Is it just me or is distaste for Libertarianism contradictory to discordianism?

[LMNO]

attempting to remake society through force.

That usually ends especially badly for everyone.

[Cain]

Yes.  Gray is convinced, however, this is the secret hiding at the heart of all major Western ideologies.  He is quite "liberal" in his own beliefs, but has major problems with Neoliberal and libertarian philosophy.

I'll try and write out some extracts now.  I was just blogging, and so didn't really get around to it.

[Cain]

The neo-liberal worldview that Thatcher accepted by the end of the 1980s was the successor-ideology to Marxism.  Ideological thinking tends to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to society and so it was at the end of the eighties, when the close of the Cold War gave neo-liberal ideas a catastrophic boost.  Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet Bloc that if they wanted prosperity, they had to import the free market.  The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficial results in the widely different former countries of the Soviet Bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece of the mindset of the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries, such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru.  Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to the post-communist lands, carrying the same draft constitutions in their briefcases.  No matter how discrepant the countries they descended on, these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.

With minor variations, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and a host of lesser lights subscribe to these beliefs.  All were exponenets of a late-twentieth century Enlightenment ideology whose basic tenents - despite being advanced as the result of scientific enquiry - are rooted in religions faith.  Neo-liberals aim to recover the lost purity of liberalism before its pollution by collectivist thinking, and like all fundamentalists they end up with a caricature of the tradition they seek to revive.  Neo-liberalism was a late twentieth century parody of classical political economy.  The classical economists of the eighteenth century believed all societies passed through definite stages of development leading to a single destination - a commercial civilization based on market exchange - but they had a clear understanding of the flaws of market society.  Lacking this insight, neo-liberals turned classical economics into a utopian ideology.

A conception of providence underlies the idea of a natural system of liberty advanced by [Adam] Smith, and liberal thought as a whole is shaped by Christian belief.

In the early nineteenth century, the chief argument for free trade was that tariffs thwart the divine design.  [...] Free trade was a means to brotherhood under the law of God.  In the 1840s, Richard Cobden waged a successful campaign against the protectionist Corn Laws in Britain under the slogan "Free Trade is the International Law of God".  For him, this was not a metaphor but literal truth.  Later economists tried to reformulate arguments for free trade in secular terms of comparative advantage, but they have never been very successful. [...]  The resulting body of thought is more dogmatic than Smith's faith-based political economy.  The free market only became a religion when its basis in religion was denied. 

[LMNO]

So, the Invisible Hand is actually YHVH smackin' a ho?

[Cain]

Oh yeah.  Adam Smith makes this pretty explicit, in The Wealth of Nations.  This relates back to the whole "people don't actually read Adam Smith, just rape his intellectual corpse" discussion TGRR and me were having.

[LMNO]

There's also a bit in Poker Without Cards, something like, "Why do you believe that there can be no freedom without capitalism?"

[Elder Iptuous]

There's also a bit in Poker Without Cards, something like, "Why do you believe that there can be no freedom without capitalism?"

I believe he said that it was a question in an interview with GHWBush, and Bush answered negatively, but there was no 'why'....

[LMNO]

Yeah, that was it.  I didn't feel like looking it up.

[LMNO]

Ok, I looked it up.

HOWARD CAMPBELL:
One of Bucky's favorite authors, a voice he found empathizing, and a really good author who killed himself young and
was only published posthumously. His second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won a Pulitzer. Toole questioned
capitalism, and, in the essay that I drew the quote from, he ends by suggesting that economic freedom will lead to
unimaginable fiefdoms. At least, unimaginable to his mind in 1958.
Bucky held that neither human equality nor economic freedom could ever exist. Both concepts, equality and
economics, are comparative by nature and thus are never absolutely equal nor free from the rules of their systems. This
isn't semantics. It's structural analysis. Bucky held that the popular ken equates freedom with capitalism. Bucky once
asked President Bush The First if democracy could exist without capitalism. Bush said absolutely not. This confirmed
Bucky's suspicion of Bush's cosmography. Look, the corporation is the keystone of American capitalism. America
was the first government to imbue an organization with legal rights comparable to humans, and to divorce liability from
the actual human owners.
Bucky was a capitalist by practice, trade, and passion. But, capitalism does not require removing personal liability
from the owners of corporations. He argued that there was a parallel with slavery. Similar to corporations, slaves were
viewed as property and given some rights. A major difference between owning a slave and owning a corporation,
though, is that a slave could generate a liability greater than their market value. Corporations can not. If the
corporation creates a liability greater than its worth, the corporation just disappears. Bucky advocated the reimplementation
of ownership liability.

[Elder Iptuous]

this claim from that passage:

America
was the first government to imbue an organization with legal rights comparable to humans, and to divorce liability from
the actual human owners.

isn't true.  corporations were created for the express purpose of divorcing liability from the human owners....
and they predate the US by a long shot...

[LMNO]

We can get into that more when we discuss the book, but for now, remember that Howard was trying to express the views of Bucky, who (some say) is a Paranoid Schizophrenic.  Accuracy might not apply.

[Elder Iptuous]

how far are you in the book?

[LMNO]

About halfway.

[rubickspoop]

Way to get the thread back on topic, Cain.

Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet Bloc that if they wanted prosperity, they had to import the free market.  The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficial results in the widely different former countries of the Soviet Bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece of the mindset of the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries, such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru.  Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to the post-communist lands, carrying the same draft constitutions in their briefcases.  No matter how discrepant the countries they descended on, these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.

The IMF is also an international loan shark, loaning billions to these same countries for "infrastructure" and "development." This money ends up getting embezzled at just about every step of the bureaucracy, which leaves little to improve infrastructure and help out anyone who doesn't work for the government. Then that government is in massive debt to the IMF forever. The IMF and its neo-liberal policies are great for maintaining colonialism now that it can't be done directly.

[rubickspoop]

And to respond to some of that military shit: my contract says that the USMC can change my MOS any time until I go to basic. However, I am about 95% sure they won't, since they flew a band director up from KC (more than 500 miles away) to audition me, after I had already enlisted with my MOS as an electrician. Also, my recruiter had to beg me about 4 times to audition and make about 10 promises of good things to come if I changed my MOS to musician (none of which I got on paper, of course). Given these circumstances, I've pretty much ruled out the possibility that this is an elaborate bait and switch to turn me into an infantryman.

PS: Thanks, Nigel. I was really happy I did good in the audition, since I haven't practiced hardcore in a few months. Of course, it helped that I had studied the solo I played for the audition with my horn prof before i left school