Can a Rightist be Considered a Faithful Latter-Day Saint?

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_Chap
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Post by _Chap »

Trevor wrote:
Droopy wrote:Ancient Roman Emperors, by the standards of the modern American blue collar class, at entry level wage rates, were living on the edge.


Living on the edge of what?


Something to do with the low number of cable channels available to them, I think. And I don't think the ancient Romans had Oreo cookies.
_Trevor
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Post by _Trevor »

Chap wrote:Something to do with the low number of cable channels available to them, I think. And I don't think the ancient Romans had Oreo cookies.


Ahhh. OK. Yes, they were truly poorly off in those respects.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
_Droopy
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Post by _Droopy »

The Nehor wrote:No response on how consecration fits into your capitalism fulfills everything from the Great Council in heaven idea?



No Nehor, because you haven't yet responded directly, in any detailed, philosophical manner, to a single point or chain of argument I've posted. You want to do the EV thing and engage in a battle of scriptural proof texts.

I'll pick this up again at a later date.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

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_The Nehor
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Post by _The Nehor »

Droopy wrote:
The Nehor wrote:No response on how consecration fits into your capitalism fulfills everything from the Great Council in heaven idea?



No Nehor, because you haven't yet responded directly, in any detailed, philosophical manner, to a single point or chain of argument I've posted. You want to do the EV thing and engage in a battle of scriptural proof texts.

I'll pick this up again at a later date.


i.e. There is no valid response.

You want to mesh extreme conservatism with the Gospel and force the fit no matter how many scriptures you have to ignore. Is your religion primarily useful only as a bulwark for your political views? If so, that can be incredibly dangerous.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_Droopy
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Post by _Droopy »

Thanks Moniker, great link. You just devastated Coggins.



How, precisely?


From reading Coggins's grand 22 paragraph treatise on economic theory, it would seem he has a -- so long as we're charitable and strike his command approach to morality and trade as "service" -- solid grasp on economic theory up through Adam Smith, which doesn't get him very far. But he does have a pretty decent understanding of the "nation of shopkeepers" approach to solving the world's problems and that's a start.


Gad, why don't you just admit that you're as poorly read on free market economics, mircroeconomics, and political economy, as Scratch is on Church history?


Indirectly, he's stumbled on the problem of externalities, but he obviously doesn't really think about it much as from his list of prejudices he clearly doesn't see why the government needs to be involved in environmentalism, for instance.
A big part of his anti-left campaign revolves around his failure to appreciate all the many ways a heated free market economy can choke itself on externalities.


Yet another hoary old leftist trope that has long ago been exploded:

http://mises.org/pdf/asc/2003/asc9simpson.pdf

This is a favorite argument of the environmental movement, claiming the represent the "social costs" of industrial or economic activity, and has been used in that context to limit and restrict development and economic growth.


Another big problem for Coggins is public goods. Clearly, there are benefits the government can provide better than the private sector. Markets will fail to provide good roads and national defense, for instance. Because this type of thing never gets mentioned by Coggins, you'd never see that where the line is drawn isn't always clear, and it's not just a liberal plot to take away everyone's freedom when government gets involved. Is health care a public or private good?


CFR on where I have ever claimed national defense, police protection, and much infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, are not better supplied by government. You're already grasping at staws Gad, and you've only just begun to warm up.


That's a tough question, there are elements of it that fall in both categories. It's not an obvious decision who should provide it, to what degree, and how, as is say, baking bread or national defense. But Coggins is so enamored by the shopkeeper model that it's just obvious to him the market always finds a way for everything, and if it works for an economy of three people exchanging peaches, apples, and pears, it will work for 300,000,000 seeking healthcare.


There is absolutly no doubt whatever (and if Gad had ever actually educated himself on this issue, I would't have to correct him here) that governmnet intervention in the medical industry and delivery of medical services is the clear and proximate cause of virtually all our present woes regarding the soaring price of medical care. A free, competitive market is the answer, and yes, there is really no other, if reasonable prices and high quality care is what is desired. Gad has a great deal of reading and self education to do before he debates me or anyone on this subject.

And what about assymetric information? The closest thing "conservative" economists can find to an efficient market is the stock market, and very few would believe even that is strongly efficient. Healthcare might be the example way on the other end of the spectrum. There are gross failures in privatized healthcare because of assymetric information, where risk-pooling/insurance comes into play. Are these problems worse than the problems that arise with public models?


Gad really thinks he can pass of googled concept dropping as serious educated knowledge. Please. Von Mises and others showed, at the beginning of the last century, that socialized markets (such as much of our present medical market) cannot work precisely because no set of government bureaucrats can ever, in any conceivable manner, acquire, process, and interpret the information necessary to set prices and determine market needs. The only way this can be efficiency done is through the market itself (those seeking medical services, weighing alternatives between them, and choosing based upon whatever personal criteria are relevant) through the mechanism of price. Price is the information that allows rational human beings, having knowledge and making personal decisions in a competitive market, to determine how, in what manner, what quantity, and at what price, those services will be provided. government intervention distorts or destroys those signals (example: the Canadian or British health care systems, Medicare, sky high drug prices, sky high food and gas prices, gas lines in the seventies etc), severing the desires of the market from those who supply the market.


I could go on to monopolies, something else Coggins never mentions, but in the end, the real issue is that Coggins has a fairly good grasp of the most rudimentary principles of economics that would be covered in the first two weeks of an introductory college course, but then that's the extent of his theoretical toolbag.


No, the problem is that your views of economics have been culled from listening to Bill Moyers and reading Time, while mine from years of serious reading and reflection on the subject. This is a matter of received left wing wisdom vs. actual education. Were this not the case, you would understand that in a truly free market, monopolies cannot exist for long, or at all, without the connivance of the state. Yours is a standard, public school educated and mainstream media understanding of economics. Why do I think this? Because you show virtually no familiarity with Chicago, Austrian, or general conservative/libertarian economic thought.


His use of "leftist" and "liberal" interchangeably is very problematic for instance, when his scope is historical and international. His polarization leads to deeper problems and contradictions for instance,


This is food for clarification. I use "liberal" in the following way: to indicate the older, pre-seventies generation of center left liberals such as JFK, RFK, Humphrey, "Scoop" Jackson, Zell Miller, Sam Nunn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. etc., who held moderate views to the left of the Right but still held many core values with the Right. At that time, a common observation was that, although liberals and conservatives agree on the need for the addressing various problems, they disagree on how those things should be accomplished. The Left was in a minority in the Democratic Party at that time, but came to prominence in the early seventies, and dominates the party today.

The Left was once called "ultraliberal" or "the far left". But the ideas of the far left are now mainstream within the Left and the Democratic Party. The most extreme views and attitudes of the late sixties and early seventies are now mainstream liberalism. So I now use the term "left" to pretty much describe the entire Left as a movement.


when he tries to make "postmodern" leftist liberals and very modernist, leftist conservatives the same thing.


"Leftist conservatives"? Care to comment Gad?


And then there are the case studies. Don't cite credible sources that should carry weight for both sides of the conversation, but throw out every right-wing survivalist blog and fundamentalist e-zine on the web to make the points. And in these cases again, it's not clear in his own expression of the contents that he really understood them in the first place.


CFR, and on the Sweden question, I linked to the published PDF of the original study as published by Timbro.

You're credibility is still where its always been Gad, down and out.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_EAllusion
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Post by _EAllusion »

Droopy wrote:
Gad, why don't you just admit that you're as poorly read on free market economics, mircroeconomics, and political economy, as Scratch is on Church history?


Hey Gad. What did you get your degree in again?
_Moniker
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Post by _Moniker »

EAllusion wrote:
Droopy wrote:
Gad, why don't you just admit that you're as poorly read on free market economics, mircroeconomics, and political economy, as Scratch is on Church history?


Hey Gad. What did you get your degree in again?


Oh! Oh!


*waves hand wildly in the air*

I know!!! :)
_Droopy
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Post by _Droopy »

You want to mesh extreme conservatism with the Gospel and force the fit no matter how many scriptures you have to ignore. Is your religion primarily useful only as a bulwark for your political views? If so, that can be incredibly dangerous.



1. This makes my call for some definitions from you twofold: first, define the term "rich', and second, the term "extreme" as you've applied it to what you term (and I'm at all sure, at this juncture, that you really have a substantive understanding of the term) "conservatism".

2. For each and every scripture you can produce in which you can claim a clear condemnation of what you term "capitalism", I can and will produce (and have previously), another that clearly indicates a free market capitalist system is perfectly compatible with a Gospel oriented society. Perhaps not Zion, as you apparently are using the term, but Zion, in the context of the building up of Jackson County Missouri in preparation for the Second Coming involves, for all intents and purposes, the secession of the faithful LDS world from the common culture: a clean break from Babylon into our own "counterculture" (if I may use that term).

We are not at that point yet, and the Brethren have not ever, in my lifetime, or that of my parents (in essence, the 20the century) produced any body of teaching that could possibly be interpreted as being anti-capitalist. Indeed, during my lifetime, all I have seen is complete acceptance of that system as desirable and superior to any other historically known system.

Once the secession occurs, and the Saints move to separate themselves much more drastically from the world, then yes, that system will be much more communitarian, and what we now know as capitalism will be superseded by a system designed to accomplish whatever it is the Lord wishes to accomplish (unity and oneness within the enclaves of Gospel culture called "Zion").

However, no present or past system of socialistic, communitarian economics has ever been anything but a failure, on the more benign side, by stagnating economic growth and prosperity, and, as socialistic principles are pushed to there logical conclusion, involving catastrophic human costs.

Capitalism is, has the old cliché goes, the worst system there is - except for all the others.

At the end of the day, my position as a conservative/libertarian Latter Day Saint is this: When the Brethren, through the revelations of Jesus Christ, found, and organize the political, economic, and social order of Zion in an official manner (as a literal secession from the surrounding society; actually establishing the United Order), then I'll be right with them. That's my caveat: only under the principles of the Priesthood and mediated by the Holy Spirit, can a communitarian system ever be made to function and actually bless a people. The revelations actually seem to indicate that Zion will be both prosperous and economically effective (there will be no rich and no poor, indicating general modest affluence for all, even though the extreme poles created by an economic free society between extreme poverty and vast wealth will be moderated toward a general average. There is no evidence in the D&C that there will be any attempt to create a classless society (as this would, of necessity involve the wholesale abrogation of free agency, perhaps the core value in the Gospel), but to narrow the large disparate extremes).

Until then, based upon economic history, logic, the laws and principles of economics, the modern historic teachings of the Brethren, and the Constitution which the Church claims is inspired, I will defend a free economic order and private property rights as what they are: the basis for all the other unalienable rights we enjoy (he who controls what you can make, how you can spend it, and the disposition of your property, controls you: you are his slave).

A number of Church authorities, most notably Marion Romney and Ezra Bensen, have made clear that the United Order is not Socialism.

My position is clear: no form of communitarianism created by human beings, without divine guidance and through Priesthood authority, is going to be anything but a failure, and history tells us that the greater tghe degree of brotherhood and unity desired, the greater and more barbaric the evils that must be perpetrated to accomplish it.

I await the United Order with baited breath. It will be interesting to see and experience what a United Order will look like, not in Enoch's day, or in Joseph's but in the 21st century. Left wing Mormons hoping against hope that the United Order is going to vindicate traditional ideological notions of socialist economic and social organization are going to be profoundly disappointed. At the same time, Mormons who cannot make the transition from conservative/libertarian principles as the Lord accepts and allows now, and expect Zion to simply recreate a pure libertarian kind of economy, but without bad people around to give it a bad name, are also in for a disappointment.

One thing is apparent. If Zion is to have "no poor", it will have to be prosperous, and no socialist system can possible produce this kind of wealth. Socialism is a system for the ruling classes; it enriches the state and its dependents, but not the masses of people who need free flowing wealth in the private sector to create the further wealth needed to fund and fill the Bishop's storehouse. In other words, the Bishop's storehouse needs a golden goose. Kill the goose, and you kill the Bishop's storehouse.

Therefore, I conclude that there will be a free market order within Zion, but it will be mediated by a Gospel system in which vast quantities of wealth will not accrue to single individuals. I don't see any reason that this would apply to companies, who would need the wealth to create gainful employment, but not to individuals. I foresee a system, quite unlike the secular welfare state (socialism as commonly understood) in which the poor and indigent are working and learning trades, engaging in agriculture, and contributing to the community as they are allowed, from the Bishop's storehouse, to exist above subsistence, in a dignified manner.

Now Nehor, we're back to an original question: is the purpose of such a welfare system to keep theses poor in Zion poor on a permanent basis, or to move them into self sufficiency that they may contribute to the storehouse rather that take from in perpetuity? I don't know what the Lord's plan is, or what conditions will be like then, but the present welfare system and Church teaching would seem to indicate the latter.

One thing is certain, and beyond dispute: all the contributions to the Bishop's storehouse will be voluntary and of our free will, and our unity will be one of free, unique individuals united in the cause of preparation for the second coming, each using his time, talents, and God given gifts to build that community, and this, above all, separates Zion from any human understanding of socialism or Utopian collectivism (all attempts at really "utopian collectivism" of which we are aware, most in this century, made the last century the greatest cornucopia of death and destruction in all human history).

Unity, yes. But, where there is one fact, there is another above it, and where there is one thing, another exists above that, and where there is one intelligence, there is another above that, and a greater one above that still. The Gospel teaches us that the universe is ultimately hierarchal, and encompasses a vast plethora of levels, degrees, and points of development in everything. Yet we require unity within our individuality to resist the world and redeem ourselves.

How the inherent and eternal tension between quality and equality, the individual and the group, will ultimately be reconciled in Zion, it will not be through any of the means or concepts expressed here by those who defend traditional concepts of socialism.
Last edited by Guest on Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_The Nehor
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Post by _The Nehor »

I'm glad that you do think that capitalism is at least inferior to the United Order. I will not praise capitalism as you do though. Even if it is second-best, I consider it a stopgap that should be gotten rid of as soon as possible and replaced with the real thing and that arguing between socialism and capitalism is choosing between two evils.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_Droopy
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Post by _Droopy »

The Nehor wrote:I'm glad that you do think that capitalism is at least inferior to the United Order. I will not praise capitalism as you do though. Even if it is second-best, I consider it a stopgap that should be gotten rid of as soon as possible and replaced with the real thing and that arguing between socialism and capitalism is choosing between two evils.



We will have to part company here again Nehor. There is, again, no such thing as capitalism. Capitalism is a concept created by Marx as a foil against which to implace his own system, which is, most certainly, evil. The problem Nehor, is that in calling economic liberty (which is all capitalism is, a purely negative freedom to make one's own economic decisions based upon one's own desires and moral philosophy) evil, you have just called free agency evil; you have termed freedom itself as an evil to be rectified. And yet, we are here to be tested in the context of our free agency, to see if we will do all that our Father in Heaven asks of us. This includes economic behavior as with all other areas of life. If you can abrogate my freedom in the realm of economics, what prevents you from seeking to abrogate it in any other area of our mortal probation?

What I see in your general attitude Nehor, is not the kind of totalitarian mindset that drives so much of secular socialism, but a deep and pervasive fear of your own freedom and the choice in the use of your agency this affords you. This is common among many in the modern world.

I think among many moderns, the primary psychological motivations that animate socialistic or "communitarian" sentiments are an authoritarian desire to control the lives of others, envy, and finally the fear of freedom itself, which ultimately I think closes a circle and returns again to envy in the sense of a fear and resentment of hierarchy in human affairs and human attainments, and I do not think the Gospel can be used to support any of those motivations.

The United Order isn't about envy, the desire to meddle in the lives and decisions of others, or fear and resentment of the varying skills, abilities, and achievements of various individuals based upon their use of their own agency. Its about purifying ourselves and being prepared to welcome Christ to this earth as Lord of Lord and King of Kings.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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