July 18_2007 - I Think Reformists Are Wrong

I was surprised to read Glen Allport's column on Strike the Root yesterday wherein he lays out all the ways that political parties, special interest groups, ideologues, mercantilists, and the rest of the running dogs of statism, screw up liberal democratic governance, and then goes on to endorse the candidacy of a statist politician in an election in order to "fix" it all! Go figure? The real problem with state governance is the state itself; who runs it and how hardly matters. That has been my conclusion based on my own historical analysis, anyhow. It really surprised me that the STR publisher would post such an article given STR's stated position on such matters.

Reformism is a waste of time. In the end, when the bourgeoisie finally conclude that they can't dominate the political process any longer, they will undoubtedly turn toward fascism to maintain control and retain their privileges. That is what they've always done in the past.

Glen_Allport, Strike_the_Root.com, reformism, Ron_Paul, statism

May 16, 2007 – More on Outsourcing from Barbara Ehrenreich

Democratic-Socialist Barbara Ehrenreich notes tartly the progressive destruction of the American working classes, both white and blue collar, in her blog post here.

“The world may be flat,” says Ehrenreich, “as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website’s editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year – and no, they won’t be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena’s city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there’s always Google Earth.” [links mine]

True enough. State Capitalism seems to be a race-to-the-bottom for most of us.

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April 18, 2007 – Euro-Statism is Just as Bad as Our Own

I was reading about the upcoming election in France and and this article in the on-line edition of the New Yorker captures perfectly the intransigent nature of the statist mind whatever its nominal political leanings or beliefs may be.

“The French” says the article, “are often accused of being trapped in their Cartesian categories. A cold sandwich cannot morph into a hot sandwich without considerable mental accommodation on the part of the person putting it together. In politics, the left cannot creep toward the center, let alone the right, without a deep, if not intolerable, sense of ideological betrayal. The right rarely even considers the possibility of creeping. Change, on the right, is more a matter of cosmetic surgery. For most of the French, the 'center'—call it a third way or Clinton’s way or Blair’s way or simply a free-market, social-democratic consensus—has been a contradiction in terms, perhaps because they remain so deeply devoted to the protective and protectionist state, l’État protecteur, that both the left and the right have helped create. The state has been reified, even deified; it carries the imprimatur of a historic compromise with reality.”

Yeah, right. Like reality can be “compromised with”, eh? The French really are different from us, but not as much as we think.The only thing states protect is their own power, privilege and prerogatives and if any actual good comes from it, well, that's just plain ol' luck or happenstance. The care and feeding of the state itself and its political base, always come first. And all this blather about “right”, “left” and “center” as a dynamic political continuum is just bullshit. Proudhon, Bastiat and Cantillon must be spinning in their graves right about now.

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