Over the past year or so, having been freed of the necessity of care of a certain sort, I have endeavored to find the moral focus on the American Left to see whether or not it is true. My first stop was the investigation of the moral precepts of Socialism itself. What I discovered is that the American Left isn't truly socialist in any way that would be considered respectable by the likes of George Orwell. And I pretty much left it at that.
These days I find that the worst bricks thrown at capitalism are that it is .. well I can't find a consistent set of descriptions outside of the adjective 'evil'. But it is clear to me that American capitalism has been socialized quite enough. Says me, the guy with the ACA healthcare. But if there is any consistency to be expected, then the bricks shold be thrown at the BRICs. I mean it's not as if Russia and India haven't been industrialized for quite enough time. Then why has their capitalism made a middle class as large and prosperous as our capitalism has made our middle class? Same thing goes for China and Brazil.So while discussing the 'undemocracy' of capitalism. I got the following:
Third off we are already facing more dire straits than just a loss of democracy. Capitalism as we know it today is, quite literally, killing the biosphere and once that happens we are all fucked beyond words. It is kill or be killed and quite frankly I'd rather NOT be cursed by my ancestors & descendants for coming up with fancy sophistry to justify cowardly inaction and apathy.
My riposte went as follows:
Urban living is cowardly inaction and apathy. Dependence upon the government creation of services funded by usurious taxation of megacorporations that build polluting convenience is the essential neoliberal modus operandi. Neoliberals as well as most of the American Left are too nearsighted and morally ambiguous to sustain a real socialist revolution. Aside from that, their masses are only marginally skilled to handle urban living (thus their agenda), and have no real political pull from traditional self-sustaining rural peasants.
In other words neoliberals ask Whole Foods to 'do no evil' and eschew learning how to raise their own damned chickens, because no liberal wants chickens in their backyard. They'd rather so sitins at the FDA over salmonella scares. (Not that they could identify it with a microscope).
It is not 'capitalism' that is polluting the biosphere, it is the incompetency of the masses to be self-sustaining that generates the demand for mass-production of staples in the urban metropolitan model. If GM wasn't privately held but publicly held, that wouldn't make their automobiles less polluting. So long as the left requires a 'living wage' instead of 'life skills', then it accelerates dependence on mass production.
The Neoliberal and Progressive agenda stops far short of socialist revolution to the transfer of wealth (not the means of production) into jury-rigged urban survival schemes. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of regulating and suing the drug companies they need for the free health care they need because their constituencies know nothing of midwifery or home remedies. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of building schools that teach how to socialize into urban environments because their constituencies know nothing of growing vegetables, repairing clothing, home repair or electricity. For them the purpose of government is to provide a greased slide from any sort of crippling handicap directly into First World living standards and life expectancy in one generation with all the affirmative actions necessary. Because science. There's your fancy sophistry. Destroy independent living, regulate everything, charge taxes.
I'll leave it as I wrote it. But as I excrept in the future I will bring up the idea of 'equality' in that bit about affirmative actions which also has tangents to The American Price. And I also like the idea of using the term 'independent living' rather than 'liberty' because that's what I mean by liberty. I mean yeoman-farmer, country squire, family compound, shabby gentility and organic self-sustained hunting, fishing, hiking, carpentry & small town values. I mean all the things I can do, unregulated, unhamstrung by government interventions. Me and my 700 Facebook friends living somewhere in one town in Texas. I mean a jurisdiction that never needs more law than the Constitution provided as of its latest Amendment, and laws that can be effectively abstracted in 1000 words or less.
But the problem is urban living isn't it?
I've worked in all the major US cities, and I know that Seattle and San Francisco like their homeless more than the rest of us. They give way to them rather like the attitude towards cows in Madras. But the citadel of the city is no place for people with no skills. Such people will never be independent begging for scraps, no matter how well laid out and tax deductable those charitable donations may be. The point of the city is to aggregate the most complex and cosmopolitan of us in our arcane specialties abetted by a matrix of specialty services. Pizza by the slice, as Clay Shirky explains, is only a profitable enterprise with a certain urban density. (As is begging). But you cannot put affordable housing in the CBD - it is a contradiction in terms. The yuppies will always win in their gentrifications. That's the point of it being a city; it's where money and sophistication go. The attempt to make cities idiot proof simply undermines them.
The American Left place little faith in corporations and yet they need them to fund their projects. The extent to which they feel morally compelled determines how much they are willing to tax, but it doesn't address the fundamental question of sustainability. It is not cost effective to have low skilled people in high density areas. It does not make sense to mass produce and ship goods to cities in the way we distribute retail goods. It does not make sense to morally justify wealth transfers to establish national standards for the short term, if you are interested in the biosphere. It does not make sense to create demand for mass produced goods that contribute to pollution when people can be trained to provide for themselves.