Every ideology has SOME merit; A review of the communist press and other miscellany
Carl
the point is.... boys and girls.....labor, the "middle class" and
less, have no voice ...today....yesterday....or tomorrow...unless you
allow it.
When the spread between the haves and the have nots is dramatic, a
nation is at risk. We are now at that point boys and girls. The New
Republicans harping on personal responsibility and the "freedom to
succeed' is more steeped in greed than social justice. "Yes" you
say....Milton Friedman all over again." Capitalism without empathy
WILL NOT generate a peaceful, prosperous society. Wealth without
empathy is of value only to a select few.
Give me a break. Government, a transparent, empathetic government....
is paramount. Regardless of what the New Republicans say, (or any
party) ....look only at what they do.
Since 1980...the New Republicans have been working to suppress any
minority rights, undermine news and information and education of the
masses, transfer wealth from the working class to only the very
wealthiest, pillaging the national treasury, deferring taxes, and
making the Republic vulnerable to decline with unbridled support of a
run amok military-industrial complex. .
"Dying to Win"...the book.... reminds us that when Ronald Reagan
walked away from Lebanon.....terrorists worldwide, especially in the
Middle East.... were vindicated and emboldened.
now...back to the feared communists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Worker
Daily Worker
snip
Beginning in the Popular Front period of the 1930s, when the party
proclaimed that "Communism was Twentieth Century Americanism" and
characterized itself as the heirs to the tradition of Washington and
Lincoln, the paper broadened its coverage of the arts and
entertainment. In 1935 it established a sports page, edited and
frequently written by Lester Rodney. The paper's sports coverage
combined enthusiasm with social criticism and is remembered for
consistently advocating the ........
desegregation of professional sports.
snip
The paper printed articles in support for the early stages of the 1956
Hungarian Revolution. Editor John Gates opened the paper for
discussion, which seemed to promise either a revitalisation or a
dissolution of the party.
snip
etc etc
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys...you decide:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.thenation.com
http://www.democracynow.org
http://www.weeklystandard.com
http://www.independent.org/
http://www.soros.org/
http://www.spectator.org/index.asp
Jeff Dege
> the point is.... boys and girls.....labor, the "middle class" and less,
> have no voice ...today....yesterday....or tomorrow...unless you allow
> it.
>
> When the spread between the haves and the have nots is dramatic, a
> nation is at risk. We are now at that point boys and girls. The New
> Republicans harping on personal responsibility and the "freedom to
> succeed' is more steeped in greed than social justice.
The term "social justice" is an intentional fraud devised to hide the
blatant political power grab motivating its advocates.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0012/opinion/novak.html
Defining Social Justice
Michael Novak
Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 108 (December 2000): 11-13.
Last year marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Friedrich
Hayek, among whose many contributions to the twentieth century was a
sustained and animated put-down of most of the usages of the term social
justice. I have never encountered a writer, religious or philosophical,
who directly answers Hayek's criticisms. In trying to understand social
justice in our own time, there is no better place to start than with the
man who, in his own intellectual life, exemplified the virtue whose common
misuse he so deplored.
The trouble with social justice begins with the very meaning of the term.
Hayek points out that whole books and treatises have been written about
social justice without ever offering a definition of it. It is allowed to
float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it
appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to
define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual
difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational
meaning is, We need a law against that. In other words, it becomes an
instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the
power of legal coercion.
Hayek points out another defect of twentieth-century theories of social
justice. Most authors assert that they use it to designate a virtue (a
moral virtue, by their account). But most of the descriptions they attach
to it appertain to impersonal states of affairs - high unemployment or
inequality of incomes or lack of a living wage are cited as instances of
social injustice. Hayek goes to the heart of the matter: social justice is
either a virtue or it is not. If it is, it can properly be ascribed only
to the reflective and deliberate acts of individual persons. Most who use
the term, however, ascribe it not to individuals but to social systems.
They use social justice to denote a regulative principle of order; again,
their focus is not virtue but power.
The term social justice was first used in 1840 by a Sicilian priest, Luigi
Taparelli d'Azeglio, and given prominence by Antonio Rosmini-Serbati in La
Costitutione Civile Secondo la Giustizia Sociale in 1848. John Stuart Mill
gave this anthropomorphic approach to social questions almost canonical
status for modern thinkers thirteen years later in Utilitarianism:
Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well
of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the
highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards
which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens,
should be made in the utmost degree to converge. [Emphasis added.]
Mill imagines that societies can be virtuous in the same way that
individuals can be. Perhaps in highly personalized societies of the
ancient type, such a usage might make sense - under kings, tyrants, or
tribal chiefs, for example, where one person made all the crucial social
decisions. Curiously, however, the demand for the term social justice did
not arise until modern times, in which more complex societies operate by
impersonal rules applied with equal force to all under the rule of law.
The birth of the concept of social justice coincided with two other shifts
in human consciousness: the death of God and the rise of the ideal of the
command economy. When God died, people began to trust a conceit of reason
and its inflated ambition to do what even God had not deigned to do:
construct a just social order. The divinization of reason found its
extension in the command economy; reason (that is, science) would command
and humankind would collectively follow. The death of God, the rise of
science, and the command economy yielded scientific socialism. Where
reason would rule, the intellectuals would rule. (Or so some thought.
Actually, the lovers of power would rule.)
From this line of reasoning it follows that social justice would have its
natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do,
so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to
hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by
specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of
just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held
responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible
would be blaming the victim. It is the function of social justice to blame
somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically)
control it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of
communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to
have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others;
these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable,
Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.
We are not wrong, Hayek concedes, in perceiving that the effects of the
individual choices and open processes of a free society are not
distributed according to a recognizable principle of justice. The
meritorious are sometimes tragically unlucky; the evil prosper; good ideas
don't pan out, and sometimes those who backed them, however noble their
vision, lose their shirts. But a system that values both trial-and-error
and free choice is in no position to guarantee outcomes in advance.
Furthermore, no one individual (and certainly no politburo or
congressional committee or political party) can design rules that would
treat each person according to his merit or even his need. No one has
sufficient knowledge of all relevant personal details, and as Kant writes,
no general rule has a grip fine enough to grasp them.
Hayek made a sharp distinction, however, between those failures of justice
that involve breaking agreed-upon rules of fairness and those that consist
in results that no one designed, foresaw, or commanded. The first sort of
failure earned his severe moral condemnation. No one should break the
rules; freedom imposes high moral responsibilities. The second, insofar as
it springs from no willful or deliberate act, seemed to him not a moral
matter but an inescapable feature of all societies and of nature itself.
When labeling unfortunate results as social injustices leads to an attack
upon the free society, with the aim of moving it toward a command society,
Hayek strenuously opposes the term. The historical records of the command
economies of Nazism and communism justify his revulsion at that way of
thinking.
Hayek recognized that at the end of the nineteenth century, when the term
social justice came to prominence, it was first used as an appeal to the
ruling classes to attend to the needs of the new masses of uprooted
peasants who had become urban workers. To this he had no objection. What
he did object to was careless thinking. Careless thinkers forget that
justice is by definition social. Such carelessness becomes positively
destructive when the term social no longer describes the product of the
virtuous actions of many individuals, but rather the utopian goal toward
which all institutions and all individuals are made in the utmost degree
to converge by coercion. In that case, the social in social justice refers
to something that emerges not organically and spontaneously from the
rule-abiding behavior of free individuals, but rather from an abstract
ideal imposed from above.
Given the strength of Hayek's argument against the term, it may seem odd
to assert that he himself was a practitioner of social justice - even if
one adds, as one must, social justice rightly understood. Still, Hayek
plainly saw in his vocation as a thinker a life of service to his fellow
men. Helping others to understand the intellectual keys to a free and
creative society is to render them a great benefit. Hayek's intellectual
work was not merely a matter of his own self-interest, narrowly
understood, but was aimed at the good of the human city as a whole. It was
a work of justice in a social dimension - in other words, a work of
virtue. To explain what Hayek did, then, we need a conception of social
justice that Hayek never considered.
Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is
social in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of
inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a
work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, through
which free citizens exercise self-government by doing for themselves (that
is, without turning to government) what needs to be done. Citizens who
take part commonly explain their efforts as attempts to give back for all
that they have received from the free society, or to meet the obligations
of free citizens to think and act for themselves. The fact that this
activity is carried out with others is one reason for designating it as a
specific type of justice; it requires a broader range of social skills
than do acts of individual justice.
The second characteristic of social justice rightly understood is that it
aims at the good of the city, not at the good of one agent only. Citizens
may band together, as in pioneer days, to put up a school or build a
bridge. They may get together in the modern city to hold a bake sale for
some charitable cause, to repair a playground, to clean up the
environment, or for a million other purposes that their social
imaginations might lead them to. Hence the second sense in which this
habit of justice is social: its object, as well as its form, primarily
involves the good of others.
One happy characteristic of this definition of the virtue of social
justice is that it is ideologically neutral. It is as open to people on
the left as on the right or in the center. Its field of activity may be
literary, scientific, religious, political, economic, cultural, athletic,
and so on, across the whole spectrum of human social activities. The
virtue of social justice allows for people of good will to reach
different - even opposing - practical judgments about the material content
of the common good (ends) and how to get there (means). Such differences
are the stuff of politics.
We must rule out any use of social justice that does not attach to the
habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. Social justice is a virtue, an
attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud. And if Tocqueville is right
that the principle of association is the first law of democracy, then
social justice is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of
putting the principle of association into daily practice. Neglect of it,
Hayek wrote, has moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the
patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes
which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring
about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that
appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more
deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if
government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of
spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the
provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common
effort of many.
Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and
Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted
from a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago's Committee on
Social Thought.
--
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes
a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and has an
almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
- H. L. Mencken
Carl
wrote:
>On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 13:33:40 +0000, Carl wrote:
>
>
>> the point is.... boys and girls.....labor, the "middle class" and less,
>> have no voice ...today....yesterday....or tomorrow...unless you allow
>> it.
>>
>> When the spread between the haves and the have nots is dramatic, a
>> nation is at risk. We are now at that point boys and girls. The New
>> Republicans harping on personal responsibility and the "freedom to
>> succeed' is more steeped in greed than social justice.
>
>The term "social justice" is an intentional fraud devised to hide the
>blatant political power grab motivating its advocates.
>
>
>Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and
>Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted
>from a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago's Committee on
>Social Thought.
Absolutely Dege...it is no surprise you tapped the greediest among us
to quote. Mitch Perlstein..purveyor that there is no evil in the
military-industrial complex...or in business in general, and no tax is
better than a tax for the common good. Like Mexico.
Only fools follow AEI ideology..
Iin its ultimate form it is ...that beligned term...fascism.