On Liberalism...
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On Liberalism...
by Rockhopper Sat Oct 01, 2016 2:50 am
More thouhts;
We get the standard liberal response to criticism, which is to insist that the only reason anyone might possibly object to a liberal policy is because they have hate our values.
Let’s take current immigration policy as an example. This limits the number of legal immigrants while tacitly allowing unlimited illegal immigration. There are solid pragmatic reasons for questioning the appropriateness of that policy. The US today has the highest number of permanently unemployed people in its history, incomes and standards of living for the lower 80% of the population have been moving raggedly downward since the 1970s, and federal tax policies effectively subsidize the offshoring of jobs. That being the case, allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who have, for all practical purposes, no legal rights, and can be employed at sweatshop wages in substandard conditions, can only drive wages down further than they’ve already gone, furthering the impoverishment and immiseration of wage-earning workers.
These are valid issues, dealing with (among other things) serious humanitarian concerns for the welfare of wage-earning workers, and they have nothing to do with racial issues—they would be just as compelling if the immigrants were coming from Europe. Yet you can’t say any of this in the hearing of a modern American liberal. If you try, you can count on being shouted down and accused of being a racist. Why? I’d like to suggest that it’s because the affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.
That is to say, a movement that began its history with the insistence that values had a place in politics alongside interests has ended up using talk about values to silence discussion of the ways in which its members are pursuing their own interests. That’s not a strategy with a long shelf life, because it doesn’t take long for the other side to identify, and then exploit, the gap between rhetoric and reality.
im
We get the standard liberal response to criticism, which is to insist that the only reason anyone might possibly object to a liberal policy is because they have hate our values.
Let’s take current immigration policy as an example. This limits the number of legal immigrants while tacitly allowing unlimited illegal immigration. There are solid pragmatic reasons for questioning the appropriateness of that policy. The US today has the highest number of permanently unemployed people in its history, incomes and standards of living for the lower 80% of the population have been moving raggedly downward since the 1970s, and federal tax policies effectively subsidize the offshoring of jobs. That being the case, allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who have, for all practical purposes, no legal rights, and can be employed at sweatshop wages in substandard conditions, can only drive wages down further than they’ve already gone, furthering the impoverishment and immiseration of wage-earning workers.
These are valid issues, dealing with (among other things) serious humanitarian concerns for the welfare of wage-earning workers, and they have nothing to do with racial issues—they would be just as compelling if the immigrants were coming from Europe. Yet you can’t say any of this in the hearing of a modern American liberal. If you try, you can count on being shouted down and accused of being a racist. Why? I’d like to suggest that it’s because the affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.
That is to say, a movement that began its history with the insistence that values had a place in politics alongside interests has ended up using talk about values to silence discussion of the ways in which its members are pursuing their own interests. That’s not a strategy with a long shelf life, because it doesn’t take long for the other side to identify, and then exploit, the gap between rhetoric and reality.
im
Rockhopper- Posts : 4282
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Re: On Liberalism...
by Lenzabi Mon Oct 03, 2016 1:57 am
Well, there are there liberals, and the Neo-liberals that may be socially liberal, but are actually of a conservative mind. Hillary is among the Neo-liberals, she has a record of voting 14times to make immigration roadblocks.
Progressives are trying to fight the Neo-liberal and how they hijack words like liberal and even progressive.
Progressives are trying to fight the Neo-liberal and how they hijack words like liberal and even progressive.
Lenzabi- Admin
- Posts : 2447
Join date : 2014-06-11
Age : 60
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