I suggest you go to your local library and check out, or request via inter library loan - William Connolly - Capitalism and Christianity American Style. It builds on Max Webers work on the early Puritan influence into economics (The Protestant Work Ethic). Connolly incorporates much of his contemporary philosophy to try and explain the bootstrap mentality, cruelty politics, and the modern religious nationalist movement. Plus the book cover is metal.
money isn’t a birthright, but food, water, shelter, clothes, and healthcare are. if we can’t be given those, we should at least be given the money to get them
Republicans don’t think those are birthrights either, because they don’t care about anyone after they’ve been born. They wouldn’t care about foetuses either if they had to be fed and housed.
Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.
from the article:
“I never thought we would be going down the socialist road,” Gillette told BI. “I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we’re slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program.”
LOL… I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies and socialists!”
They don’t care about anyone before they were born. Abortion is just a hot topic for them to parade around to get votes, and nowadays, that strategy is backfiring so much that they try to ignore it as much as possible.
I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.
You say this like they have any decency or shame. They will continue to talk out of one side of their mouths about being a party of the common man while letting people who can’t “afford to live” continue to die quietly in the gutters.
I”m not sure how you arrive at that. You seem to have missed my point. That is, if the republicans get what they want (a ban on min incomes), they could end up getting as a consequence something they want even less: the state getting involved in commerce in the course of upholding human rights legal obligations.
It makes little sense because they know full well the money will spent one way or another. So most likely this is a political tactic for something else. If there is a segment of unmotivated R voters somewhere but a strong likelihood that they would be more motivated to the polls if there were a proposition to ban any form of welfare, getting a proposition on the ballot would actually just be a trick to get more people turning out for Trump (because they will tick the Trump box while they are there).
What matters to republicans the most is not any kind of values or ideology; it’s simply nothing more than taking and holding power.
IIRC it was the Bush election where the republicans put a proposition on the ballot for gay marriage. Superficially you would think “sure, the republicans want to stop gay marriage”. But in reality the republican politicians did not care about gay marriage at all. They cared about a segment of elderly non-voting christian right conservatives. Those voters could not be motivated to get off their asses and travel to the polls to vote for Bush, but they would be damned if gays could get married, so they were highly motivated to vote in that election and of course while they are in the voting booth they ticked the Bush box. The gay marriage proposition was just a trick to get more votes for candidates.
I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable. Republicans do not care. They will let Bob walk to work barefoot, starving, and destitute, until it eventually kills him, and the whole time claim Bob’s well-being is his own responsibility, and if he can’t manage his life on the wages that the free market provides, maybe he didn’t deserve to live in the first place. This is the party that asks rape victims what they were wearing, and suggests that bulletproof backpacks are the answer to school shootings. They do not give a fuck.
I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage
Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.
then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable.
You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.
I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole… The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.
The local govs taking direct action. The state gov may be controlled by human rights hostile republicans at the state level, but there are many smaller governments within the state controlled by liberals.
And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.
You’re talking about Republicans but then saying “state” is a generic word.
But anyway, assuming you mean nation-states, what makes you think there’s anything preventing nation-states from just letting their people starve? They do it all the time.
You’re talking about Republicans but then saying “state” is a generic word.
I’m saying when I personally used the word “state” in the bit that you quoted, I was using the generic meaning of state. It’s an overloaded word (multiple meanings). What I mean by the “generic meaning” is that I was not referring to the state level jurisdiction. E.g. if the context were Texas, my use of the word “state” was not the state of Texas in that quote. The word state can simply mean government at any level. A federal government (aka nation state) can also generically be referred to as the “state”, even though it’s not state as the jurisdictional construct that composes the United States.
Likewise, even a local government like a city or county can be generically called the “state”. So to answer your question, the state of Texas can ban welfare checks from the state level in the whole state of Texas, but a lower (non-republican controlled) government can circumvent that by offering food and shelter instead of checks.
Welfare can happen at any level. I went to the emergency room and racked up a 4-figure hospital bill, and said “I have no insurance or income”. It was no problem… the county had financial aid that I qualified for. The county paid the bill for me, not the state¹ or fed.
in that case, I mean state in the sense of a jurisdictional construct.
I don’t care what the science says! I don’t care about the suffering of others! This offends my capitalist sensibilities that I have never questioned and I’m not about to start thinking too hard about it now just because some hippy libs want to sneak communism in the back door!
I have zero respect for this world view and hope we are able to simply bulldoze it with unstoppable momentum.
Nicely put. I just cannot tell if that is how you feel or your just channeling.
For me, I am divided. On one hand people do nothing unless motivated and needing basic necessities is a powerful motivator. On the other, I am curious as to the most cost effective approach. Plus I would much rather spend money on people getting along then police and armies.
Edit: Just thinking, maybe call me a libertarian socialist. Maybe that is why I am always confused.
In that case, I would burn all my money rather than pay it in taxes before I died. Just put every single penny you have into Bitcoin or something and then purposely delete the private keys.
Because I don’t really know of any charities that I would support, but I could support some sort of open source software, I guess, like donate everything to fdroid, or something.
FOSS related: The Free Software Foundation, The Software Freedom Conservency, The Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka the EFF), Debian, the Mozilla Foundation, the Document Foundation (aka Libreoffice)…
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