Re: [RC] [ RC ] NRO: The Social Darwinist Smear ECONOMICS POLITICS

[David R. Block]

Title: "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech

Hmmm. "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz   On 4/11/2012 6:10 AM, bil...@aol.com wrote: David :   Nice article, will save for my files. However, as right as much of the thrust of Lowry's, piece is, there are, in fact, de facto social Darwinist economic policy advocates in the Republican Party, like Gilder, and like the late Milton Friedman. Hence everyone who still follows Friedman's ideas today. DRB: I would prefer Hayek, but he may have something in his closet that is upsetting, too.   What critics of the Ryan plan are upset about is that the blame for problems which that plan seems to assume, should fall on average citizens and not on the finance capital wealthy, viz, Wall Street speculators. DRB: I'm really curious how one could target Wall Street Speculators without creating a blatantly discriminatory law. Which, no matter the intent, sets a really bad precedent. I still do not buy the narrative that the only guilty parties are on Wall Street. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae need to be gutted and replaced with people who know what the **** they are doing instead of being filled with the likes of Barney Frank's current homo hookup. And he was chairman of the committee in 2007-2010 who played Sergeant Schultz. "I zee noth-ink, noth-ink!!!" Who said that "love" was blind?? THIS SURELY ARGUES FOR IT. Maybe it is being in the mortgage industry, but those of us in the industry have more bile and venom for those two agencies than anyone on Wall Street. THEY insisted that the mortgages be created with no credit check, THEY created the entire "sub-prime" mortgage market from the Community Reinvestment Act, and THEY even bought and sold some of those "evil" derivatives that almost crashed the whole banking system. giving them coveted "Government Insured" status-without which these financial instruments probably could not have been sold. Where was their Congressional Oversight?? Involved with one of the executives, but no conflict of interest here, no sir. (YEAH, RIGHT.)   My position is directly derivative of Kevin Philips,  if you want to know. Since ca 1980 if not before, he has been more-or-less politically independent but, as you also know, at one time he  was a conservative theorist of the first order. But along the way he became disillusioned with finance capital and certainly since ca 1990 has been at war with that wing of the Republican Party.  This hardly means that he is pro-Democratic Party even if, here and there, he may go along with Democratic ideas. Basically he rejects the Washington Consensus, which, in practice, is a bi-partisan supply side theory of economics.   My opposition to supply side thinking is near absolute. DRB: I dunno, but I think that I would take the much, much shorter Reagan recession over this one. Maybe that's just me.   My contempt for finance capital economics  --to a whole class of Wall Streeters-- is also near absolute.  Hence my comment about "conservative" economists who "can be" worse than the Left.   This, BTW, is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Left, just a comparison, as if someone said that "if anything Communism is worse than Fascism." Clearly NEITHER alternative is worth a damn, its just that one is worse than the other. DRB: Well, a lot of those Wall Streeters, so-called "conservatives," are donating a hell of a lot of money to President Goldman Sachs. I question their classification as "conservatives." ("President Goldman Sachs" shamelessly stolen from Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.   My humble opinion   Billy   ===============================================     4/10/2012 10:36:15 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, david.r.bl...@verizon.net writes: NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com         The Social-Darwinist Smear By Rich Lowry April 10, 2012 12:00 A.M. Social Darwinism isn’t what it used to be. President Barack Obama lambasted the Paul Ryan budget as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” in a scorching budget speech last week. The charge displayed the same care as his contention that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation passed by Congress — in other words, another verbal temper tantrum substituting petulance for reason. Social Darwinism is the 19th-century creed that, drawing on biology, supposedly held that a laissez-faire economy should operate on the basis of “survival of the fittest.” The strong rise, while the weak fall, unaided and deserving their pitiable fate. What are the telltale signs of social Darwinism in the Ryan budget? Total federal spending will only increase from $3.6 trillion this year to $4.8 trillion in ten years. If you can’t already hear the cries of children relegated to the poorhouse and of old people pushed out onto ice floes, you must be a 21st-century robber baron. Ryan wants to spend 19.8 percent of GDP as of 2022, a greater share of the economy than when President Bill Clinton left office — that infamous advocate of private-sector predation at the expense of the worthless poor. Doesn’t Ryan want to cut taxes for the rich? He would reduce tax rates, while making the revenue up by closing loopholes and deductions. This Darwinistic notion was endorsed by President Obama’s own fiscal commission, chaired by men the president fulsomely praised without ever once mentioning that they were a danger to the weak and the vulnerable on account of their unhinged belief in a society run by and for the evolutionarily superior. But Ryan wants to end Medicare, doesn’t he? Ten years from now, Ryan proposes introducing an element of choice into Medicare while limiting the program’s growth to the GDP growth rate plus 0.5 percent, the same spending goal that the president sets out in his own budget. If Ryan is “red in tooth and claw” on Medicare, so is the president. The difference is that President Obama prefers a price-setting bureaucratic panel to competition as his Darwinistic tool to weed out the maladapted elderly. If the president were asked to enunciate a line between heartless social Darwinism and prudent budgeting, he surely couldn’t do it. What he means by a social Darwinist is someone who wants to spend less money than he does. By this standard, the president is a damnable social Darwinist compared with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which wants to spend $1.5 trillion more than he does over the next ten years and raise taxes by several trillion more. If social Darwinism is merely the belief that the market is the best system for allocating capital and wealth, and that a free society will necessarily be an unequal one, then almost everyone in America is a social Darwinist. Even the president constantly pledges fealty to the market and doesn’t want to confiscate all of Mark Zuckerberg’s income. He is using social Darwinism as a free-floating pejorative for people whose policy preferences he doesn’t like, which is entirely appropriate. The liberal historian Richard Hofstadter popularized the label in a book he wrote in the 1940s. He applied it to supporters of the free market in the 19th century who never applied it to themselves. As Princeton professor Thomas Leonard points out, American businessmen in the Gilded Age rarely leaned on Darwin: “Their defenses of laissez faire much more commonly invoked religion, the common good, Horatio Alger mythology, the American republican tradition.” Even the two alleged theorists of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, were complex figures and awkward fits for the term. Hofstadter used social Darwinist, Leonard writes, “in the traditional way: as an epithet to discredit views he opposed.” In this respect, liberalism hasn’t evolved at all down through the decades: Seventy years later, it’s still the same witless insult, for the same reason. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lo...@nationalreview.com. © 2012 by King Features Syndicate Permalink -- "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz   -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org   -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org