Why E.D. Kain is not a neoconservative

Thanks, Rod. And I agree entirely. Movement conservatives have become, more or less, perhaps "watered-down" neoconservatives, the entire lot of them. I say watered-down because I think that, unlike true believers, many movement types don't have as strong a tie to the underlying ideological foundations of neoconservatism. But they've bought the tickets and are certainly along for the ride...

Sigh,

An "unfettered free market" (or some synonym for that) cannot be the cause of social brekadown in Britain or America, because no such thing or anything remotely like it has existed since WW2 (really 1909 and 1929) respectively.

The very limited (though very necessary, in the basic sense that they averted total collapse) liberalisations of the 1980s are drawn upon by the Left and various idiosyncratic conservatives to create an utterly ficional laissez-faire society, which they can then *oppose* in order to yet further increase the amount of government employees. It would be pathetic were it not so effective. (Michael Oakeshott, a man I imagine many here respect, pointed out this vile trick many decades ago.) If you want to further increase the size and scope of the modern state beyond its already historically unprecedently large proportions, the onus is on you to justify it, not blither on about the phantasm of laissez faire.

There are many annoying things about American style conservatism - its facile optimism, its dogmatic democratic-republicanism, its reliance upon schismatic pseudo-churches and the ideology of religious consumerism, to name a few - but being too laissez-faire is not one of them. One would have thought after "no child left behind" and the whole compassionate conservatism debacle, we could lay that absurd canard to rest.

But we did have true laissez faire capitalism in the 1800's and what was the result - two depressions, extreme discrepancies in the distribution of wealth.

Again I say - conservatives - neo or otherwise - cannot claim to be for family values, community and morality if they support an economic system which destroys family community and morality. Capitalism promotes profit - not the well being of the society. We must turn the equation around - we do not exist to serve an economic system - economic systems exist to serve us - as in the community. So our first question must become will such and such economic policy support the family? the community? I do not think either socialism or capitalism can claim to do either.

Blaming a liberal individualism for the growth of government ignores that capitalist economic systems - in their search for profit - always will exploit. This leaves a lot of ragged edges which the government then seeks to resolve. In seeking lower cost of production - the system will always seek the cheapest labor, will not offer pension, will not offer health care so of course then the government gets called in.

I welcome remarks such as Kain's in that he helps us to start to see that our choices are not simply capitalism or socialism -

Mr. Butler at 12:07 is onto something.

In the late 1960s liberalism freed the individual from social conventions and morality.
In the mid 1980s conservatism freed the individual from economic conventions and morality.

The combination of these has proven so toxic to family and community that thrice-married drug-addicted carpetbaggers are celebrated by conservatives as defenders of traditional values.

Analytical types may be able to glean a source for error in either of the camps right or left from the post on...
Cartesian mathematics!
(leading to metaphysics, of course, the place all good thinkers arrive at in the end)

at Front Porch Republic - our problems with "liberal" or "progress" go back a lot further than we'd like to acknowledge, and do violence to the very way we think of the world we live in: " we have a science that examines processes rather than beings, for a process is a change over time of the relationships among various measurable magnitudes. And we have the analysis of those beings into their simplest parts, the parts most easily described in purely algebraic-quantitative terms. We lose a sense of the integrity of beings as active wholes, a formal integrity that makes them what they are"

Conserving error isn't good way to go, even if we think its The American Way.

John Gray (and Rod) get way too sentimental and idealistic with type of thinking.

The 1970's was a miserable decade for the English. I would encourage Rod to really focus on the facts on this one instead of the philosophy.

a quick youtube search of "England 1970's economy" brought up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsoP6bjADic

Doesn't quite look like the English look back at the 1970's so fondly.

The 1970's was a miserable decade for the English.

As it was for everyone else.

The way out was massive government stimulus and the accompanying deficits. The difference this time was that economic liberalizers also used this as an opportunity to throw out the post WWII social contract and replace it with economic darwinism.

Rod, the contradiction between an unfettered free market and social and cultural stability would undoubtedly be denied by Austrian School economists like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, but the way so many Austrians praise countries like Hong Kong and Singapore who have the worst demographic problems makes me very doubtful.

However, it is true that in countries with abundant mineral and land resource like Australia and parts of the US there is no contradiction between the two. The contradiction arises when a region's sole natural resource (in the cause of Europe and Asia, soils of geologically extraordinary fertility) cannot be used economically. This situation arose from the opening of Australia's extremely old soils to farming with the development of fertilisers, with the result that European farmers were far too labour-intensive and the diets they produced too protein-poor to compete with ecologically less sustainable farming abroad.

Once farming becomes inefficient economically, the large labour supply of Europe had to be turned to other uses, and the Industrial Revolution provided not only that, but also a huge incentive to create technology that would raise wages and improve living standards in an effort to be competitive with newly colonised regions like Australia and White South Africa. However, the need to consistently improve sales to be competitive made businessmen far from conservative and cautious about change - they had to change constantly to improve their sales and profits, whilst with their poor living standards the growing urban populace took to these new inventions (regardless of long-term value) and also to radical political ideologies designed to make for certain cultural instability.