fpb | Are the Republicans trying to make Obama a gift of the presidency?

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Rick Perry has shown that he doesn't have what it takes. Sarah Palin surprised me (that Indianola speech certainly sounded like a bid for national leadership) by announcing that she won't run. Now Hermann Cain, who had briefly flashed across the sky, has committed electoral suicide and damaged the whole party into the bargain. The Republicans risk selecting Romney by default, and I have said what I think of him.

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From:

fpb.livejournal.com

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.

From:

superversive.livejournal.com

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.

From:

superversive.livejournal.com

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.

From:

fpb.livejournal.com

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.

From:

fpb.livejournal.com

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.