Letters to the Editor
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Blame is more than a useful rheorical device
It's essential to human development and basic to hominid behavior.
The fact that it is not flowing upward in our current administration is a distinct sign of organizational and systemic failure.
Jojo should be invoking Kurt Gödel about now...
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@Mona
No. Do you care if Hitler is viciously torturing and then killing you because you are Jewish, Stalin because he thinks you side with Trotsky, or Franco because he thinks you are not sufficiently Catholic?
Mona, have you met any human beings recently? Many of us care not only about our continued individual existence, but also about the survival of the ideas in our heads. That's one of the reasons why we have families - because the continued existence of our culture, of our feelings, symbols and thoughts, are just as important as the continued existence of our bodies.
Yes, it makes a hell of a lot of difference to me whether my community is being destroyed, or whether I'm just another unlucky bastard in a random series of killing. I can reconcile me to a death that protects certain elements of my future - that continue my language, my culture, my beliefs and thoughts. A complete annihilation of my identity both personal and social is a much worse sort of death.
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Jesus! You poor fellow. It's like a trip to the mall for you?
I believe, you can still inform yourself to an imperfect but reasonable degree by being a smart consumer of "the media."
Somehow I rather doubt you have developed the skill and ability necessary, or experience, to pull it off.
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@LWM
I have resisted today. Thank you for doing it for me.
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Philosophers all
@mona - A individual human being cannot normally survive outside a group unless and until they have first been raised inside a group. The rare documented exceptions are almost always developmentally disabled and nearly incapable of functioning in society. As an idea, the rights of the individual can be said to exist in a Platonic sense, independent of any external constraint or authority. In practice, however, the rights of the individual must be guaranteed by a social contract. That contract may take the form of normative behavior (in small groups such as a tribe or clan), or the Rule of Law as expressed in one or more social institutions (e.g. religion, government, education, economics and family). I think a lot of this discussion is confusing the one context with the other.
The arguments seem to be pitting existentialist and essentialist philosophies against each other. By existentialist I mean the idea that existence precedes essence. By essentialist I mean just the opposite, that essence (ideas for example), precede existence. The inalienable rights of human beings can be argued from both camps.
In matters of ethics I tend to believe that certain actions (like murder and rape) are always wrong. No law, no government, no religion, nothing, can make them right. That would make me an essentialist. But I also think that other things (like sex of nearly any sort) are right or wrong as a result of the consent of lack of consent on the parts of the participants. I guess that would make me a (happy) existentialist.
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jojo--
When it comes to theory, I'm with Wolfgang Pauli. Most of it isn't right. It's not even wrong.
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"The Original Shrill One"
In his 1965 review of Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin gently chided the authors for going too far. "Consider the following three propositions," he wrote. "Money does not matter. It does too matter. Money is all that matters. It is all too easy to slip from the second proposition to the third." And he added that "in their zeal and exuberance" Friedman and his followers had too often done just that.
A similar sequence seems to have happened in Milton Friedman's advocacy of laissez-faire. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, there were many people saying that markets can never work. Friedman had the intellectual courage to say that markets can too work, and his showman's flair combined with his ability to marshal evidence made him the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose.
Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries' governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?
The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.
In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there's a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857
http://www.sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com/