Hugo

I don't know what you mean by that. If you mean that bad actions cannot produce good results and that good actions cannot produce bad results you are very much mistaken.

In the long term such a system just won't work. You see, the only thing that is going to actually kick an addiction for good is personal willpower, accountability and responsibility. By removing the options for those from addicts, you are not helping them overcome their addiction at all. What you are doing is letting them remain addicts but preventing them from getting their fix. If this system was to fail, or a loophole be found, those addicts would be back on their drug of choice before you could say "syringe." No, it would prevent that. They have no incentive to learn responsibility and fiscal skills because the benefits that those attributes would give them are already available for nothing. Your statement is akin to opining that grocery stores help people to learn agriculture and animal husbandry.

Alright, but as I said, the big picture is that democracy and freedom in this century were saved only because of the USA. Do you recognise that? Yep. Usually, the intended consequences are to avoid a worse evil. For example, supporting Stalin against Hitler, and turning on him when Hitler was dealt with. For example, supporting Saddam against the Ayatollah, and then turning on the Saddam when the Ayatollah was dealt with. For example, supporting the Mujahedeen against the Soviets, and then turning on the Mujahedeen when the USSR collapsed. The US is quite fluid in picking some allies but steadfast with others (for instance, throughout the 20th Century the US has never turned upon Britain with the one "exception" of the Suez incident, or upon Canada), but the goal is the preservation of democracy. The dynamics of US foreign policy and alliances is geared towards taking on problems and threats to world peace and freedom one at a time with as much backing as one can get, rather than going in guns blazing against the whole world. Dominant elite! Give it a rest! Who is the dominant elite? What are their names? How are they manipulating things? Who is "running" America behind the scenes, eh? The "bourgeois"? I've got news for you, my friend, 90% of Americans are bourgeois. The American political-economic system gives a constant fluid shifting of power and that power never concentrates. That's why the American people have been able to hold on to their freedoms for so long.

We all should do. If we don't, it's time for some remedial learning. Regardless, this whole line of debate is highly pedantic. If you want to refuse to use words ending in "ism", go ahead. As for me, and for people who make a living writing about and discussing these issues, we'll continue, because these words are useful for concisely expressing complex concepts. I've also noticed that everyone who was attempting to defend socialism in this thread has dropped out with nothing more to say. It certainly speaks volumes as to the invalidity and indefensibility of the socialist theory.

PI, you are obviously interpreting this programme as being for addicts only, while the rest of the general populace carries on as before. That's not how I interpreted it, because this system when only applied to addicts is even more unfeasible. How are you going to get them into the programme? Are you going to make it voluntary (in which case virtually nobody will volunteer and it becomes a total waste of time and tax money), or are you going to violate their civil liberties and rights and just draft them into it? Free marketer, yes, capitalist, no. Capitalism requires democracy. Pinochet's combination of authoritarianism with the free market resulted in a wildly unstable economy with inflation that reached 341%, unemployment that soared to over 18% (comparable to that of the USA during the Great Depression), interest rates that topped 50%, and contrary to the trends of capitalism, the overal GDP dropped sharply during his reign and, in 1993, still had not recovered to the level it was at 20 years earlier. That's not capitalism. Furthermore, if you imagine that because we are libertarian now guarantees that we shall always be libertarian in the future no matter what we do I think you need to read more of the Weimar Republic, and the famous quote of Pastor Niemoller.

Great, another excuse to gamble away billions of taxpayer dollars on something that "maybe wouldn't work." Maybe you don't mind another hike in your income tax, but I do. Ah, so the government determines what they need. This would be the same government that refused a wheelchair to a disabled war veteran because they were concerned that his house had no ramp, that $2bn was better spent in a stupid gun registry than on the police forces, that all baby walkers needed to be banned because some parent was dumb enough to let a kid fall downstairs in one etc. Come off it. The government cannot be relied upon to make good decisions and it certainly can't be expected to micromanage the daily needs of 30 million Canadians with any degree of competence or efficiency. The communists tried central management of resource allocation and millions starved. Oh, brilliant. Do you know how many times the gun registry database has been compromised already (i.e. hacked)? What if some student doing the data entry for minimum wage makes a typo and a family doesn't get any food for a month? What you are basically proposing is a massive computer system that contains all the income data, family information and resource allocations for the entire population. You don't think this is going to be a prime target for hackers? What if there's a technical problem? Back in the early 90s some construction worker cut through the main internet backbone in the USA and the entire internet slowed to an absolute crawl for four days. Can you imagine what would happen if nobody could get any food for four days? Systems, systems, systems. The only way to do this is a truly enormous bureacracy that will be a vast drain on resources, one that'll be open to abuse and corruption. How can you assume that everybody involved with the creation and maintenance of this system will be of saintly virtue, and how can you be certain that all of the programmers and network engineers you'll hire to put it into place will all be so perfectly skilled that not a single mistake will be made? Records is one thing. You are talking about actual pre-emptive intervention in the economy and in individual lives. This is massive state interference, and it is communist in nature. Furthermore, you are forgetting that the further the decision-making process is divorced from the actual scene, the worse the decisions are. This is why planned economies are failures, and this is why in Western armies officers in the field are encouraged to use their initiative and make their own command decisions - generals hundreds of miles away don't know what's going on. What you are doing is proposing a removal of the right of people to be responsible for their own lives, and divorcing control of their lives from them by several government levels. If this was done, there would be a severe compromise in individual rights and liberties and an undermining of the values that underpin our society. This idea will never, ever work. Just forget about it. If you want to help drug addicts, help them at the individual level where it'll do some good. Imposing massive state control on our entire society to help drug addicts is like using a sledgehammer to drive in a thumb-tack. And you still haven't told me how this new culture of state control will be prevented from snowballing into a new Nazism or Marxism.

There are many problems with this. How do you decide what a person is to spend? If you set a low limit on, say, groceries, what if a person blows all their money on a very expensive delicatessen and then doesn't have enough to eat that month? If you set a high limit and a person spends all their money at the cheap cash-and-carry grocery store, what of the remainder that they don't need to spend but are obliged to? Which companies are you going to let people spend at? All grocery stores, or just some? How do you police it and make sure that unethical businessmen or drug dealers are not setting up phony grocery store businesses? How deep do you micromanage this system? Are you going to just set a limit for, say, groceries, or are you going to set a limit for bread, milk, etc, and how do you account for people who don't eat bread and drink milk? Are you going to set separate obligations for those with families? Are you going to make sure that mothers buy diapers? How are you going to find out which mothers don't breast-feed and make sure they buy formula? What if an infirm person gets someone else to buy their groceries, whose account does it count against? To make this work you would need a massive bureaucracy, with an enforcement arm and a surveillance arm that had access to private bank accounts, to privileged company payroll information, to the transaction records of privately held businesses etc. Basically, a huge violation of personal rights and an elimination of privacy. What this basically amounts to is massive state interference in the personal lives of the citizens, rather like communism or Nazism. Power tends to snowball. The massive accumulation of power by communists and Nazis led to the murder of about 130 million innocent people and I don't think we want to start down that road. I'd rather drug addicts blew their pay on drugs and neglected themselves than we create a massive state spying institution and end up with a Gestapo, a Lubyanka and a GULAG. This is the absolute worst idea I have heard in a long time.

The great struggles for freedom, democracy and liberty in this century against the twin evils of fascism (in which, forgive me, I am going to lump both Japanese militarism and Islamic fascism) and communism could not have been won without the USA. Without America, WWII would have been lost and the Cold War would have been lost. To my mind, that means that in the big picture America is a defender of freedom, liberty and democracy. Sometimes it lapses. There have been periods such as the Nixon presidency when foul ethics were allowed to pollute American foreign policy, and in this case America really ceased to be a bastion of democracy and liberty for this certainly was not what it encouraged overseas. The best that can be said about the USA during these periods was that it was a bastion of anti-communism but in many cases, her allies were little better than the communists. These periods were egregious, those actions were wrong. There were other times when the USA just exercised poor judgement. Carter probably did not intend that his soft stance on communism would lead to Soviet confidence and the invasion of Afghanistan. Clinton probably did not deliberately commit treason by selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Somalis or Kosovans probably were not at the front of his mind when he made his decisions on US policy regarding those regions. These were mistakes, good intentions with foul consequences. I don't think the USA can be said to have a primary mission, since the role changes with the administration and the political mood of the populace. Jimmy Carter and Theodore Roosevelt were very different presidents, and American foreign policy was similarly different during their terms. Some presidents were hard-line anticommunists, like Nixon, Kennedy or Reagan, some were not, like Carter or Clinton. But if you want an overall picture of American foreign policy in this century, and it seems that you do, I believe that that picture is one of American defence of liberty.

Yes, but was there artistic intent in their creation? Why not? There is no real reason why a film cannot be art. A lot of films meet the criteria: they were made with artistic intent, they are timeless, they affect people on multiple levels including the emotional. But this pretty much rules out most films including the explosion-a-minute summer blockbuster and the teen movies with the trailers that promise many scantily clad girls and absolutely no plot. These films have clearly been crafted without artistic intent in order to make money. You can make money from good art, but you can't usually make money from bad art, so if you know you can't make good art just make a product that will sell. And if you ask me why I'm able to make these judgements, it's because I have a brain, as does everyone else. Does anyone disagree? Anyone here think that Tomcats or The Bachelor is high art? Then you are denying yourself a valuable tool for thought and discussion for poor reasons. How much time and bandwidth would it waste to go back through this thread and replace every instance of "capitalism", "socialism", "mercantilism" and "feudalism" with a precise description of each of those systems? And what would be the point, since we all know what is meant by those words anyway? Avoiding the word "system" is ridiculous. These concepts are systems, economic and political systems. A system is a group of interrelated or interacting elements that form a whole (in our case, an economy, a polity or both), in the case of our discussion. Why would you deny the obvious? I believe that this whole line of discussion is obtuse in the extreme and smacks of an attempt to be a "radical thinker" or to be seen as one unbound by conventional thought. Sadly, it takes more than denial of the obvious to be considered a great thinker. I suggest you stop it.

This debate was started in a rather ad-hoc fashion and I believe it's getting very disjointed because of it, so I will try to clarify my views on this issue and we can go from there. The USA is, as a rule but not without exception, a culture of freedom, liberty and democracy. The enemies of the USA are, as a rule but not without exception, undemocratic and unlibertarian, and that's being very kind to most of them. I do not applaud the poor judgements or egregious actions of the USA, and there are many. For instance, FDR's kowtowing to the USSR resulting in the mass executions of tens of thousands of Polish prisoners that could have been avoided, or Clinton's sale of all information on the US nuclear arsenal to the Chinese or his ineffectual just-for-show meddling in Somalia and Kosovo. The difference is that these tend to be exceptions in a nation that normally gives billions of dollars in foreign aid each year and attempts to help its allies against various inhuman threats. On the other hand, the enemies of the USA are consistently egregious. It was the rule that the USSR would torture and execute their own citizens on a regular basis and seek to overthrow all foreign governments whether democratic or not whenever they were not Moscow-centrist communist dictatorships. There were no exceptions. I find war abhorrent and wish an end to it. Unfortunately, until everyone else in the world feels the same way we are doomed to war. The least we can hope for is that the wars we pick will be just and fought for the right reasons. I recognise that war is not always the answer. Reagan was able to shrewdly topple the Soviet Union by the mere threat of economic collapse and the possibility of military defeat. This doesn't always work. Twelve years of economic sanctions and an actual military defeat did not stop Saddam from massacring his own people. Where a military operation is the only viable solution to the problems of tyranny and oppression, we should try not to shirk that in favour of half-measures that will cost even more innocent lives.

My question does not ask anything of good and evil. It simply asks what course of action you would have preferred to war in order to realistically attempt to end regimes that killed their own people and sought to kill the people of other lands. Do you want to answer that now, or is there another dodge in your future? Now, what was that you were saying - that you are disappointed that America did sit back sometimes? They just can't win with you, can they? If they go in, they're evil. If they stay out, they're evil. So my question #2 is: can you get past your own bigotry?

What would you have done? Sat back and done nothing as Saddam butchered his own people and annexed his neighbours in order to butcher them too? Wring your hands and wax about the evils of war while the Communists took over Vietnam and proceeded to put a million people to death? Were you preaching soft diplomacy and brotherly love while Soviet tanks crushed Czech and Hungarian protesters to a pulp? I'm asking you: what is the better solution? What great new idea have you come up with that could have avoided all these deaths while still ending, or realistically attempting to end, the evil regimes those deaths were incurred fighting?

Oh - you mean the 1 million Vietnamese that were murdered by the Communists? Or the 2 million Cambodians that were murdered by the Communists? Or the 300,000-1,000,000 Iraqis murdered by Saddam Hussein? I think these people would testify that they wished to heaven that the US military had been a little more successful or "belligerent" overseas. But please, tell me how the US military butchered more than a million civilians in Vietnam, more than 2 million in Cambodia, and more than 300,000 in Iraq. I can't find any figures that support this idea at all. For instance, the highest figure I found for civilians killed in the Vietnam War was 200,000 - and that was killed by both sides, not just the South and the USA.

True. But the fact that the US military protected you from it is testament to the fact that it's a subjective point, no?

Very interesting. Here's an interesting article on the USSR, and here's one on the PRC, two regimes that DARPA helped keep you safe from. Otherwise, you might have joined the 41 million people that the USSR murdered, or the 35 millions that the Chinese Communists murdered. Let's not forget that both were highly aggressive and militarised powers with a history of aggression, invasion and annexation of other nations. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty glad that the US had/has such a strong military. It stops me getting a bullet in the back of the head.

Pellaken, We already have a thread on this subject. This new one is redundant. I'd suggest you post in "Which 'one true God?'" which has already begun to explore this topic. In fact, I already answered the very question you asked there.

I could argue this further, but you raise good points. I think the military can only be a threat to democracy if the political system allows it to be, and note too that where juntas occur the military is hardly "strong". However, I'm willing to concede, and say in conclusion that both of SirRiff's points were highly subjective. Do you concur?

Assuming that the military budget is within the means of the nation to pay (which, in the case of the US, it is), what is the downside to a powerful military? How many people believe that a powerful military is a liability to a nation? How many times in history has a nation been defeated because it had a powerful military, and how many times has one been victorious because it had a weak military? To state that a powerful military is better for a nation is as objective a statement as, "to have $2 is better than to have $1." And if you disagree, I'll be happy to give you my PayPal details and you can transfer some of your "liability" onto me.

That is a highly subjective judgement, while the value of a powerful military is an objective one.

I think these options are too limited. I have no option that I can honestly choose.

Art has certain criteria to be defined by. It should be timeless, it should touch the viewer or reader on an emotional level and preferably on other levels too. It can be very strongly argued that reality TV and other such "art' does not meet the criteria to be art. Further to this point, I don't think you could even find a single Survivor viewer who believes that what they watch is art, or believes that the "art" of Survivor is within a million miles of Guernica, or Endymion. Not in so many words, but is implied because Smith shows that "self-love" actually transcends the self to include the interests of one's family, and also a wish to sacrifice present wealth for future wealth and to take a risk today for a gain tomorrow. Nevertheless, it remains that capitalism, economically, can only result in a win for society. If one is selfish, society benefits because the capitalist system means that the benefit of one is, by and by, transformed into the benefit of all. If one is selfless, then one is free to be charitable and giving because of the freedoms that capitalism allows. They can be used to describe a general political-economic modus. They cannot pick up on all the subtleties, but nevertheless, you can identify a mercantilist culture and distinguish it from a capitalist one easily enough. If you want an analogy, think of computers. You can call a computer "x86-based" which will tell you what sort of computer it is, what hardware principles it is based on, what instruction set it uses, and what software it is able to run. You cannot tell the details of this computer system from that simple description, but nevertheless, you can lump x86-based systems together and distinguish them from, say, MIPS-based systems or Alpha-based systems, without needing to abandon all those definitions simply because they cannot be very detailed.

I can certainly see that point. The problem is that popular culture is inevitably dumbed down because the masses are, at the risk of sounding arrogant, dumb, and really, they always were and always will be. Pre-capitalist societies seemed to have better artistic output because the commoner was unable to patronise the arts, that patronage being reserved for the aristocracy who tended to have better taste. That better taste is still present now, but it becomes somewhat drowned in the sea of popular culture. There isn't much to be done about it since you can't force people to see the Bolshoi instead of the Toronto Maple Leafs, or to discard their J.K. Rowling in favour of Les Murray. Or rather, you can, but you can't make them like it. All you can do is exercise your rights as an individual that capitalist democracy has given you, and patronise the arts you see fit to. No, it is, really. This state of affairs is responsible for giving you the greatest freedoms and best standard of living yet enjoyed in the history of mankind. If you genuinely feel that dumbed-down pop culture and advertising is too great a price to pay, well, there's plenty of mud huts available in Africa for you. Anyone. I believe AOL-Time Warner shares are at $17.15 right now, they trade under the ticker symbol "TWX" on the NYSE. Or you could get some shares in Fox Entertainment, which are a lot pricer at $28.99 per share. Take your pick. No, August, I already went over this. I shall attempt to clarify again. When I said that capitalism was preceded by feudalism and mercantilism, these were just examples of the kinds of systems that preceded them. A culture need not pass through systems in a certain order, nor need it pass through every system or even change systems at all. It really depends upon how the culture progresses. Not to split hairs but it was about 5,000-5,500 years ago (the Sumerian shell-ring is the first currency known to archaeologists). Yes, this is what I have said. Harnessing sin to produce virtue. Moreover, Smith goes on to say that "self-love" is a harsh description. He adds that most people, given a choice, would work the bare minimum possible to the lowest standards they could get away with. The drive to work harder is usually the drive to help one's family, which is not selfish, so in this way capitalism harnesses selfless virtues and encourages them by giving people the means to accumulate wealth and prosperity for their families. No, I'm British.

I don't think market forces are to blame, really. The mentality of the citizen has changed. If you look at the typical New England colonist, founding-stone of democratic capitalism, he was hard-working, community-spirited, politically active and had a firm moral fibre based upon religious belief. We have swapped that for increasing laziness, disenchantment with the community, political disinterest and a near-complete lack of ethics. The democratic capitalist system is the best system for obtaining freedom and prosperity. All other systems have failed in this regard. Theory is irrelevant if that theory cannot be successfully put into practice, and in practice, mercantilism, feudalism, and socialism are all utter failures at obtaining liberty and prosperity for all when compared to democratic capitalism. The problem is that, although the obligations of the citizenry are less under capitalism than under other systems, they are still there, but they are being neglected. Take voter turn-out as an example. How can democracy function properly when 40% of the electorate just doesn't bother voting? People have neglected their political obligations as citizens, just as they are neglecting their moral and social obligations to stick to the family and to be ethical rather than just follow what the most popular lobby group is saying right now, and as they are neglecting their economic obligations to exercise a little good judgement as consumers and stop rewarding companies that don't deliver a good product. These obligations aren't hard to meet. They are certainly more within the grasp of the average man than socialist obligations, and they are certainly more fair than feudal obligations. The problem is that socialism encourages apathy and laziness. The lack of freedom discourages involvement in anything, after all, why bother when you have no choice anyway? So, as you can see, as socialist values begin to creep into our society they have an effect. People become lazier and cease to care about important things. University professors and teachers are overwhelmingly left-leaning these days and the children they educate grow up to become adults exhibiting typical left-leaning tendencies: apathy, laziness, lack of responsibility and ignorance. Canada is a great example of this. A nation that once consisted of hard-working, moral people, a nation that fought two world wars, has been replaced by a nation of whiners afraid to take a stand on anything, cowed by politicians so much that they continue to support a party that steals from them, expecting a big public sector, welfare, free healthcare, and not caring that these agendas cannot be sustained or supported, not caring that the government taxes them to death and runs up massive debts in order to give them the hand-outs they claim are their right. They do not think about tomorrow. They have given up personal responsibility, running up mountains of private debt, and how can a government be fiscally responsible when citizens don't demand it and don't respect it themselves? Yes, that is when democratic capitalism was young. You don't have to believe in Marxist stages since they are incorrect anyway. Russia went straight from mercantilism to socialism, as did China. This is wrong. Adam Smith observed a new phenomenon that was beginning in the 18th Century. He explored it and hypothesised upon where it might lead us. Capitalism dates back only to the 18th Century, before that, you have mercantilism, feudalism and so forth. It's easy to tell. Democratic capitalism produces rapid growth and progress, other systems do not. The life and welfare of a medieval peasant was no different from that of a Sumerian peasant who preceded him by four millenia. The life of a medieval king was no different from a Sumerian king, either. There wasn't that much in the way of technological progress, or in ideas of liberty, equality, equal racial and gender rights, and so forth. Once capitalism is introduced, things suddenly start moving forward at a very rapid pace, technologically, socially, economically. We are far wealthier than our grandparents were. Our grandchildren will be far wealthier than we are. Our great-grandmothers couldn't vote or work, but our women can. Compare this to four and a half thousand years of stagnation and you can clearly see where democratic capitalism begins. Then you would be wrong. It's important to keep definitions clear. I can't decide that I will call an apple an orange, it isn't, and it will confuse people I talk to. Market relations is a whole different concept. Please don't confuse the debate.

That is a very good point, BD, and I would agree. Democratic capitalism is a pluralist system with three parts: the economic, the political, and the moral-cultural. When one of those three falters the whole is compromised. I think what we are seeing of late is to do with failures in the moral-cultural aspect of the system. People no longer subscribe to the values that were popular when democratic capitalism was young, such as Christian ethics, a communal spirit, family values, and so forth. We have replaced these things with disdain for all things religious and moral-absolutist, with disenchantment with the community, and with new family values that swap excuses (permissiveness and "quality time") for proper child-raising, and are more interested in finding oneself than improving oneself. I agree with this too. The three aspects of polity, economy and society are supposed to be separated for their own good. Church and state should be separate for the protection of both and for the people. When two start to merge and have undue influence on each other, there is a problem. However, it goes both ways. Big business can interfere in government, but government can interfere in big business, too. Just look at the controversies surrounding Canada Steamship Lines, all of Chretien's sordid little projects and other pork-barrelling. This is why they are supposed to be shielded from one another. Democratic capitalism praises freedom above all else and if any one of the three key aspects is compromised, freedom is in danger. Freedom is obtained by having a fluid power structure where no one body can obtain too much power in any one field, let alone more than one. Interference in this separation concentrates too much power in too few hands.

I don't agree with this moral relativism. Some things are just evil. Killing innocents is evil. Stealing is evil. Rape is evil. There is a definite evil side to human nature and if you really have to ask what that is, I invite you to just watch the news tonight.