John Paul II stated unequivocally that labor unions are “indispensable” for workplace justice, and collective bargaining is just another name for workplace democracy. Unions are seen by John Paul II as the democratic institutions that form a bulwark against the abuse of workers at the hands of either the employer or the state.

Sorry, guy, but as an Irish Catholic (don't let my name fool you), your take on labor unions and the Catholic church seems to be at odds.

I'm reading Laborem exercens right now, and a few things jump out at me:

"In the modern period, from the beginning of the industrial age, the Christian truth about work had to oppose the various trends of materialistic and economistic thought."

For certain supporters of such ideas, work was understood and treated as a sort of "merchandise" that the worker-especially the industrial worker-sells to the employer, who at the same time is the possessor of the capital, that is to say, of all the working tools and means that make production possible....The interaction between the worker and the tools and means of production has given rise to the development of various forms of capitalism [and "collectivism"] into which other socioeconomic elements have entered as a consequence of new concrete circumstances, of the activity of workers' associations and public autorities, and of the emergence of large transnational enterprises. Nevertheless, the danger of treating work as a special kind of "merchandise", or as an impersonal "force" needed for production (the expression "workforce" is in fact in common use) always exists, especially when the whole way of looking at the question of economics is marked by the premises of materialistic economism.

It seems to me that your entire line of argumentation is in direct contradiction to this encyclical, as you are arguing from the premises of "materialistic economism." And lest you attempt to argue that this is socialism and Marxism, not anarcho-capitalism, you might be interested in reading the entire encyclical. You can find it at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html.

The internets are wonderful.

You have to give this much credit to Howard Kurtz: if the man is on the tube, and you turn down the sound low enough so that his words are just a soothing monotone, he certainly does give the appearance of a reasonable, well-tempered, objective, trustworthy arbiter of right and wrong in the media. His appointed role as "media critic" is intended to give a pleasant and quasi-transcendent reassurance that "someone" is making sure that the "extremists" of the right and the left do not inscribe their "agendas" on the blank-slates of unwary TV-viewer consciousness.

Turn up the volume, and turn on your own mind, and Kurtz is more the "junkyard" dog protecting an Orwellian bureaucracy of Real Reporters and Real Editors that are so tied in with the power elites they supposedly "analyse" that it actually is possible that a Brit Hume is seen as "objective" and it is understood that the "Left" will always equal "whack-job".

And, of course, Olbermann is the "competition"; he is not playing by the rules. CNN and Fox seem to have reached an impasse where they will divide up the terrority of that wonderful TV-land nation of "the American people" (left-wing whack-jobs need not apply for citizenship). Like two mob families who have made a truce to avoid more bloodshed between them, they look at Olbermann - and they hate what he is doing. Who does he think he is anyway? Ed Murrow?

kdwmson:

Reality, dude

[Me:]"Cherles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and finally, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, and Rachael Carson."

I count five writers of fiction and one government-made economic catastrophe.

That's four writers of social criticism in the form of fiction. They were famous for depicting in their novels the evident fallacies of your philosophy. And one scientist/writer, the most awesomely effective science writer of all time, in fact.

Plus the greatest market failure of the modern industrial age. Merely repeating the rightwing fairytale myth that government somehow caused the Great Depression does not make it so. It doesn't even make an argument that it is so.

But there's a pretty easy counter to such nonsense: the first country to recover from the Great Depression was Sweden. And it recovered simply be engaging in massive, Keynsian, pump-priming deficit spending. Next came Germany, which did pretty much the same thing--only it went the military Keynsian route, the one much favored by American conservatives throughout the Cold War era. The US was far more timid in its approach, but was still well on its way to recovery when FDR, still under the pre-Keynsian thrall, decided it was time to get back to balancing the budget, and plunged the US back into the 1937-1938 recession.

In short, there was about as good a realworld experiment as one could ever ask for, and it showed conclusively that Keynes was right: economies as a whole, approached through equilibrium models, have multiple equilibrium points, and can readily get stuck in ones that are far from optimal. When they do, the market itself is powerless to correct itself. Only government action move the economy to another, more optimal equilibrium plateau. For all the huzzahs later raised to Friedman's monetarism, all this ever really amounted to was showing that money supply was a much more efficient fine-tuner of the economy. But when faced by something as massive as the Great Depression, fine-tuning is simply inadequate for the job.

You have also stated several times now that the American people don't support liberalism. This is yet another baseless assetion on your part. In fact, as I noted last year, even self-identified extreme conservatives support the welfare state:

http://patternsthatconnect.blogspot.com/2006_02_19_archive.html

....it’s worth looking at supporting data from the General Social Survey (GSS), arguably the most thorough survey of American public opinion, administered 25 times since 1972. This data-which shows remarkably consistent findings across all the times it has been administered-represents the gold standard when it comes to American public opinion research, and it provides undeniable evidence of conservative support for welfare state social spending.

Since 1984--the first year all the relevant questions were asked in the GSS--a majority of extreme conservatives (self-identified 7 on a 1-7 scale) said we were spending too little on a combined measure (call it NatWelfComp) of whether people think we’re spending too little, too much or about right on seven different areas--Social Security, welfare, “improving [the] nation’s education system,” “improving & protecting [the] environment,” “improving & protecting [the] nations health,” “improving the conditions of blacks,” and “solving problems of big cities.” The number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too little on one or more programs (net: i.e. “too little” on two, but “too much” on one is a net of “too little” on one) was nearly twice the number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too much: 59.3% to 30.7%.

So, if extreme conservatives support the welfare state by 2-1, it's pretty damn clear that the American people as a whole support it as soundly as a rock.

Moral: Movement conservatives absolutely have to demonize liberals for a very simple reason: poisoning the well is the only chance they have. If people actually listened to liberals and heard what they stand for, movement conservatives wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

An excellent demonstation of this happened in Ohio back in 1988. Michael Dukakis, a liberal who ran away from his record, who ran on the slogan "it's about competence, not ideology," lost Ohio by 11 points.

Senator Howard Metzenbaum was running for re-election at the same time. He was a first-tier target for the GOP, who were convinced he was far too liberal for Ohio. Metzenbaum pleaded with Dukakis repeatedly to run a strong economic populist campaign instead--the sort of campaign that Metzenbaum himself was running.

Metzenbaum won by 14. That's a swing of 25 points between the two. The difference between running as a liberal vs. running away from being a liberal.