I agree and that is along the lines of what I was referring to in my references to personal responsbility. Every ‘one’ should first accept responsibility for themselves and their actions. IMO – too many people look to government (Fed and State) to bail them out of bad decisions.

That is not to say we should not have any social programs, in fact we must (have some)- but the majority of the current programs seem to ingender dependence and a sense of entitlement, vs helping people back to a position of independence and self-sufficiency. Society has an obligation to protect and help those that are not capable (permanently or temporarily) from protecting or providing for themselves. However, I do not think that the Federal govt has proven themselves to be a good steward of this responsibility. This is one of the primary reasons (IMO), the Federal govt continues to overreach its Constitutional authority, which leads to more socialistic programs, which in turn takes us back to the original purpose in this article.

My opinions for possible solutions, I will leave for another time.

I’m a sheepdog perhaps, but a sheepdog that wants the sheep to grow tougher foreheads for butting. A system that involves gross inequalities of power, from ownership of capital or from office-holding in government, tend to attract the wolves into acquiring those positions, or entering the circles in which the powerful move. Because I agree with you that the wolves take power in society, one way or another – some are religious leaders, even – more often than the sheepdogs, I think some toughening up of the sheep is in order.

I could go into ideas for bottom-up social reform, but anyway, again, I’m glad that now you and I understand what each other is saying on these issues.

Your personal goals sound altruistic, and it would be ‘nice’ to think that all of mankind may someday live in peace and harmony where everyone works towards the common good. Perhaps, someday in the very far future (long after we are all worm-food), something like that may be possible. I personally doubt it, but you are surely welcome to your beliefs and to pursue those goals as long you do it peacefully and within the laws of our nation. I had thought your position was one of advocating violence in order to change the world order and that any and all means were justified to accomplish those goals – as others in history have claimed as they committed genocide for the ‘common good’. If that is not the case, then by all means I encourage you to pursue those goals and wish you great success and happiness.

Having seen up close and personal the unseemly side of human nature, I have less optimism that humanity is ready for or capable of such deeds. There are few Mother Teresa’s in the world, and far more sociopaths than saints. There is an article that has been floating around the web of late titled ‘On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs’, that characterizes human nature into those three categories. (read here if interested: (http://psychjourney_blogs.typepad.com/psychjourney_podcasts/2009/02/on-sheep-sheepdogs-and-wolves.html)
While obviously a gross over-characterization and over-simplification, I do believe there is some basic truth to it, in that there is a small segment of humanity that is predatory. These are the sociopaths who have no regard for human life and will do anything for their own gratification and/or self preservation. The vast majority would prefer to live in peace, but by and large are not capable of or necessarily interested in having to handle the wolves, so that falls to the sheepdogs.

These threads have gotten too long, rambling and a bit acrimonious, so I will keep this one short. I’m not abdicating any points , simply short on time.

PS: I don’t mean to say the way the military should be run otherwise – I don’t know that. I haven’t read anything more than Sun-Tzu and heard a few service members and their spouses talk about their experiences. I do think that post-traumatic stress disorder should be treated better, listening to a military wife talk about a serious need for more of that. But my point was we have traditionally praised the work of a group that is run far more like a totalitarian dictatorship than we run our civilian lives. Maybe that’s getting off-topic, but – doesn’t it present a problem to the thesis that people are better off when their lives are not dictated to them? I really hope after reading my two comments above that you are not putting that cardboard cut-out of Stalin in front of me and talking to it, because I think it’s something that presents a crisis to something that your political philosophy and mine have in common.

Please read my response to Robert. It answers some of your statements about what I think is a straw man held up to Marxism as written by Marx, rather than Lenin or Mao or any other (disgustingly false) claimant of Marxism, whom those who value human life rightfully despise.

It seems as if you are using your service in the military (which, by the way, is run with a pretty tough and strict hierarchy, in which the common soldier has no voice but only obedience or punishment, like the USSR and Maoist PRC – certainly was so back when you were in) as justification to speak for -our- country more than I may speak for it. Far from being a watchman of freedom above the common rabble, you offend the tradition of American rights by insulting my heritage: the founding fathers’ attempt to make all property-holding male members of this nation equal citizens – and we have expanded that to all US naturally-born human beings. You hold your ideology higher than that foundational imperative to consider “all [humans] equal” by not considering me a brother outright.

You may disagree with me on political specifics but I consider my efforts to dream of what I will practice later – very much a result of the better parts of my upbringing so far. I was raised on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which gives hope and value to those whom the dominant voices in society call weak and poor (and weaken and impoverish). I was raised on his story of the sheep and the goats, in which Jesus said that citizenship in heaven was contingent upon whether someone took care of the oppressed (Matthew 25). I was raised looking at the ancient Christian church in Jerusalem, in which its members sold their property and put the proceeds into a communal fund, so that everyone could have adequate care and all were free to do with themselves what they saw best (Acts 2:45-6). I was raised -thinking- that this nation echoes Emma Lazarus poem’, some of which is printed on the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

But now I see that so many in America don’t want to adequately care for their tired and poor fellow citizens, much less those of the world. (Indeed, US-based corporations still exploit the poor of the world and the US government continues to destroy Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world.) So I resolve to somehow fill in the gap – and I find in my evil, ignorant youth a social system that attempts to care for -all- of its members, rather than preferring people who enter certain professions or who get on the good side of people with bigger gold-piles. Why wouldn’t I, considering all humans inherently equal, strive to make my community see the way I do? Not with guns or window-smashings, but persuasion and leading by example. But you speak to me as if a foreigner, despite the fact that as a social worker I would do nothing -but- care for Americans, doing less to care for myself than the high-salaried.

How insulting. How patronizing. I don’t hold above you the possibility that I may someday work in your nursing home or hospice, calling you un-American for downgrading my importance in society. But I hope someday that -you- see how pro-America it is to empower the lower-middle and lower classes, showing them how to bring themselves up toward equal status with the rich. That’s not forcing people toward mediocrity; that’s moving people and – more importantly – teaching people how to move toward excellence. That’s not genocide; that’s working so that others may live better. I will echo Marx here when looking at some things done in his name even during his lifetime: “If that’s Marxism, then I am not a Marxist.” What you understand me to be is horrible and it harms the nation your family has generally well-served. Fortunately for all of us, you’re way wrong.

Here’s what seems to be your view of Marxism judging just from your response here:

1. Marxism requires a “government owns its subjects” philosophy.
2. Marxism requires a “politburo of elitists who look at you as simply one member of a herd of cattle that they will manage and milk for what they define as the common good”.
3. Marxism goes against human nature and requires genocide.
4. Marxism is for the weak who just don’t want to work hard enough to be anything of value.

Okay. Marx. Had a vision of the working class and the peasants rising up, violently, to overcome the non-working aristocracy and/or the big capital-holders. He acknowledged that they would not treat the deposed elite nicely (probably executing some of them), but believed that eventually they would settle down and let the bourgeoisie back in to work alongside them – or the bourgeoisie would die off. They, being the people unified, would instate a system that was far more democratic than the status quo, which angered them to revolution in the first place. Including – communal ownership of property, rather than private ownership of property, except for items that especially needed to stay with the individual. And – democratic decisions on how to manage said property.

This is very different from the Bolshevik revolution and those similar to it. Vladimir Lenin set up the Russian revolution to be led by one party made of a handful of individuals, which included Yosef Stalin. This means that the people were taking directions from a handful of individuals, who called themselves far more capable of leading than the people themselves: an elitism, not a populism. When czarist rule ended at the hands of the people, the Bolshevik party did not step down, as they promised to do. I see this as no different than populist appeals by other sociopaths in history who hadn’t read a word of Marx, who were only promising things to people to get their support, then to enslave them.

Please, stop insisting to me that people who lied to everyone about planning to participate in something like that which Marx imagined – are true Marxists. And it makes no sense to insist that advocating Marxist ideals necessarily results in oppression, unless the people ruling themselves leads to oppression – at least greater oppression than we have now – and if so then you and I will have to disagree on that, although I will admit that it would be a tyranny of the majority, not perfection. But considering the “communist” revolutions of the 20th century, they’re no different than if a man or a party of people promises to instate a republic, or a democracy, or a totalitarian dictatorship, but in fact instates something else. There are, for example, so many national governments that declare they are republics and democracies – and are nothing of the sort. Should we denounce republicism or democracy while looking at things which are at more than a surface look – not either? Of course not.

Marxism is an idea of a progression into a social system in which a people largely govern themselves with a minimum of hierarchy (like a confederation, although with obvious differences), economically and politically – called communism – but is not complete anarchism. So let’s get past the straw men and talk economics and politics. If you think that there are flaws within a system with that description, then let’s talk about those. If you still want to dispute my claims about Marxism then we will have to review Marx’s words and then reconvene and dispute or agree upon them.

“We all got picked on as kids. When I was twelve two kids beat the hell out of me, one of them using a stick, for no good reason. Did I pull back into my shell and spend the rest of my life running scared and making excuses as you seem to be doing? Hell no.”

“Excuse” is a word that someone uses when one wants to degrade someone’s denunciation of the status quo, of wanting other things to change, rather than oneself. Kinda like how you beat the shit out of someone else, rather than took shit from them. Should I call your fighting back a form of whining, making excuses? I’m telling you that the system is absurd and it needs to change. And if I stopped at talking (although communication is an often underrated part of the process of change), then it could be considered whining, sometimes. But I and the people who end up agreeing with me will do something to change it.

With that said, I don’t want to beat the shit out of someone to make things change. When you change things through violence you only create fear or the desire to fight back. But when you persuade someone that your way of thinking is good, then you have two people willing to work together. If not enough people can agree with me that what I define as Marxism is good, then it doesn’t deserve to be implemented, just like any other idea. But if they do, then why shouldn’t it be?

“As Adam Smith so brilliantly described in Wealth of Nations, when two people voluntarily exchange goods and services both parties do so because they feel that they are getting something worthwhile. For instance, I am a computer programmer and my company pays me a good salary because I produce something that they consider to be worth at least as much as what they paid me. There is no coercion there; it is completely voluntary.”

If it’s actually a good deal for both parties involved, then there is no problem. But I see so many bad deals going on that what results is not a society, but rather people using their predatorial instinct on their fellow human beings, hating and envying each other. People are so concerned with keeping up with the Joneses; I hear rumors in my head of what greater cooperation and community can do. Maybe in an introverted, individual job like computer programming, one doesn’t even consider the need to cooperate, except to know what the client wants. It’s a job with high demand and I’ve not heard of many programmers who had much problem paying the bills. But when you have a system in which people are allowed to stockpile capital and let it sit there, unused, while people without enough property on which to subsist are sitting outside the activity in their community, clamoring over each other to impress these employers more than the others, but ultimately there isn’t going to be enough willingness to hire people until the capital-holders see a guarantee of profit – then you have a problem. When you have a few people deciding how the majority of resources in a community are used, too much of the desires and abilities of the members of that community are going to remain unfulfilled, unused. Here I see an awful suppression of human desire and creativity – not its freedom, as apologists of the status quo see or perhaps lyingly claim. Ultimately, one way or another, that’s what’s going to happen when a few people are predominantly in charge of ensuring the utility of labor and capital, simply from private property laws and the hierarchical structure of industry and commerce. So I want to empower more people to voice their desires and abilities. This may generate a clash between the formerly silent and the traditionally loud, but if the loud aren’t willing to negotiate, then sorry. But my crude arithmetic says that this will end up benefiting everyone more than elitism – it creates a more well-rounded consideration of how materials (and more importantly, human effort) can be used.

So is that kind of social work such a worthless profession, as you claim? Because I don’t see anyone magically improving in the ways I described on their own; just as you saw that people just aren’t or don’t want to be as good at computer programming as you could be, so you filled in the gap for them. Although why you think your job is arbitrarily more valuable than mine (as expressed in my salary) escapes me. People’s contributions to society seem far more equal in value to me than conventional status hierarchies judge them. Okay, so some people have to go to school longer in order to do what they do; cool. But while they were going to school, the non-medical students and non-law students weren’t sitting on their ass, they were working too – and gaining important skills.

Again, just so you know, you’d waste your fingers to insist that I want to brute-force anyone to accept my way of thinking. I’m all about changing people’s minds themselves so they make demands in society for change, along with me. That’s no different than demanding better terms in a business contract.

“You need to expand your view of history beyond the ridiculously discredited crap that Howard Zinn wrote. There is a world of truth and countless examples out there that you are refusing to see.”

Yet another false assumption about what I think. Actually, I’ve had my problems with the book, but a good deal of what I’ve read in that book has been confirmed by other sources, so I don’t see it as “ridiculously discredited crap”. It seemed that he romanticized the people in some spots, but it was shocking to realize just how romanticized the presidents and generals have been in my other encounters with US history. I may be an idealist, but I’m not scared of learning from people with different perspectives, I’m not scared of agreeing that their perspective is more valuable than mine before the discussion occurred, just as I am not scared of seeing my ideals as they are.

“I stated no such thing, please read my statements again without interjecting your twist/interpretation and elucidate what in anything that I wrote is contradictory.”

To say that one is responsible for taking care of oneself in some interactions in society, but responsible for the other parties in other interactions – creates a contradiction. I don’t want to misrepresent you, but it seems that if I agree with your system of thinking, I must say: If someone gets you to sign a contract in which you have the raw end of the deal, even if it’s a less severe raw end than other contracts, then it’s your fault. But if they take money from your person with their hands, it’s their fault. Could you tell me whether I am wrong in saying this? Because it blames the victim in some cases of unfair exchanges, but blames the perpetrator in other cases of unfair exchanges. The resolution of this issue that occurs to me is to create a system in which people overall work together rather than overall trying to gain an advantage over the other. As it is, we live by a very confusing/confused ethical-legal system.

Your use of a nom de guerre and hiding behind a purported veil of fear for your safety is specious at best, but arguably would be required for dissent in your Marxist utopia. Ironic, don’t you think?

You claim that something I stated was contradictory, but fail to state how so. You stated:

“You say that in the market people are responsible for themselves. If someone swindles them in a trade, or if someone pays them shit wages for a lot of work, then it’s their fault…”

I stated no such thing, please read my statements again without interjecting your twist/interpretation and elucidate what in anything that I wrote is contradictory. Please do not take the tact of ‘..when you cannot counter the logic, attack the source..’. It is not effective and will not serve your purpose in this discussion. Outside of the few of us in this thread, I seriously doubt many others will be following this discussion.

And no, you are far from the first young person I have run across that latched on to some semblance of Marxism, Communism or Socialism in college and felt that they had seen “the divine light” to fix all of the world’s ills.

Judging by your statements, I would guess your are in your early 20s, attending college, probably utilizing student loans or other benefits of this corrupt capitalist system you purport to overturn (another irony IMHO). You have yet to have a real job much less a profession, as such the majority of your purported knowledge is based upon hyperbole. I would venture that most if not all others with which you associate and share these beliefs are in a similar situation.

I on the other hand am in my 50s and by your age I had served in my nation’s military, lived overseas, traveled abroad and had the opportunity to see some of these cultures and systems you believe are so wonderful – they are not. Since that time, I have spent over 12 years in law enforcement, started three companies and created hundreds of jobs and actually contributed to society both monetarily as well as with my time and sweat of my brow. So, unlike you, I speak from actual experience, knowledge and life. Oh and for the record, I supported myself from the time I was 17, worked my own way through college using the GI Bill. I have never applied for nor accepted any form of government aid nor unemployment. And no, the GI Bill is not ‘government aid’, as I actually did something to earn it.

While I respect your right to have these beliefs, I have served as has my son and 8 prior paternal generations in our military to protect those rights. You on the other hand purport to know better by reading books written by individuals who for the most part never accomplished nor contributed much either, except perhaps to some mass graveyards in multiple countries. And yet you still choose to deride the very country, for which members of my family and friends have fought and died.

Fear not: While you and your Marxist friends conspire in ways to kill and overthrow this country that has given you this freedom, the patriots of this country will continue to stand watch and actually protect and support all of our citizens, even you – as we have sworn to do all these many generations. Sleep well at night with your assumed name, posting your beliefs that mock us, knowing that nothing you say or do will sway us from this task. Hopefully, someday you will come to value what so many have died to preserve and will join us on the line – upon that day, we will welcome you as our brother and until then we will continue to protect you. Semper Fi