reflections on political science...

[Peter Kropotkin]

In thinking about Political science/theory, one is rarely faced
with what should be a fundamental question, why government,
and or why not government? Kinda like the metaphysics of being,
why is there being instead of non-being? Why is there government?

To bottom line this, government exists to do things we are unable
or cannot do for ourselves.... given our modern reality, we need
government to provide services we cannot provide for ourselves...
for example, for the most part, doctors held a terrible reputation
in Europe for centuries...and what finally redeem their reputation?
Government's forcing doctors to increased regulations...The
government role in insuring doctors' competency is vital in
maintaining our trust and good heath in the medical system....
This is just one example of how government fulfills a vital role in
preforming services that benefit our lives... .

Now the conservatives mantra that the "government is part of the problem"
instead of the "government is part of the solution" as liberals hold...
is in itself part of the problem... or is the safety/security of people,
part of the problem... Or is the police and fireman and the military part of
the problem? Or is having hospitals and sewage plants and school's part
of the problem? Or is having freeways and airports and public transportation
part of the problem? Personally, part of what makes a society, a civilization,
is the infrastructure of that civilization... for example, what made Rome
the powerhouse of the ancient world? It was the civilizing aspect of Rome's
infrastructure that made Rome the greatest empire of the ancient world...
And part of that infrastructure was publicly built roads and aqueducts
and public buildings, such as baths and temples... that infrastructure was
the most advance infrastructure in the west for almost 2000 years...
Take a look at every great civilization since Rome and the one constant
has been the advance infrastructure that civilization has had...
a society becomes a civilization by its infrastructure....
and to attack our current civilization by an attack upon its infrastructure,
by an attack upon the value and worth of the government...
in other words, to attack our government by saying, it is the problem,
is to attack its infrastructure.. Is to attack what makes America a civilization,
and not just another country.....if we are the greatest country on Earth, it
is because of our infrastructure... or as Adam Smith should have said,

"The wealth of Nations lies not in its military power or monetary wealth,
but in its civilization, its infrastructure. Therein lies the wealth of a nation"

So to follow a conservative argument and hold for a reduction of
our infrastructure, is to hold for a reduced civilization, a reduced
America... it is to deny the real greatness of America, which lies in
its infrastructure, its roads, its police and fire departments,
its schools and hospitals and sewage plants.. and in its military....
as that has become, for now, part of our modern infrastructure,
(and I dream of a day when we have no more need for a military)

At the heart of the American civilization, lies its infrastructure,
and that is only possible within a government...
no government, no services and no infrastructure...
and that means no civilization... is that really what we
we want or need?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

One of the arguments against government is this idea
that governments are not as efficient as private enterprise...

That idea has a couple of flaws within it... one, that private enterprise is
in fact, more efficient than the government... and two, that the
idea of being efficient is the point of the government...

so, part one is the allege efficiency of private enterprise..
and anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes in big business,
or in "private enterprise" can tell you, that big business
is nowhere as "efficient" as is claimed.... I have worked for 45 years,
both in big business, Marriot corporation for one, and in another national
grocery chain, today, I can tell you that corporations are a bastion of
inefficiency and incompetence.... the way that corporations hide that fact,
is by blaming their workers and unions and immigrants, but that that is
simply the corporation throwing its employees under the bus...

a corporation is only as efficient as its management... and most companies
management are about making money and not about a company efficiency...
A CEO sees a company as a cash cow to be milked, nothing more..
I have seen with my own eyes, a CEO doing everything that they can to
increase the stock's value to increase their net worth.. certainly not to
help the company bottom line or to increase a company's efficiency..
the company/CEO, thinks about 6 months out, at most a year, and why?
Because of their stock bonuses.... nothing more...

Now the second part of the question lies in the overall efficiency of
the government vs corporations, big business..

And here lies the fallacy that the government should be efficient...
that part of the mission of the government is to be efficient...
which brings us back to the point of the government...
is part of the point of, the telos of government to be efficient?

The point of government is to provide services, not to make
a profit... and conservatives seem to think that the point of
government is to make a profit.. and in fact, if we were to
make the point of government to make a profit, most if not
all of the services provided by the government
would be unable to make a profit... take schooling/education for
example, I can't see a way to make schooling profitable without
excluding the poor.... turn education into a profit-making machine,
would by its very nature, exclude anyone who parents are unable
to afford schooling....thus millions of children would be unable to
go to school... and the very idea of a democracy relies on an
educated population to know what is best for each family or individual....
this is why that conservatives attack both education and democracy...

if we do not educate and inform the population, we cannot have
a democracy and thus by denying education to millions, our
democracy is damaged.. or as IQ45 has publicly said, in a speech in 2016

" I love the poorly educated"

and why not... his greatest defenders are the poorly educated...

and we will examine the efficiency argument in one particular aspect of
the government role in education...

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

and now education, what is the point of, the value of education?
Why do we educate people?
And we come down to our understanding of what is the goal,
the telos of people?

For centuries, the value of education was to create a "gentleman''...
and a "gentleman" was an upper-class creation... the middle class or
the working poor need not apply.... only the upper class could be
a "gentleman"....and therein lies a understanding of what it meant to
be human.... to goal of being human was to be an "gentleman"..
and the vast majority of human beings were not fit to be a "gentleman"
not to be upper class....

but around the time of the "Industrial revolution", (a chicken or the egg
type of problem) came a change whereas the value of an education became
the need of providing people with the skills of working within the "Industrial
revolution". ..... in other words, in our modern society, you need a much
larger skill set.. you need to read and write and add and subtract
and you need to be able to have the skills to work in a modern environment...
having the skills of a "gentleman" isn't going to fix a broken furnace or build
a road or run an office... much different skills are needed to do the jobs
that exists today... and that is the point of modern education... to give
people skills to do modern jobs... and that becomes the point of, the
value of what people can do... all people are fit for is being a modern
"worker bee"... and that is all people are educated for.. to hold skills to
do work in an industrial society... and nothing more...
and thus, we have conservatives fighting education being anything more
than reading, writing, and arithmetic... to make education being the
lowest common denominator of human skills...thus meaning that the
only reason a human being has value is to be a "worker bee"...
if we believe in a conservative statement that a "taxpayer cost" of
education has more value than educating workers, than we must hold
that the only value of human beings is to be a "worker bee"...
and there is no value in the ARTS, or reading novels, or
engaging in philosophy.. or practicing music or in such frivolous
thing as acting....each of these actions don't contribute to the
overall ''good'' of society, at least according to conservatives, which is
the creation of ''worker bees''......

but in liberal values, a human being is more than humans only value, which is to
be a ''worker bee''.... I hold that being a ''worker bee'' is the lowest
possibility of being human....that the height of human existence to be
a factor worker or an office worker or to hold, as I do, a factory lite job...
to me at least, is the lowest steps of human existence...

for me, the factory job or factory lite job, only meets the lowest level
of Maslow's pyramid of needs.. in which we human beings are creatures
that have needs that must be met... a factory lite job cannot fulfill the
higher needs of being human... which is self-actualization and transcendence...
and what exactly does that mean?

In which self-actualization means all our bodily and emotional needs
are met and we must take the next step which is to "realize one's
potential'' in engaging in philosophy, I am attempting to realize my
potential, my own possibility of achieving my goal which is to become,
to be the greatest philosopher ever...it is irrelevant if I can achieve it or not..
that isn't the point... the point is to try to become the greatest philosopher
ever.. that is my goal, my own telos....
and my being a "worker bee" interferes with that goal, that possibility...
and for millions of people, being, having a goal of just being a "worker bee"
prevents them from reaching their possibility of becoming, of reaching their
full potential or their full possibility...
and within our limited goal of education, just to create "worker bee's",
fails to allow people the possibilities of being or becoming who they are....

to find out what education should be, we need to work out what being
human really means... is being human only about becoming a "worker bee"
or is being human about reaching our full potential, reaching our full possibilities...
what are we being educated to do? What is the point of being educated?

Kropotkin

[mickthinks]

government exists to do things we are unable or cannot do for ourselves

I believe this is an error. The government exists because it can. Our job is to trammel it so that it is as benign as possible. Why not get rid of it entirely then? Because in the absence of a trammelled, benign government, a renegade, malign one will take over.

Read Nozick's "Anarchy State and Utopia"

[Peter Kropotkin]

government exists to do things we are unable or cannot do for ourselves

I believe this is an error. The government exists because it can. Our job is to trammel it so that it is as benign as possible. Why not get rid of it entirely then? Because in the absence of a trammelled, benign government, a renegade, malign one will take over.

Read Nozick's "Anarchy State and Utopia"


K: I read it during my anarchists days, decades ago... and my own opinions
about Nozick's book is framed by my being an anarchist for over a decade
(I wasn't a book reading anarchist, I lived the life.. I was off the grid, paid no
taxes, didn't own a car, didn't really have a place to stay, I wasn't playing at
being an anarchist, I was one)

and the entire point of Nozick was this, prevention of "the violation of individual
rights" that in a nutshell is Nozick political theory.. to prevent "the violation of
one's individual rights"... which sounds great in theory, but the problem lays
in this idea of "individual rights"... "Individual rights" according to whom?
Which individual rights and why those rights? As Nozick himself says, the
individual himself/herself, decides upon which individual rights are
the right "rights"... I may decide that my (and he uses this word)
fundamental right is freedom.. and another may decide that their
fundamental right is safety/security, and another may decide that their
fundamental right may be seeking love....
and what all this really means is there is no universal, overall understanding
of what it means to be human... to each his own in understanding what being
human means... and how do we achieve anything if we all value vastly
different things? This "understanding" of human nature is really
a return to Hobbes "state of nature" in which, says Hobbes,

"The state of nature is an existence where each man lives for himself"

and whereby a state, as Hobbes might have put it, is a miserable state of war in which
none of our important ends are reliably realizable... in other words, Nozick misses
one of the essential points of being human in which meeting our needs
is of greater value than protecting our individual rights.... especially
considering every single person values differently their own individual
rights... human needs are far more universal, common than individual
rights....for example, freedom as an individual right, might be held
by some, but not by all....and the individual right to property,
(which is strongly defended by Nozick) is not a universal value held
by all.... but needs such as food, water, shelter, education, health
care is needed by all human beings... individual rights are not
universal, but needs are universal.... and the fundamental point of government
cannot be to protect individual rights because there is no way to
universalize individual rights but we can hold to a certain type
of government because needs are universal to all human beings....

and that is one of the problems with Nozick's theories... Nozick's
theory might, might work within a small-scale tribal existence,
but completely fails in a large scale modern existence that is our
modern world....Nozick's fails to explain how vast modern projects like
building bridges or the space program would be possible...
Limitations to the government to having value, to only
the protection of individual rights, leaves loopholes the size
of North America in it..... for example, one could argue,
legitimately, that for my own safety and protection, I must have
a universal basic income to protect my own individual rights.....
the quest for individual rights can be used to justify almost any
action....from dictatorships to slavery to the Holocaust, can
all be justified by a claim to individual rights... I have the individual
right to protect myself from the Jews or Gays by means of locking
up and even killing them....and which ''right'' is justified, the rights of Jews
or Gays or the homophobic/ antisemitic person? and how do we
rationalize the two competing ''rights?'' In Nozick's theory, how do
we judge between two competing rights? What standard do we use
in Nozick's theory to judge between two competing rights?

There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to judge between two
competing rights....or said another way, how do we resolve
conflicts within an minimal political system as given by Nozick's
"nightwatchman" theory? The theory "that a government only function
is to protect the rights of its citizens"

Under the guise of "protecting" some rights, you leave the door open
to the protection of all rights, regardless of their value because
the individual is the only legitimate judge of their own rights and
that theory fails to account for any conflicts between two or more
conflicting rights....so how do we rightfully judge between
two conflicting rights in Nozick's theory?

How do we put Nozick's theory into practice without running into
the brick wall of Hobbes "state of nature?'' For all I can tell,
holding to individual rights as the guiding light in our political
system, leads us directly to Hobbes "state of nature"

Kroptkin

[mickthinks]

PK, you've responded with a wall of text which appears to have little to do with the burden of your first post, nor with my objection to a premise I found in it. Are you conceding that the proposition "government exists to do things we are unable or cannot do for ourselves" is false? Or were you attempting in that screed to meet my objection with some kind of counter-argument, and if so, can you direct me to that counter-argument? I must have missed it.

government exists to do things we are unable or cannot do for ourselves

I believe this is an error. The government exists because it can. Our job is to trammel it so that it is as benign as possible. Why not get rid of it entirely then? Because in the absence of a trammelled, benign government, a renegade, malign one will take over.

Read Nozick's "Anarchy State and Utopia"

K: I read it during my anarchists days, decades ago... and my own opinions
about Nozick's book is framed by my being an anarchist for over a decade
(I wasn't a book reading anarchist, I lived the life.. I was off the grid, paid no
taxes, didn't own a car, didn't really have a place to stay, I wasn't playing at
being an anarchist, I was one)

and the entire point of Nozick was this, prevention of "the violation of individual
rights" that in a nutshell is Nozick political theory.. to prevent "the violation of
one's individual rights"... which sounds great in theory, but the problem lays
in this idea of "individual rights"... "Individual rights" according to whom?
Which individual rights and why those rights? As Nozick himself says, the
individual himself/herself, decides upon which individual rights are
the right "rights"... I may decide that my (and he uses this word)
fundamental right is freedom.. and another may decide that their
fundamental right is safety/security, and another may decide that their
fundamental right may be seeking love....
and what all this really means is there is no universal, overall understanding
of what it means to be human... to each his own in understanding what being
human means... and how do we achieve anything if we all value vastly
different things? This "understanding" of human nature is really
a return to Hobbes "state of nature" in which, says Hobbes,

"The state of nature is an existence where each man lives for himself"

and whereby a state, as Hobbes might have put it, is a miserable state of war in which
none of our important ends are reliably realizable... in other words, Nozick misses
one of the essential points of being human in which meeting our needs
is of greater value than protecting our individual rights.... especially
considering every single person values differently their own individual
rights... human needs are far more universal, common than individual
rights....for example, freedom as an individual right, might be held
by some, but not by all....and the individual right to property,
(which is strongly defended by Nozick) is not a universal value held
by all.... but needs such as food, water, shelter, education, health
care is needed by all human beings... individual rights are not
universal, but needs are universal.... and the fundamental point of government
cannot be to protect individual rights because there is no way to
universalize individual rights but we can hold to a certain type
of government because needs are universal to all human beings....

and that is one of the problems with Nozick's theories... Nozick's
theory might, might work within a small-scale tribal existence,
but completely fails in a large scale modern existence that is our
modern world....Nozick's fails to explain how vast modern projects like
building bridges or the space program would be possible...
Limitations to the government to having value, to only
the protection of individual rights, leaves loopholes the size
of North America in it..... for example, one could argue,
legitimately, that for my own safety and protection, I must have
a universal basic income to protect my own individual rights.....
the quest for individual rights can be used to justify almost any
action....from dictatorships to slavery to the Holocaust, can
all be justified by a claim to individual rights... I have the individual
right to protect myself from the Jews or Gays by means of locking
up and even killing them....and which ''right'' is justified, the rights of Jews
or Gays or the homophobic/ antisemitic person? and how do we
rationalize the two competing ''rights?'' In Nozick's theory, how do
we judge between two competing rights? What standard do we use
in Nozick's theory to judge between two competing rights?

There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to judge between two
competing rights....or said another way, how do we resolve
conflicts within an minimal political system as given by Nozick's
"nightwatchman" theory? The theory "that a government only function
is to protect the rights of its citizens"

Under the guise of "protecting" some rights, you leave the door open
to the protection of all rights, regardless of their value because
the individual is the only legitimate judge of their own rights and
that theory fails to account for any conflicts between two or more
conflicting rights....so how do we rightfully judge between
two conflicting rights in Nozick's theory?

How do we put Nozick's theory into practice without running into
the brick wall of Hobbes "state of nature?'' For all I can tell,
holding to individual rights as the guiding light in our political
system, leads us directly to Hobbes "state of nature"

Kroptkin