Leftwing & Rightwing Anti-Centralized Government

[Chris Rhines]

Try the Industrial Revolution. Even here, the 1880s and 1890s were pretty much hell for anyone whose name wasn't Rockefeller, or Morgan, or Carnegie. The same arguments about government regulation of business were made then, and then, they were the law. The results can be found in any history book.

(I'm gonna assume you mean the U.S. industrial revolution here.) They certainly can - economic progress the likes of which humanity had never dreamed, and prosperity increasing more, for more, and faster than at any time prior. And that was with an economy that was centrally managed to an astounding degree.

Unregulated, unrestricted capitalism can be as oppressive as unrestricted socialism, or unrestricted anything else.

You're making one of the classic errors of political thinking - mistaking capitalism for an economic system. It's not. Capitalism is a social arangement, in which individuals are free to make whatever economic arangements (communist, socialist, mercantile, propertarian, hard-money, various types of barter) they wish.

- Chris

 

[Zundfolge]

Try the Industrial Revolution. Even here, the 1880s and 1890s were pretty much hell for anyone whose name wasn't Rockefeller, or Morgan, or Carnegie.

I call BS.

The 1880s and 1890s where not bad for most people ... sure there where great changes in society and technology which caused hardship for some, but there is a tendency to focus only on the negatives. Poverty during the industrial revolution wasn't really any worse than other times in history, in fact quite the opposite, the middle class grew tremendously during that time ... so much so that middle class people had time to sit around wringing their hands about "the poor" and write books about them. People tend to feel guilty about the poor when their parents where poor but they are not.

We like to listen to moralizing pseudo socialists like Dickens and Swift bitch and moan about "the haves and the have nots" because its compelling storytelling, but the real facts about the time are that it was a wondrous time of advancing technology and an advancing economy.

 

[DRZinn]

[best Boss Hogg]Woo-hoo! I knew someone else would refute that before I even got home![/Hogg]

 

[Chrontius]

If your right to do as you wish with your property includes killing my kids, there's a serious problem with your values. The proper level for the administration of environmental laws in that level that encompasses all of the effects of whatever damage you're causing. Air moves, water flows, and the person your pollution harms may be hundreds of miles away. My concept of Federalism is that the the level of government assigned to a problem needs to be large enough to span the problem, but no larger. Given the fact that Nature repects no man-made lines, this is probably a good place for central government action, at least in theory.

Ok, I'm going to simplify things a bit from ecology and the recent benzene incident in China... the gist of it is that a cheaply built chemical plant blew up in China, and the resulting benzene spill -- a hundred tons of the crap -- is working through Russia. China owns the land upstream of Russia, including the river. Does that make it okay to dump stuff in the river?

Khabarovsk's regional governor, Viktor Ishayev, says China has built 16 petrochemical plants on the Songhua, which joins the Amur 170 miles southwest of Khabarovsk. Because none have adequate filtration equipment, tons of waste flows into Russian waterways.

... Scientists first expressed alarm in 1996, when fishermen noticed their catch had a medicinal smell. Tests found staggering levels of pollution. "It was a bouquet of industrial chemicals," he says. "The fish smelled so bad, even the cats wouldn't eat it."

The single biggest problem with capitalism as implemented now is the acceptence of externalities - specifically, externalizing costs of doing business by creating problems which force others to indirectly subsidize the offending business.

 

[Hook686]

It has been my observation that no matter what the size of the tribe, group, community, state, nation .... there are going to be those that demand control and those that resist being controlled. The dynamics seems the plight of man ... anarchy, maybe fluid confederations, is more what I see taking place in the middle east than a viable form of government. It is a shame that government of the people, by the people and for the people is not working better in this new millenium. So much conflict among Americans ... unyielding, nasty to each other. Too bad all the frontier space left does not have electricity, cable TV, boom boxes and Big Macs.

 

[LAK]

I call BS.

The 1880s and 1890s where not bad for most people ... sure there where great changes in society and technology which caused hardship for some, but there is a tendency to focus only on the negatives. Poverty during the industrial revolution wasn't really any worse than other times in history, in fact quite the opposite, the middle class grew tremendously during that time ... so much so that middle class people had time to sit around wringing their hands about "the poor" and write books about them. People tend to feel guilty about the poor when their parents where poor but they are not.

We like to listen to moralizing pseudo socialists like Dickens and Swift bitch and moan about "the haves and the have nots" because its compelling storytelling, but the real facts about the time are that it was a wondrous time of advancing technology and an advancing economy.

Right. In the 19th century and into the first part of the 20th century; the Church, private institutions, and people supported the poor, operated charity hospitals etc. Now it is stolen in the form of the income tax, looted by corrupt institutions and agencies, and has created alot of parasites.

At the turn of the 20th century America as on the way to becoming the wealthy nation on earth - not on paper, but tangible wealth both in the treasury and owned by citizenry. Debt based currency, socialism and now globalism have reversed all that.

What is referred to as "the healthy economy" today is simply a measure of the amount of money changing hands and "growth" largely based on debt capital investment and foreign ownership. Instead of "growth", a better measure of the state of a nation is; how many citizens (per capita) are debt free, own their homes, and are on the way to being able to support themselves in retirement.
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