RobP “nobles oblige” and “philanthropy” predate “socialism” thus, socialism can take credit for nothing, other than the oppression it demands to function.

You say “Twisting Thatcher's pattern of thinking around a bit,”

That is what Ho Hum did, it produces a fraudulent and fallacious argument.

Anyone who postulates a argument point based on “twisting” what someone else said really destroys the basis of their criticism before they start.

Shadow Minister “Economics is not just an artform. There is a considerable amount of work in place to predict the results of different actions.”

Disagree SM… regardless the amount of work which might be used in “prediction”;
“prediction” is not “economics” and “economics” is not solely about prediction.

But to the matter of economic prediction, the world contains 6 billion or so independent variables and the number of interactions which will influence those 6 billion variables is infinite. To predict anything based on infinite variables is an insoluble problem… hence most economists are in a state of permanent disagreement not only with their peers but also themselves.

Having supposedly benefitted from “Keynesian” economics in UK in the 1950-1980, I would observe, Keynes was a moron and his economic theories a useful as Wilson’s “plumbers nightmare”, used to illustrate money supply.

The last people you want to give economic authority to are the shonky politicians, who sell their soul for re-election or the even shonkier civil service “expert” (of every flavor) bureaucrats, who sit like silent puppeteers thinking they control the rest of us

Col,

The way I see "socialism" and "individualism" depends on the context. They both have a part to play, while too much of either is no good. I was watching Australian Story this week and last, which was an expose of the work of Peter Andrews in renewing the landscape on his rural property after years of one-sided farming practices which had led to land erosion amongst other damaging effects. I'll use this as an analogy.

What he found was that after decades of previous land clearing, whenever there was a deluge of rain in the area, the water ran off the land so fast it washed the soil away with it leading to vast erosion gullies. What he was a genius at was intuitively working out how to balance the landscape so that the water was retained on the land for as long as possible but without totally damming it. So what he did was to artificially build blockages (rocks, dead trees etc) in the creeks at critical points (much like beavers do) to break the natural speed of the river and let it move through at a trickle. What resulted was that his property was a green oasis amongst the parched surrounding properties.

The balance between socialism and individualism I see in the same way. Socialism is the equivalent of damming up the flow so that the waters of individualism don't run through so fast they destroy the fabric and habitats of people in society. But the smart "socialist" will not totally dam up the flow because that both deprives the water to others downstream as well as turns his oasis into a smelly, stagnant cesspool. The important point here is to strike the right balance given the existing circumstances.

RobP
That assumes that there is an inherent conflict between the interests of individuals and those of society. I can see how this is justified to stop people killing, assaulting, robbing, etc: aggressing against others’ person and property. But force and fraud are illegal under capitalism. So what would be an example of the conflict of interests as between individual and society, apart from aggression or fraud?

“Society” is not a thing in itself. It is an aspect of human action: people co-operating with each other. Society doesn’t get up in the morning and decide what to have for breakfast. Society no more thinks than it eats or drinks. Society is not a decision-making entity.

Society is not the state, and the state is not society. If the explanation of government is that it “represents” society, then what was it doing all those centuries before people had the vote? And what about in those countries where people do not have the vote? And what about in Australia, where voting is compulsory? You can’t build any theory of consent on that.

The state, whether democratic or not, is that minority of society who claim a legal monopoly of actions that the state declares to be crimes for everyone else. It is a legal monopoly of force and fraud.

It is a false dichotomy to contrast ‘individualism’ and ‘socialism’ for two reasons. Firstly individual action, excluding force and fraud, is not inconsistent with social values. On the contrary, all social goods, and all social groups, are the result of individual human action. And secondly, social co-operation can be based on consent and voluntary exchange; or on legalised force and fraud. The question is which it should be.

No-one has a problem with voluntary socialism: people voluntarily forming themselves into groups to promote some social end, such as charities, soccer clubs and volunteer fire brigades do.

But have you justified the use of violence or threats as the basis of social co-operation? If not, you have not justified any governmental action.

With the land example, remember that governments made it a condition of landholding for many decades in the last century that landholders *must* clear the land, and this was the origin of much land degradation.

Thus even if the dichotomy between individualism and socialism were granted, it still would not justify the assumption that government has superior knowledge, capacity or goodness. Socialism still would not provide any advance on the original problem, because governments are constituted by the same imperfect human beings as constitute the original problem.

But quite apart from that, no-one has a right to speak for values above human values. Anyone pretending to, is merely speaking for his own values as against those of others. If we took away all the humans, there would be no value in the earth to speak of.

To say that the land was degraded is to say that its capacity to provide for future human values was degraded. But if it doesn’t mean that, then what does it mean?

So this means the earlier owners were mistaken in their use of the land, so far as they intended to preserve its productive capacity. They used it to produce too much for the then present, and not enough for the now future.

But this does not solve the problem. Because if the cost of preserving the land is to go bankrupt, as I understand Peter Andrews did, then how is that an option for other land-users generally?

The ideal is both to use the land to serve today’s human interests in food, etc. and to preserve its capacity for future human values including ecological. But this is to say no more than that the ideal is to preserve and enhance its capital value. Otherwise how are we to know what are the relevant values to be preserved?

None of these problems provides any reason in favour of using the legal apparatus of coercion and compulsion to make decisions, except to ban force and fraud. We should let individual freedom, not a legal monopoly of crime, decide what form social c-operation should take.

>>The billions of people should not be free to choose what to use as money because the wisdom of Pericles knows what better for all of them, than they do?<<

¿Qué?

That's quite an achievement, Jardine K Jardine. A sentence that, despite consisting entirely of simple words, is totally meaningless.

Congratulations.

Plus, of course...

>>So collectivist economic planning works does it?...Do you honestly think that the ‘financing of industry and trade’ requires a centralized government monopoly to constantly inflate the supply of paper money<<

No. Nor have I ever suggest that it might.

Are you sure you aren't imagining things?

>>Without that, industry and trade would collapse because people would not be able to figure out how to make payment? Their wishes need to be forcibly overridden by a secretive cabal deciding how much fake money to print and give it to whomever they want without accounting to anyone?<<

That's bordering on the paranoid delusional.

I'd stay indoors if I were you. They might be out there, just waiting... waiting...

Peter,

"“Society” is not a thing in itself. It is an aspect of human action: people co-operating with each other. Society doesn’t get up in the morning and decide what to have for breakfast. Society no more thinks than it eats or drinks. Society is not a decision-making entity."

True. But what society at any time is, is the social equlibrium that is built up by the previous actions of many individuals. The point is that, if you move through too fast with any sort of radical venture, capitalist or otherwise, you will start wrenching the fabric of society that has been built up. For some people - I doubt if you're one of them - that can lead to a number of mostly invisible or subtle conditions like dislocation, pain and marginalisation. So, in response to your comment: "That assumes that there is an inherent conflict between the interests of individuals and those of society", of course it is true that one man's meat can be another's poison. Would people fight politically if they didn't think their interests were at stake? Isn't there something in it for you to oppose what I've written, for instance?

I should say I'm not against individualism per se, but against any rampant form of it that overrides the rights of other, less powerful individuals by tipping the playing field too far in one direction. I think we might agree there.

NB: Athough I put it in quotes, I probably shouldn't have used the word socialist as it is such a loaded term and close to being out of date. Substitute that for the word collectivist instead in my earlier post and see if that makes more sense.