Understanding the Political World through Words and Terms
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Over the years, as I have attempted to make sense of our crazy world as it applies to politics, I have almost needed to rewrite the various definitions just to try to make sense of them myself. Even though you may end up not agreeing with the terms and definitions that I apply to them, you will at least see where I’m coming from and the thoughts used to come to my understanding. I first recognized the need for something along these lines from just listening to the various disagreements over the various political and economic terms being used by people who appeared to have a pretty good understanding of the realities and theories involving government and law.
What I found out is that many people throughout history have offered up a host of terms and definitions and that they don’t necessarily agree with one another or even make sense to the common man. During the founding of our great nation, people like Jefferson used the phrase “political economy” as the label for those who studied this area of knowledge. Even though it is not used today I think it is a very fitting term. I like to use the term socio-economics to describe the area of study for the following reason but before I start, what I think is interesting, is we have historically relied on a host of individuals some of whom, were not the greatest or honest of people such as Karl Marx to give us insight into this most important area of knowledge. It is my opinion that we should not necessarily rest on historical definitions, however great or smart we were told these people were. We also know from recent history, that certain political movements change the definitions in their messages to meet their goals and some are downright misleading. As an example, a classical liberal, during the mid 1800s is now called a libertarian. What we call progressives today, were called socialists in the early 1900s and are also called liberals today by many folks. There is also a difference between terms used in academia and those used by we the people as layman. This obviously creates confusion for those just learning or who don’t have a solid political or economic foundation of knowledge to rely on. Please also remember that I’m not trying to rewrite the definitions in great detail or specifics, but I am just trying to understand them or better stated attempting to teach what I perceive the various terms to mean and perhaps get rid of some of your misconceptions or perhaps mind.
Socio-economics; the study of the effects of society from the laws and economic principles it embraces. I started looking at this as two separate and distinct areas. 1. Who makes the decision and 2. How those laws effect society and the economy. Politics as my father once told me should be defined as “the art of getting elected” which I thing is somewhat fitting. You will find that “some” common political terms tend to fall under one of these two categories. For instance, a Military Junta really defines more “who” is making the decision, much more than what laws are being instituted. The term Democracy is also more about who is making the decision, as is the term dictatorship.
The words or terms that are the most difficult in my opinion to understand are those that are attempting to blend various activities or methods together like the word socialism. Also one should note that a word is more of its common usage and terms often deal with it legal definition and that they are something very different in meaning. Get a Black’s Law dictionary to check this out.
Let’s stay on democracy as bit and make a couple of notations. If you look up the word in Wikipedia, you’ll see that there is “no” universally accepted definition. Yet our politicians spew out the term as if it this clear cut thing we all know and love. Actually, all democracies have failed over time. They actually don’t work and some of our founding fathers knew this and we have a number of quotes from them acknowledging this. Yet almost everyone believes that democracies are the best form of government. It is interesting that so many people perceive something to be the best that doesn’t work and that this is so emphatically taught in our education system. Our founding fathers therefore gave us a democratic Republic, meaning that the Citizens decide who their representatives are and that these folks make the laws on their behalf. Our Republic unlike any other in prior history, added a Bill of Rights, at the Citizens request I might add. The reasons why democracies fail, by the way, are quite interesting and you can read about that in numerous essays on the web and in the late Harry Brown’s book, Why Government Doesn’t Work. I’ve concluded from my studies that by adding a layer of politically elected representatives, a democratic Republic, that this does not aid in making democracies work, and that democratic Republics fail for the same reasons as democracies fail. I need to clarify that obviously there are a bunch of democracies working around the world right now, the issue is that they do not work for their intended purpose of providing for what is in the best interest of the majority and as noted before all eventually fail over time for the same reasons.
Democracies are generally considered those political systems that allow a few of the basic individual rights such as voting directly or through representatives, freedom of the press and freedom of speech and that’s about as far as it goes. Issues such as election fraud and property rights or the lack thereof muddy the distinction.
Two words that I think should be eliminated from usage in politics are liberal and conservative as they do not provide adequate or specific information. Both are adjectives that have been turned into nouns and if you have ever spoken to someone who calls themselves either of these terms, you will get a wide range of philosophies from all walks of life dealing in religion, economics and the law. At best they are very generalized terms that can be replaced easily with much better words.
How about the isms: communism, fascism, socialism, libertarianism, Marxism, Leninism, etc. Communism is easy, think of it as when everyone works for the government and government owns everything. All for one, and one for all. Sounds good, but talk about something that doesn’t work. Communist societies die even faster than democracies.
Libertarianism is pretty easy also as they believe in less government and generally the lesser the better. They believe that the free market, if it is not manipulated by government mandate, will do a better job at providing at what is in the best interest of the majority. There basic premise is that no one knows what is in your best interest as an adult better than you do, and therefore you should be able to do with whatever money you earn, as you see fit.
Now we have social, fascism, Marxism and Leninism and in my opinion these are the words that are the most understood. People tend to based their definitions on the intensions of the system rather than the methods used in the system. For instance, socialized medicine can incorporate government employees being the administrators of the system. Anytime government administers a project or business, it can be said that this is the socialized sector, what same call the public sector. The military, public police, the courthouse, etc. are all part of the public sector, that which is being administered by the government. In a communist society, the land, building and business/project is owned by the government, with socialism, that is not always the case. The building can be owned by private individuals and leased to the government, such as a hospital of family and children services that lease their buildings. Both socialism and communism come from the same word origin, society and community, but Marx suggested that communism is government ownership. Fidel Castro, however called himself a socialista, so how much of the land and business is owned by the government is somewhat subjective as it applies to the definitions. It appears to me in general, that socialism is the administration of a project or service by government and communism is ownership of the land and business/project as well as the administration by government.
As you will conclude later, the end results are a lot more similar when you look at them in these contexts. Fascism is the use of taxation and regulation by government over projects or businesses, but is most often associated with dictatorships. However, I think a dictatorship is a misunderstanding of a reality that exists when it is perceived that one man or women is in total control of a government. This can’t happen, since every known so-called dictator, has a group of people behind him watching his back such as, Raul Castro, Fidels brother who is now the number one guy in charge in Cuba. Hitler had his cronies, as did Mussolini, Stalin etc. behind him as do all so-called dictators, they must. Someone has to carry out the orders of the oligarchy, however small or large it may be. Oligarchies by the way are the control of government by a small group and this occurs a lot more often throughout the world than we wish to conclude. The well known seven families of Mexico, who have been running that country for over a century now, comes to mind. As we even know in this country, there appears to be people behind the scenes that have a lot more power over government action than the actual politicians and bureaucrats. Most countries fit the definition of fascism, under my definition as taxation and regulation are the prominent means of redistributing the wealth for the alleged benefits of the majority.
In my opinion, these, communism, socialism and fascism are the only needed terms to evaluate what kind of government a country has and each defines a methodology of who and what is occurring within the system. Ownership, administration, taxation and regulatory oversight determine what kind of government we have. Add in the “who makes the decision” such as the direct democracy now being used in Switzerland, the democratic Republics such as the U.S., Japan, England and most of the world and we can pretty well define each and every nations political system. For instance, the U.S. is really a fascist democratic republic, as are most countries around the world today.
Fascism is generally a term that is considered derogatory in nature and it actually is as you will come to understand. It’s all about the money especially as tax rates and regulatory oversight increase over time. The United States, in my opinion, is a very good example of a fascist society and why I believe it is facing some the social problems it is currently experiencing. The United States for instance didn’t really have a Federal Income Tax for the majority until WWII when the Victory Tax was implemented. Overall tax rates were below 10% for the average person for the first 150 years of our great nation and were actually much less than that for the first 100 years or so. Overall Tax rates have increased in our country over time to where they are today. We have approximately 115 different types of taxation/regulatory fees today and we only had a handful when our nation was created. The entire Federal Government was run on a luxury import tax, so only luxury items were taxed and only those items that were manufactured abroad and transported in.
Over the last decade, over 4,100 factories have shut down in this country. Could it have anything to do with an overall tax rate of over 50% for each individual today. Start adding them up; property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, license plates, driver licenses, business licenses, etc. etc. etc.
Now here is what communism, socialism, and fascism all have in common. They all take the profits out of a project or business and gives them to the government for redistribution. They just do it in different methods. With all of these systems, the end result can be the same. The incentive for profit and reinvestment is greatly removed from the equation, depending on the level of taxation within a fascist society.
It should be noted that all three methods appear from historical records to contribute to the demise of a society. We were all taught as kids the reason that communism fails because the incentives to work hard are removed from the equation. If one can make the same amount of money by working less, it then becomes a matter of forcing someone else to do the work. That’s the element of fascists, socialist, and communists societies that end up creating a tyrannical situation as government tries to extract more and more money out of people. The more force used the more tyrannical the system. As governments gets larger, they need more money and they end up having to print it, because you can only get so much blood out of a turnip, as the old saying goes. 95% of the worlds countries have been living off of printed fiat currencies over the last 50 years and some, as we are now seeing, have reached insolvency. Printing more money just debases the existing money supply and that eventually leads to price inflation.
If you read the essay “The Fallacy of Democracy” at the below link, you will continue to understand some of the complexities and more important, why I believe we are experiencing some of the results of what I call the greatest social experiment in history. The democratic Republic of the United States. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/HarrietRobbins/UU38TwCmrjQ%5B1-25%5D