Cop out.
Morphs Law
edit: I see you have edited your post and added more. I’ll respond later. Originally it was one sentence.
“Monkey this up”...
by minimus 85 Replies latest jw friends
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em1913
I'm not familiar with Morph's Law, but having looked it up, I stand by my comments. Economics, especially the Austrian variety, despite the best efforts of its adherents to paint it as a science based on Pure Fact and Reason, is as much a matter of Faith As The Assured Expectation Of Things Hoped For, The Evident Demonstration Of Realities Not Beheld as any form of religious belief. I know a lot of Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and god-forbid Randites with sticky copies of "Atlas Shrugged" under their mattresses who are just as desperately culty in their beliefs as any hard-boiled Witness. And I'll put an awful lot of the Trump people I've met in the same camp. Not all, certainly, but a distressing number of them, especially old white people who live in the whitest state in the union and are nonetheless convinced that OMG MEXICANS ARE HERE TO STEAL OUR JOBS AND WRECK OUR PROUD CULCHA when they see the brown-skinned carnies working the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. What Richard Hofstadter wrote about "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in 1964 is even more true today. (Not that I'm citing him as scripture, you understand, but I do suggest you look it up and read it -- well worth anyone's time.)
Now, you can turn it around and say MARXIST! POT, KETTLE, ETC., but the difference is I don't look to Marx as the last word in my beliefs. I believe he was correct in his analysis of class structure, but I don't hang by his every written word as sacred writ. Why would I? As human beings we're all just making this up as we go along, and anyone who claims otherwise, who claims to have the Real Truth, is just as deluded as the cheesiest elder on the platform. So, sure, go ahead, Morph away. But look in the mirror while doing it.
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MeanMrMustard
Good Lord, more Morphs Law in action.
Go here to brush up on Morphs Law:
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/4739524539187200/morphs-law
I don't agree that the good Austrians proved anything, except to those already inclined to accept those beliefs.
You said this in your previous post, and it is perfectly OK, in my opinion, to say. But what follows this statement is more of the same crap that appears in earlier posts. It’s fine to disagree. But it’s not fine to poison the well and claim that anyone who may have a disagreement, including those in the past, are just like a bumbling JW at the door. The moment you say, “I think XYZ and everyone who disagrees is just like the JWs or any cookie-cutter cult,” you’ve lost it.
Not an argument.
Notice: you still haven’t justified your original statement, mainly that capitalism is racist. You went off on the labor theory of value, but this doesn’t help you in this regard.
You say you stand by the labor theory of value. Fine, but that’s where it ends then, unless you want to concede that discussing it wouldn’t be like a JW bumbling through the reasoning book at the doorstep.
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em1913
Capitalism uses racism, and profits from it. That's a simple historical fact. The great New England fortunes of early America were largely built on the slave trade -- and those of us here are only just beginning to come to terms with that. But it's unimpeachable historical fact. The great fortunes of the pre-Civil War south -- need we even discuss those? The vast railroad fortunes of the 19th Century -- whose physical labor, exactly, built those railroads? It goes on and on, but I think the point is made.
The "black codes" imposed in the South in the late 19th Century were largely imposed to ensure a continuous source of cheap labor for, not just the plantation system, but also for manufacturing. The continued repression of African-American wages served as a useful tool for keeping working-class white wages down as well. And it wasn't just the South that profited from this -- the use of lower-paid black labor during the years of the Great Migration was used as a constant threat over white workers, thus preventing them from coming to any understanding of working-class solidarity across racial lines. The CIO worked mightily during the 1930s to overcome this, to only limited success, because the problem was so widespread. It wasn't until the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1941 outlawed race differentials in wages for defense contractors that any real progress was made toward dealing with this issue, and that law was bitterly opposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and similar capitalist-interest groups, and enforcement was always spotty. This, too, is unimpeachable historical fact. And I won't even start on our current administration, run by a billionaire who was seeded in his "self made" business career by a slumlord father who ran racially-restricted buildings, and who himself had an extremely dubious racial record in conducting his own real estate enterprises.
As for the rest of it, I believe that economics, as I said, is far more a "faith" than a "science." And when discussing matters of faith there's really no point in two people who are clearly of different fundamental philosophies running around in circles with each other. I can cite Marx and you'll cite Bohm-Bawerk and I'll cite Hilferding and you'll cite Hayek, and I'll say tomata and you'll say tohmato, and eventually we'll just call the whole thing off. I'm not in this for the ego-boost, so I'll save us both the trouble. If there's one thing I learned on the doorstep it's that you can't make a Witness out of a Mormon. OMG MORPHS LAW!
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Simon
I don't think you know what Capitalism actually is and you have a poor grasp of history and economics.
America didn't get rich because of slavery. One of the reasons the America south is poorer today is because they clung to slavery instead of the capitalist invention of industrialization. THAT is why America as a whole, but the Republican north specifically, prospered and they became a world leader (coupled with some fortunate geography and a couple of world-wars). Slavery is an incredibly inefficient system which is why the nations that outlawed it first tended to do so well.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty and fed more people than any socialist regime ever. In fact, socialism has starved more people to death than they have killed with bullets - quite an achievement because they've directly killed so many.
It's a failed ideology that produces misery every time it's tried.
PS. The southern railroads used slave labour, the rest were predominantly built by the Chinese with paid work.
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em1913
"“A Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.”
Yep, divide and control. This is actually a really good example of the point I was making, so thanks for noting it. Moving ahead a bit historically, but on the same general theme, I'd call your attention to Stetson Kennedy's book "Southern Exposure," published in 1946, which offered a detailed and thoroughly documented expose of how major Northern industrialists were in full collusion with Southern racists to ensure a continued source of cheap manufacturing labor to fuel their operations. A book well worth seeking out for anyone interested in these issues/
Getting back to the railroads,I think you might want to look more deeply into the treatment of "coolie labor" by the railroads, because it isn't quite as simple as "paid labor.". It wasn't a particularly happy situation for those workers, to say the least, and their importation en masse by the railroads for the specific purpose of cheap labor was used as yet another tool for driving down wages overall in that particular sector. White rail workers saw the Chinese not as fellow laborers, but as a specific threat. This attitude continued long after the Transcontinental Railroad itself was completed, and led to incidents of racial violence between white and Chinese workers into the following decades, most notably the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 in Wyoming, involving miners employed by the Union Pacific Railroad -- which in turn detonated a wave of anti-Chinese racism that swept rapidly across much of the Western United States.
Among those jumping on this particular bandwagon was the then-thriving Populist movement itself -- which adopted a rather militantly racist, anti-Chinese platform in response, which had the effect of pushing the entire movement sharply in the direction of reactionary nativism, and after a disastrous alliance with William Jennings Bryan's failed presidential campaign, to the movement's eventual adoption in the early years of the twentieth century of an overall white-supremacist orientation.
The remnants of that movement, especially in the Midwest, made a significant contribution to the rise of the Second Era Klan, a movement which swept the entire United States in the early twenties and even controlled the state of Indiana, before collapsing under the weight of a debilitating sex scandal in the late twenties. Its fragments in the 1930s drifted into other movements, notably those of Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith. After much fragmentation and straining thru the filters of Birchism and Cartoism, this identical strain of nativist populism -- its racism now encoded rather than worn on the sleeve -- resurfaced in the Buchanan movement in the 1990s, which eventually hijacked the straggling remains of Ross Perot's nativist but not especially racist Reform Party, and laid the groundwork for the populist movement that began in the late 2000s and continues to the present day.
History's fascinating, it really is -- and as Mr, Faulkner so aptly put it, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
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LoveUniHateExams
I've never seen one person that looks like a monkey or gorilla.
Except maybe ...
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MeanMrMustard
@em1913:
No, capitalism doesn’t “use” racism. Capitalism is a system of private property and free voluntary exchange, it doesn’t “use” racism in any way. You cite many examples of racism, and all are true. No debate there. And those examples are historical, no debate. But you seem to completely and utter misapply them to an economic system, and then conclude the most ironic things.
For example, you cite the “black codes”. You could have just as easily cited the Jim Crow south too. These things actually happened, and they were horrible. But they were laws enacted by government. The black codes were a set of *laws*. That has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. Those are good examples of racist individuals grabbing the power in government to force their racist conception of the world onto everyone. A good question to ask is: why did they feel they needed to enact laws to accomplish their goals if in fact the racism was already “baked in” to the economic system? In reality, markets tend to beat away racists, as they quickly become economic losers.
What about slavery? Slaves were used, for all sorts of things, before it was abolished - all true. But it wasn’t because it’s baked into capitalism itself. These were people that thought less of other races independent of the economic system. How do we know? Because we see slavery under all sort of economic structures.
And that, is the great irony here. The greatest fundamental principle of capitalism is private property rights. You own yourself and your labor. It was this very principle that pushed for the ultimate abolition of slavery. And yet... yet... you advocate for the system that would give ultimate power to a centralized authority, a system that you have shown by your own examples to give you the exact result you reject!
A few words about economics and faith: I believe here you also mischaracterize the situation. If you advocate for a general theory of something - that is you claim you figured out how something works and you have a universal principle worked out, and then someone comes along and thinks for a few minutes and starts listing ways your principle fails, it has nothing to do with faith. It is simply someone being shown to be incorrect.
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MeanMrMustard
I remember quite clearly, my 9th grade history teacher.... looked so much like a frog. Even the way he cut his hair accented the look. I mean it was freaky. He was Puerto Rican. Is that racist?
