system of American credit formation. Dirigisme is another form of this, as advocated by DeGaulle. This is my basis for the 'anti-Fed' comment. I do believe that a national bank is absolutely necessary, just not under private ownership and indirect control.
This programme would include:
1. Protecting industry (where 80% of innovation occurs in the scaling-up production process that has now been off-shored, mainly to China and other Asian markets) through selective tariffs and governmental policies, as well as a return to 'comparative-advantage' trade (ie, The modern German model of post-WW2), instead of the 'absolute-advantage' model that the US currently practices.
2. Government investments in infrastructure creating targeted internal improvements (especially in transportation, alternative energy, and technology).
3. A national bank with policies that promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation.
As for isolationalism, I hardly think that a goal of 'as-free-as-possible', non-cartelised trade WITHOUT gunboat diplomacy qualifies as such. Where I differ with him would be the enforcement mechanism of how to get to a 'non-cartelised' state of global commerce and financial control.
Again, I fundamentally disagree with Paul and the right-wing end of the libertarian spectrum on most economic issues, as they tend to place far too much faith in a private response to oligarchy as well as attacking the social safety net WITHOUT offering a viable solution.
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Read some Gabriel Kolko to start to see the nexus of big banks/business and government:
What you have is an artificially constructed choice called either 'deregulation' by the so-called right-wing, OR 'government oversight' by the so-called left-wing. Both are false paradigms. The last thing the systemic controllers want is a 'level playing field'.
The problem with the US experiment is not big government per se, it is big government that has morphed in all areas over the last 100 years into nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for the systemic controllers. Agencies that should be for the public good are simple the tools of the elite designed to to crush all competition from small and mid-size firms.
This started in the USA during the so-called Progressive Era under Theodore Roosevelt, wherein huge monopolies like Standard Oil, etc, utilized a 'don't throw me in the briar patch' argument to get the force of government into regulating business practices (regulations that many times in the 100 years since they have written, then had a bought and paid for Congress pass). Far from creating a free market, this quashed their rivals in so many cases, and made it exceedingly hard for small entrepreneurs to compete.
The US Animal ID act is a perfect example, wherein a small sized chicken farmer has to pay exorbitant licensing fees per chicken, thus forcing them out of business, whilst monstrously huge consortiums like Tyson, etc, simply are allowed to buy one large bulk license that covers millions of birds.
Check out New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, who in his book "The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916."
In it, he lays out a case for the rise of modern corporatist system during the Progressive Era.
This in turn, allows for the violation of a anti-fascistic principle – No socialization of losses and privatization of gains
(ie the confluence of big business and big government in mutual reinforcement)
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Conservatism-Gabriel-Kolk...
http://www.4shared.com/document/Psy6aMNF/Gabriel_Kolko_-_The_Triumph_Of.html
Kolko was soon joined by other New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams in challenging the reigning "corporate liberal" orthodoxy. Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms," it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.
.............in advancing the corporate liberalism idea whereby the old Progressive historiography of the "interests" versus the "people" was reinterpreted as a collaboration of interests aiming towards stabilizing competition . According to Grob and Billias, "Kolko believed that large-scale units turned to government regulation precisely because of their inefficiency" and that the "Progressive movement - far from being antibusiness - was actually a movement that defined the general welfare in terms of the well-being of business" .
Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era. He discovered that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the twentieth century; meanwhile, corporations reacted to the free market by turning to government to protect their inherent inefficiency from the discipline of market conditions. This behavior is known as corporatism, but Kolko dubbed it "political capitalism." Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government-business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today . Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation (see Weaver's The Suicidal Corporation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Kolko
http://users.crocker.com/~acacia/kolko.html
http://miltenoff.tripod.com/Kolko.html
http://www.stateofnature.org/liberalElitesAnd.html
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Here are some links for left libertarianism, anarcho-socialism, and other concepts that are common place here in the EU, but alien to most in the US :
Peter Vallentyne http://philpapers.org/s/Peter%20Vallentyne (left libertarian),
Michael Otsuka http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio (left libertarian), even much of Noam Chomsky (he has called his libertarian socialism an anarchist philosophy)
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"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance.
Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace .
Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution."
– Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory & Practice, 1947
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http://www.iwa-ait.org /
http://www.iww.org /
http://workersolidarity.org /
Other links to left forms of democratic workplaces and social structuring:
"The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm" by David Ellerman
http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/demofirm.doc
"Libertarianism Without Inequality" by Michael Otsuka (free PDF)
http://ebookee.org/go/?u=http://depositfiles.com/files/m0uj43n84
Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
PETER VALLENTYNE,
HILLEL STEINER, AND
MICHAEL OTSUKA
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio/leftlibP&PA.pdf
http://newpol.org /
New Politics, published since 1986 as a semi-annual, follows in the tradition established in its first series (1961-1978) as an independent socialist forum for dialogue and debate on the left. It is committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements. It stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action. In our pages there is broad coverage of labor and social movements, the international scene, as well as emphasis on cultural and intellectual history.
Above all, New Politics insists on the centrality of democracy to socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for progressive social transformation.
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One variant of contemporary left-libertarianism affirms the classical liberal and libertarian idea of self-ownership, while rooting a robust version of economic egalitarianism in this idea. It combines the conventional libertarian idea of self-ownership with unconventional views regarding the ownership of land and natural resources (e.g. those of Henry George), residual claimancy vis-à-vis the firm, or both.
http://praxeology.net/all-left.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
Here are some more new left scholars that do not fall into the camp of easy-labeling
Hillel Steiner http://philpapers.org/profile/2771
Philippe Van Parijs http://www.uclouvain.be/en-11688.html
David Ellerman http://philpapers.org/s/David%20Ellerman
Antonio Negri http://www.egs.edu/faculty/antonio-negri/biography /
Autonomism http://www.autonomism.com/autonomism /
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"A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result -- and a natural one -- has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent."
Lysander Spooner
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cheers
= new reply since forum marked as read
