[extropy-chat] Socialism versus Transhumanism

[Technotranscendence]

Missed this one...

On Sunday, November 23, 2003 12:28 PM Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
wrote:
>> The problem is that democracy is not antithetical
>> to statism, especially not government intervention
>> in the economy.  All extant democratic polities
>> are welfare states, some bordering on socialism.
>> You might say this tendency is contingent and in
>> a different setting democracy would not lead to
>> welfare statism or socialism.  However, people like
>> Hans-Hermann Hoppe argue on purely political
>> economic grounds that democracies will always
>> tend in that direction.
>
> The current status of many extant democracies is
> not an indictment of democracy as inherently
> socialist.

Well, I did cover that above.  This is why I wrote, "You might say this
tendency is contingent and in a different setting democracy would not
lead to welfare statism or socialism."  I tend to agree with Hoppe and
others here: once you have a government, then it will increase its
power.  Socialism is just the maximal point of that increase, wherein
the state absorbs all social activity.

Now you may disagree with this point -- which I see below you do -- but
that was the issue I was raising NOT ignoring.

> In fact, socialist tendencies are, according to
> historical commentators, a key indicator that a
> democracy is headed down a slippery slope to
> tyranny, when the majority discovers it can vote
> itself largess from the public treasury, taxed to
> the tab of the minority.

But isn't that the point?  In any democracy, how long will it take for
special interests or even majorities to find out how to work the
system -- in terms of finding ways to take wealth instead of making it?
I believe the learning curve in democracies is not that steep.

> Republican features are intended to prevent,
> halt, or otherwise mitigate this slide, as Max
> has said.

I know that and so other libertarian and anarchist critics of democracy.
Their point and mine is that such features at best only slow this slide
which is inherent in the system.

> They are really needed only so far as the
> degree to which a democratic government is
> empowered to regulate the lives of individuals,
> and how successful statists are over time at
> redefining such powers to encompass greater
> and greater amounts and areas of human
> endeavor.

Agreed, but any empowerment heads toward the same goal.  The real
solution here is to look for systems that are better than democracy or
republics.  I believe this can be found in polycentric legal orders
(i.e., anarchist systems), though even such systems are not invulnerable
to corruption.  They just take longer to decay.  Democracy and republics
tend to be on a fast track to increasing statism because they infect
more individuals and groups with powerlust and give them the means to
act on such.

By this later is meant a point that Hoppe brings up in _Democracy -- The
God That Failed_: class consciousness is blurred in democracies.  Since
the line between rulers and the ruled is everchanging, individuals and
groups become less suspicious of state power, since while it might be
used against them, they, too, might one day use it for their own ends
(viz., against others).  Thus, instead of jealously guarding their
freedoms, they instead look jealously on others' powers.  (A case in
point is antitrust law in the US.  For a long time, so called
Conservatives were critical of it until they saw it could be used
against their enemies and now only a few question it.  Another case is
the New Deal itself.  Still another is Medicare, where Republicans and
Democrats now seem to compete over who can hand out the most loot.  (I'm
speaking specifically of the new prescription drug benefit.))

Put another way, once power is accumulated, it's very hard to dissipate,
since people tend to see it as a opportunity rather than a threat.
Every time you hear, "There ought to be a law" this is just this
tendency manifesting itself -- the tendency to see government as a
workhouse rather than a dangerous beast.

> For example, here in the US, Congress seems
> to have few powers, according to the
> Constitution,

It depends on what you mean.  I tend to think the power to draft, coin
money, tax, and the like are too much.  Plus the Congress can amend the
Constitution as well, meaning it can expand its powers.

But seriously, since the US government faces no competitor -- it's a
monopolist -- it can do whatever it wants for the most part.  The
government even interprets its own limits via the courts.

> yet the greatest power that congress has is
> the power to regulate interstate commerce.

See above.

> The Constitution does not have a glossary to
> define what 'interstate commerce', or even
> 'regulate', means.

See above.  The mechanism is to use the courts.  That doesn't work
because they're government courts.  It mgiht offer more of a check, too,
if the courts were not appointed by the very branches of the government
they're supposed to check.  (Only a bit more, since eventually they
would come to an arrangement even under such a system.  Or there would
be conflict until either the courts took over, making them unchecked and
unlimited, or were subdued, making them no check on others' power.)

> As a result, where it was once accepted to
> mean the overseeing of purely commercial
> traffic between states via channels of
> commerce, as and where it occurs at
> borders, interstate commerce was
> reinterpreted during the FDR administration
> to cover any sort of human activity that has
> any sort of impact on commercial activity
> which might potentially involve, or in the
> future involve, goods and services in traffic
> between the states. The SCOTUS decision
> which was responsible for this reinterpretation
> was, of course, the result of Roosevelt
> threatening to pack the court, but it was still
> responsible for 98% of the domestic statist
> expansion in the US in the 20th century.

I'm not sure about the 98% figure, but even before FDR there was
creeping regulation in this area.  The problem can be traced back to the
Constitution itself and central government expansion began long before
FDR -- first with the Constitutional Convention, though perhaps the next
biggest episode after that was the U.S. Civil War.  Later expansions
were merely elaborations of that.

> This trend was something I described in my
> 2001 essay, "It's About The Trust, Stupid!",
> published in The Libertarian Enterprise. As
> Jose Cordeiro commented the other day,
> redefining the terms of discourse is the most
> heinous way by which statists expand their
> influence.

Something noted long before by others, but still a valid point that
needs to be brought up again and again.

> Politically, they steal labels like 'liberal' and
> 'progressive' to stealthily legitimize their
> subversion. They become involved in the
> legal system and help to rewrite the legal
> dictionaries with expanded definitions of
> terms to fit their needs for statist expansion
> of power.  They engage in promoting their
> new definitions via the press and literature.

I don't think it's all that conscious like some vast plot.  The thing is
meanings do shift over time, driven, as Rand would point out, by changes
in the underlying philosophy.  However, such changings in philosophy are
not immune to influence.  It's basically a dialectical process with
different influences driving the whole system and influencing each
other.  There are counterveiling forces -- or the system would either be
totally free or totally controlled.

Later!

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/