Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Socialism restricts the redistribution of wealth

There are times when things get shuffled around, put in a drawer, forgotten. I meant to get back to this in a much more timely fashion, but it just never happened.

John Rawls' most well known work, "A Theory of Justice", is where he writes the following: (page 242)

It is necessary, then, to recognize that market institutions are common to both private-property and socialist regimes, and to distinguish between the allocative and the distributive function of prices. Since under socialism, the means of production and natural resources are publicly owned, the distributive function is greatly restricted, wheras a private-property system uses prices in varying degrees for both purposes. Which of these systems and the many intermediate forms most fully answers to the requirements of justice cannot, I think, be determined in advance.

Rawls last line in particular is alarming: "Which of these systems and the many intermediate forms most fully answers to the requirements of justice cannot, I think, be determined in advance"

So what.... the planners are just going to have to conduct a series of social experiments in order to make sure they get it right? At the cost of whose life, liberty, and property? Hasn't enough destruction been wrought out in America at the hands of progressives and their schemes? Oh well, I suppose. Just as long as the Rawlsians achieve their "well ordered society"? See my prior posting, he uses this phrase over 70 times in the book. Justice? Screwing around with people's lives just to achieve your utopian view is not just. This is not just.

Rawls is correct though, in that socialism would restrict wealth redistribution, as the state would suck all it up indefinitely. This is actually something you can verify across the wider socialist world, by noting how often socialists will complain about the 'excesses of capitalism' and so forth - it produces more and they know it. So did Rawls. Which produces a very fascinating contradiction in this book of his, A Theory of Justice. How does a would be planner properly plan society - a "well ordered society" - without growing government so large so as to end up as a tyrannical socialist regime? On page 241, he writes:

In conformity with political decisions reached democratically, the government regulates the economic climate by adjusting certain elements under its control, such as the overall amount of investment, the rate of interest, and the quantity of money, and so on. There is no necessity for comprehensive direct planning. Individual households and firms are free to make their decisions independently, subject to the general conditions of the economy.

This is too contradictory to stand, which is possibly why Rawls' theories remain a creature of college indoctrination and nothing more. So 'comprehensive direct planning' isn't necessary, how about indirect? How about piecemeal? Some form of planning is clearly necessary, otherwise you don't have a "well ordered society". 40 years after being published, these ideas are still being pushing in academia which is why I have no intention of letting it go.

I'm not in the class anymore where Rawls was a hot topic, which is what made it easy for me to forget about this. But this sounds a lot to me like the earlier progressives who wanted a more activist government, but weren't socialists either.

Should the colleges ever become successful in indoctrinating enough utopian Rawlsians, hopefully someone will find what I'm attempting to do here, and be prepared to deal with this at that time.

http://tinyurl.com/79dvrlz

2 comments:

  1. If you take a moment to read the harvard paper on affirmative action, you will find the paper starts with something like this.

    to the effect that we have endeavored on a 40 year social experiment in affirmative action

    well. who gave them permission to destroy my life coming out of bronx science after i spent my childhood working hard to get there? who are they to insure i had not enouhgh money to make a company, buy a house have children..

    by what right?

    if you read it, they admit it, but do not realize that Joseph Mengele was a socially conscious doctor inventing interventions to improve children's lives in a socialist state

    why did my family flee nazism, and soviet living? to end up here and live it all over again, or rather die again?

    read the 1948 law on genocide
    the US has been committing genocide against the majority to make them a minority or if they dont stop, remove them...

    but who would prosecute them for murdering white people who the jews are white people inside a set of white people.

    the nazis shoa II has been going on for decades

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  2. All I can really say in reply is that not everybody in America has fallen for the trap that we need some authoritarian running the show. We have to end the reign of the planners. I can write all I want about this, that, or the other thing, but your family witnessed it first hand.

    I'm trying to learn, before I have to witness it as well.

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