Sunday, September 18, 2005

Human Progress: Technology, Capital and freedom

All the popular Oriental based ‘isms’ that have exercised our academics in the past 100 years have been utterly wrong and devastating.

by StFerdIII

There are many theories to explain historical progress and most suffer from one quaint but rather ugly feature – they are entirely wrong and usually deadly. The most Oriental of them, or those that preach the submission of the individual to the religious cult – Communism, Nazism, Islamism, Maoism - end up killing millions of innocents and brain washing entire generations, destroying human societies in their vain hope to control the world. Determinism, dialecticism, geographical ‘luck’, and ‘inevitable’ stages of historical development populate the intellectual refuse bin of historical explanation. Most of these theories were products of misinformed minds such as Marx, or the misreading of historical patterns by those such as Lenin, Rousseau, Howard Zinn, or the intellectual forbears in the late 19th century that gave us the grand schemes of national fascism, socialist determinism or Lamarckian communism. Today we have radical Islam following the same worn out path of historical-religious determinism and inevitable world leadership. As Hannah Arendt stated in her post World War II analysis of fascism, the ideology of fantasy is what makes such constructs as Islam or Nazism so frightening. Their irrationality is hard to comprehend and harder for rational democracies to preemptively fight against.

Post modern thinkers from the French school such as Derrida, Foucault and others have convinced our ‘elite’ and chattering media that a constitutionally built political and economic system, based upon capital and market economics, as evidenced by the US or 19th century Britain is an anachronism that borders on criminality. For Derrida and his modern acolytes in left liberal parties, CNN, the New York Times, Harvard and across Europe and Canada, the basis of society must be government control, ownership, risk reduction and enforcement of liberal nihilism – where capital markets, mores, responsibility and boundaries of conduct can be ignored. Such ideas are not new and they are not very sane.

A system based on a firm republican or parliamentary constitution, and market capitalism [RPCMC] works because it forces innovation and individual ownership of parts of the production and consumption processes. RPCMC is necessary to allow people to own and care for parts of the political, economic and moral processes that build society. Disallowing such ownership or allowing it without laws, regulations, transparency and respect for private property [ie. not over taxation or theft of private assets], is to create a society that will always under-perform and eventually fail. Thus all the Oriental ‘isms’ that have dominated and indeed destroyed our historical development in the past 100 years are examples of what mankind must avoid if he wants to further improve the world and our society. It is doubtful however than man is smart enough to understand this, or learn from the past and the rise of these Orientalist ideas which have come quite close to eradicating civilization.

The RPCMC system is one premised on free exchange and ownership and is based on private market exchanges. Markets force contracts, democratic pluralism and transparency. They are also a prerequisite to build a middle class. Without a middle class, property owners or vested-interest politics would revert to a leviathan and the rule of the ruthless. Church and state would be melded together and laws would be arbitrary. A strong middle class has everything to lose and will want to protect their freedom of exchange, accumulation, religious ideals, and economic and personal development. As Martin Lipsett rightly pointed out, a market economy and middle class does not ensure political change, but without such developments, you will not have the capacity to form a pluralistic and democratic society in which the church, state and individual are rightly separated. China and India will be the modern day experiments to test the above statement. My bet is that India progresses after some time far more rapidly, socially, economically and politically than China, since it is a more Western oriented, and British Constitutionally based country than China ever will be.

In fact the RPCMC is the only moral and sustainable model that has been invented by the human. We would have no intellectual, spiritual or technological progress without capital, markets and constitutional democracies. Innovation based on collateral is the basis of modern society. Collateral is based on land, hard asset appreciations [buildings, developments, company stock] and is deployed to make more margins on higher value added, and profitable services, products and market development. This process is not cyclical, not deterministic and it is not class based. It is an open process, open to the best ideas, efforts, capital and concepts. It is also dependent on morality, honesty, contracts and helping your fellow man. A cynical loner, who despises, destroys and is distrusted, will be rejected by the RPCMC society.

In fact RPCMC is the only solution to the problem of inequality and poverty. Government is certainly not the answer. The problem with poverty is that government, mafia, and unions obstruct the use of capital, collateral and labor intelligence. Bad government, corruption, trade barriers, taxes, and the lack of using land and hard assets as collateral to produce capital, which can then be reinvested in the process of earning more returns, obstruct the creation of wealth and the reduction of poverty and inequality. This is as true in the advanced West as much as it is in the impoverished third world. For example redistribution of incomes in the West does little to reduce poverty. Most of these funds are lost, stolen or redirected to other programs. If you want to alleviate poverty, increase jobs, reduce taxes, spur investments and get rid of unions and other obstructions to the real flow of capital and labor.

The West and its political economy is the greatest moral, wealthy and innovative empire in history. We should not let the left wing pin-heads and other utopian dreamers try to destroy historical progress by raising taxes, barriers, and increasing the size of big government – or by letting them convince us that radical Islam is not a threat. I for one do not feel like going to a government-funded mosque on Friday as big government redistributes my private assets hither and yon, telling me how good and moral it is to relieve me of the burdens of responsibility and thinking.