Reflections of a stormy petrel

Cain's just saying what a lot of American conservatives are thinking, unfortunately.

While Cain's phrasing was unusually crass, I've had plenty of conversations with conservative relatives who insisted that the unemployed are, by and large, merely too lazy or too proud to take the work that's out there.

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(I'd still assume unemployed conservatives feel differently, of course.)

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fellmama.livejournal.com

What unemployed conservatives?

;)

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Well, yeah, at this rate I doubt there will be many unemployed conservatives left -- and not because they're finding jobs.

I think Cain's quote captures, in chemical purity, the sort of materialist Calvinism that's infected conservative economic thinking, and which was one of the things (along with e.g. increasing anti-intellectualism) that led me to stop self-identifying as a conservative.

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(If popular conservatism in the US didn't labor so hard identify itself with Christianity, all this might bother me less. As it is, though, it's becoming a serious source of scandal. Growing up, I was taught that to be truly Christian is to be conservative, and vice-versa. Needless to say, in the process of breaking with conservatism, it took me a long time to sort out and distinguish my political and faith commitments.)

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fellmama.livejournal.com

The only "unemployed" conservatives I know anymore are elderly--or at the least, retired. I think in particular of a former teacher of mine who, despite his G.I. bill education, military pension, and state-subsidized health care, frequently takes to facebook to declare that we should all stand on our own two feet and not expect any of them government handouts.

I remain unimpressed.

(Incidentally, I was raised to believe that true Christianity was by definition liberal. I've come to a more nuanced view of theological conservatism but, well, faith without works is dead, eh?)

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ACtually, the delusional aspect of conservatism in this respect is the notion that private charity can and should be the be-all and end-all of social relief. That is, conservatives believe that they can do anything by means of private charity and without state intervention. This is not only wrong, but dangerous. First, it places a whole stratum of society in the position of clientes, or, to be blunter, institutionalized beggars. A man who applies to a government office for unemployment relief is asking for a legal right; a man who goes to a private charity for it is begging. Second, it sets up a series of uncontrollable private powers. The power of charities and foundations is already far too large as it is; under the conservative utopia, who would prevent them from (for instance) forcing any charity recipients to join a particular church or party? Third, it never in the history of the universe worked, so why should it work now?

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Speaking as one who has gone to a government office for relief, I can tell you that it places me under a far worse odium than private charity could ever do — because, in effect, it gives me the official and legal status of a beggar, and that government office proceeds to dictate the details of my private life in a way that no private charity would have the bad conscience to do.

The power of charities and foundations is already far too large as it is.

It is NOTHING to the power of the state, which is swollen to Stalinesque proportions when it becomes the MONOPOLY provider of charity. Private charities and foundations do not have the power to imprison, the power to deprive people of their livelihood, or the power to shoot people. Don’t talk to me about the ants in the wainscoting when I have been trodden on by the elephant in the middle of the room.

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I'm not against public assistance in principle, but I'm still inclined to prefer private charity where it can be made to work. You will certainly find issues of the kind that Fabio's concerned about (c.f. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/making-poor-people-pray/), but one of the things that really amazed me some years ago, when my father went on unemployment for a time, was how invasive and demanding the terms of the assistance were.

That being said, Fabio's been on government assistance before himself, but in the UK. It might be instructive if you two were to compare your respective experiences.

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Public or private assistance is humiliating never mind what, because it is not money you earned. Period. Having said that, a properly staffed office with people who care about the work they do makes all the difference. I have met both kinds. For reasons that have nothing to do with the private-public guff, I don't really want to to speak here about what I noticed and where the regularities were; I shall be more explicit if you or

superversive contact me personally. However, I can say that I did not find the principle in itself wrong.

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I would remind you that as early as fifty years ago, the Ford Foundation and a few other private bodies of that kind actually plotted to destroy the Pope and change the direction of the Church at the time of the contraception/Humanae Vitae affair. They were not completely successful, but they were more successful than anyone since Martin Luther. And this follows on the way in which they effectively rescued, bankrolled and backed the villainous Kinsey. When the Kinsey Report first came out, the media and responsible authorities effectively destroyed it (the then chairman of the American Institute for Statistics stated something like "there are six criteria for accuracy in statistics, and Kinsey fails at least four"); but by consistent bankrolling, behind-the-scenes support, and stage-setting, they turned it into one of the most significant events of the century. The power of private foundations over media and ultimately over public opinion simply cannot be underestimated, and that is not even counting their power to intervene directly and immediately. They set the direction for scientific research. They can blackmail any university. In places like Africa, private charities have more power than the United States or China. If you want to know why our culture has taken the direction it has, a serious study of private foundations, of the kind that some historians have made for Communist Party penetration, would be very much to the point; only - can't imagine why - no history department ever thought of financing one. Just as they never did finance research into Communist penetration as long as Communism was a real power, preferring to mock people who saw "reds under our beds". Well, guess what? the reds WERE under our beds, and in every other significant position; and so were the emissaries of opinionated, vicious private wealth. The two things have a lot in common.

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joetexx.livejournal.com

bravo

Apologies to the late Dr Asimov.

Bravo Fabio!

Have your read Dwight Macdonald's 1950's study of the Ford Foundation? Or Ferdidnand Lundberg treatment of the role of foundations in polititical and economic policy in The Rich and the Super Rich (1968)? The latter book permanently shaped my view of the way American society works in the real worls as opposed to what the civics books tell us.

I knew that Kinsey's research was an intellectual disgrace, but not the part that the foundations played in promoting it.
Any dources you could reccommend?

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Here are a few pointers:http://pt-br.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=187210304641278&topic=299 There is an element of conspiracy theory, but the role of the Rockefeller Foundation is unarguable.

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joetexx.livejournal.com

Thanks, the stuff about the effects on the penal code was especially enligtening.

Edited Date: 2011-10-12 03:10 pm (UTC)

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That might be the case if the state were the monopoly provider of charity, but as it happens it's not even close and does not have the power to be. I have a life-sized picture of the State trying to close down the Ford Foundation or the Bill And Melinda Gates lot. They can shut down a few Catholic institutions for political reasons, but in front of real money they wouldn't know where to begin. And without wanting to go further in public - you may contact me privately if you want me to go any further - I would remind you that I was speaking of personal experience.

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P.S.: Stalinesque means building prison camps to murder people by the million. I would suggest you watch your language; perhaps in North America, where people have never experienced anything like real tyranny, this kind of talk about having to fill in a form seems appropriate, but to those of us who have seen the blood and terror of it in person it only seems hysterical and stupid.

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CS Lewis had it exactly right when he said that a Christian party would be of the left in some things and of the right in others. Conservatives can only keep their claim to Christian identity by ignoring a mountain of Gospel admonitions against the rich, amounting to the statement that only by a miracle of God can any rich man at all be saved; but just as liberals are clapping their hands and cheering at the picture of the rich man in Hell and the encouragement of virtuous poverty and even monastic schemes of shared property, Christianity turns and bites them on the rear end with the prohibition of lust of any kind, the demand for lifelong celibacy or marriage without divorce, the demand that one should work and care for his family, and so on. Christianity is a wild horse that will always kick and trample over whoever tries to corral it for any reason.

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Me, for one. Next question?

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The obvious one: how do you feel about remarks like Cain's, and how would you relate them to the circumstances of your own unemployment?

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Cain’s remarks constitute a half-truth, but one that I find it refreshing to hear, for they are the half of the truth that socialists, bureaucrats, and the Left media are continually trying to obscure. He is quite right that it is foolish to blame Wall Street, or capitalism generally, for my (or anyone’s) being unemployed, when it is the capitalist liberty of enterprise that provides most people with employment. These protesters are merely the latest in a long line of idiots proclaiming that half a loaf is the same as no bread, and then blaming the baker because there isn’t more.

In general, blame is a poor way of dealing with adverse circumstances: time spent blaming people is time lost from constructive labour. I find this a useful rule: If I must blame someone, let me begin by blaming myself, for my own behaviour is the thing I have the most power to change. If there is blame left over, then let me assign it to other people, and to institutions, and to structures of society, in that order. The structures would not exist unless supported by the institutions, and the institutions would not exist unless supported by the individuals who work in them: all comes down to individual efforts and decisions, or (too often, alas!) to individual sloth and the habit of deferring decision to others.

My own unemployment is a complex case; if there were an easy remedy for it, I should have found it by now. Partly I am unemployed because of various medical conditions that make me unable to do certain kinds of work; partly because I was prevented for many years from getting an education that would fit me for such work as I can do, through the officious stupidity of public-sector bureaucrats; partly because I have spent the last few years looking after my aged parents, a thing that only a cad would refuse to do, but that the cads who run bureaucracies (public or private) do not consider as ‘work’.

The only way in which I can find any capitalist institution to blame for my predicament is that too many businesses have accepted the myth of higher education as a necessary credential. People who pay a certain sum in tuition, and sit for four years in a classroom without causing a fuss, are rewarded with a piece of paper known as a bachelor’s degree; and because this degree is so easy to earn if you have the time and the money, it is (at least in my country) generally considered the absolute minimum qualification for any job requiring intellectual ability or clerical skills. A career counsellor whom I consulted a few years ago, after many tests and interviews, told me flatly that I should never find a job I was fit for without a degree. I therefore, after ludicrous effort, found a way to clear my name of the black mark that had made it impossible for me to get a higher education; and I got halfway through the required four years of sitting still, when my car was hit by a truck and I suffered injuries that made me unable to finish.

I have spent the last seven months (1) helping my parents sell their house, (2) dealing with the catastrophe caused by my stepbrother’s getting them confined in hospital and declared incompetent, with the intention of making off with their money; (3) putting their belongings into storage, and moving myself into an apartment; (4) fighting a court battle to prevent my stepbrother from removing my parents’ money from the country, and getting a more appropriate person appointed as trustee; (5) suffering a minor stroke due to the accumulated stress, and to my pre-existing hypertension; (6) recovering from the stroke; (7) moving my parents, after six months’ delay, out of the hospital and into an assisted-living facility. I don’t see how I could have either sought or sustained regular employment during that time.

Most of my troubles this year have been unnecessary, but they were all brought on either directly by the actions of my family, or indirectly by the Rube Goldberg apparatus of laws, regulations, and court procedures which my brother exploited in his effort to deprive my parents of their liberty and property. None of my troubles would have been any the less if capitalism had never existed.

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Capitalism has nothing to do with the free market. By which I mean that it has nothing to do either for or against the free market. Monopolies, state or private, may be defined as less efficient forms of capitalism, but they are forms of capitalism. And conversely, freedom only makes capitalism more efficient as it makes every other aspect and area of society more efficient.

The reason why Hermann Cain is an idiot is nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is that when there is no work there is no work, and no amount of positive thinking can make it otherwise. It is as bad, as sick, and as depraved, as to blame your lack of positive thinking for the fact that you are dying of cancer. My own business is going down the tubes at present, because less companies want stuff translated - especially to and from Italian - and also because some people are stupid enough to use computer translation instead of the real thing. I will have to apply for unemployment again, but if anyone tells me that it's my own fault - or the fault of any of the other translators who are similarly getting shafted - I promise I will react violently. Cain, as a member of the director class, has no right to say anything on the matter; his kind will never be unemployed and know nothing of it.

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It is that when there is no work there is no work, and no amount of positive thinking can make it otherwise.

This is true only if you assume that ‘work’ is something that must be bestowed upon the individual by an outside power. It is, in fact, the cargo cult theory of economics.

I will have to apply for unemployment again, but if anyone tells me that it's my own fault - or the fault of any of the other translators who are similarly getting shafted - I promise I will react violently.

Cain’s point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is that it is not Wall Street’s fault. There is not a conspiracy of Evil Capitalists™ to put translators out of work.

Cain, as a member of the director class, has no right to say anything on the matter; his kind will never be unemployed and know nothing of it.

What is this ‘director class’ of which you speak? Cain is the son of a chauffeur who grew up in the Jim Crow era in Georgia, and worked his way up from nothing. He has been unemployed in the past and knows as much of it as you or I. You appear to assume that because someone is now rich and in a position of economic power, he must always have been in that position. In fact you are parroting the bog-standard Socialist belief that great wealth is always and everywhere and intrinsically unearned, and that anyone who has wealth is ipso facto a member of a parasite class. I suggest you try to learn some of the most elementary facts about the man’s C.V. before you try to tar him with that brush.

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Capitalism has nothing to do with the free market. By which I mean that it has nothing to do either for or against the free market.

The term ‘capitalism’ was invented by nineteenth-century Socialists as a term of abuse, and they applied it as a contrapositive label to Socialism. (Proposition: ‘All Socialism is state control of the means of production.’ Contrapositive: ‘All conditions in which the state does not control the means of production is capitalism.’) In this original sense of the term, it most definitely does have to do with the free market, in the sense that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You cannot have a free market in a Socialist economy; and since the terms are defined as mutually exclusive and exhaustive opposites, by those definitions you cannot have a free market in anything but a capitalist economy.

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Wrong. The operative words in Cain's outburst were "If you don't have a job" and "blame yourself". Especially the last two. You cannot pretend that he said something else just because it would be convenient if he had. And to use insulting terms does not change FACTS. If there are four million unemployed in a country, and only two hundred thousand jobs are on offer, then there is not enough work. Period.

As for the director class, such a thing exists and is in power. It is no more important to it that Cain was the son of a sharecropper, than that Steve Jobs was adopted and a college dropout. I will even grant you that both of them have earned their places at the top - unlike most of the occupiers. What matters is that, bar for possible total self-destructiveness, none of those who are now in that position will ever know unemployment again, and that they will make sure that none of their children will. If you have any problem with that analysis, talk to Angelo Codevilla or to the many other conservative analysts who have pointed out the existence of a new aristocracy that occupies the commanding heights of society and makes sure that its own members never suffer from want.

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Bullshit. The term defined the business structure that depended on capital. The Communist use of it is largely abusive and entirely secondary. I stand by my statement and maintain that the only way to use the term capitalism usefully without being misled by a dead political orthodoxy is to use it to describe the kind of business at whose heart lies the use of capital - a very important and very distinct concept which, but for "capitalism", would have no word to define it, thus reducing our ability to understand history and the world.

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