Al Gore and Coercion in the Free Market

Al Gore co-authored this with David Blood in The Wall Street Journal

"When greeting old friends after a period of absence, Ralph Waldo Emerson used to ask: 'What has become clear to you since we last met?'

"What is clear to us and many others is that market capitalism has arrived at a critical juncture. Even beyond the bailouts and recent volatility, the challenges of the climate crisis, water scarcity, income disparity, extreme poverty and disease must command our urgent attention.

"The financial crisis has reinforced our view that sustainable development will be the primary driver of economic and industrial change over the next 25 years. As a result, old patterns and assumptions are now being re-examined in an effort to find new ways to use the strengths of capitalism to address this reality. Indeed, at the Harvard Business School Centennial Global Business Summit held earlier this month, the future of market capitalism was one of the principal themes discussed."

What is very clear in Al Gore's mind is that market capitalism is engineered capitalism and has nothing to do with profit capitalists providing what the market--consumers--want. Rather, it has to do with what political engineers want. It is also very clear that the political engineering comes from the economic engineers who don't know laissez faire from socialism, men such as Henry Paulson and Allen Greenspan.

What form of oligarchy is this? It isn't the form of a democratic-republic, as our Founders invisioned, not when the majority of Americans demand that no bailout be contrived for the mortage industry yet our republic ignores the democratic wishes of free people who wish to remain free and contrive the bailout, anyway.

What form of psychological spin is Gore putting into our heads? Since when did capitalism need to be called market capitalism, and what other form is there, except the managed, mixed-economy we are now prisoners of?

Well, if by market capitalism Gore mean a market economy, he is way off base. A market economy cannot be politically engineered. It is "engineered" by the offerings of the producers in a relationship with consumers, who decide which produced offerings they will give their money to.

"A socialist economy, in contrast [to a market economy], is characterized by [ ] central planning. [G]overnment often is asked to intervene in the economy to correct situations in which the price system does not work. It regulates 'natural monopolies,' for example, and it uses antitrust laws to control or break up other business combinations..." [emphasis added] About.Com

"A 'natural monopoly' is defined in economics as an industry where the fixed cost of the capital goods is so high that it is not profitable for a second firm to enter and compete. There is a 'natural' reason for this industry being a monopoly, namely that the economies of scale require one, rather than several, firms. Small-scale ownership would be less efficient." http://www.progress.org/fold74.htm

"The great evil in economics is not communism, not socialism, not capitalism, not landlords or bosses, not unions, not feudalism or industrialization or automation, not progress or lack of it, and not any scarcity of natural resources. No, the great evil in economics is coercive monopoly." Fred E. Foldvary

But natural monopolies are not coercive. Communism and socialism and feudalism are coercive, and Gore's "market" capitalism is not capitalism because capitalism demands the admission that capital is property of its owner, not of the state. Only capitalists can create capital; government cannot. Gore and Obama treat capital as if it was a coercive monopoly, when in fact anyone can be a capitalist, and three quarters of all the business in this country is conducted by small business, not by natural monopolies nor by coercive monopolies such as first class mail deliverable only by the United States Postal Service.

Once again Gore gets it wrong when he may have valuable contributions to make. He does make people think, and that is a contribution; but he makes them think using the wrong terminology.

On National Public Radio International, I heard an "environmental artist" say--correctly--that we don't have global warming, that, instead, some places are warming, some are getting colder. Some places are getting hotter, and some are becoming wetter, some dryer. The Arctic may be melting, but Antarctica has 17 inches more ice than at any time since that continent's discovery, and from China to Colorado the winter of '07-'08 was the hardest on record. Lower temperatures had never been recorded in China; snow was still on the mountain peaks of Colorado in June. Fires in California, at an all-time high, are fanned by hurricane-strength Santa Anna winds.

The weather is changing, but you wouldn't get that simple message from Gore. And from his lips, and Obama's, to yours ears, you will never get the message that government intervention creates coercive markets, weighting down one part of it so that another must be offset by "redistributive" taxes, which then creates another anomoly in what ought to be a self-correcting market economy, but which has instead become a government-managed capitalism, masked by the word "market."

Government-managed capitalism is a contradiction of terms of the highest order; but to the degree that Marxists and other collectivists can get away with it, they can convince the economically illiterate that government controls are necessary.

And keeping people economically--and politically--illiterate is what the Fairness doctrine is all about, limiting free speech made by opponents of the left. Every Rush Limbaugh would necessarily, by law, be required to be followed by a Gore or an Allen Colmes.

And that would not be natural.

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Artificial, Public-Financed, Non-Profiteering Industry

While everyone in government is talking about "what we need" to get our economy going again, what is they are talking about?

They are talking about specific proposals to get the auto industry running again; to create alternative energy sources large enough to be of "use"; to create a mortgage system that will serve the people and not the "big pockets of the CEOs."

What they--everyone in government and everyone who supports the government's efforts and policies toward these ends--fail to remember is that under the doctrine of naturalism--that all things work to the degree they ought to work when left in their "natural state"--artificially created and managed industries are not natural to the nature of man.

As industries which would not be created naturally by profiteers, who seek that profit by offering what the public wants at prices it can afford, these artificially created and managed industries the government is talking about such as wind turbine farms and hybrid energy cars are already costing the public billions of dollars, in subsidies or other government handouts, years before any results are seen.

President-elect Obama seeks to sink as much as $100 million in ten years into "alternative" energy sources. This is our money. Are we going to make a profit? No. We are going to pay for research and development, because that has already been approved by the Fed and Congress. In the auto industry alone that is hundreds of billions of dollars. Now we are being told the Big Three auto companies will fail if they are not bailed out to the tune of hundred of billions of dollars more for simple overhead.

The American public will soon see that it has bankrolled almost (or more than) a trillion dollars--for products we will have to pay for again when we buy them. If windmill farms and compressed natural gas and clean-burning coal plants and nuclear power plants are economically feasible and profitable, then let the Boone Pickens, the Edison Lights, the Exxon Mobiles, and the others who have the industry knowledge and the financial backing do what they do naturally by seeking profits from these industries. And where there are government regulations standing in the way, make the government step aside. But if there is no profit to be made, there is certainly no economic reason for capitalist profiteers to get involved.

And it is never the government's mandate to "partner up" with industry and become its "big brother."

"According to Deumer [an early 20th century socialist banker], banks presently serve private interests. They serve public interests only inasmuch as these do not conflict with the former. Banks do not finance those enterprises that are most essential from the national point of view, but only those that promise to yield the highest return. For instance, they finance 'a whiskey distillery or any other enterprise that is superfluous for the economy.'" Daily Article by Ludwig von Mises

What is "superfluous" for the economy is anything the public must finance, because if the public must finance it, it is not worth the cost of profiteers seeking to sell a product that people want. Products that create profit are products people want; and products that people want which then create wealth for the profiteers are what build the economy.

This is the metaphysically naturalist state of existence observed by capitalists as a veridical perception, which "is a direct relation of awareness between a conscious subject and an object of empirical or abstract content."
http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/08/academys-strong-definition-of_03.html

The relationship of the "conscious subject" to the "object" is subjective; in other words, it depends on the metaphysics of the conscious subject to determine: the ontological relationship between him and a product; the market for the product; the profit margin that is necessary; and the means of production. But in this case we are talking about whether or not the means should be financed by all the people in an effort to nationalize one industry or another; or whether the means of production should be left to those who can finance the economy with their profiteering methods.

It all depends on the relationship of the conscious motives of the subject, you, me, our neighbors, and Congress, the President-elect, and court justices who hear the cases against such public means of production as will certainly be heard in those courts. We know the way that Congress and Obama wish to go; we do not know which way all the involved courts will render: for sovereignty of the individual to decide which markets to support, or for the government's right to absolve we individuals of our right to support a market or withdraw our support of that market. In other words, whether or not we become the subject-citizens of a socialist state.

The means of production owned by the people in this country has already become a trillion dollar "industry," which is a bailout but which is being hailed as a "necessary evil" to save the economy. Yet, we already know the direction we are headed. You could say that we are like the deer in the headlights of an on-coming car.

Unless we prevent Congress and Obama from continuing with this nationalization of the means of production, that car is going to hit us, and one industry after another will collapse from an economy artifically supported, artificially because the industries supported by the government bailouts no longer have a purpose in profiteering. Now they have a purpose in spending our money to build us cars and to finance our homes which we must then pay for again with our purchases and our mortgages.

And when we no longer have any money left because we have been artificially supporting markets that ought to be profiteering from us, we are twice poorer for it--once financially, once morally.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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American Socialism; Theism as Skepticism; sntjohnny and Me

American Socialism Is Upon Us

"Capitalism and markets [ ] are all inherently about self-interest and the pursuit of profit," said Dr. Yaron Brook. "Capitalism encourages and enables selfishness, and as long as our culture looks at profit and self-interest as vices, [ ] big government will always be preferred to free markets." [italics added] "Why Big Government Is Back, and How to Shrink It to Its Proper Size"

http://www.aynrand.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=41441&em_id=44383.0&JServSessionIdr001=efh7ehivs1.app7a

This might be a surprising perspective to many people. But it really is surprising only to capitalists who simply want to earn a living--perhaps a big living, but a living that is ruled by nothing but proper market ethics and proper ethical treatment of his or her consumers. And I am one of those to whom it is a surprising perspective.

I should not be surprised. I know full well that the market situation we are currently in was caused by zealous, not ethical, pursuit of the dollar. There is a difference. We expect the neighborhood butcher, farm co-op, or shoe store to treat the community with a high standard of ethics. To do otherwise would be to risk negative letters-to-the-editor in the newspaper, and maybe an investigation by the local TV affiliate, if the situation warrants it. Consumers who feel bent out of shape by the way they were treated locally often sue.

But on the larger scale, in the bigger market places, we all know that ethics tend to become fuzzy, or even misplaced once a rule of ethics is broken the first time and not caught. The big markets can usually fend off attacks by angry customers, unless the business is WalMart or something similar. WalMart is expected to be all things to all people; that is how it grew to be so large. Big selection plus big inventory equals low low prices; that is what constitutes "all things to all people" most of the time.

But Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, explained why the reasons for the resurgence of big government are due, "not to any alleged failures of the market, but to a longtime cultural hostility to its moral basis: the selfish pursuit of profit."

We as Americans have lived with the idea of socialism long enough that most of us do not see how its operating principles-if they can be called "principled"--have crept into our nation's politics, policies, and regulations. In the Treasury Department's U.S crazy scheme to save Wall Street but they included this in big, huge piece of socialist nationalism in section 8: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." [emphasis added] [see The Last Nail in the American Fascist Takeover ] more

Excerpt from Anthony Horvath’s
Christian Apologetics Ministry
http://sntjohnny.com/front/one-atheist-admits-im-right-another-responds-to-big-bang-post/364.html
And the Reclassification of Theism
as the Skeptical Position of Naturalism

"It is not very often that you get an admission as clear as the one that was posted on my forum today. I asserted in this post on my blog that at the bottom, most atheistic arguments against the existence of God are based on the ‘presumption of naturalism’ with [missing info in original post.] The atheist on my forum said:

'At the conclusion, you argue that the evidence will show God’s existence if only we give up our assumption that all explanations must be natural. What you fail to give us is any compelling reason why we must abandon that assumption.'"

Unfortunately, Rev. Horvath's critic undercuts his own position by saying he would, in effect, be willing to accept giving up reason. Horvath responds--quite logically--by saying, "The atheist in question says that this assumption can only be abandoned in the face of extremely good reasons, but it should be evident that anyone who believes ‘all explanations must be natural’ is really just throwing up a smokescreen if he now demands ‘reasons’ for thinking otherwise."

Oh, if only we would listen to what we say before we say it. In light of what Horvath said regarding the abandonment of reason for "compelling" reasons, I think the critic would have thought out his words more carefully.

But my favorite atheist philosopher said we must take men at their word. If they say it, then they said it, and we cannot presume to judge that they meant something else. This does not mean we cannot ammend our statement when our contradiction becomes evident.

But unless Horvath's critic writes back, we must assume he does not understand the difference between:

1. A principled deduction of logic that tells him that naturalism is natural, while supernaturalism is---not, by definition, natural; and

2. The decision that it makes no difference whether a thing is "natural" or "not-natural" if one is willing to suspend his rational judgment to decide that the "not-natural" can somehow become the "natural," or at least the "acceptable."

Horvath tells him--and others like him--"If you’re just starting to examine the merits of Christianity and are evaluating skeptical objections, the key here is to understand that all the later objections to things like the resurrection and miracles stem from this prior assumption."

What Horvath himself fails to explain is that naturalism was the prevailing world-view for nearly 1000 years, until Augustine.

There are four goals for the informed naturalist, says physicist and cosmologist Dr. Quentin Smith. "i) retrieve naturalism from its de facto reclassification by medieval philosophers. This is a reclassification (which may have been a result of some other deliberately chosen goal) from its original, accurate, classification in Greco-Roman naturalism, and this reclassification was effected by the medieval philosophers. This reclassification still prevails today." Philo Online http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm more

Reverend "sntjohnny" Horvath Wrote Me an Email:

I Responded

Actually, I only responded to the first two paragraphs, as you will read. He sent the email because of his contention, which I challenged, that followers of Ayn Rand's Objectivism would "inevitably" come around to embracing Christianity.

[Dear Curtis:] "It is only 'inevitable' in certain senses. If you apply the principles you hold dear in Objectivism consistently I believe that you will find that Objectivism does not in fact have the answers while Christianity does.

"Consider. One of the most cherished doctrines of the Objectivist is the rights and freedoms and dignity of each individual human. However, to what degree can this be supported from an atheistic philosophy, especially an atheistic perspective on evolution, which is the prevailing scientific explanation for the rise of humans? Under this framework, a human is nothing more than an animal." [signed Anthony Horvath]

"stjohnny" and I are too familiar with each other to actually bother writing "Dear X," or actually signing it, except that my "automatic" signature is automatic, I do sometimes write "Sincerely," or simply "Curtis," and this time he finished his letter with "Yours."

My (Partial) Response

The atheism and evolution have no bearing on the freedom and dignity of the human individual.

You say according to evolution I ought to conclude man is "nothing more" than an animal. But the denotation of "Man" is that heis the "rational animal." From this perspective we conclude several things:

1. That "Man qua Man" requires the highest degree of rationality a man can discover;
2. That rationality belongs to individuals because there is no "collective" mind;
3. That since rationality belongs to the individual, just as his fingers are his, and his stomach is his, his mind cannot be coerced into doing, being or thinking what it does not want to be. more

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