Good luck trying to convince people. I think that Malthusianism just makes sense to people instinctively, and that counts for much more than the fact that it's been proven incorrect over and over again. Even though doom and gloom about things like "overpopulation" have been debunked time and again by people like Julian Simon ("The Ultimate Resource") you'll never convince people who've bought into it to change their minds.
Could you explain to my why being “anti-GMO” necessarily implies being “anti-science”? What definitions of “GMO” and “science” are you using to make that proposition true?
I actually am anti-science, in the sense of “science-as-religion”. The comment I originally replied to is a good example of what I'm talking about: being anti-science is blasphemous, it's heretical. I'm against this kind of nonsense. Not that I think it necessarily is, but so what if being anti-GMOs is anti-science? What's the problem with that? We should be able to have a frank discussion about the merits of GMOs and indeed of science, but we can't, because science is a religion, and you get denounced as a heretic if you criticise its underlying assumptions.
My own position on genetic engineering is that I'm not inherently against it in an abstract way, but I'm against almost all of “actually existing” genetic engineering. Most of the debates about genetic engineering focus on whether or not genetically engineered crops are safe, or whether they provide better nutrition, but I think these are distractions from the real issue. The issue is about control: whether farmers save and choose their own seeds, or whether they must get them every year from a corporation.
"Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain cabrohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrevelant standards."
The real problem is that capitalism does not care about efficiency, it only cares about billing someone else for any inefficiencies you create. See: Enterprise IT.
The article is a mess, but the root of the problem is that while the article presents giving “power to the people” and "dethron[ing] authoritarians" as goals of the left in principle, in practice what the left does when it comes to power is always the opposite. Leftists may talk about believing in democracy and freedom, but these principles are incompatible with the left's overarching goal, which is promoting economic equality. Since people are inherently different, the only way to guarantee economic equality is to use state power to control people. Of course, even where leftist principles are put into practice, such as in Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, etc., the result still isn't economic equality, only a lack of freedom and general impoverishment of the most of the population.
"Democracy" and "freedom" are wholly compatible with promoting economic equality, given the understanding that "freedom" means the right of the people to exercise their will through democratic institutions.[1] If promotion of economic equality is what benefits the greatest number, then it is natural to assume that free people will exercise their will to minimize economic inequality (as they have in social democracies in Europe).
[1] To a leftist, and indeed many other people, what separates authoritarianism and free society is not the lack of someone telling you what to do, but who that someone happens to be. Arguably, a classic libertarian government is indeed authoritarian: state power is exercised pursuant to the policies of philosopher-kings who believe in a particular set of "rights" (private property, etc), not pursuant to the will of the people themselves (who may very well have different beliefs). Indeed, even as someone who isn't a leftist, I have a hard time seeing much difference between classical libertarianism and divine monarchy. Whenever I hear talk of "natural rights" I think about who kings once justified their unilateral exercise of state power by reference to divine natural law.
The obvious difference between a libertarian government and divine monarchy is in the level of authority given to the government. In a monarchy, the monarch's will is law. Under libertarian government, the government is extremely limited to only protecting a very small set of rights. You could in theory have a libertarian monarchy where a king was only given a limited authority to enforce laws related to natural rights violations, but the two concepts are very different.
A libertarian democracy of course is more desirable. Which means the people's votes, or the authority given to their representatives, would be limited to only those issues related to natural rights violations. Under a libertarian government, the people are still quite free to exercise their will, only they could not use the government to impose their will on other individuals. Social problems can still be solved through community organizations outside of the government.
I think the biggest weakness of the pure libertarian philosophy is the uncompromising defense of property rights. If a small group manages to acquire all of the property, they can use their monopoly to exploit everyone else while the government protects their "rights".
My view is this: once you bind everyone under the monopoly on violence that is government, its wrong to not let the people who are bound decide what the government should do. That's the fatal flaw of non-anarchist libertarianism to me. Its some cabal getting together to decide what "natural rights" should be then using the monopoly of violence to protect what may be their minority viewpoint. Appealing to "natural rights" is no better than appealing to "divine law." Its self-serving hand waving.
That's the old "there is no morality without God" argument. Just because rights aren't handed down on stone tablets (i.e. natural rights) doesn't mean that there are no rights. In the English tradition, rights arise from the long-standing practices and beliefs of a society. Thus, unless we have a society that embraces savagery and murder in general, it's not "just fine" for the majority to cause the genocide of a minority.
Also, what's worse: a system in which the rights of minorities may occasionally be trampled, or a system in which a minority of philosopher kings by design circumscribes the political self-determination of the majority?
Classical libertarians are in the position of arguing that self-determination (the right of a free people to structure their society as they wish) is slavery, and that the object of peoples' political freedom should be circumscribed to a narrow domain handed down by an Inner Party of philosopher kings.
If Keynes's predictive model was so good then why has every application of his theory, whether in the US in the 30's, 70's and now, Japan in the past couple of decades, etc. failed so miserably? On what basis are you claiming that Detroit's collapse was structural, rather than being caused by bad governance? Other areas of the US, and other countries for that matter, have seen their main industries decline, but they've managed to replace them with others without suffering the total disaster that Detroit as.
Re: Keynes. It's hard to be a failure when no major nation adopted Keynes' approach in the 1930s. It was far too new, though he was certainly trying to convince people.
Keep in mind General Theory wasn't published until 1936. FDR didn't become a convert until 1938 -- after his attempt to balance the budget in 1937 led to a disastrous recession that undid a lot of the prior gains from the depression (the US government had a budget surplus!). WW2 spending was what wound up being the stimulus that dragged the world out of the recession.
Liaquat Ahamed's _Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World_ goes into great detail as to why the great depression occurred (the Gold standard), and why it lingered.
I also think you may want to read more into Japan's economic policy and financial history. Japan's troubles started with a financial crisis and asset bubble bust twice - in the late 80's and late 90's, similar to the global 2008 crisis, Except Japan had a much, much weaker institutional response than the USA and even the UK did. They shuffled almost annually through a series of milquetoast PMs. Their central bank governors wouldn't commit to anything. Japan had to nationalize a lot of the private losses and bank bankruptcies that were occurring while contending with no growth and a deflationary spiral. Japan's debt was not the result of Keynesian stimulus (that would have required sudden and massive expenditure, given the size of Japan's economy), it was the result of "keeping the lights on" in an era of almost no growth.
Now, in 2013, Abe and Kuroda are finally attempting what looks like a quasi-Keynesian approach -- massive quantitative easing to drive inflation expectations skyward. I say "quasi" because it's not a fiscal stimulus (people are too nervous to try given their debt-to-GDP ratio). And this approach is more Krugman than Keynes. It will be interesting to watch.
Detroit was a case of structural problems combined with bad governance. Sorry if that was not clear. It was a side point to basically say that Southern Europe is not Detroit. They were a victim of private excesses fed by capital flows from the North and a lack of EU-wide fiscal integration to cushion their economy after the crisis.
