Karl Marx By A Different Name

[initforme]

Unfortunately our Uber wealthy folk may have a hard time with the heaven entry aspect. Matthew 19:24

 

[initforme]

Nope I got it thru observation. The work ethic of today's american worker is the greatest this nation has ever seen.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Unfortunately our Uber wealthy folk may have a hard time with the heaven entry aspect. Matthew 19:24

There is no such perennial group of "wealthy."


"...economic mobility. About 60 percent of the households that were in the lowest income quintile in 1999 were in a higher quintile ten years later. During the same decade, almost 40 percent of the richest households fell to a lower quintile. This is a nation where you can rise or fall. It is a nation where you can climb the economic ladder based not on who you are born to, or what class you are born into, but based on your talents, your passion, your perseverance, and the content of your character." https://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/2013_05_Imprimis.pdf



"Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income: More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year. Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.

The top 1 percent,,.... is such an unstable group that it makes no sense to write, as so many progressives do, about what has happened to its income over the past ten year or twenty years, because it does not contain the same group of people from year to year.

... the turnover among the super-rich (the top 400 taxpayers in any given year) is 98 percent over a decade — that is, just 2 percent of that elusive group remain there for ten years in a row.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that among the allegedly privileged 1 percent, inherited wealth accounts for only 15 percent of household holdings, a smaller share than it does among middle-class families."

Print On Demand | National Review

I am contemplating another P.O.D. venture. (That is, “print on demand”–the modern form of vanity publishing.) I did one before via the P.O.D. firm Xlibris . It wasn’t a sensationally bad experience…

www.nationalreview.com

You don't read at all, do you.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Nope I got it thru observation. The work ethic of today's american worker is the greatest this nation has ever seen.

In a constellation of stupid posts, this may be the most stupid.

Quite an effort on your part.

Nope I got it thru observation. The work ethic of today's american worker is the greatest this nation has ever seen.

Steven Malanga

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?



In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions, . . . imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.

A free society had to be one in which people could pursue economic opportunity with only minimal interference from the state. To do so without producing anarchy required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. [There cannot be a] long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall…required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. “The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism,” Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit.” Instead, the essence of capitalism is “a rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth so as to keep a business (and ultimately the whole economy) sustainable and self-renewing, Weber wrote. It is “the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational …enterprise.”

Weber famously argued that the Protestant Reformation—with John Calvin’s and Martin Luther’s emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty, and deferred gratification at its center—shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed. Calvinism and the sects that grew out of it, especially Puritanism and John Wesley’s Methodism in England, were religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises.

After the Civil War, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants, many from countries with little experience of free markets and democracy. Their assimilation into a culture that they recognized not as Protestant but as American reinvigorated the country, helping to set late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America on a distinctly different path from much of Europe.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish had largely shaken off poverty and joined the American mainstream. Waves of Southern and Eastern European Catholics followed them, as well as Eastern European Jews—some 20 million immigrants between 1890 and 1925—who quickly replicated the success of the Irish in a country whose institutions emphasized and rewarded hard work, thrift, and self-improvement. Within a single generation, one study shows, the average early-twentieth-century immigrant family had achieved income and educational parity with American-born families, so that the children of these immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as the children of families rooted here for generations.

The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification. Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement…

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons…portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded…in the mid-1960s, [many] abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying…[instead] political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions…[and] tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.



When the schools and the wider society demoted [bourgeois values], the effects were predictable. In schools, for instance, the new “every child is special” curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students’ self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with “material wealth and physical appearance,” the authors observe. Thus did the sixties generation spawn the Me Generation of the seventies. By the mid-1980s, a poll of teens found that more than nine in ten listed shopping as their favorite pastime.



[T]he devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. Thanks to the Johnson administration’s illusion that the country could finance massive social-welfare programs and a war without consequences, the U.S. by 1974 staggered under double-digit annual inflation gains, compared with an average annual gain of about 1 percent in the early 1960s. The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that “saving and shunning debt was for saps,” Fortune observed.



The corporate restructurings of the 1980s, prompted by a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs and takeover artists who used aggressive financial instruments with provocative names like “junk bonds” to buy and then make over big companies that failed to remake themselves, reordered corporate America, shaking it out of its 1970s complacency. The 1980s version of the Horatio Alger tales was not an inspiring story of uplift but the popular movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” speech…a new era of consumption based on credit blossomed in the resurgent 1980s, and Americans turned from savers to debtors. Ostentatious displays of wealth grew more common. From 1982, the year that Volcker finally tamed inflation, to 1986, luxury-car sales doubled in America. The average age of a purchaser of a fur coat—that ultimate status symbol—declined from 50 to just 26 in the mid-1980s. To fuel such purchases, inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer-credit debt rose nearly threefold, to $2.56 trillion, from 1980 to 2008, while the nation’s savings rate shrank from an average of about 12 percent of personal income annually in the early 1980s to less than 1 percent by 2005.



One stark illustration of the change: by 2006, those who refinanced their mortgages were taking out in cash nearly a quarter of the equity they’d accumulated—compared with just 5 percent a decade earlier.

The denouement of this transformation was the 2008 meltdown of world financial markets. America has certainly had its con artists, robber barons, and speculators before, but what distinguished the latest panic was that millions of mortgages belonging to ordinary Americans triggered it—According to the FBI, reports of mortgage fraud soared tenfold nationwide from 2001 to 2007. No one knows precisely how deep the problem ran, but some mortgage servicers, examining portfolios of subprime mortgages that went bad in 2007, found that up to 70 percent of them had involved some kind of misrepresentation. Loans that required no verification of the borrower’s income infamously became known as “liar loans.” One mortgage lender who compared 100 of these loans with IRS tax filings found that in 60 percent of cases, the applicants exaggerated their incomes (or underreported them to the IRS). Occupancy fraud, in which investors intent on buying new homes and then quickly flipping them for a profit lied about their intentions, accounted for about 20 percent of all fraudulent mortgage applications. Since the mortgage meltdown began in 2006, builders in some regions have found that as many as a quarter of the buyers of the homes that they sold in new developments lied about their purposes. This multitude of scams required the complicity of businesses that ultimately destroyed themselves and shattered an entire industry.



What Adam Smith had in mind book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which traces the evolution of ethics from man’s nature as a social being who feels shame if he does something that he believes a neutral observer would consider improper,… courts of law, for instance— reflect and codify … ethical perceptions of individuals, and that these institutions provide the essential backbone of any sophisticated commercial system. Modern experiments in neuroscience have tended to confirm Smith’s notion that our virtues derive from our empathy for others, though with an important qualification: the ethics of individuals need reinforcement from social institutions and can be undermined by the wrong societal message, as neuroeconomist Paul Zak writes in Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy. When people find themselves bombarded by the wrong message…some will resign in disgust, but others will gradually suppress what scientists call the brain’s “other-regarding” behavior and the shame that goes along with it and violate their own ethics. This mechanism of deception pervaded the recent housing bubble; cheating to get mortgages became so commonplace that cheaters barely seemed to perceive that they were committing fraud.



In the wake of the market crash, our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves. Few have asked whether we can recapture the civic virtues that nourished our commerce for 300 years.

[Unfortunately], while John Wesley once observed that religion produces “industry and frugality,” and the American Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher declared that the way to avoid poverty was through “provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality,” today the National Council of Churches, to which these denominations belong, advocates for a left-wing “social gospel” of redistributing wealth (see “The Religious Left, Reborn,” Autumn 2007). And though the Catholic Church once strove to assimilate generations of poor immigrants into American economic life, today its major social-welfare organization, Catholic Charities, has become an arm of the redistributionist welfare state (see “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul,” Winter 2000).

But trying to teach adults about thrift or the patient accumulation of wealth through hard work, when they didn’t learn these things at home or in school, will be an uphill battle.



Could the schools do what they once did—create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to “making Americans,” as Hirsch proposes in his forthcoming book. Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge” curriculum, for instance, introduces kindergartners to the Pilgrims, Independence Day, and George Washington; first-graders to Ben Franklin and the concept of law in society; and second-graders to the Constitution as the foundation of our democracy. Other school reformers, according to David Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, have raised the achievement of low-income kids by using a “no excuses” model that teaches bourgeois “virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift.” But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?

The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.

www.city-journal.org

 

[alang1216]

These folks hate any who earn their money.....no matter the level at which that earning is done.

And watch the punishments he suggests be visited on workers and earners!

".... corporate executives are his special bête noire, Mr. Piketty is also deeply troubled by the tens of millions of working people—a group he disparagingly calls “petits rentiers”—whose income puts them nowhere near the “one percent” but who still have savings, retirement accounts and other assets. That this very large demographic group will get larger, grow wealthier and pass on assets via inheritance is “a fairly disturbing form of inequality.” He laments that it is difficult to “correct” because it involves a broad segment of the population, not a small elite that is easily demonized.



.... Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits... he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.”
It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meager US social state.”

... an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation." Thomas Piketty Revives Marx for the 21st Century





It is clear now, what another Marxist meant by "You didn't build that!"

It means "I can take it away from you."

"These folks hate any who earn their money.....no matter the level at which that earning is done."

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

These are two of your quotes that appear to contradict each other?

Can you truly be this stupid????

The first is my statement......the second Piketty's.


Actually, you support one of my suspicions.....I always believed that there is a certain affinity between stupid people, and lying....perhaps a necessity in that precinct.

My apologies to the Queen of Cut & Paste. Of course, now it's obvious they don't contradict each other since I guess your statement appears to be a Straw Man.

 

[PoliticalChic]

These folks hate any who earn their money.....no matter the level at which that earning is done.

And watch the punishments he suggests be visited on workers and earners!

".... corporate executives are his special bête noire, Mr. Piketty is also deeply troubled by the tens of millions of working people—a group he disparagingly calls “petits rentiers”—whose income puts them nowhere near the “one percent” but who still have savings, retirement accounts and other assets. That this very large demographic group will get larger, grow wealthier and pass on assets via inheritance is “a fairly disturbing form of inequality.” He laments that it is difficult to “correct” because it involves a broad segment of the population, not a small elite that is easily demonized.



.... Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits... he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.”
It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meager US social state.”

... an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation." Thomas Piketty Revives Marx for the 21st Century





It is clear now, what another Marxist meant by "You didn't build that!"

It means "I can take it away from you."

"These folks hate any who earn their money.....no matter the level at which that earning is done."

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

These are two of your quotes that appear to contradict each other?

Can you truly be this stupid????

The first is my statement......the second Piketty's.


Actually, you support one of my suspicions.....I always believed that there is a certain affinity between stupid people, and lying....perhaps a necessity in that precinct.

My apologies to the Queen of Cut & Paste. Of course, now it's obvious they don't contradict each other since I guess your statement appears to be a Straw Man.

While I accept your apology......it should have come with penitential prostration.

 

[alang1216]

While I accept your apology......it should have come with penitential prostration.

He's your straw man, put him in any position you desire.

 

[initforme]

Some good reading although I believe regulations are critically important for corporations to have. If not, they would FOR SURE 1) willingly abuse and hurt their employees 2). Willingly pollute 3) strip necessary benefits like health insurance, paid sick days, paid sick leave, and paid vacation days. Those are necessities for employees. We can have industry and save endangered species at the same time with zero affect or costs to a company. We still need people watching industries every move.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

Why unsustainable?? Do you have any idea????
Everyone could be dirt poor, filthy rich, or you could have huge inequality but no threat to democracy at all unless the rich or poor are taught the distribution is not fair and people should revolt or be allowed to to vote for money and not have to earn it.

Do you understand?

 

[alang1216]

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

Why unsustainable?? Do you have any idea????
Everyone could be dirt poor, filthy rich, or you could have huge inequality but no threat to democracy at all unless the rich or poor are taught the distribution is not fair and people should revolt or be allowed to to vote for money and not have to earn it.

Do you understand?

Do you know your history? When people are sufficiently desperate and feel the current system is not looking out for their interests they may resort to violent protest or outright revolution when they feel they have nothing to lose. I can see this pattern here in the US on both the Left and the Right. Ask the peasants of China or the Serfs of Russia why they supported a communist that promised them a better life.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

Why unsustainable?? Do you have any idea????
Everyone could be dirt poor, filthy rich, or you could have huge inequality but no threat to democracy at all unless the rich or poor are taught the distribution is not fair and people should revolt or be allowed to to vote for money and not have to earn it.

Do you understand?

Do you know your history? When people are sufficiently desperate and feel the current system is not looking out for their interests they may resort to violent protest or outright revolution when they feel they have nothing to lose. I can see this pattern here in the US on both the Left and the Right. Ask the peasants of China or the Serfs of Russia why they supported a communist that promised them a better life.

People resort to class warfare Marxism when they are encouraged by Marxists to do so. They did it in Russia and China and 150 million were slaughtered. Do you understand now. A poor family in America get $70,000 a year or more in welfare so they have a lot to lose if they turn Marxist or if they are gullible enough to care about the Marxist slaughterers. Do you understand now?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

Why unsustainable?? Do you have any idea????
Everyone could be dirt poor, filthy rich, or you could have huge inequality but no threat to democracy at all unless the rich or poor are taught the distribution is not fair and people should revolt or be allowed to to vote for money and not have to earn it.

Do you understand?

Do you know your history? When people are sufficiently desperate and feel the current system is not looking out for their interests they may resort to violent protest or outright revolution when they feel they have nothing to lose. I can see this pattern here in the US on both the Left and the Right. Ask the peasants of China or the Serfs of Russia why they supported a communist that promised them a better life.

Yes they promised a better life and instead they slaughtered 150 million of them and that is what you are advocating because you apparently have no brains. Do you understand this now?

 

[alang1216]

"...inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth, leading to unsustainable levels of economic inequality that could threaten democracy"

Why unsustainable?? Do you have any idea????
Everyone could be dirt poor, filthy rich, or you could have huge inequality but no threat to democracy at all unless the rich or poor are taught the distribution is not fair and people should revolt or be allowed to to vote for money and not have to earn it.

Do you understand?

Do you know your history? When people are sufficiently desperate and feel the current system is not looking out for their interests they may resort to violent protest or outright revolution when they feel they have nothing to lose. I can see this pattern here in the US on both the Left and the Right. Ask the peasants of China or the Serfs of Russia why they supported a communist that promised them a better life.

Yes they promised a better life and instead they slaughtered 150 million of them and that is what you are advocating because you apparently have no brains. Do you understand this now?

I'm not a Marxist and I don't advocate revolution. What I want is a society where everyone feels that they matter and that their government is on their side. What I see in the US is the opposite. Many people feel our government is the enemy and they are encouraged by people in the media and in the government itself. It is 'us' against 'them' and people like our PoliticalChic that are fanning he flames.

I used Marxists as examples but I could just have easily used Facists or neo-Naziis as examples of the other side. It wasn't Marxism that led to the last US Civil War.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

I'm not a Marxist and I don't advocate revolution.

you are but you lack the IQ to know it

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

What I want is a society where everyone feels that they matter and that their government is on their side.

OMG!! Perhaps one of of the dumbest things ever said!! Our genius Founders wanted a society where everyone felt they mattered because they were free from central govt. That is what they gifted to us and that is why we became the greatest county in human history by far. Our govt is on our side to the extend it respects our Constitutional and God given right to freedom from govt. Our Founders knew central govt had been the source of evil in human history, and that was without seeing HItler, Stalin and Mao. You have seen them and still cant understand the basic principle of your country!!

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Many people feel our government is the enemy and they are encouraged by people in the media and in the government itself. It is 'us' against 'them' and people like our PoliticalChic that are fanning he flames.

Yes, she is a lot like our genius Founders in her love for freedom isn't she? Maybe you should go to Cuba where there is no freedom but everyone gets a little welfare and feels they matter despite living in a virtual concentration camp!!

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

I used Marxists as examples but I could just have easily used Facists or neo-Naziis as examples of the other side. It wasn't Marxism that led to the last US Civil War.

We are in kindergarten with you. Marxism Fascism Neo-Nazism were/are all identical to our Founders since they all involve big liberal govt and oppose the individual freedom that are genius Founders gifted to us. So yes, Marxism fascism Neo-Nazism monarchy liberalism and socialism caused the civil war (700,000 dead) since they sought central govt solutions to problems, in the case the problem of slavery. Would you finally care to think about whether you support freedom (Republican) or Marxist government( Democrat) ?

 

[alang1216]

Many people feel our government is the enemy and they are encouraged by people in the media and in the government itself. It is 'us' against 'them' and people like our PoliticalChic that are fanning he flames.

Yes, she is a lot like our genius Founders in her love for freedom isn't she? Maybe you should go to Cuba where there is no freedom but everyone gets a little welfare and feels they matter despite living in a virtual concentration camp!!

She is an ideologue who talks about 'freedom' in a mystical/religious sense. I'm a Skinnerian. Like matter and energy, we have a fixed amount of freedom that can be converted from one form to another but never increased or decreased. Sure you can go live by yourself in the wilderness and be free to wander anywhere but you can also starve or die from lack of medical care. You can also be locked up in solitary confinement and have the freedom to never have to worry about either.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

She is an ideologue who talks about 'freedom' in a mystical/religious sense.

As our Founder did, freedom from liberal govt was the greatest revolution in human history. Ot was based on a new understanding of human nature. That's why Jefferson said, "now there is something new under the sun."

Do you understand now??

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Like matter and energy, we have a fixed amount of freedom that can be converted from one form to another but never increased or decreased. Sure you can go live by yourself in the wilderness and be free to wander anywhere but you can also starve or die from lack of medical care. You can also be locked up in solitary confinement and have the freedom to never have to worry about either.

When we talk about freedom we mean freedom from big liberal govt, the kind of govt from which our genius Founders gave us freedom!
Now do you understand?