Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, January 28th, 2009 - 76 comments
Categories: national -
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National’s two main internal factions consist of the Conservatives, and the Neo-Liberals. Overall the Conservatives want to keep things pretty much as they are, and with such an inspiring reason for being it’s hardly surprising their star has waned over the last couple of decades.
The Neo-Liberal camp has a different agenda. Like the Conservatives they too champion individual liberty, private property and a reduced State. But what Neo-Liberals seek isn’t remotely conservative. Rather it’s quite a radical doctrine. Whereas Conservatives still see value in maintaining a State for at least its regulatory function, and some might even secretly admit that the State can and should intervene in an economy to properly harness its benefits for greater society, the Neo-Liberals see any State ‘interference’ in the economy as evil. For them Nirvana is when businesses (that’s big business corporates, not corner dairy owners) have free rein to do as they wish. That position isn’t remotely conservative because no democracy has ever traditionally been so. Even Conservatives know that leaving it all to powerful private interests doesn’t make for very healthy economies or democracies. The Global Credit crisis also demonstrates that when governments get too hands-off some pretty serious and undesirable consequences can arise – invariably requiring expensive clean-ups at public expense.
Right now the Neo-Liberals are in retreat because anyone to the left of Roger Douglas can see that total laissez-faire non-regulation of markets not only doesn’t work, it’s downright negligent. Let’s hope National’s Conservative wing can shrug off its grey cardy and rise to the occasion because they’re definitely the lesser of the two evils.
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GC: I take the view that any system which doesn’t work tolerably well throughout its progress doesn’t provide enough certainty to be an especially good idea. This is a stock objection to the dull counterfactual `but it hasn’t ever been followed through to completion so you can’t judge it!’ argument common to economic extremists at both ends of the scale – marketeers and communists and anarcho-primitivists are all guilty of using it. The reason for my objection is that democracies can’t be relied upon to see long-term schemes like this through to their logical conclusion. Large groups of people are adversity-averse, and when adversity starts to bite, either the system begins to fall apart, or some form of coercion is required to maintain it. In the former case we end up with a half-baked compromise, in the latter case we end up with the power transfer problem (qv).
L
Post above addressed to Clint, also.
I should clarify what I mean: systems in which prosperity scales up evenly, with fewer troughs and generally greater equality, are more durable and less prone to hijack in mid-stream than those which require a `no pain, no gain’ approach from some or all of the electors in a polity. If there’s a segment of the electorate who feels that way, politicians will emerge to represent their interests and challenge those who want to stay the course.
It’s about balancing the expected return with the expected risk and cost of failure.
L
Billy is feeling riddled. Tis the price of impending admonition. Y’see Billy I had gotten that right. Pre-emption and all that..BTW when I add something (helpfully) I don’t expect that to be taken as my answer to the construct of the question you formed and was alluded to thus as your conundrum. To be otherwise – a sincere question for instance – we should have to agree to some extent at anyrate upon its content, accuracy and relevance. Taken as rhetoric appeared to me the brightest possible basis of it, a rhetoric which allowed users(you in this case) make stuff up. Perhaps. So.. to griddled you get riddled.
Lew, thanks for that. I’d hate mis-attribute. In future tho and assuming lprent unable accomodation, that postscript ‘L’ looks a sound idea. Sorry I didna figure it earlier.
To others suffering what looks a distinct challenge in the language they use here, the term ‘neo’ is most often taken to mean new. ie neonate = just born.
Used to express neo-liberal it is thus patently clear that verbiage like — I think the same is true about “neo’ liberalism. It hasn’t been fully realised at all either. This will piss off the politics lecturers who have been for years preaching that NZ’s “neo liberal’ TINA, Ruthenasia type garbage to gullible first years. is bombastic rot. Apologies called for to the so inflamed as a result. Even-handedness could not be expected sensible consideration without it.
QtR: Sorry, I missed your other comment above.
you’ll see I’m no communist.
I never alleged that you were, and indeed I don’t think you are (though you wrongly alleged that I’m a `capitalist’).
No its never been tryed in practice and it isn’t fine in theory. Stalinism is not Marxism and I’m sure the british communists don’t advocate Stalinism or going back to some mythical agrarian utopian egalitarian state. So I still don’t get where your coming from using the Khmer Rouge to criticise communism. I personally think your just being perverse.
I think one shouldn’t learn all the lessons of one’s wider ideological background. The KR and Stalin and Mao and Castro are all derived from Marx’s communist ideas, and they all teach the same lesson, of which anyone seeking to implement any of Marx’s ideas ought to be aware in as much crystal clarity as possible. It’s not perversity, it’s prudence.
You can’t seriously be denying the economic ends of the war, can you? I’m not saying it was solely economic (no one would say that) neither was the Khmer Rouge’s genocide (it was ethnic as well) but of all the stuff I’ve read about the war Ã’ve never heard anyone deny an in part economic motive.
It sure did look like you were directly equating the Nazi war of expansion and holocaust with the KR insurgency and genocide, which is not quite the stupidest comparison I can imagine, but it’s still pretty stupid.
While any war of expansion has some economic motive, the Nazi expansion had an ethnic dimension for mostly nationalistic reasons as a response to the humiliation suffered at Versailles (demonstrated in part by the frontispiece to Triumph des Willens and Hitler’s accepting the surrender of France in the very same rail car in which the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, among many other things) and the consequent perception that the German race had failed due to dilution.
The KR insurgency was ethnic for strictly economic reasons, because of the perception that foreigners (mostly from France and the other French Indochinese states) were corrupting the Khmer peoples’ (supposedly) traditionally humble and hard-working character of subsistence by privileging those with foreign connections over those who worked hard and carried on their traditional ways. A variation on the `dilution and corruption’ theme to be sure, and certainly with the purpose of returning to a mythical golden age, but there the similarities with the Nazi expansion end. The economic aims of the Nazi programme were in service to the war effort of expansion and securing the new empire – by my rather dry qualifier `plus the necessary strategic territories and resources required to ensure its integrity’ I meant `plus the whole world’, since that was what would be required, in their minds. The KR achieved their military goal in a matter of days, and turned to the economic goal. They kept the spectre of constant war with Viet Nam alive for propaganda purposes, but they weren’t actually fighting it. War was a means to economic (and cultural, etc.) reform, not the reverse.
L
Lew
It sure did look like you were directly equating the Nazi war of expansion and holocaust with the KR insurgency and genocide, which is not quite the stupidest comparison I can imagine, but it’s still pretty stupid.
The stupid comparison is that of the British Communist party with the KR. I was not equating the the Nazis and the KR. I was making a facetious comment about state capitalism vis a vis the Nazis to show how absurd your equation of the British Communist party and the KR is. This cultural, economic, ethnic discussion is some aside we got ourselves into. We both seem to agree there were economic and social reasons for the respective war and genocides. We probably only disagree as to the degree of each motivation. My main point and one you have yet to dissuade me from is your conflation of the what the KR was responsible for and the ideology of the British communist party or that of Marxism qua marx. Equating the two is to me as ridiculous as equating state capitalism with the holocaust – my original point.
As to you being a captialist. I’m not talking about some Randian defintion of capitalism ie laissez-faires. I’m talking the original defintion of captialism as in synonymous with state-capitalism. Nothing you’ve ever said has made me think your anything but a capitalist and not an anarchist or a socialist, or a communist &c. What do think yourself as?
The stupid comparison is that of the British Communist party with the KR.
It’s a good think I didn’t make that comparison, then, else I’d be legitimately criticised as a damned fool. All I did was acknowledge that the two groups have a common ancestor. That’s valid, because they do. I recommend you read Chandler’s Brother Number One (as a starting point, the bit on Saloth Sar’s ideological apprenticeship) before you try to argue otherwise. Get the second edition, it was revised after his death in 1998.
Nothing you’ve ever said has made me think your anything but a capitalist and not an anarchist or a socialist, or a communist &c. What do think yourself as?
As I’ve told ear-benders from the Libertarianz to RAM, I’m a moderate
Regarding economic systems, I’m mostly agnostic. I believe markets (in the theoretical sense) are the best tools we have for determining relative utility or worth, and as distribution systems. However I don’t believe markets are perfectly efficient (in the formal sense of that word) without regulation, because fundamentally I think they should be servants to, rather than masters of, the polity in which they operate. Fundamentally, this is because I’m a political scientist, not an economist or a businessperson. I also believe market theory applies to a very wide range of phenomena – including the choice of economic systems itself. I believe in democracy because it creates a market for political ideas, and as I said, I believe markets are the best way of establishing the utility of competing things.
So you probably think I’m a capitalist because I broadly support what we currently have – capitalism – though I have a long list of changes I’d like made to its implementation. I think that capitalism, as Churchill said of democracy, is the worst system except for all the others who have tried. No genuinely democratic polity who had the choice has yet completely given it up, and that means that it has manifest utility. (Though some are trying, and that’s interesting too).
Make sense?
L