Some old right-wing ideas

[lpetrich]

Some ideas common in the US right wing, at least, are some centuries old. Journalist Colin Woodard tells the story in "American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good", his successor to his "American Nations".

He notes that a common premodern view of society has been what might be called an organic one, where everybody has their part to play in it, like body parts and internal organs in a body.

But during the 17th and 18th centuries, some British aristocrats supported a novel defense of their position: individualism. The best-known of the ideologists that they supported was philosopher John Locke.

Their position was that liberty is something zero-sum between "government" and "people". If one has more, the other must have less. "Government" was the king and his underlings, while the "people" were not all the people. In his mind, the "people" were property owners like nobles, gentry, wealthy merchants, and maybe also small farmers who owned their land.

Leaving out all the poorer citizens, and there were a *lot* of them back then. Landowners were kicking their tenants off of their land, and those people became landless paupers. There were so many of them that they could not earn very much for the work that they could find. They were malnourished enough to grow 6 inches shorter and live only half as long than middle-class and upper-class people, but the usual response from the defenders of aristocratic republicanism was that they were lazy bums who ought to be made to work for poverty wages. Some of those defenders even proposed enslaving such people. John Locke himself claimed that poverty was caused by “scarcity of provisions or the want of employment” but “the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners, virtue and industry . . . and vice and idleness.”

In Virginia, these aristocrats created the sort of society that they wanted, where much of the laboring population was enslaved.

 

[lpetrich]

Colin Woodward thinks that instead of government vs. people, it ought to be a triangle of government, a wealthy elite, and the ordinary people. He notes that the wealthy elite getting too powerful has not exactly created good government or a dream world for the common people or their nation as a whole.

He notes that in medieval Hungary, the nobility succeeded in putting some restraints on the king, eliminating taxes on themselves, and forcing the peasants on their estates into serfdom. The Hungarian state was so weak that the Ottomans conquered it and ruled it for 150 years. Francis Fukuyama wrote:

The “freedom” sought by the Hungarian noble class was the freedom to exploit their own peasants more thoroughly, and the absence of a strong central state allowed them to do just that. . . . The twentieth century has taught us to think about tyranny as something perpetrated by powerful, centralized states, but it can also be the work of local oligarchs. . . . It is the responsibility of the central government to enforce its own laws against the oligarchy; freedom is lost not when the state is too strong but when it is too weak.

The antebellum southern states were in a similar situations. In some ways, the antebellum South was a libertarian dreamworld.
Taxes were very low, especially for the upper class, which pretty much exempted itself from taxes. Governments' services were also very limited.

While New England had had government-funded schools for most of its existence, the Southern states were very short on that. Education was for whomever could pay for tutors or boarding schools for their children, and that meant in practice the upper class.

Government law enforcement was very limited, and vigilantes, plantation overseers, and private militias filled in that gap. There was an exception, and that was vigorous censorship of criticism of slavery. This even extended to a "gag rule" in the US Congress, where South Carolina congressmen once forbade antislavery speeches and petitions. It lasted 6 years there.

The Southern plantation elite cherished its liberties, and worked to deny liberties for everybody else. That was very obvious for the plantation slaves, but that was done in a lesser degree for the less wealthy free citizens. Most of the Southern states had rather steep property qualifications for public office. In the early 19th cy., a typical American laborer earned about L20 a year, and in South Carolina, to be a state representative, one needed an estate valued at L150, to be a state senator, L300, and to be a governor, L15,000. This legislature then chose all the state and local officials, the state's two US senators, and also the electors in the Presidential Electoral College.

During the Civil War, the plantation-owning elite was reluctant to do much to support it, despite its very existence being threatened by it. Planters preferred growing cotton to food crops, despite the Confederacy having food shortages. Cotton could get them much more money, of course. Some Confederates leaders objected to drafting young men for the army as involuntary servitude, including some state governors and the Confederacy's Vice President, Alexander Stephens. Not that the Confederacy's elite did much voluntarily. They refused to hire out slaves to build fortifications, for instance.

I'll quote CW on my favorite bit of that:

In 1863, with a full-scale Union invasion well under way, the CSA empowered the army to seize grain and other goods for the war effort; when an officer presented South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond with an order for a share of his corn, he tore it up, tossed it out the window, and declared that submitting to it meant “branding on my forehead ‘Slave.’”

He was a big defender of slavery, proposing the "mudsill theory" of society, where higher civilization rests on the labors of a miserable lower class. He also claimed that slavery was good for the slaves, since they were well taken care of, unlike factory workers in the North, who were not, and he even proposed enslaving poor white people.


I'm sure that a lot of libertarians will protest at this point that they are against slavery. But slavery is treating human beings as property, and property rights are supposed to be sacred. Furthermore, abolition of slavery may be interpreted as theft by redefinition -- the government decrees that you don't own certain of your property.

 

[BH]

I was about to bring up that story about Hammond. People like him were so self absorbed and selfish he was not even willing to sacrifice a little for people fighting for him so he could keep the type of lifestyle he was used to. He was so self absorbed he failed to understand that if that army he didn't want to feed failed he and everything he knew was going to fail also. Dumbass.

Wasn't the reason the king of France was beheaded in the revolution because he wanted the powers he had given up back and was secretly sending money out of France to fund foreign armies to defeat France? As part of the supposed peace terms the other countries beating France would demand Louis be given back all the powers he lost or so he hoped. If so I would have chopped his sorry head off too.

 

[lpetrich]

As Colin Woodard notes, excessive individual liberty can lead to tyranny, with only a few rich families having much of that. The antebellum South was like that, and parts of Latin America are also like that.

Then CW gets to the Gilded Age of the late 19th cy., something that many present-day libertarians romanticize as some Golden Age. That time was a time of big change to society, with the rise of big businesses and with many artisans and farmers being put out of work. Thus a sizable fraction of people became employees rather than self-employed farmers or artisans who owned the tools of their trades. That produced a big problem for traditional republican conceptions of virtue, since such conceptions were dependent on having economic security and independence.

The leaders of those businesses used individualism to justify their action, and they invented the notion of "freedom of contract", that anything goes when "freely" entered into by all those involved. They got the courts to invalidate laws mandating safe working conditions and safe products, all because they interfered with the supposed freedom to work under unsafe conditions and to use dangerous products -- the right to be exploited. When the Federal Government mandated truthful labeling of medicines in 1906, the Supreme Court decided that this applied only to ingredients, and not to whatever claims the medicines' makers made about their efficacy. Thus, they could commit outright fraud if they wanted to. This and food-safety regulations were provoked by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", a book that described some grossly unsanitary conditions of industrialized meatpacking.

These oligarchs also justified themselves with Social Darwinism, or more properly, Social Spencerism, after a leading advocate, Herbert Spencer. In it, rich people are successes in the struggle for existence, and poor people are failures. “If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die,” he argued. “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, to make room for the better.” He also opposed public education, sanitation efforts, and housing regulation. He is the one who composed “survival of the fittest,” and not Charles Darwin.

One of his followers:

... “We never supposed that laissez-faire would give us perfect happiness,” its greatest defender, Yale professor William Graham Sumner, wrote. “It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. . . . If the social doctors will mind their own business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature.” The poor, he asserted, “constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things.” By contrast, Sumner declared, “the millionaires are a product of natural selection” so that “wealth—both their own and that entrusted to them—aggregates under their hands.”

... He coined the term “the Forgotten Man” for the unsung productive citizen whose hard-earned wealth was sapped to provide for the unworthy poor, a rhetorical figure who, by one name or another, has remained at the heart of libertarian populism ever since.

Welfare recipients living lives of luxury off of the labors of poor exploited taxpayers? That is far from new.

 

[lpetrich]

Taxes were very regressive back in the Gilded Age, falling on physical assets rather than financial ones. Like counting cows and pigs and not stocks and bonds. A 2% income tax on upper-class incomes was declared unconstitutional in 1894.

This unregulated economy was very unstable. There was a major collapse in the 1870's, and it was only in the 1930's that it lost its title as the Great Depression. When railroad workers did a lot of strikes in 1877, the oligarchs got governments to send in troops to fight the strikers, a form of government intervention that they heartily approved of. The oligarchs then financed the construction of National Guard armories.

The railroads had close to monopoly position, and this helped oligopolies and monopolies form, like John D. Rockefeller with Standard Oil. When that company got big enough, it started dictating prices to the railroads, for it and for its rivals.

In other words, the unregulated marketplace had stifled innovation, destroyed the possibility of meaningful competition, artificially depressed economic development and market pricing in entire regions of the country, and resulted in higher prices for consumers. Total economic freedom was destroying the free market itself.

The oligarchs bought many politicians, and many high-level Federal and state officials were rather closely associated with them, like family members and corporate board members and lobbyists.


The aforementioned libertarian Gilded-Age romanticizers thought of it as a Good Old Days without labor unions, even though according to "private sector good, public sector bad", labor unions are good, since they are private organizations.

But there were labor unions back then, and around 1900, judges would often issue injunctions against strikers, forbidding them to do such things as parade or picket or invite other workers to join them. More government intervention that the oligarchs loved.


Turning to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Cycles of American History, he noted that big-business leaders liked another form of government intervention, protective tariffs. Some advocates of laissez-faire were honest enough to criticize this selectivity, like William Graham Sumner. “Protectionism” wrote Sumner, “is socialism.... If employers may demand that ‘the State’ shall guarantee them profits, why may not the employees demand that ‘the State’ shall guarantee them wages? ... The argument that ‘the State’ must do something for me because my business does not pay, is a very far-reaching one. If it is good for pig iron and woolens, it is good for all the things to which the socialists apply it.”

 

[Bomb#20]

The antebellum southern states were in a similar situations. In some ways, the antebellum South was a libertarian dreamworld.
...
I'm sure that a lot of libertarians will protest at this point that they are against slavery.

Why the heck would they protest that? You already know they're against slavery. They already know you know they're against slavery.

Here's what's worth protesting: you and all the other Nazis just like you. The Nazis smeared groups they disliked; you're smearing libertarians because you dislike them; therefore according to your own inference procedure you are a Nazi. Nazis are evil! Stop being a Nazi, you Nazi!

There, did I convince you you're a Nazi? What, I didn't?!? You mean, it takes more than guilt-by-made-up-association to prove an X is a Y? Sacre bleu! So why the devil would you imagine you can make a case that there's something wrong with libertarianism just because you're able to make up an idiotic association between two diametrically opposed ideologies whose primary common feature is that you hate both of them? What the heck is wrong with you?

But slavery is treating human beings as property, and property rights are supposed to be sacred.

Indeed so; and according to libertarianism, people own themselves. Slavers get slaves by kidnapping. Masters get slaves by paying slavers for them. So if you are going to define people as property, then slavers are robbers and masters are receivers of stolen property -- i.e., they are common-law criminals one and all. Slaves are victims of criminals; therefore they are people it is the proper function of government to come to the assistance of, according even to libertarian notions of minimal government.

But you already know all this. So why are you pushing that idiotic canard that the antebellum South was a libertarian dreamworld? It's a lie that a pathetic subset of the leftist population repeat to one another in order to pat themselves on the back for refuting libertarianism without putting in the effort to come to grips with libertarians' actual positions. You should be embarrassed to make such pseudo-arguments. What, do you think you're Underseer, that this garbage is the best you can come up with? For gods' sake, Petrich, you are intelligent. You transparently are not going to persuade any thinking person with that sort of ad hominem. So you are evidently preaching to a choir of your fellow ideologues. Do you regard preaching to your own choir as a worthy activity?

 

[BH]

These oligarchs also justified themselves with Social Darwinism, or more properly, Social Spencerism, after a leading advocate, Herbert Spencer. In it, rich people are successes in the struggle for existence, and poor people are failures. “If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die,” he argued. “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, to make room for the better.” He also opposed public education, sanitation efforts, and housing regulation. He is the one who composed “survival of the fittest,” and not Charles Darwin.

This begs the question in a lot of ways. For one, the rich who feel this way rely on custom, laws, and rules people are accustomed to give deferance to. There are human made laws you don't steal or other such things people are just conditioned to obey and defer to. In their mind being succesful is getting a lot of money and having an army and police force protect their assets from a generally conditioned to be submissive poorer public. My question is if these rich Spencerists were really so smart and superior why did a lot of them lose their money, land assests and even lives to various left wing revolutions around the world led by and joined by these poor folks they felt were so inferior to themselves once they the poor figured out they simply weren't going to play the rich folks game anymore. Now what happened after the left wing folks took over is another matter. I'm just saying the rich who felt like Spencer were not really that superior, it was all smoke and illusion, or else they would not have gotten shot or beat up by the poor and their shit taken to begin with. Yeah, they may have had more skills in some things than those poor but when the poor decided to utilize whatever they had to use the rich lost.

 

[BH]

As Colin Woodard notes, excessive individual liberty can lead to tyranny, with only a few rich families having much of that. The antebellum South was like that, and parts of Latin America are also like that.

Yeah, this is the thing lost on a lot of folks. You have a few well off families in a community or county. They control most of the employment because they own the businesses that do most of the employing or hire other dependent businesses to do work for them or their companies. They also are a small enough segment of the population they can talk about people who are not doing anything illegal but just saying and standing for things they do not like and can make them leave the area by refusing them jobs or putting pressure on smaller less influencial employers in the area they can hurt by refusing them business if they hired such people. For example, for a long time there were only local owned banks. If these well off folks had large amounts of money in them and the bank was going to loan money to someone who wanted start up a business or home who wasn't going to play their racket, even if they were completely qualified for the loan, the rich person could throw a stink and threaten to pull their money out if that person got the loan. Or, if an already existing business needed a loan and it had hired someone that the rich folks did not like they could tell the bank that they would pull their money out if that business got a loan. That happened a lot.

They can also somewhat keep the police from bothering them when they skirt the law or commit small offenses. The police have family in the area. Police can fine, arrest, ect but these business owners can find reasons to fire their relatives if they do so. The law protects the police from direct assault, ect but it does not protect relatives from being fired from their jobs if they displease their employers and any employer who wants to run someone off can always find some way to have cause. So the police usually turn a blind eye to a lot of things.

BH is not rich or well off but had several family members who were and/or often times involved in local politics, banking, ect years ago. They shared a lot of stories with me of things they heard and saw over the years.

Basically if you get to rich and powerful you or a small group of people like you through control of the local economy are able to do and treat people no different than if you were some third world dictator

 

[Horatio Parker]

I can't remember the exact quote, but one Confederate official said planters would gladly give their sons for the Confederacy, but not their slaves.

 

[BH]

I can't remember the exact quote, but one Confederate official said planters would gladly give their sons for the Confederacy, but not their slaves.

Of that I have no doubt. A lot of people of wealth and power being so narcissistic and psychopathic care more about their money and influence than they do their own children.