The State Is Like a Gang... to Some Extent

By -
Every false doctrine contains a germ of truth, otherwise no one could ever come to believe it. I think Marx's postulate that value is based on labor (it was not a "labor theory of value": he explicitly postulated this) clearly falsifies reality, but its plausibility rests on the fact that labor clearly has some connection to value.

Realistic "statists" have always recognized that there is a similarity between the state and a dominant gang, but also that there are many differences as well. Consider the "statist" Augustine:
Regimes, including Rome for Augustine, can make at best a partial claim for justice, which makes his own claim that a just war is about punishing a transgressor questionable, or at best tentative, because the identity of the original transgressor, if such an entity can be said to exist, is unclear (something of course he realized, though did not always state explicitly) when political societies are so frequently founded in blood. 
 The state ain't great. But it's better than anarchy, and in the "city of man," that is all we can hope for.

Comments

  1. Thomas L. Knapp11:27 AM

    Gene,

    I see at least three propositions in there (that the state isn't great, that the state is better than anarchy, and that given the characteristics of humankind, "better than anarchy" isthe best we can hope for).

    Stating the propositions is all well and good, but do you have any arguments in favor of their validity to offer?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:55 PM

      Very amusing Tom.

      Delete
    2. Thomas L. Knapp4:04 AM

      Well, it's not intended to be funny, and I don't see how it is.

      You are often very good at poking holes in anarchist dogma, but are you capable of supporting your own claims, or are they likewise just arbitrary dicta?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more