Cheers

Gramsci. Yeah, okay, I guess. Kinda. I'm not at all offended by that particular attribution. Actually, I should feel flattered. (BTW, "Gramsci is not a keyword" is kind of funny, since Raymond Williams, the author of "Keywords," was a Gramscian.) I think there's certainly some stuff in there that Gramsci would agree with, but I think he'd blanch at some of the other stuff. But there's not much in what I wrote that sets it off as *specifically* Gramscian. I guess the closest your cited passage gets to a patented Gramsci notion is the "potent ideas" bit, but then, that's probably what someone else was calling Foucauldian. Maybe you're reading into it a bit, in hopes I'm implying you're an intellectual.

And your response is indeed reductio ad absurdam, and misses the point. We don't teach FSM in the school because the school is not the appropriate place to teach religion. That's rather strikingly different than deciding not to allocate a task to private industry rather than a government monopoly because failure to support the public monopoly might lead the people to think Bad Things about the role of government.

The very mobility of ideas that has come with improvements in transportation and information technology, coupled with the obvious power differentials that mark global capitalism, make such ideas extremely potent. They get reproduced and strengthened through innumerable channels, including Pope Hat, and when taken up and applied willy-nilly by IMF flunkies or Chicago-trained technocrats in government posts, they gain the power of fiat in places where they can (and do) wreak great mischief. By the same token, I would argue, their very ubiquity and (when unmitigated by extra-market interventions) their stolid indifference to human suffering make them fair game for a lively critique from whatever corner of the earth they might happen to touch.

you need to hit the books. Gramsci isn't a keyword. I daresay your knowledge of the classics is lacking.

1. Patrick, where's the Gramsci, aside from I think one reference to hegemony? I gave the dude the day off. I'm afraid it's true that I'm a parody of my kind, but I can think of a worse thing to be.

2. Any Foucault stuff is pretty 101. I was going more with Chomsky's and Barsamian's framing-the-debate stuff. Don't know Strawson, sorry.

3. I'm afraid I have no idea what "non-cant" means. Oh wait, I just looked up "cant." Good word. For others out there, it means I'm hypocritical and sanctimonious in a religious, moral, or political way. Ironically enough, my dictionary's example of usage reads, "The liberal case against all censorship is often cant."

4. Ken: really? No policy X to prevent people from thinking wrong thought Y? So I guess it's okay to permit the teaching of FSM theory to 8th-grade science students in our public schools. My flying spaghetti monster example *may* qualify as a reductio ad absurdum argument (although I don't think it does), but if so, your formula does the same thing. I don't agree that it represents my position very well. I would summarize my concern as, "Strongly consider Policy X if it substantially increases people's ability to act and participate in society and enjoy other rights and not die, especially if those whose rights would otherwise be abridged are vulnerable sectors of society." A decision to not subject an already existing, progressive, redistributive, and beneficial law to a simple-majority recall vote is not remotely similar to hooking people to machines to control their brainwaves. Norway just is not the gulag archipelago you're invoking. And BTW, have you noticed that the states' tax revolt movements' favorite move is to make any new tax subject to a 60-70% supermajority? My slippery slope is not just Foucaultian discourse theory; it's how the right has been setting us up.) Rights exist precisely in order to protect the most vulnerable among us–yes, even to protect us from the majority at times. If everything were done on a simple majority vote, gays and blacks would likely still have no rights, and you could be sent up on murder charges on a 5-4 decision. I'm honestly surprised that you, as a lawyer, seem to take such a firm stance in favor of this position.

Those weren't short, non-cant words.

Here's the thing. You want to use generalized philosophical arguments about capitalism as a whole, and complaints about some of the wrongs that have accompanied it, to answer my questions about the best policy approach to a single problem. I don't tend to find that convincing. Despite your attempts to characterize me as using unrestricted free-market rhetoric, I've only tried to address this one single situation. Nothing else is before me at the moment. I've not responded, for instance, with generalizations about how many millions of people have been killed by communism or socialism, or how much growth has been suppressed by them across the world, or how they've been accompanied by suppression of dissent and innovation. That would be the rhetorical equivalent of what you are doing.

I'm focused on this one situation. I'm in general agreement with you that reliable universal mail service is a public good that should be maintained for a variety of policy reasons. I'm just trying to determine whether there's a reason to deliver it through government monopoly rather than subsidy — a reason that doesn't boil down to faithfulness to dogma. I'm ready to be persuaded, for instance, that the monopoly method is less expensive for the government.

The totalitarian comment was quite deliberate. I'm not on board with an explanation that we should go with policy X to prevent people from thinking wrong thought Y. That is not, to me, an appropriate relationship between governors and governed.

Or calling out the messenger with red-baiting dodges.

I appreciate your effort to have a meaningful discussion with Ken about all of the ills of capitalism complete with citations to authority, and even to fit this blog into them from a Gramscian perspective, but in your efforts toward martyrdom you make yourself a parody of the more original thinkers you cite.

Yep, my Ayn Rand comment was cheeky. I admit it. I had just heard about the new program on NPR Tuesday morning, and I couldn't resist. But I don't think any of my comments, including in my first post, have been directed at any individual, at any point. (And aren't individuals the only meaningful unit of society?) When people raised a reasonable objection to my exaggerated rhetoric and asked me where I got off, I gave repeated, good-faith, and increasingly time-intensive efforts to elaborate an argument to show what I think are some political dangers (both immediate and broader) attendant to what I consider to be attacks on the (by now minimalist) Keynesian welfare state. The more carefully reasoned I have tried to be, the more wildly ad hominem and dismissive the return volleys have been. Why might that be?

If I didn't satisfy Patrick's desire for me to address all of his points, it's partly because I had thought better of mentioning such embarrasing "hidden subsidies" of capitalism as the Enclosures, genocide, colonialism; (or to move to more recent examples) Apartheid; forced child labor; no-bid contracts for the war in Iraq; an increasingly privatized prison-industrial complex that locks up the chronically unemployed; fortress-style iPod factories where the workers can't leave; Nike factories where the workers are beaten; Coca-Cola bottling plants where the workers are assassinated; open-pit gold mining (by US and Canadian companies) that leaves children's skin sloughing off; special legislation okaying increased arsenic levels in the water supply; Red Lobster seafood dragged up by unregulated divers who are dying from the bends; cheap tropical hardwoods stolen from indigenous peoples' territories and "mixed in" with the legally exported wood; cheap produce underwritten by sub-minimum-wage exemptions for farm workers; ethanol R&D funding; one-sided "free trade" agreements; riot cops; surveillance cameras; made-to-order US-sponsored coups (at the behest of United Fruit, Anaconda, various oil companies); and so on and on and on. This is where the critique moves me further afield than simple populism (which is where I had previously mainly left it).

I have some familiarity with third-world development issues, and from this vantage point I can attest to the fact that (so-called) free-market capitalism gets its foot in the door with substantial state and suprastate intervention, nearly every time. The notion of a fully self-regulating market has always been a convenient fiction, but in many parts of the world it's a baldfaced lie. By relying on IMF/IDB/World Bank requirements for the stripping away of every public good, yanking the commons out from under subsistence-sector folks, and in short, creating "free" subjects by systematically dispossessing them of all means of their own physical reproduction save by the sale of their labor power in a market glutted by these very processes of mass dispossession. In such contexts, and especially now, as 100s of millions of people are caught in a world food crisis, words like "freedom of choice" and "the market" and "comparative advantage" do worse than ring hollow. They ring a death knell. I think these facts ought to count for something. But what do we see instead? We see, time and again, that the tautological nature of free-market theology requires that every charge of a market-induced crisis be quickly stifled with the retort that the problem was that the market reforms had not gone far enough. Or calling out the messenger with red-baiting dodges.

The supplanting of government-guaranteed rights with the vague reassurance of an 18th-century Scottish philosopher that an invisible hand will take care of everything, is not a politically neutral act. The very mobility of ideas that has come with improvements in transportation and information technology, coupled with the obvious power differentials that mark global capitalism, make such ideas extremely potent. They get reproduced and strengthened through innumerable channels, including Pope Hat, and when taken up and applied willy-nilly by IMF flunkies or Chicago-trained technocrats in government posts, they gain the power of fiat in places where they can (and do) wreak great mischief. By the same token, I would argue, their very ubiquity and (when unmitigated by extra-market interventions) their stolid indifference to human suffering make them fair game for a lively critique from whatever corner of the earth they might happen to touch. Even Appalachia.

Best,

Dan