Strange Brewer -v- Piper on Adam Smith & Noam Chomsky (separated at birth?)

Strange Brewer on Mar-13-2005 at 02:37 PM RST @ 69.179.2.67

Gonna lose that snow in a hurry... Piper; ever Read Noam Chomsky? I KNOW you won't like him, but I am interested in a serious point by point examination of some of his work. In fact, I'd like to set up an e-mail dialog with you to debate economics, something a bit more rigorous than drunken chat "Slams". Not that I have anything against them; they are a lot of fun, but I'd like to get beyond that with you, since it's clear that your views are well-researched, carefully thought out and well systemitized. I think it would be fun. We could save the results and blog them, I think it would be worth doing. What are your thoughts?

Strange Brewer on Mar-13-2005 at 02:43 PM RST @ 69.179.2.67

Here is a snitppet you might find interesting, if odious... But no name calling. Destroy the argument, not the man. Chomsky is a fat, overbearing self-centered prissy fop, but he presents a clear view that is worthy of debate. If you read Adam Smith, I’m not talking about the illusions that are concocted about him but the actual text, there are many things that I would consider typical left-wing thought. So for example, Adam Smith does give an argument for the market, but his argument for the market is based on the assumption that under conditions of perfect liberty, which he hopes will be attained, the market would lead to perfect equality. In fact he regarded equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, as being an obvious desideratum for a decent society. That’s a left-wing idea. Or Aristotle. Let’s take Aristotle, the founder of modern political thought. Is he on the left or is he on the right? Aristotle discusses the different kinds of social order, oligarchy, tyranny and democracy. Among the three, he prefers democracy, but he also mentions flaws in democracy, and the flaws are interesting. The major flaws have to do with inequality. So, if you have a concentration of wealth within a democracy, then first, most of the population will not be able to participate freely, because they don’t have the opportunities. And even if they were to participate, they would use their force, their numerical force, to pursue their own interests, not the common good of all, and their own interests would be opposed to the interests of the minority of the wealthy. Well, for him democracy ought to be free, participatory, a community of free men participating equally, trying to find the common good. So a democracy wracked by extreme inequality would have serious flaws. He saw a conflict between democracy, on the one hand, and inequality and poverty, on the other. His conclusion was: let’s eliminate poverty. So, for Aristotle, democracy has to be what we would call a welfare state. It has to guarantee “lasting prosperity to the poor” by distribution of “public revenues,” a welfare state in other words. And then he goes on to describe means of doing this. He says that the best, the only properly functioning democracy, will be when everybody has “moderate and sufficient property.” Property is a broad term. Well, is he on the left or is he on the right? He’s taking a position which in contemporary terms would be called left-wing social democracy. He doesn’t talk much about organization of work, he’s obviously not talking about the industrial system and so on and so forth, but in the spectrum, he’d be way off on the left. On the other hand, there are conflicting factors. By “community of free men,” he meant first of all men not women, and secondly he meant not slaves, and thirdly not aliens, so that cuts out a considerable part of the species. It’s a little hard to blame Aristotle for this; these questions were not addressed until very recent years in fact. Nevertheless, there is Aristotle.

Strange Brewer on Mar-13-2005 at 02:45 PM RST @ 69.179.4.206

ANd the conclusion, cutting to the chase... If you look at the American constitutional debates, you discover that James Madison, who was the framer, faced exactly the same dilemma as Aristotle, almost in the same words. He said yes, we want a democracy, but if there’s going to be inequality, the mass of poor people will use their voting power to attack the wealth of the rich. They will carry out what we would call agrarian reforms— it was an agrarian society—so they will try to take the property of the rich and have it for themselves. And he said that’s wrong, just as Aristotle thought it was wrong. They faced the same dilemma but drew opposite conclusions. Aristotle’s conclusion was, “Okay, let’s eliminate poverty.” Madison’s was, “Let’s eliminate democracy.” Quite clearly, he said the goal of government must be “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.