FDR's and LBJ's fascist tendencies are the reason we have entitlements, and the United Auto Workers' fascist tendencies are the main reason the auto companies are failing. We blame CEOs, and exonerate unionized workers, because CEOs make "excessive" amounts of money, while workers are, well, working. But we never stop to think that CEOs have a lot of talent, education, and jobs that require hard work and much more stress than working on an assembly line. The advantage of being on the left is that you don't have to think or put forth any effort to be considered compassionate.
From this quote Robbie obviously took the side of Marx in his spat with Bakunin. I took the other side and I think history has exposed Marx as having been wrong about decreasing liberty via authoritarianism as an end to be sought.
Entitlements via subconscious pathologies? Robbie you are mixing micro with macro... even more you are taking quick steps from conscious to subconscious. Tough to do which is why I might be misinterpreting some of your positions.
But moving on... how do personal pathologies of elected officials equal out to social policies that are popular? Directly mind you not indirectly... because then everything gets thrown into the interpretation
So did the fascist tendencies of FDR beat the fascist society of Germany? If so then good. Ditto for passing popular legislation.
UAW? If you are opposed to the purchasing power of walmart and want to attack their ceo's then i'd be happy to get into a discussion of the collective bargaining pro's and con's of the UAW. I hold human beings to be more important than excessive shareholder value thats an ideological position on my part. The idea that unions are the reasons for their troubles shows a very shallow grasp of the issue, unions didn't stop the foreign makers from making popular high quality cars. If the American Auto Manufactures management aren't as good as the competitors with managing their unions,well that's a problem but not the unions or the other compainies.
CEO's have talent...well, some do some don't.
Ineptitude and pay rate are not necessarily corollaries.
Larry Summers is getting a promotion to a job in the Obama administration for missing and helping perpetuate the housing bubble!?!?!?
What percentage of economist missed the housing bubble as a major crisis... and/or stayed silent on it 75,85,95%????
How many of them got fired for it?
I am a lowly wage slave mind you so i'm oft to be disingenuous and ignorant of so many things.
As to Robbie's experience from being on the left, that "you don't have to think or put forth any effort to be considered compassionate" I can't speak to it because I have never worked with people and talked about compassion at all. I've always worked with people on the left talking about improving the quality of life for people through policies and organizing. At least in my experience compassion ain't a topic of discussion much.
Mind you compassion (ethics more broadly) often is a topic in my political philosophy classes... and I must confess I do enjoy a good philosophical debate. But when it comes to actual politics and organizing, dealing with very real problems and how to solve them--what I would define as "politics"--there isn't much use for such ivory tower intellectualism. To someone in politics words have meaning... but human consequences are the important issue at hand.
That does drum up some debates within social science has to how and what we are measuring with our analysis. But i'll leave that for anohter day.
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