. In a world of free will, they make it through choice. Lookinng at them from the outside, they would look exactly the same. Both made a decision to act and the act resulted in what was seen as a positive outcome.

I would say that much of what is talked about in conservative circles these days revolve around free choice (the poor are poor because they want to be poor). And with the rise of science, the differences in standards of living are generally attributed through a mix of pseudo-hard science (we're just wired differently than them) and misunderstanding of soft sciences (it's just a culture of poverty that keeps them where they are). Free will and the concepts of freedom are more widely embrace and diefied than fate. But there is still that strain which flows mostly in the undercurrents, but is reinforced in the notion, which I hear all the time from wealthy donors, "i give back because my family has been blessed more," (most recently by a banker as he was cutting a check), as if their rise to economic well-being was out of their hands. Or just listen to sports or entertainment star talk about their "god-given talents."

A Magic Man in the sky and a

cmaukonen — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:09:10 +0000

In reply to I agree that the Market Fairy

A Magic Man in the sky and a Free Market Fairy. An all this time I had though that western man had risen above such pagan beliefs. Apparently I was in error.

I don't find that persuasive

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:12:24 +0000

In reply to Not really. Predestination

I don't find that persuasive as a reconciliation of those ideas. Predestination would seem as though it entails determinism. If one is predestined to a certain fate, isn't that fate in some sense determined? And if it is determined, then what of choice, personal responsibility, free will? And the very high premium placed on individual effort, hard work, and an assumption of justice in the sense that one is deemed to have deserved one's fate?

Not really. Predestination

Elusive Trope — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 15:12:22 +0000

In reply to But isn't capitalism defended

Not really. Predestination would say that God revealed that you were one of the chosen ones by providing you with the will to give greater effort. Your greater effort and the success that came from it were the signs.

The Free Market fairy seems

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 14:48:32 +0000

In reply to Beliefs (Or, the Ghost of Christmas Present)

The Free Market fairy seems to me to actually be believed in by some academic economists and opinion writers but not so much by powerful economic elites. The latter use it at their convenience because of the way it relieves them of having to do things they don't want to do or they justify to themselves that they are not able to do because of fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, like pay more taxes, accept restrictions in the form of regulations, etc.

The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder returns gets insufficient attention in our society as a structural issue in my view that creates the moral and legal justification for giving short shrift to the interests and values of communities, future generations, workers, the environment, etc. ("everything else", that is). Marjorie Kelly in The Divine Right of Capital makes and develops the implications of this point better than anyone else I know of. If memory serves, she refers to it as the doctrine of "shareholder primacy".

Economic elites historically and now routinely seek to get the government on their side through anti-competitive policies, rather than in a laissez faire mode in the service of free market ideals. This happens through protectionist legislation, other subsidies such as the oil industry's R&D tax credits, cost-plus defense contracts, GS's values and policy preferences having such outsized influence on what the US Treasury and the Fed do leading to privatization of profits and socialization of risks with no apparent irony impairment or shame, etc.

I do think that many individuals down the economic ladder have deeply internalized the Free Market Fairy assumption of just rewards. Non-elites often take this stuff far more seriously than elites do.

Capitalism is not one system, and I am glad you spoke of the Free Market Fairy rather than capitalism per se. There are wide variations in "capitalist" systems around the world. None of them comes close to operating on pure free market principles.