Political Theory

March 26, 2013

Weak Principles

By Don Kirk in Optimists and Pessimists, Philosophy of Mind, Political Psychology, Political Theory

The School of Life in London runs a philosophy blog where a Mr. Stevenson has seven ‘Principles of Optimism.’ His principles of optimism include being busy, have ambition for the future, devote your life to something more important than the self, expose yourself to new ideas, be an empiricist, and suffer criticism gladly. Hmm.

The first five could describe Hitler or Stalin as optimists. Nothing provokes more head-shaking than listening to a philosopher describe how much of an optimist Karl Marx was. Optimism is a psychology, not a set of principles.

It is possible to inject optimism into a pessimistic life, and the mental health improvements are well-studied and documented. But it is how we form our pessimism originally that is just as important as employing ‘principles’ to become more optimistic.

The perceptions of the partially-full/empty glass of water are grounded in how we perceive human nature. If we find humans to be inherently bad, we develop a pessimistic psychology. If we find humans to be inherently good, we develop an optimistic psychology.

The easy test of the divide is to notice how we vote: if we approve of statism, we are pessimists wanting the state to assert control over inherently bad human beings. If we approve of less-regulated humans, we are optimists. ‘Principles’ do not have much to do with it, because the two psychologies are deeply imbeded in everyone. And note, such ‘principles’ can easily be used to describe people who are definitely not optimists.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

March 22, 2013

Kirkuk: Iraq’s Pivot Point

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Political Theory

The Iraqi Kurdistan region

Germany’s Der Spiegel has an article today on Kirkuk, the city of 900,000 in northern Iraq rich in underground petroleum and coveted by contesting ethnic groups. The Prime Minister of the country, Maliki, has sent an entire army to the city to let the Kurds and Sunni and Turkmen in the city know that the nation’s rule is sovereign. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister’s argument, his army wears the black of the Shi’a of southern Iraq, not the colors of the nation of Iraq. Immediately as the Shi’a army marched to Kirkuk, the pershmerga of the Kurds dug into the hills overlooking the city and wait for the Shi’a to make any overt move. The Shi’a army, though much better armed, does not want to take on the fabled pershmerga, famous for their ferocity and refusal to give up.

Iraq is not a country that can live with internal pluralism. Iraq is a tripartite ethnic conglomeration imposed as a single nation-state by British imperialists after World War I. It makes no sense to continue to keep it as one country, as dug-in opposing armies makes clear. Iraq should be three states: Kurdistan in the north, Sunni Iraq in the west and middle, and Shi’istan in the south. The middle Sunnis will create an Amman to Baghdad corridor, and the Shi’a will eventually align with Iran. The Kurds? Give them eastern Syria and watch them build the most enlightened democracy in the Middle East, one to rival Israel’s development of a democratic state.

As for Kirkuk: no one wants to take on the pershmerga, so Kirkuk goes to the Kurds.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

March 18, 2013

Infants Rule

By Don Kirk in Economics, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Theory, Socialism's "intellectual suicide"

Economics professor Jeffrey Dorfman of the University of Georgia has an excellent piece today in Real Clear Markets suggesting that the inability of politicians to agree on economic policies is a function of the politicians following one of three philosophers. Dr. Dorfman suggests that free-marketers follow Vifredo Pareto (no harm to anyone, a Libertarian position), free traders follow Nicholas Kadlow (not actually a philosopher), where the harm done is outweighed by the benefit derived (a form of Utilitarianism), and John Rawls, who famously argued that the ‘first position’ is to be given to the least-well off for a society to be just (the welfare state of democratic socialism, Keynesian economics). Rawl’s most famous book is above.

Rawlsian ’first position’ argument is infantalysis. The least-well off are those unwilling or incapable of providing for themselves. They are, especially to the determinist world-view inherent in all socialists, “helpless.” The characteristic of ‘helplessness’ is the fact of the human infant, by far the animal with the longest period of helplessness of any animal on the planet. Rawlsian philosophy/Keynesian economics is motivated by the psychic desire to reward, to care for, to nurture, to provide for human helplessness and in that psychic desire, they propose policies which will reward the infant’s lack of judgment, the infant’s lack of experienced prudence, the infant’s lack of any practical sense of responsibility found only in a mature, grown adult.

Professor Dorfman is correct in his analysis. But he missed the deeper psychological insight: The policies of ‘caring’ economics perpetuates the helplessness it desires to alleviate. Democratic socialism is like all forms of socialism: self-defeating economics, infantalysis philosophy.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

January 4, 2013

Not Nostradamus, but…

By Don Kirk in Democratic Capitalism/Democratic Socialism, Political Theory

This classic 1942 WWII book is the source of Schumpeter’s famous description of capitalism as “creative destruction.” In capitalism, the economy is made up of millions of hard-working people trying to attract the customers of competing firms by offering lower prices or higher quality or better service or greater utility on like products and services. The capitalist is trying to ‘destroy’ his competitors and the result is the tremendous benefit to consumers: competition lowers prices, improves quality, and spurs innovation.

Schumpeter believed that socialism would eventually win over capitalism because, thinking much like Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Successful firms buy out or eliminate their competitors, so eventually ‘competitive capitalism’ becomes ‘corporate capitalism.’ Under corporate capitalism competition declines, rent-seeking from government protects market share as profit margins erode, and the entire dynamism of capitalism collapses into a torpid corporatist State.

Schumpeter believed that there would be a transition stage between capitalism and socialism. Let’s call it, ‘democratic socialism,’ where the means of production are not yet state-owned but where the private means of production are taxed to supply both social redistribution of income and finance a welfare state. This transition stage from capitalism to socialism would have several features, but the four most notable features are that interest rates would approach zero, firms would sit on their cash because of the lack of superlative profitable investment opportunities, the “socializing” values of corporate managers would replace the risk-taking values of competitive entrepreneurship, and bourgeois family values would “disintegrate.”

Those four features exactly describe today’s American economy. Real interest rates are now at their historical lows at effectively zero, the amount of corporate hoarded cash is already in the trillions, for the first time in its history more Americans work for large managed corporations than small entrepreneurial firms, and the collapse of the American family has been an ongoing study in sociology for decades. If Schumpeter is an accurate predictor, then the 16-year back-to-back, consecutive Keynesian (Fabian Socialism) presidencies of Republican George Bush and Democrat Barrack Obama will likely be recognized as the start of the 21C transition stage of American capitalism to American socialism.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

December 23, 2012

Freedomist Migrations

By Don Kirk in Economics, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Theory

The Census Bureau just reported the fastest and slowest growing states in the United States during 2011, the second year of the tepid recovery from the Great Recession.

In order, the top nine states are North Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and South Dakota. The worst three states actually losing population were Vermont, Rhode Island and Michigan.

Each state has its own success or failure story to tell, but some broad trends are clear. The mountains in the West and the warm South are booming relative to the rest of the nation, and those small states with the most socialist governments in New England are faring the worst.

But what really stands out is the growth of the Freedomist States. Five of the top nine growth states are Freedomist, those states with the rare combination of no state income tax and a legal ‘right-to-work’ business environment. Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, Florida and South Dakota are all Freedomist. All are physically large, two are politically purple (NV and FL), while three are conservative.

One possible conclusion to draw from the population growth data in 2011 is that moderate fiscal conservatism tends to attract people, while extreme fiscal liberalism tends to repel people. Perhaps, the risk-takers seek one and the risk-avoiders seek the other.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

December 2, 2012

Liberals Bail to Canada, Conservatives Invoke the Constitution

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Left-Liberalism, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Theory

In the 11/27 Human Events, a magazine for staunchly conservative intellectuals, Jarrett Stepman makes a detailed historical argument against recent calls by conservatives to secede or nullify the growing progressive legislation in the United States. When progressives–a.k.a., liberal or democratic socialists–lost presidential power in the United States from elections in 2000 and 2004, many called for liberals to move to Canada.

Conservatives, in contrast, in losing presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 are calling for nullification or secession, two failed theories settled during the Civil War, that will permit the conservatives to stay where they are instead of moving to ideologically compatible climes.

The issue is actually freedom, although the conservatives, without freedom as a philosophy, cannot see the true nature of the controversy. My comments to Mr. Stepman’s article:

“Conservatives are deep in the weeds when they argue for secession or nullification, resurrecting arguments settled long ago to satisfy their dislike for current progressivism. The key is to avoid basing their secessionist/nullification arguments on the Constitution, but instead, base their argument on the Declaration of Independence. If a large majority of the people of New Hampshire, for example, truly object to the long-term goals of achieving a national ‘democratic socialism’ by the growing progressive movement, they should declare themselves to be independent from the United States and establish a new sovereign nation, a very formidable political task.”

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

November 28, 2012

Socialism’s “intellectual suicide.”

By Don Kirk in Economics, Ethics, Political Theory, Socialism's "intellectual suicide"

Since ‘socialism’ is so often a category on this blog as “intellectual suicide,” let’s explain very briefly the three features of the ideo/theology of socialism which makes it intellectually suicidal.

Socialism’s ‘intellectual suicide’ is the phrase of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist famous for creating praxeology in his four-book work, Human Action. Von Mises’s argument was that socialism is intellectually suicidal because of its inability to price. Prices in socialism are set by fiat, either by an all-wise individual or by an all-powerful bureaucracy. Since the dictated prices have little or no relation to costs or profits under socialism, such prices are removed from reality. Because socialism is an ideal instead of reality, its inability to price according to reality is intellectual suicide.

Second, socialism is an intellectual regress. In a regress, the impulse is to find bottom, and at the bottom the regress is nihilism, the nothingness. Socialism’s regress is a function of its denigration of profit and merit. Profit is a measure of efficiency and merit rewards human creativity. Lacking both efficiency and innovation, socialism stagnates an economy because the return on investment is less than the cost of the investment, resulting in an economic ”death spiral.” Without profits to generate efficiency in socialism, for your $10 investment you receive an $8 return; for your $8 investment you receive a $5 return, etc. And because of the denigration of merit there are few innovations in socialism; there are no life-saving pharmaceuticals, for example, ever invented in a socialist nation.

Finally, the intellectual suicide of socialism is grounded in socialism’s ‘flip of morality.’ Socialism uses the legal monopoly by government over armed force to take away what one person has earned from the sweat of their muscles or mind and redistribute that confiscation to someone who has done nothing to earn it. This is theft, whether by Robin Hood swinging through the trees wearing green tights or by the government. By ‘flipping’ the morality of theft, socialism makes theft moral.

Socialism is intellectually, economically, and morally incapable of building or creating prosperity. Socialists can certainly spend money, but because of their regress to nihilism they cannot generate prosperity without instituting some modified form of capitalism.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

November 21, 2012

Divide and Conquer

By Don Kirk in Ideo/theologies, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Theory

My comment today at Dennis Sanders’ blog, Big Tent Revue:

An argument could be made that “diversity,” pluralism, and trust of your fellow citizens is better found in a coalition of center-Left with center-Right than it is within the ‘big tent’ concept of the two major parties in American politics. So long as the center-Right and center-Left mutually agree to the bifurcation of the large moderate middle in our national politics, they help institutionalize and insulate the ideological extremes which now dominate in the two ‘bases’ of the duopoly. The “moderate middle” in the American electorate is larger than either of the two bases (40% versus 30% and 15%), so the two extremes must keep the moderates divided (20% in both parties) in order to continue to win elections and establish national policy. The resulting policies are forever pendulum swings between the ideological extremes of ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘religious nationalism.’ Frankly, the success of growing extremism in our politics (for forty straight years) is made possible by the acquiescence of the two centers to refuse to join the other center in a coalition of people who much more closely share values and think alike than either center finds in their respective party. So long as conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans and lite-Libertarians refuse to coalition into a new moderate party of liberty-loving fiscal conservatives who are socially moderate, the insults and hate they experience from the ‘base’ of each of their parties easily marginalizes their shared values and especially their shared ability to halt so much social regress created by the duopoly extremes, made in the Orwellian double-speak of social progress.

Divide and conquer works, so long as those divided refuse to coalesce.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

November 4, 2012

Purity & Polarization

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Political Psychology, Political Theory, Politics

The 2012 national election is now nearly over, with the ultimate decision determined by the results in the above nine ‘swing’ States. The chart is from Politico; they expect three southern States to go to Mr. Romney and six States to go to Mr. Obama. Once again, as it has in the past three elections, how Ohio votes will likely decide who is the next President of the United States.

What this map does not show is how much polarized our national politics is over the past forty years. Largely hidden beneath the normal electoral contest between two opposing points of view is the increasing rigidity in each view. Dr. Seth Masket of the University of Denver has research on California politics showing that political polarization between the two parties has increased steadily for forty years and shows no sign of abating.

Professor Masket’s book, No Middle Ground, argues that both major parties succeeded in switching from bipartisan moderation to partisan loyalty in 1953. I argue that the “switch” to partisan purity winning their party’s nomination, and then using the gerrymander to protect their incumbent true-believers with ‘safe seats,’ accounts for the inexorable rise of polarization in our politics for the past four decades. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business of character assassination and entire cemeteries voting on Election Day, but when bipartisanship was the reward for incumbency, government worked better.

The moderate middle in American politics has no organized effective voice. There are very few American political parties extolling the centrist values of the bourgeoisie. The two major parties—the duopoly—operate under a “big tent” concept which effectively divides and subsumes the moderate voters to control by the ideo-extremists. The duopoly’s mutual control over 50 State legislatures and hence the entire elections process makes the rise of a centrist third party nearly impossible.

So long as the few moderate third parties are politically impotent, and so long as ideological purity is the reward for winning re-election in both major parties, our nasty and extremist polarization will continue. Either the moderate middle in America organizes itself as a citizens’ reform movement, or our politics will continue in its long forty-year decline into hate filled extremes.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

September 18, 2012

The Burning Sun

By Don Kirk in Foreign Affairs, Political Theory, World Freedom and World Peace

Just a few weeks ago, this blog posted the map of China’s claim of sovereignty in the South China Sea. The boundaries of China’s claims are hundreds of miles from its shores yet just offshore against the lands of several neighboring nations. The other countries reacted with predictable outrage, but Japan especially experienced a nationalist backlash.

In response to Japan’s angry anti-China sentiments–which included a wealthy Japanese businessman purchasing disputed unihabited islands claimed by both China and Japan–Chinese nationalist riots broke out this week in at least five major Chinese cities. Japanese shops, restaurants, and factories in China have been attacked; several have suspended business until calm is restored. In the picture above, the Japanese flag is burning.

Trade between the two nations is a whopping $340 billion per year. China is threatening Japan with another ‘lost decade’ of economic stagnation if China shuts down their bilateral trade. Exasperating relations, the Japanese recently negotiated with the United States to construct state-of-the-art missile defense systems. Many merchant ships bound for Japan use the South China Sea; those missiles defend Japan’s trade.

In post-war political theory, encouraging trade between traditional antagonists will generate peace, since both partners had so much to lose by a future war. In Kant’s theory, no peace on the planet is even possible until all nations are free. In ‘democratic peace’ theory, no free nations have ever attacked the other, so like Kant the goal is to make nations free, then peace results.

China is not free; Japan is. Either the Chinese find a way to ‘save face’ and revise their preposterous, grandiose claims of sovereignty over the territorial waters of its neighboring nations, or the threats and flag-burnings could get out of control. National/socialism in a non-free nation pitted against nationalism in a free nation is a recipe for disaster.

[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]

1 2

Political Theory

Coming to Amazon soon!