Tuesday, March 19, 2013

So who's being "Binary"?

I was surfing around looking at anti-Sirico stuff after reading this jab by The Grumpy Mailman Blog when I came across this recent review by Elias Crim over at the American (cough) Conservative (cough, cough). Excerpt:

Culturally speaking, Fr. Sirico gradually became an adherent of the Reagan revolution, a movement that seemed to find its vindication in 1989, only to ossify intellectually in the years following. Even without an Evil Empire, the Reaganites seemed only able to think in a binary fashion: capitalism vs. socialism (or anything else). Even as supply-side economics became a matter of Republican institutional dogma, the historical record showed a growing government and increasing income inequality. Reagan’s vision of widespread employee ownership went unfulfilled, and for most members of the American middle class, the unintended consequence of economically neoliberal policies was a road to serfdom that by 2008 felt more like a superhighway. Wage slavery, with no path to ownership, or welfare: take your pick.

The author asserts that Reaganites are being "binary" when they point out that you either have some sort system based on economic freedom (like capitalism) or some sort of system based on central control (like socialism). But he goes on to state that Reaganism leads to either "Wage slavery, with no path to ownership, or welfare: take your pick." That sounds thoroughly binary to me, although I prefer to use the term false dichotomy to describe this particular fallacious view of reality. Sorry, but I'm not a "wage slave", whatever that is precisely, and I'm not on welfare, thank you very much. I left my job as an IT Professional (not a slave) and started an incorporated consultancy.

Furthermore, I have many friends who are neither slaves nor freeloaders. Sure, I know people who dislike their job. But most of them are able to change employers--and often do--and the ones who can't are most often constrained by external factors, not by whip-cracking capitalist villains in larger offices.

Finally, I'm not sure whether or not Mr. Crim considers those who pay him to write copy as his "slave-masters", but I'm pretty sure he is not a welfare case. The tag at the end of his review states that he "is at work on a new web zine to be called Solidarity Hall." I have to say that makes him sound very much like someone taking advantage of the freedom we have in our country to be an entrepreneur.

So his own existence itself is evidence against his own assertion, ironically. The more these people attempt to promote an imaginary Third Way, the more they just become dogmatists touting their own contrarian ideology.

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14 comments:

  1. Finally, I'm not sure whether or not Mr. Crim considers those who pay him to write copy as his "slave-masters", but I'm pretty sure he is not a welfare case. . . .

    You are assuming that Mr. Crim considers himself to be one of the subjects that he is writing about. Au contraire. He is writing about the little people, you know.

    He, like others with whom we are familar, is an Observer and a Thinker. See what I mean. (Come on, he's developing a "thinkerspace" over at Solidarity Hall.)

    IOW, whatever it is he says, or whatever it is he prescribes, is not to apply to himself.

    By the way, speaking of binary, I find it curious that the conclusion he draws in his review just happens to match the very reason for the name of "Solidarity Hall", namely "we are pushing back against another wall—that of ideological blindness—built jointly by camps representing the State on one hand and the Market on the other." What a coincidence!

    To a child with a hammer . . .

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  2. ...the world's problem are all nails. Yes. I've been thinking a lot about this "contrarian totalitarianism" tendency lately and I really think that it comes down to some deficiency in their intellectual development. These types have fixated on certain people in their own general "camp" in the 2-party system as being The Problem. Generally people who are successful and rich. When I look at someone like this (e.g., Romney) I say "That man is rich because he is successful." I believe they see it the opposite way: "That man was able to become successful because he's rich."

    Maybe they have evidence for their way of seeing things because all they detect is cronyism all around them. In my world, cronyism is virtually absent. So they have a different slur for people like me: new money.

    When it comes down to it, they are more obsessed than anyone else I know with money, they wish they had more and they are envious of people who do have more. I.e., they belong in the democrat party.

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  3. "None of his three teenage daughters display an interest in the Greek and Latin classics thus far."

    LOL

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  4. Generally people who are successful and rich. When I look at someone like this (e.g., Romney) I say "That man is rich because he is successful." I believe they see it the opposite way: "That man was able to become successful because he's rich."

    I have never understood this mentality. Who the heck cares whether someone else is rich? Romney's wealth does not impinge on me and my family in any way. I am perfectly content with my little middle-class house, and guess what? No Evil Rich People are trying to take it away from me. So, where's the problem? Live and let live. Sheesh.

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  5. Well, yeah Diane, I basically agree with you, but I will cede the point that rich people could use their wealth and power to "bully" people, if you will. Whether this is SOP for them is another question altogether.

    I also have to mention that the government can push people around a lot more than big business, AND furthermore it does.

    They love to point to wealth discrepancies between rich and poor, which is humorous coming from a medieval studies dude. Go back to the middle ages for REAL wealth discrepancies. Many people ate what they earned each day. Was that a "capitalist system"? And the nobility didn't even have to worry about eating--servants brought them food.

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    1. Well, you'll get no argument from me re corporate bullying; I'm only too familiar with it.

      Do wealthy individuals bully, though? Well, some do, some don't. Bullying comes in many forms. Wealth and power may enable some of the more pernicious forms, certainly. But you can be an ordinary middle-class bully and make people's lives pretty miserable. It's that old Original Sin thing, which is no respecter of class. ;)

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  6. When Patrick Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death", he was being totally binary, and being binary suuuucks.

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  7. I think Mr. Crim is one of those self-anointed, who "believe that third parties can make better decisions than people can make for themselves, and particularly that they are those third parties". (See the first couple minutes of this outstanding explanation.)

    And if you are working from that belief, then the obvious conclusion about someone who made money in the marketplace is that he necessarily profited by exploiting the gullible (who lacked the wisdom of the self-anointed to make better decisions), or by circumventing the rules. IOW, his gains are ill-gotten. This of course makes discrepancies between the rich and the poor especially galling.

    Compare the treatment of Mitt Romney to John Kerry. The Kerrys have many times the money of the Romneys, yet the Romneys were vilified for making their money on the backs of workers and their dying wives. John Kerry got his money legitimately, tho -- he married into it -- and thus had no such taint.


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    1. Yep. Very instructive.

      And what about all the Saint Kennedys? Their wealth (and even Jackie's horsies) were apparently just fine and dandy.

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  8. I had no idea that fr sirico was Paulie Walnuts' brother. wow!

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  9. These people seem to equate "free markets" or "economic liberalism" with lawlessness. "free" to them seems to be "free from law enforcement of any kind" including laws regarding fraud, self-dealing, etc. Which of course is nonsense.

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  10. Kathleen, that's exactly right. And they never really back that assertion up. It's assumed that everybody knows that these people are cheating, somehow.

    Crim has an asinine "Open Letter to George Weigel" (who is a villain to these types, ostensibly for being a much better and more prolific writer) in which he mentions the 2008 crash as proof that we're all wrong about capitalism. But he misses 2 points: the point that many conservatives and libertarians predicted the crash due to the WRONG regulations and financial institutions behaving badly, misrepresenting products, etc. The other point he misses is that most of the bad regulations were done in the name of reducing the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, something that he crows about ceaselessly.

    The interesting thing to me is that whenever they publish lists of the richest people something like 80% of the names on it are different from year to year. In other words, rags to riches and riches to rags are both occurring pretty regularly. So the idea that certain people are invariably "in control" so to speak isn't really substantiated by reality we see. Also there are many wealthy people who give huge sums of money away to charity. I've never heard any of these scolds even mention that sandcastle-shattering fact.

    This post on Wordsmith Intellectuals is germane to the topic and always worth revisiting.

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  11. Also there are many wealthy people who give huge sums of money away to charity. I've never heard any of these scolds even mention that sandcastle-shattering fact.

    so true.

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  12. Talk about Romney and giving away to charity, I've heard that Mitt gave away the money he inherited from his father, and the wealth he has, he earned.

    I totally agree, pikkumatti, that marrying into money seems to be "acceptable," but I get complete cognitive dissonance since at some point, some evil capitalist had to have made it. But then being leftist involves a lot of cognitive dissonance.

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