UPDATE

Rather suddenly and unexpectedly, The Witch Doctor and My Black Cat will have to take our leave from all things Blogosphere for a couple of weeks. Perhaps someone will have discovered The Interesting Intertwinglement by the time we return. We doubt it though.

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The Witch Doctor does not know any of the other medical bloggers personally, indeed she does not even know who they are with the exception of Dr Rita Pal, Dr Bloggs and more recently Julie. However, it is just about possible to deduce one or two things about the ages of most of them and an interesting phenomenon is developing.

Dr Grumble was pointing out yesterday that of those medics who blog regularly there are probably very few young doctors among them. I may be wrong about this, and apologies to the youthful ones if I am, but it seems to me that The Ferret Fancier and The Junior Doctor are the youngest. There is a great new medical blogger who might be younger still.  Rita is probably next in line. I’m not sure about Basics Doc - he might be next. There may be more younger doctors or medical students still blogging regularly and My Black Cat is going to look them out. The remainder seem to be “at their prime” or past it depending on whether it is a good day. The Witch Doctor, of course is of an evanescent  age depending on what particular spell she is under.

The Witch Doctor seemed to misunderstand what Sam was saying over the weekend. She thought Sam was of the opinion that the older bloggers were a load of old medical fogies who lived in the past and were resistant to change. However what I think she was really saying was that we were resistant to any degree of privatisation within the NHS.

I think Sam is really quite fond of us all in spite of our weird ways.

Over the weekend too there was some despair among the bloggers regarding which party to vote for in the next election.

In the past there was probably a general trend for those with a Socialist leaning to vote against privatisation and those with a Tory leaning to vote for it. Not sure what you did if you were a Liberal though. But now the waters have become very muddy and no-one seems to know what each party stands for.

This led The Witch Doctor to contemplate what would be her voting pattern in the next election. She also spent some time considering her views on privatisation.

Now, we witches are not hindered by any present or past allegiance to any political party. We are certainly not and never have been socialists, old labour, new labour, social democrats, communists, tories or liberals. We have absolutely no allegiance to any of the new or extremist parties either. We believe all political ideologies eventually become tainted and we look out for that happening to whoever is in power and do what it takes to vote that party out. We are truly floating voters. It makes us feel important. We love it when they woo us round about election time.

The wooing is good fun but a waste of the politician’s time. The Witch Doctor will wend her way to the polling booth and do whatever it takes to vote against hubris.

She will not take leaders into account at all because she has learned over the past few years that they do not run our country. It is the gurus in the Think Tanks and powerful businessmen that encircle our leaders who do that.

One of the problems is that there is a new political ideology that has been foisted upon us unawares. It is a problem because no-body understands what it is about. Many have never even heard of it. Not knowing it is happening and not knowing what it is really about means we don’t know whether it is good or bad.

It is called The Third Way.

Another name for it is Communitarianism.

Tony Blair’s name was closely linked to The Third Way. So are those who surrounded him and those coming after him.

However, it is likely that all three major political parties are now Communitarian to a greater or lesser extent. This is why the voters are confused.

If you do a Google search for articles published on The Third Way, you will find a little intertwinglement or two. But you have to know what you are looking for.

The Witch Doctor placed a little Third Way intertwinglement experiment in Saturday’s post. It was so deeply hidden, she doesn’t expect anyone to spot it. Especially those who refuse to click.

Communitarianism is the reason why Old Labour who used to be so in favour of nationalisation, is now wooing the private sector. We witches also believe it is the reason behind The Skills Escalator.

All political parties will be hand in glove with the private sector from now on, so you’ll need to get used to it.

It is an important part of Third Way politics.

My Black Cat and I will try to learn all we can about The Third Way before the next general election. We have already learned a little.

And we’ll look for more intertwinglements.

Just in case some of them turn out to be very important.

a red apple ……………………

The Witch Doctor – Link to a random page

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LINK TO UK MISSING KIDS WEBSITE

LINK TO MISSING PERSONS WEBSITE

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© Dlundin | Dreamstime.com

This post reviews Paul Theobald, Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change Its Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).  [An article that summarizes many of the points made in the book is available here]

Theobald, Woods-Beals Chair of Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College and author of two other books on rural education and community revival, here presents a wide-ranging revisionist account of the economic, political, and educational history of Europe and the United States in an effort to suggest reforms that begin in schools and ultimately will transform the U.S. into a more populist and economically stable place.  In this review I’ll summarize his main argument and then explain what it means for homeschooling. 

Chapter one revisits the history of political thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Hobbes and Locke, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of James Harrington and Gerrard Winstanley.  Unlike Hobbes, Locke, and their American acolytes who framed the baleful and possibly illegal U.S. Constitution, Harrington and Winstanley did not reduce human beings to economic actors in a perpetual state of natural war against one another.  On the contrary, they envisioned a cooperative natural state.  Hence political deliberation, not economic activity, was the primary thing.  Their views lived on in the thought of Montesquieu, whose impact on the United States was significant for a time but ultimately eclipsed by Lockean individualist economic reductivism.

Chapter two revisits the history of economic thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Adam Smith, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of Francois Quesnay, Henry George, John Ruskin, and others.  Smith’s economic reductivism and belief in the inevitability of industrial growth was accepted by subsequent thinkers like Mill and Marx, who disagreed only about the pace at which reform would and should unfold.  But Theobald uncovers for us a third alternative to the poles of industrial laissez faire or industrial socialism.  Illustrated by the many communal experiments of mid-19^th century America, by Thomas Paine, and again by Gerrard Winstanley, who Theobald thinks should be listed “among the world’s great thinkers,” (62) agrarianism has always been available as a viable alternative to the human and environmental degradation that has followed from industrial “progress.”  But the agrarian option has been suppressed and eclipsed by entrenched business interests and the ideology of Social Darwinism.

Chapter three revisits the history of educational thought.  Here Theobald for the first time reverses things.  It turns out that the winners in the world of education, at least at first, were the good guys.  Jefferson’s egalitarian agrarianism provided the intellectual grounding for the common school movement.  Its emphasis on universal, free education, organized and governed by local communities, is one of the great achievements of the brief agrarian or “communitarian moment” in mid-19^th century America.  But it was not to last.  Business interests and Social Darwinism co-opted the common schools, re-defining them not as political but as economic engines that would sort and prepare students for future occupations.  Yet this did not occur without a fight.  Again, Theobald uncovers a tradition of dissent from the dominant trends.  This time it’s Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg who tried but ultimately failed to rescue schooling from the economic reductivists.  The economic view has now achieved overwhelming dominance, as illustrated in the absurd Nation At Risk report of 1983 and, most recently, No Child Left Behind.

Such is Theobald’s historical account.  The last three chapters lay out a series of reform proposals that all in one way or another seek 1) to restore to public education a political dimension that will allow students to critique the media-industrial complex that seeks to control every aspect of life, and 2) to restore control of schooling, and ultimately the nation, to local communities.  His reforms range from the plausible but unlikely (John Goodlad’s restructuring of grades), to the highly unlikely (randomly selected local citizens serving as a school’s Board of Assessors), to the wildly fantastical (a new constitutional convention that will completely revise our form of government).  His basic idea is that since schools are historically the only beach-head for agrarian values, school reform is the best bet for eventually producing society-wide transformation.

Here’s what all of this means for homeschooling.  Theobald’s historical claim is that the common schools of the mid 19th century were qualitatively different than the public schools that emerged in the 20th.  It was of course these 20th century public schools against which critics both left and right railed in the 1960s and 70s, which critique led to the homeschooling movement.  If Theobald’s efforts to return the country to a mid-19th century agrarian society where local communities ran their own schools were successful, there would be little need for homeschooling.  It is interesting that in his three chapters dealing with school and social reform he never once mentions private education of any sort.  Theobald doesn’t want his agrarianism to be a minority alternative movement.  He wants it to take over the country.

There is an obvious problem with this communitarian utopianism.  Theobald’s historical account that celebrates mid 19th century agrarian values does not come to terms with the racial exclusivism and religious bigotry that were pervasive in those days.  Communal values work best when the population is homogeneous.  To have communion you must excommunicate dissenters.  This was the dilemma Robert Putnam never really solved in his famous book Bowling Alone, and it is not even addressed here.  Theobald’s exclusive attention to the intellectual history of American economic, political, and educational life ignores the social side of things and masks the fact that one reason progressivism did what it did in all three domains was to replace the provincialism of local communities with expertise based on scientific knowledge.  We may debate the degree to which this scientific expertise was actually non-partisan (in fact it proved in the early 20th century to be even more racist than the agrarian provincialism it replaced), but the ideal at least was to have objectivity rather than outright partisan bigotry.  Were we to return to Theobald’s idealized 19th century, the same dynamic would be with us.  Some locales would probably be homogeneous enough to create consensus for universal free schools for all.  Others though would have significant minority populations who would probably have to turn to private schools or homeschooling to escape what they would take to be the oppression of majoritarian populism.  Roman Catholics had to do this during the period Theobald celebrates.  Others would have to do it today.

Theobald is something of a dreamer.  What he really wants is a new country.  He thinks the Constitution was illegally imposed on the nation and would have us go back to something more like the Articles of Confederation (but with changes–he lays out his proposals in the final chapter).  A more realistic tack he might have taken but did not would be to seek to have his agrarian ideals realized in minority communities of the like-minded.  Were he to make this switch he would probably find no Americans more open to his ideals than homeschoolers.

First published 11 October 2009

Last Thursday The Telegraph reported comments by David Blanchflower who warned about a ‘lost generation’ of workers, which will be attributed no less to George Osborne and his plans for deep cuts in the public services. He said that such plans ‘could force unemployment up from its current 2.5 million to four million over the coming years.’ Gone, also, are the days where Labour can say with a grin that the Tories are the party hell bent on slashing spending, for Brown, just days before Blanchflower suggested that any changes should be put off until at least 2012, himself accepted the “need” for cuts. (Continue)

I found this interesting youtube channel – tvo or tv ontario – it’s canada’s equivalent to the BBC but goes further by using its youtube channel as a platform for videos that aim to “empower people to become more engaged, better informed citizens.” The nub I initially came across, below, has academic Rinaldo Walcott talking about his vision of a better world. I was wary of his rant at first because I am a tad fed up of people using the same line about capitalism as right-wing america is using for socialism (being the root of all evil and all that.) It’s just the same broken record running backwards. But I think he makes some compelling points after that short vociferation, take a look:

Last Thursday The Telegraph reported comments by David Blanchflower who warned about a ‘lost generation’ of workers, which will be attributed no less to George Osborne and his plans for deep cuts in the public services. He said that such plans ‘could force unemployment up from its current 2.5 million to four million over the coming years.’ Gone, also, are the days where Labour can say with a grin that the Tories are the party hell bent on slashing spending, for Brown, just days before Blanchflower suggested that any changes should be put off until at least 2012, himself accepted the “need” for cuts.

To my surprise Ed Balls was one of the first high profile names to put a figure to the amount of cuts in public spending. Balls, earlier this year, was lambasted for his insistence that we avoid spending cuts, why the U-turn? From my own experience with working in schools I learned something very interesting about allocation of funds, namely that a school is allocated so much to meet the needs of the children it accepts, for example children requiring special educational needs, that require increased funding. A school, in knowing that it will need increased funding for the next school term or year may perhaps keep quiet about the fact that it doesn’t need as much funding in the present term, in order to secure that increased funding for the next, often resulting in unnecessary spending, that is to say the obligation to make it look like the school needed that money (the school I worked in had twice as many televisions as it had classrooms, and with the new term bringing a child with severe special needs, spending seemed like the only guarantee to match that same money again).

This can be seen as a kind of microcosm for local and national spending in general, that the wrong things are being prioritised, and silence is a safeguard for a rainy day. But with swingeing cuts looming, rather than waste that money to ensure it is matched next time, another system should be sought. The system I propose is called reallocation, which in other words is the renegotiation of necessity in spending, rather than huge cuts, that also protects provisions where necessary. So for example if one service in the public sector has enough money leftover after necessities to, say, build a state-of-the-art sports centre or visitor centre, but another is struggling with plans to build adequate social housing, the choice should be there for the former service to reallocate that money to its counterpart, but still be entitled to receive that same money from local government the next year.

What’s good about the idea is that when local government allocates the different sectors its varying amounts, if one sector realises that it has been allocated too much, or to meet its target it must spend unnecessarily, that sector can opt to reallocate that money to another, perhaps less off sector, or at least a sector of more importance. What’s unique about the idea is that the sector itself is responsible for the reallocation, dialogue with local government would most definitely be promoted in order for further decision making at the top, but more options would be delegated to the public sphere, while the state sustains a position of financial overseer, in charge of maintaining the established standard for what is necessary spending, and what can be shelved for the common good.

Reallocation is partly inspired by, this infamous turn of phrase, left communitarianism, in that the local authority, with necessary input from renewed civic institutions, takes a large portion of control over the way it spends its money, with the state acting as the bastion of sensible spending.

Some naysayers will say that those in central and local government haven’t got it within them to dictate what is and what isn’t sensible spending (I wonder where such an opinion could’ve ever been formulated?). However that is not true always. Many influential politicians have signalled to what is for keeps and what is frivolous and can be shelved in a time of economic struggle. Some rather idealistic commentators have pointed to curbing excessive pay, extending inheritance taxes, and even getting rid of the Royal Family, the latter apparently making the saving of £185 million. Though I’d be happy to see some of these put into action, we don’t even have to get that radical (though, obviously, sometimes it helps). The Trident missile programme is priced at £16bn, ID cards luckily are as good as shelved, why before almost the entire political establishment is in favour of cuts isn’t the 50p top rate taxation not set in stone, why are top earners able to get tax relief on pensions.

There are those who are always going to say that taxing the rich like this is akin to punishment, but if measures like this are not taken, then it is the poor who suffer, and why should they be punished?

The basic premise of reallocation is to take from extravagant spending – usually, as with Trident, mandated at a more optimistic economic period – and not draw anything away from the public sector, who at once have done nothing to deserve it, but will bear most of the burden. Furthermore, it is a way of re-engaging civil society back into decision making over how local authorities should best spend their money, as well as bringing authorities together and sharing – not wasting – money in hard times, without jeopardising the way in which central and local government allocates money in future.

What’s in it for me?

That’s the way Americans debate health care, just as it is the way we debate everything these days. What will it cost me? What will be my options? What will be the effect on my taxes? This is not an entirely absurd or venal approach. Self-interest is an appropriate prism through which to evaluate public policy. But this narrowness and solipsism illustrates the way in which America has personalized, and thereby stunted, what used to be called the American Dream.

The American Dream represented the idea that the United States was a place where any person could accede to whatever life their talent, ambition, and diligence would allow. It was about universal, common opportunity. Today, it is about my opportunities. It is the notion that I can succeed, I can acquire; and it’s every dog for themselves.

The practical difference between these visions is subtle. Either way, success or failure is largely predicated on the desire and drive – yes, on the pointedly self-interested ambitions – of the individuals who strive to better their lives. But the recasting of the national narrative as one of individual privilege and away from common, communitarian ideals is a radical shift, which undermines the opportunities on which both conceptions tacitly depend. As Bill Clinton admonished in the 1991 speech announcing his candidacy for the Presidency, “We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our [personal] destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American.” America has only moved further from this sense of shared fortune in the intervening years. The fact that we all desire more comfortable lives hardly makes that aspiration a collective experience.

Today, the question before America is whether to reform its atrociously dysfunctional health care system to ensure the availability of coverage for all Americans, including the 46 million who have no health insurance whatsoever. Those whose voices are raised most loudly, most angrily in this debate are those with health care insurance, who do not want a change in their present options (although this has never been a part of any proposed reform) and who do not wish “to pay for the health care of others.” Tax dollars (My tax dollars!) supporting a low-cost, government run insurance program is somehow an uglier form of socialism than, say, the corporate welfare and Wall Street bailouts to which Americans are all too accustomed.

The Obama administration has been tepid and confused in support of its own proposals, and unwisely ceded responsibility for drafting the legislation to Congress, one of the least effective legislative bodies in the history of democracy. Just as damagingly, it has also relinquished the terms of debate, allowing the focus to center on the financial consequences of reform rather than the moral imperatives. The issue of universal coverage is rarely cast in terms of economic justice; and the case is far too seldom made that a country that makes health care available to all its citizens is exactly the kind of country we wish to call our own.

Were it not so pathetic, it would almost be funny that those who would kill health care reform in the U.S. point to the Canadian system as a principal bogeyman. As someone who has shifted his residence to Canada in large part because of the availability of universal health care, I am dumbfounded this argument gets any traction whatsoever. The cherry-picked, anecdotal horror stories about Canadians who endured long waits for access to treatment utterly misrepresent the promptness of emergent and urgent care and the comprehensiveness of preventive, non-urgent, and elective medicine. That Canadians and their government pay only 55% of what Americans pay on a per capita basis and have substantially lower morbidity and mortality rates than Americans certainly recommends the system, even in innumerate, jingoistic America. The supreme irony of the American hullabaloo over Canadian health care, of course, is that adoption of a Canadian-like system is not even under consideration in the United States Congress.

Canada does, however, have something important to teach us about the vast reach of the social benefits of universal health care. The distinguished Canadian science fiction writer Robert Sawyer was recently asked why there are so many world-class writers hailing from Canada. “The answer,” he said, “is that all of us in the arts in Canada are blessed with this thing the Americans are terrified of right now, which is socialized medicine, universal healthcare. I’ve been a full-time professional since I was 23 years old; but so many of my colleagues south-of-the-border are shackled to pretty meaningless nine-to-five jobs, not doing what they want to do with their lives because, for that basic necessity of their health and well-being, they have to have a regular job. Set aside the Canada Arts Council and all the provincial arts councils; the number-one best thing Canada ever gave to the arts was our universal health care system.”

Americans must once-again imagine their country as a place where all can prosper and all can contribute to the richness of the national experience. Until then, America itself is but a superfluous, marginal aspect of the American Dream, nothing more than a fungible setting for fantasies of wealth accumulation.

The health care debate illustrates with nauseating clarity the epidemic narcissism that has infected and crippled the American Dream. Will this noble and globally celebrated ideal survive the small-mindedness of its present custodians? It is difficult not to despair. As George Carlin famously said, “They call it the ‘American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Few questions loom larger on the political horizon right now than defining the proper role of government in regulating individual freedoms. As many have argued with varying degrees of sanity over the past few months, much of the current health care debate boils down to what kind of government America both needs and deserves.

Today I’m over at PoliticsDaily.com taking issue with a piece that came out over the weekend in Slate by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg points to a dismaying trend of “nanny state”-type intrusions on individual liberties sweeping the United States, things like a series of New York City initiatives that aim to ban smoking in public places and to reduce the consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks. In response, he mounts a spirited (bipartisan) attack on such heavy-handed public policies, arguing that our country is on a slippery slope toward “paternalistic over-reach.”

I disagree.

Have a look…

Image: Anatomy of a Smoker9 by drburtoni via flickr under a creative commons license.

At the risk of reviving the libertarian misogyny bogeyman, I’ll quote an interesting post from Laura Greenback on why women are on average more opposed to the legalization of marijuana:

What could it be? Why would women shy away from this cause? Do men use marijuana more? Do women just hide it better?

When I asked my girlfriends about it, a college roommate suggested that the feminist attitude that got us where we are today works against us when it comes to issues like marijuana policy. We feel the pressure to be seen as strong workers and perfect mothers, so we shy away from getting behind something our coworkers and PTA members might see as “out there.” (…)

Of course, it’s harder for those of us who are role models for children. I’m a mentor of a teenage girl. When I started at MPP, I worried about being a bad influence. But whenever I worry, I think about how empowered she was when I took her to a self-defense class, or how much fun we had riding roller coasters at Six Flags.

When it came up, we talked about how she is too young to try marijuana because her brain is still developing. I told her that medical marijuana helps sick people, and that I am working to keep good people out of jail.

It’s a tougher call for mothers. My own sister told me her husband didn’t want their kids around me at first. But they chilled out, and the kids still call me Aunt Laura and beg me to help them make mini-documentaries on their flip cam.

I think that’s exactly right: women are more likely than men to signal social solidarity through their policy preferences. My guess is that this can be explained with evolutionary theory, but, whatever the reason, it seems to hold empirically.  If women are more communitarian, libertarians would do well to focus on the communitarian aspects of libertarianism. Women aren’t anti-libertarian in any substantive sense; but libertarianism has an understandable but undeserved reputation for antisocial abstract individualism.

Is There Really One Kind of Life Which Is Best For Each of These People?

Yesterday, I introduced Nozick’s utopian thought experiment. It’s a fanciful tale in which you have to power to act like Nightcrawler: in the event you do not particularly value the world you find yourself in, you can teleport yourself instantaneously to another world. You also have the godlike power to create a better world to teleport to. Nozick’s conclusion is that no individual would countenance living in a world that took more from him than he received. Despite outrageous assumptions, what emerges is a competitive market for association, one that eliminates free-riders and negative externalities.

Of course, you may say Nozick’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one:

Not one lyric in the entire song about exit! But I am the walrus!…Because, just imagine, it might be a nice place to visit, but not to live….Anyway, if we admit the virtues of a framework for utopia, what would it look like in real life? What would be its closest approximation?

Well, for starters, we’d have to find ways to reduce the cost of exit and entry. We also need more options (see, Seasteading, Charter Cities, and Free Zones.) And unlike the thought-experiment, there’s no way to dream away externalities. Communities impinge upon each other. There will have to be some method of adjudicating disputes. Another problem involves the costs of gathering information on potential communities, what they’re like, how people fare in them. The list continues: there’s a possibility that members of a community will lie and keep its members in the dark as to what life  on the outside is like. (Think M. Night Shamalama Ding Dong’s The Village.) Disbanding some communities is easier said than done.

This little gadanken appears harmless enough. Ridiculous, yet informative–it illustrates how the power of exit creates an efficient market for public goods. Unfortunately, not everyone values exit this highly. Some define freedom by voice. Others, like Patrick Deneen, want to tighten the screws on entrapment:

This, in a microcosm, is a central paradox of our political system: our cosmopolite meritocrats theoretically admire localism but abhore [sic] the idea of living within the confines that such life would entail; our Red-State locals tend to despise cosmopolites, but support (and vote for) an economic system that encourages borderlessness, placelessness, and a profoundly abstract economy that has the effect of eviscerating those very localities. This arrangement is one of the central features undermining the localist cause today, and it’s difficult to see how it will be reversed.

Deneen doesn’t consider whether or not these places are worth living in. Evidently one bed would have been enough for Goldilocks. And at the Front Porch Republic Jeremy Beer writes:

We need to encourage people, especially young people, to think about location (”location vs. vocation” would be a nice catchphrase to popularize), and to burden the question of location — of place — with the weight of ethical importance, rather than treating it as yet one more consumer decision to be made and thus submitting it only to the usual financial criteria.

This is small beer, but he concludes:

Discourage mobility!-a good ironic bumper sticker for someone to create.

Let us distinguish three kinds of utopian visionaries. First, there are imperialistic utopians. They believe it is morally desirable to coerce everyone into one pattern of community, namely their own. Missionary utopianism sticks to one boring position community, but adherents do not force others to accept it. Instead, they hope to peacefully persuade or convince others. Existential utopians merely hope for their preferred community to exist and be viable, so that those who wish for such arrangements can attain them.  So long as their longed for community exists, they live and let live.

Missionary and existential utopians ought to support the real world correlatives of Nozick’s framework. Imperial utopians, not so much.

Having seen tidbits of Obama’s speech on healthcare, I believe it’s safe to say he’s an imperialistic utopian. I can’t speak for Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer or Charles Taylor, for that matter. But their views come close to communitarian imperialism.

What kind of people do these imperialists think we are? Given how people differ in personality, in desires, aspirations, intellectual abilities, and proclivities, given how heterogeneous we all are in nature, it’s absurd to conclude there’s one and only one community that would be ideal for everyone to live in. Even worse would be to assume that wherever you happen to be born is best.

Nozick asks us to consider these theses:

I. For each person there is a kind of life that objectively is best for him.

• People are similar enough, so that there is one kind of life which objectively is the best for each of them.
• People are different, so that there is not one kind of life which objectively  is best for everyone, and:
• The different kinds of life are similar enough so that there is one kind of community (meeting certain constraints) which objectively best for everyone.
• The different kinds of life are so different that there is not one kind of community (meeting certain constraints) which objectively is best for everyone (no matter which of these different lives is best for them.)

II.  For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other. And there is not one community which objectively is the best for the living of each selection set from the family of sets of not objectively inferior lives.

I find these distinctions most illuminating. What do you assume about others? Below the weaknesses of many political philosophies lies an assumption on how simple and homogeneous humans are.

Several years ago I was at church (not my current assembly) and I began to take note of the many new people. I had long since given up on trying to meet and really know all the new people, since this church was growing so fast. But I was concerned for the spiritual condition of the newcomers. Speaking to each one separately, I soon discovered an amazing set of similarities among these new regular attenders. They all had been coming for several months; some for a year, and none of them could articulate to me at all anything that would indicate that they were actually in Christ. And none of them had any idea what the Gospel was. The Lord gave blessed opportunity to share the Gospel with these folks- inside “the four walls”.

I asked them why they were coming to this church, and they all said ‘because it makes me happy’ ,or ‘it makes me feel good’, or ‘it gives me some inspiration and helps me get though the week’. Another answer had to do with having “a community”.

Yes it’s true: these ’seekers’ were coming to church and they never heard the Gospel in the service. This church was working hard to become a successful church through the addition of numbers of people, via Willowcreek’s ‘Vision 2010′ program of church growth. “Outreach” services addressed people’s felt needs and issues of Psychology and Sociology, but nothing of the Gospel was mentioned. I remember the announcement man saying (with a laugh) from the pulpit something about how “we” (the church) did not want to be controversial or make people uncomfortable. As far as I could tell, the plan was to bring in as many people as possible, mix together the Christians and the seekers (unbelievers), “plug them in” and hopefully they would eventually become Christians. Let me repeat: these church attenders I spoke to had no idea what the Gospel was.

We attended a Christmas Eve service at a mega church in another state. After more than two hours of jovial entertainment and glorification of men, there was still not one word of Gospel Truth spoken to the two thousand people gathered. (And there was no worship.)

About a year ago I went to a memorial service for a little boy who died in an accident. The church building was packed with hundreds of people from all over the community. There was not one word of Hope or Redemption through Jesus Christ in the whole service. The liberal minister’s word of consolation to the grieving was to find comfort from the community. These hundreds of people never heard the Gospel in that place at all.

At our Biblical church where Jesus is central and the Gospel is heard from the pulpit, there are visitors and relatives who occasionally are in attendance. This give us opportunity to also share the Gospel with them also, as the Lord leads, since this is not just the job of the pastor, but all believers are called by the Lord to be His witnesses.

Consider the spiritual needs of those visitors who come to your church; perhaps they have never heard the Gospel. And if you are looking for a mission field, consider the ‘unreached people groups’ found inside America’s Liberal and Modern Mega Evangelical church buildings.

Proclaim good tidings of His salvation from day to day. Tell of His glory among the nations, His wonderful deeds among all the peoples. Ps.96:2-3

Comunionismul (din cartea “MANIFEST – Va fi revoluţie!“)

a.Comunionismul

Din Limba Latină:
communio, -ire, -ivi, -itum vb. a fortifica, a întări, a asigura;
communio, -onis s.f.  comunicare, comunitate, legătură; asemănare

COMUNIONISMUL (communionism) -   este un concept care periodic apare în conştiinţa societăţii, sub diverse forme. Iniţial ca UNIONISM, fenomenul a apărut şi s-a dezvoltat pe diverse interese, comerciale, religioase, naţionale, politice.

Atributul dominant al creării uniunilor a fost interesul comun al părţilor. . Uniunile se manifestă şi la nivel de bresle şi sindicate şi au rolul de protecţie şi promovare a interesului comun. Uniunile politice s-au realizat iniţial pentru apărarea în faţa unui duşman comun şi apoi pentru dezvoltarea comună. Unele uniuni au fost impuse (Uniunea Sovietică), altele au fost liber consimţite (Statele Unite, România).

Gestionarea în comun a problemelor societăţii prezintă câteva avantaje categorice, forţa economică crescută, investiţională, militară, canalizarea cercetării, rezolvarea problemelor sociale. Pornind de la interesul comun al individului, neamurilor şi ţărilor, evoluţia firească a societăţii este spre înlăturarea barierelor statale, libera circulaţie, libertatea şanselor, comunicare, protecţie comună. Asta înseamnă realizarea unei legături trainice intre comunităţi din neamuri şi ţări diferite.

Comunionismul se fundamentează pe interesul general al omenirii, casă, piaţă şi legislaţie comune pentru toţi participanţii.

Acest interes poate fi stabilit de oameni, naţiuni,ţări sau poate fi impus.

Traversăm o perioadă în care se trece de la capitalism la un nou sistem social – economic. Mondializarea se vede peste tot. Interesul general începe să domine lumea. Informaţia e liberă, lumea se grăbeşte. Interesul local se transformă întrunul acaparator de piaţă mondială, în timp foarte scurt şi, în cele mai multe cazuri, fără să ţină cont de interesul general al societăţii şi de specificul local. Altfel spus, nu este un caştig să mâncăm toţi cei de pe Pământ, hamburgeri de un anumit tip, zilnic sau programat. Este însă un caştig să aibe toţi ce pune pe masă, să aibe toţi oamenii acces la servicii sociale (educaţie, sănătate, cultură) iar acestea să fie compatibile pe tot globul. Asta înseamnă ARMONIE.

Comunionismul, realizat ca uniune liber consimţită de ţări şi neamuri, trebuie construit pe valorile umanismului (încrederea în valoarea omului, în dezvoltarea, manifestările, libertatea şi creaţia lui). Valorile umanismului sunt fundamentale şi nu putem vorbi de un neoumanism. Libertatea de credinţă este una din libertăţile fundamentale ale omului. Orice credinţă se fundamentează pe binele primit de om şi pe principii de existenţă decente. Indiferent de tipul religiei, atitudinea dezvoltată faţă de semeni este de sprijin, de comuniune. Suportul moral născut din religie, din credinţă, susţine spiritual şi individul şi comunitatea în acelaşi timp. Atâta timp cât se respectă liberul consimţământ!

Comunionismul nu este ecumenism şi nici communitarianism, nu este un concept născut pe principii religioase şi nici o filosofie nouă. Societatea ar fi evoluat normal spre comunionism, în etape de teritorialitate, la început asocieri zonale, apoi continentale iar în final etapa globală. Aceasta ar fi fost evoluţia firească a societăţii.

Mersul normal al societăţii este spre casă unică, piaţă unică, legislaţie comună şi un Administrator Mondial, un Guvern Mondial. Categoric comunionismul este altceva decât comunismul şi presupune spaţiu şi drepturi comune garantate, libertate individuală, egalitate de şanse, exprimarea culturală, menţinerea identităţii.

The health bills coming out of Congress would put the decisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They’d decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare.

Yet at least two of President Obama’s top health advisers should never be trusted with that power.

Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).  

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31).

The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president’s budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn’t be accountable to the public.

Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors’ lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too “enamored with technology” and is determined to reduce access to it.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they’re “associated with longer waits” and “reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices” (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it “debatable” whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you’ll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist “embedded clinical decision support” — a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Americans need to know what the president’s health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much: “Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians’ offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms” (JAMA, June 18, 2008).

No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done: “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”

Do we want a “reform” that empowers people like this to decide for us?

“The very means of our bondage shall become our sword, which shall legitimately destroy their institutions and laws that have for so long been used to exploit people, rather than protect people.”

Preface

Amongst the privileged class, that is the property owners, shareowners and business owners, an opinion exists that one’s own welfare is their own individual concern.

Their mind senses that any single person has the power to become rich, propertied and therefore empowered and less of a burden.
The philosophy of the privileged class is a selfish and bullying idea that treads on the unfortunate and weak, whilst destroying the very fabric of our society by destroying the mutuality that is the community.

As Communitarians, we object to the philosophy of the privileged class and strive to create a society that protects the weak, helps the unfortunate and limits the power of those that would seek to exploit them.

Our philosophy is that of the Community.

David Noblet

Introduction

I have long considered myself a Communist.

Since I was a young pre-adolescent youth, I sensed that Communism and the internationalist spread of the proletarian revolution through the vanguard of the Communist Party was the only sustainable vision of human interactions, whether they be social, economic, environmental, or even spiritual.

Fervently supporting my ideological heroes of Marx and Lenin (and whoever happened to be Chairman of the CPSU at the time!) I wrote articles, sent letters to the editor, joined groups, protested outside embassies, visited the Soviet Union, agitated against my bosses, spread workers’ literature in the workplace and, generally made my own small gestures of defiance at capitalism, liberal democracy and exploitation.

Reading the texts of Lenin, Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”, Castro’s fantastic and epic pre-revolution speech “History Will Absolve me” (made in a hospital bed whilst under arrest and being tried), the latest reports from Moscow out of the CPSU (such as the Plenary Sessions of the Supreme Soviet) and other progressive leaders and authors, I absorbed the principles of Communism happily and devoutly.

Following my 1986 visit to Moscow, at the time of glasnost and perestroika, and, quite literally, hot on the heels of the Chernobyl explosion I saw the realities of the first true attempt at creating a communist society and economy. Simply put, I was shocked. I was left dumbfounded at the thought that this behemoth of a country had become a superpower. It was obvious for all to see that the Soviet Union was falling apart, both literally and figuratively. Infrastructure was dilapidated, industry hopelessly inefficient and outmoded, consumables for people to buy were both rare and of shoddy quality, methods of business were clumsy and unsuited for the professional exchange of ideas, contracts and resources.

Realising that the application of Communist ideology had either gone wrong, or could not work, I withdrew from the communist movement around about 1987, writing a swingeing series of letters to the Socialist Unity Party newspaper “Tribune”. I did not wish for the collapse of the USSR or its allies (for it was ideologically committed in theory at-least) but I knew the end was near following the implementation of the reforms that introduced alien concepts of free speech, accountability, pluralism and national self-determination of the constituent Soviet Republics.

The end came quickly. As I look back, with a tinge of sadness that myself and my Communist friends in the Soviet Union and around the world have witnessed the failure of the first major attempt at Communism in the history of the world, I realise that that very failure – with all its human shame, massive economic failings, and proud achievements of defeating fascism, confronting rampant capitalism, defending workers and oppressed peoples around the world – has taught me that my faith in communism has not been misplaced.

In deciding to write this brief pamphlet I have assessed my own vision of what communism is about, where it grows from, and how we should achieve it, and protect it.

I am strenuously averse to using the term “Communist” in describing the crux of my thesis. It is a term so loaded with misperceptions, lies, slander and ideological baggage, stupidly fought over by naive left-wing theocrats that have no idea about the application of communist ideals in reality. I have decided to move away from that infantile disorder and use the term “Community”, a term often so misused by the ignorant to describe the traditional “communist” parties.

These fools, who tend to be capitalist lackeys, know so little of communism they call communist parties “community” parties. Oh, what a joy to hear the phrase “Soviet Community Party”! Dear me…

Anyway, I take the name Community Party and use it to describe an alternative manifesto of what may be properly called a Communist Party, Neo-communist Party, Neo-Leninist Party, or whatever. The essential point here is not the name of the party, though in marketing it is of extreme concern from a sense of saleability and branding.

Some major fault lines I have crossed. There-in lays the reason why I do not use the name “Communist Party”.  I do not promote the Marxist prediction of the inevitable revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and capitalists. We know that liberal democratic governments embrace capitalism and have used welfare policies (since Marx) to capture citizens (including workers, parents, children, the “underclass”, the elderly and veterans) into the acceptance and reliance upon the capitalist mode of production and the state’s role in protecting and promoting that dominance of capitalism. To expect workers to rise-up against the bourgeoisie is an unreal fantasy that we know will not happen in our pseudo-slave society.

We are enslaved to capitalism on a voluntary basis. As long as we are drugged by the materialism and whims offered by the fashion and brands so intrinsic of liberal democracies we cannot awake from our stupor.

In writing this I utilise the term “social economics” to describe the type of economic system we should seek to operate. A social economy is an economy run not for profit but for the social good with the aim of minimising profit seeking and exploitation through socially responsible employee terms and conditions, wage rates, resource use, environmental impact, and product pricing. Business must exist for the social good though they will be permitted to make surpluses.

Likewise, I use the term “communitarian democracy” (Communitarian Democratic) to describe the system of state governance. In a communitarian democracy all citizens are responsible for their actions as individuals and do have traditional freedoms to do things any human being chooses to do. Those freedoms are contingent upon the obligations or responsibilities complicit in exercising that freedom. Obligations to community and society as a whole outweigh individual freedoms. The state and community must have roles in regulating and enforcing behaviour so that ill-thought behaviour does not undermine the community freedoms to be protected, free of exploitation, unlawfulness etc. Some American neo-conservative, religious activists use the term “communitarian” to indicate a type of society that allows for the enforcement of group, family or community morals and ethics, usually religious in nature. I reject any concept of organised religion (though I see no harm at-all in spiritual fulfilment), and downright take offense at this religious debasement of the term “communitarian” when such groups tend to act more like fascists than enlightened souls. All churches, religious organisations and spiritual organisations must be operated within guidelines set by the state and community.
Communitarian democracy is directly opposed to the liberal democratic model of governance that places strong emphasis upon the individual person, all sorts of personal “freedoms”, free trade and political plurality.

I promote the overthrow of capitalism and their liberal democratic partners through the very mechanisms that they so promote. We must use their system to end their dominance. We must never give them reason to outlaw us, oppress us or censor us. The very means of our bondage shall become our sword, which shall legitimately destroy their institutions and laws that have for so long been used to exploit people, rather than protect people

In doing this we must act in a way that gains us mass support, through professionalism, determination, consistency, and effectiveness.

This pamphlet is for those of us who know that a better economic and political system is possible. It is. It is presented here. Heady thoughts of revolution are replaced by the realistic knowledge that activism can spread the ideological faith that we believe and promote, if we are to effect systemic change from within.

The task seems huge and mighty. It is. Let us get started.

Learn the lessons. Always remember the people; remember what we believe; ensure no-one ever defeats our aims.

Lessons from (Experimental) Communism

Human beings naturally aggregate into groups of people. It is not a perverse or mystical happening. Karl Marx adequately illustrated people are drawn together in response to the prospect of selling their labour, proximity to markets in which to sell their produce, near to services they need or desire, and indeed the prospect of gaining capital.

The prospect of gaining capital (or an excess of assets over liabilities) is a process that depends on the act of adding value to a commodity or service via the input of various means, namely carried out by the provision of labour in supplying component parts of such means.

What we also learned from The Communist Manifesto and Capital was that market forces – those very same forces that urbanised individuals and families – proved a fertile ground for the growth of exploitation of labour and the creation of capital. Groups of people living in the same communities were born into squalor and strived to lift themselves and their families out of that mire through sheer hard work and penny-pinching. Staying alive was basic and necessary to the human spirit.

Marx predicted that as the exploitation increased in scope, and capital grew more and more in the hands of the privileged few, workers who had earned that very same capital as the product of their own labour would explode with dissent, eventually resulting in the downfall of the capitalist economic system. Marx was only partially correct, we can now observe with the pleasure of hindsight. The Communist revolutions in Russia and China showed that the exploitation of the masses can result in revolt and a consequential attempt at the creation of nations built upon the common property ownership.

The human failing since experienced in the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China demonstrate that greed, corruption and capital are very difficult to eradicate, despite the claimed common ownership of property and, specifically, the means of production by the state. Indeed, it seems to many observers that the former “communist” economies were simply state capitalist economies and not true collective or mutual systems. Workers in the USSR were sometimes exploited and coerced to the extreme and workers in the PRC are still very badly exploited by state sanctioned individual business people who use state provided forced labour, in effect as slaves, to increase capital and personal wealth.

Essentially, the practice of totalitarian rule in the name of so-called “communism” has had negative effects, which, though caused by different motives than those of capitalist exploitation, have been equal to very outcomes warned of by first by Marx and then later, in 1921 after direct experience, by Lenin.

The historical judgement on the first attempts at Communism will be necessarily harsh. We must not delude ourselves that the practices used to coerce populations into submitting to the collective will, or the economic effects of outlawing small-scale capitalist activity were worthy and in some way justifiable. We must judge these first attempts at applying Communist ideals fairly and in the light of human reality. We cannot discard the will of individuals and subsume them to the might of the state without suffering severe social outcomes that disturb the ideological security of the party and encourage a type of dissent that can undermine production, management, the economy, and provision of state services.

In essence, we must govern in a manner that allows enterprise whilst engendering an environment that co-ops or forces those enterprises into participating with the greater vision and philosophy that Communitarians have. It must be a permanent collaboration between our party, constitution, membership and society. It has to be a relationship that places the will of the community at the forefront of the economy and nation.

The State and Enterprise

The fundamental principal of Communitarian philosophy is that the economy must exist for the benefit of society, particularly for the community in which it exists and operates. We do not actively pursue international economic revolution – though we do, of-course, find this idea very attractive. Such an internationalist vision is a proud one, but it is an infantile distraction we can ill-afford to waste time and resources upon. It is important for our own government to enact policies applicable in a concrete and defensible legal and economic jurisdiction.

When our governance and economic stability are assured can we then examine and possibly assist, with due diligence, the emancipation of external peoples. It is vital we remember that our own governance must never be endangered by embarking on external policies that may threaten our own existence through their failure.

Managing the human drive for self-improvement and self-gain is an absolutely vital and basic aspect of our attitude toward enterprise. Unrestrained capitalist enterprise has shown itself to be fundamentally exploitative, unsustainable, and of a greedy nature.

We must respect the ability of people and groups of people to provide goods and services that contain added value and result in surplus income. At the same time, we must ensure that the potentially exploitative behaviour of private enterprise does not result in objectionable practices or capitalist profit.

To ensure that the relationship between state and enterprise continuously meets the exact standards demanded by the Community Party and society, we must systematically examine, licence, oversee, and (when needed) discipline the management of private enterprises that wish to start-up or that currently exist. Failure to take an interest in these enterprises would be an abrogation of our duty to ensure that the economy exists for the benefit of individuals and society. This means we must make appropriate law that enables state and local community involvement and oversight, through the use of legal force if necessary, in the management and operation of any privately owned enterprise.

Ensuring that the economy must exist for the benefit of society does not only mean that employers must treat their employees and community in a legally approved manner. Private enterprise would be permitted to create surplus income that would not be defined as “profit”. That surplus income would be divided between community, state and entrepreneur in a manner deemed fair by the local community and state.

Part of the relationship between private enterprise and society will be that entrepreneurs must provide domestic goods and services at close to production cost and will not be able to domestically charge prices, fees or other miscellaneous amounts that are excessive without the express sanction of the Community Party and local communities.

The state will retain powers to nationalise enterprises and conversely to close them down when they so wish. Nationalising or the “expropriation” of business should usually – though not always – be confined to sectors that use strategic resources or are strategic industries, such as communications, utilities, emergency services and transport. Sometimes the state may nationalise a business because of its poor management, excessive profits, or inappropriate management. We would consult the local communities in which it operates and take measures that reassert the Communitarian philosophy of the Community Party. This would often mean replacing the management board with new members who are firm believers in the primacy of the community and Party.

It is vital that we remember that a strong and sustainable economy will mean a strong and sustainable community. Strong communities will result in a strong and sustainable society. Without a productive economic community, we cannot provide the very things that communities demand, such as consumables, utilities and recreational facilities. This is why the relationship between state and enterprise is so very vital to Communitarian philosophy.

We are determined to place the economy as central to the prospects of all people.

To enable strategic management of the economy government will establish Trade Associations made-up of all economic actors: businesses, councils, educational institutes, religions, sport bodies, cultural organisations and state owned enterprises. No aspect of society will be free to establish their own selfish direction which would threaten social and community cohesion and prosperity.
These Trade Associations would be mandated with following Community Party policies in matters such as employment, resource use, pricing, production, trade, research, and development. All domestic and overseas businesses and organisations wishing to exist in the country must register with and submit to Trade Associations and their rules and regulations.

The Trade Associations will be governed by representatives of member organisations, local communities, the Community Party, local councils, and state agencies.

In keeping with our Communitarian ideals we expect that local businesses (state and private owned) would cooperate to provide economic and social facilities that enhance and strengthen community values. All workers must be provided with entirely free of charge community-owned childcare facilities, medical centres, parking areas, canteens, and recreational areas. Small enterprises would be encouraged to join other enterprises in providing these facilities which are important in improving staff welfare, production output, and work quality.

Of extreme interest to all capitalists is the issue of profit. They threaten to withdraw their savings, close their businesses and move lock stock and barrel overseas. They constantly demand the freedom to run their businesses as they see fit and keep surplus monies. Such selfishness will not be tolerated in any circumstances.

A Community Party government must make it a crime to directly or indirectly encourage, incite or otherwise promote the capitalist mode of production. We must meet that challenge head-on by arresting and imprisoning any such criminal. Their assets will be seized and reallocated to new management boards, and their derived income and savings seized for the benefit of the new business, the state, and local community.

All businesses and enterprises will be required to pay corporation tax to the central government. That tax rate will be uniform throughout the country and will not differ by sector or performance. It is advisable that the rate be set at the maximum rate possible – after allowing for employment costs, production costs, local community charges, and social facility costs.
Surplus income, not retained by the business or enterprise for legitimate business reasons, must be transferred according to legislation passed by the Community Party.

Communitarians demand that all able-bodied citizens are productive, preferably in a sector of the economy or community that they choose to work. The state must encourage the individual desire to work or endeavour. It is a central part of maintaining a productive economy and fulfilled workforce. There is however, a problem that does exist that threatens both the productivity of the economy and the budget of the state. That problem is unemployment.

This is a difficult issue for almost all Communitarians. We do not like the idea – indeed it goes against all values we stand for – of people being forced to seek work for businesses that seek only to profit from their labour. We do not like to contemplate the idea that those on unemployment benefits are a blight on society, in effect stealing off the good work and prosperity of others.

Communitarians take a hard-line on idleness and refusal or rejection of employment. We understand that people may opt not to seek work in an environment of capitalist exploitation and poor work conditions. We do not accept that in a Communitarian state people would remain unemployed. But these are not mere simple pronouncements. We have concrete ideas and plans to get workers back into participating in the great social scheme of things.

Employment is a precious and important public and social good. Workers help our economy and work makes people, families and communities happier and more bound to each other. Employment is a mutually reinforcing activity that encourages self achievement and prosperity. Communitarians intend to do whatever is needed to give people work. We will establish community-based schemes, business opportunities, rural opportunities, communal and cooperative businesses, order businesses to employ more staff – some in specific roles, and employ people in Party roles. Each and every person will be properly rewarded in terms of remuneration and terms and conditions of employment. Communitarians want 0% unemployment.

The rejection or failure to accept or carryout work offered will result in severe consequences. The acquiring of income is a right of all people. This right is balanced by the obligation to do something to get that money, i.e. work or grown old. Failure to turn-up for work, failure to do the job agreed, failure to follow agreed practices, and anti-social behaviour on the job, all call for legal action against the recipient of the income.

Pay without work is tantamount to theft and must never be tolerated. Society cannot allow selfish and self-interested freeloaders, no matter their ethnicity or psychological make-up, to reap the rewards of others.

This policy may seem harsh to some. Bear in mind that all currently unemployed persons, school and university leavers, immigrants and workforce returnees will be allocated fully-paid, full-time state employment with all related travel and accommodation costs paid for by the state. That is a fantastic deal and unemployment beneficiaries should be attracted to our welfare oriented policies that place value on individual effort and mutuality.

Of equal importance to the management of enterprise is the maintenance of a corruption-free economy. To this end we must vehemently search out politicians, bureaucrats and community leaders who exploit enterprises to gain wealth and power for themselves and their associates without the consent of either the wider community or the state. Such contravention of the law should be severely dealt with, in consultation with the communities affected.

Of equal import is the ineptitude of those who claim to serve the Party and community yet fail to follow directives, laws and policies. The failure of politicians, bureaucrats and community leaders to fulfil one’s function and responsibility must be met with absolute discipline and determination backed with the full weight of the law. We expect democratic accountability from all involved in the use of (and benefit from) state office and power.

To ensure consumers are readily able to purchase items required for everyday usage the government and its agencies will establish price controls in areas of the economy that require intervention. Electricity, gas, water and telephone services will be price controlled along with household items available in retail outlets.

Some whole sectors of the economy (e.g. financial and banking, telecommunications, electricity etc) must be nationalised or expropriated by the state.

Nationalisation means that ownership will be transferred to the state in accordance with international agreements. Typically this means that a fair market price must be paid for the business by the state. Naturally, this could be expensive. But it remains a valid option.

Expropriation would not directly mean nationalising the business. Rather it means coercing the business to act in a certain manner that makes it a de facto arm of the state. This can be done by passing laws governing the make-up and conduct of Boards, directors’ responsibilities, corporate responsibilities and trade association rules and regulations. Essentially, through a policy of legal barricada any business can be subsumed into state compliance, including voluntary transference or ownership to the state.

Social Responsibility

Inseparable from the relationship between state and enterprise is our intent to improve the quality of life for all people in the community through providing a strong sense of common purpose, common identify and conformity to accepted social norms through inclusive policies of social responsibility.

Communitarians are aghast at the complicity of the state in the growth of private capital and wealth at the expense and disadvantage of the great proportion of peoples. By refocusing the entire economic system to prevent capitalist economic exploitation, we will rebalance the social fabric by giving all people the same rights, without hindrance or test, to benefits available. Communities will have the funds to provide desired levels of healthcare, education, policing, housing and employment. All people will have a stake in their community and the community will have the power to deter and coerce their members to preferred courses of action.

Demanding our economy exist for the benefit of society does not limit our responsibility to protect the weak, help the unfortunate and limit the power of those that would seek to exploit them.

We are all too familiar with the story of the pensioner sent to prison for not paying household bills that she could barely afford to pay, whilst the molester or mugger is given community service. We are all too familiar with the immigrant who wears different clothes who is called separatist, whilst the racist hate mongers of the right wing demand her expulsion. Similarly, we are aware that successive western governments have sought to combine monetarist economic policy with a very tight fiscal policy.

Simply put, the liberal democratic states have embarked on such a radical policy of liberal economic policy that the whole of society has been broken down into its most simple base constituent parts – the individual economic unit. This has happened slowly, through policies that appear slight, harmless and irrelevant. Apart from the obvious welfare policies (for example, taxation that penalises couples), we have had a long and sustained policy from all political parties in government – including the “socialist” Labour parties – that has emphasised the gain of wealth, the growth and accumulation of capital and share ownership. In a sentence, we are told that greed is good because individual ambition is a proud trait that will improve our life.

With the capital to allow further investment, the rich have become besotted by their own wealth. It is no great surprise that they and their proxies invariably preach the claimed virtues of the capitalist system. In doing so, they reinforce the social attitude that the exploitation of public resources should benefit ambitious individuals firstly and lastly and that precious state resources should not be expended upon those that cannot contribute to helping themselves.

We have been subjected to obscene policies that privatise public assets, tax by stealth and ration state resources. Combined, these lead an unprecedented assault upon the unprivileged classes who struggle, as they always have, to pay for their mere existence and day-to-day costs. It also explains why tax defaulters are jailed yet criminals are not as we cannot afford to keep them! It explains why some repugnant racists jeer at immigrants blaming them for their own lack of access social services that are actually rationed by the state.

Whilst the numbers of millionaires has exploded and the generation of capital has been bullish the privileged class has not actually grown in comparison with the unprivileged classes, who now suffer from astounding levels of debt, low pay levels, menial work with no prospects and no security, increasing levels of absolute poverty, poor access to healthcare, no pension, and the inability to purchase any luxuries. This trend is as Marx predicted. The growth of the capitalist class forces many, many people from the lower middle classes into the difficulties experienced by the underclass.

We see this happening on a scale now that is unparalleled in human history. One example is that of huge multi-national supermarket chains forcing farm producers and other manufacturers to supply produce at or near to the cost price. The public, attracted by less expensive produce abandon their local high street shops and markets to purchase the wares of an exploitative brand. Moreover, the High Street, the centre of our communities is slowly abandoned to capitalist property developers.

We have inherited a society in which the powerful and influential privileged classes disdain the slumber of those below them. Political policies aim to benefit the privileged few, as they are the wealth generators, whilst appeasing the underclass through social security, as they are, even in this materialistic age, a reservoir of potential revolution. Hence, the government has historically taken the mantle of capitalist protector rather than that of socialist vanguard.

Any Communitarian would swiftly end this favourable attitude to capitalist exploitation, taking excess private wealth for the whole of society. Communities will be empowered economically and politically to combat the rampant capitalist exploitation of society and state. The state will join with communities by supporting their efforts at realising their dreams of equality, justice and liberty. It is our common social responsibility.

We revile against those that purvey messages of hate. These are typically those with no developed sense of mutuality essential for respecting those who are different. Communitarians fight against segregationist policies, local elites, geographical differentiation, apartheid policies, class barriers, inequality, all types of discrimination, ageism, nationalism, and the primacy of the individual.
Communitarians work toward establishing a society that recognises hard work, rewards fairly and fights on behalf of citizens to protect them from those that would exploit them and enslave them.

Creating community organisations that are the voice and vanguard of the local area is a central part of our philosophy. It is why we are Communitarians.

Local citizens will be able to get elected onto “Community Representative Councils” that will act as our eyes and ears in local communities. We will empower such councils to take actions that strengthen law and order and deter abuses of local economic and social policy as well as to encourage local community involvement. These Community Representative Councils will be mandated with the responsibilities to discover local conditions, request central government assistance, sit on company Boards, help develop polices, and to order police and legal actions. Such local organisation will allow us to project our will into local communities and to over-ride local authorities that may not be fulfilling their potential.

We will not outlaw or limit the activities of law-abiding political activity or organisations, though we will openly give preferential treatment to organisations that assist the Community Party, local authorities, and the state carrying out our policies.
The Party must be through sheer necessity, be the leading and guiding force of society and the nucleus of its political system, all state organisations and public organisations.

Communitarians respect history and its role in contemporary society. This does preclude any necessary legislation that is required to maintain a peaceful law-abiding society that protects the state, society and community. If required the traditions and customs of the country, constitution and society will be challenged to ensure that a fair and equal society is maintained or adequately satisfied.

All national governments should have the concerns of local citizens at the heart of their policy and at the centre of their ambitions and dreams. A government that does neither of these things is not a government but self-interested cloistered elite that cannot act in the interests of the masses or the country. Communitarians believe that acting in the local interest is acting in the national interest.

The free-market oriented governments and capitalist economic powers, including the internationally owned companies and globe-spanning commercial empires, are satisfied with the performance and operation of liberal democratic governance. They can issue their edicts, coerce the local authorities and effectively punish those authorities that dare question their pro-capitalist policies.
Amazingly, they like the idea of decentralisation of responsibility to local levels. Yet, in stark contradiction to our own principals, the leaders of the liberal democracies do not devolve the decision-making responsibilities to local communities. The local authorities, hospitals, emergency services and local agencies find themselves in the unenviable position of increased responsibility to provide new and better services as ordered by the government, but incredibly with greatly rationed resources. Wage costs are held-down, numbers of staff are limited or reduced and service levels increased. No wonder local communities are in a state of dire helplessness!

The clear and unambiguous lack of real intent by local authorities or central government to behave in a pro-active manner that protects and serves the local populace is lamentable. It is also a natural outcome when the local government is hamstrung by bureaucracy – a bureaucracy that serves the whims of politicians, especially those that are remote or removed from local life, and not local citizenry.

Communitarians would alter the whole basis on which national and local decision-making is made. Wealth creation by capitalist entities would be illegal. The welfare of all people would be of paramount importance to our government.

In making decisions that affect local communities, we would allow them to participate in, through Community Representative Councils, and ultimately make the final decision (within the boundaries set by the Party). We would go as far as delegating limited political, economic and social policy to local communities. If government expects communities to provide services then those services should be as seen fit by that community.

We must of-course oversee the practice of local peoples’ democracy by setting the boundaries and rules of operation to limit any potential for corrupt and illegal practice. We can never allow policies that contradict stated Communitarian aims such as equality, freedom and justice. We would rather dictate policy than allow local decision making that legitimises inequality, unfairness or injustice.

A system of governance

Our first government should be popularly elected in a general election and must assume and fulfil the responsibilities of a sovereign government: law and order, justice, foreign affairs, taxation, administering public and social services, conservation of natural resources, scientific research and education.

A principle of the Communitarian Democracy is that we will gain political power through election and not violence. There is no attraction to gaining power through revolution. Our aim is peace and harmony – not the repugnant use of violence for seizing power. We are united in our opinion that illegal violence must never be used to gain power.

Voter constituencies or electorates must be comprised of roughly equal numbers of voters. Eligible voters should be any citizen able to independently and physically cast their vote. All votes must be cast in person at a voting booth, or via Special Votes made by overseas citizens and those physically unable to get to the booth.

All citizens must register to vote. This means that there must be no barrier or exception made on the basis age, gender, religion, ownership, rank, criminal record or other factor. Under these rules every single citizen (including children and prisoners) can be a voter. Failure to register to vote must be illegal and actively enforced through imprisonment, or other sanction.

As minority party representatives, we will seek better oversight of capitalist operations and ending the involvement of private enterprise in public service provision and management. We will demand serious examination of civic accounts and demand transparency of decision-making processes.

As a majority party, representatives will urge the monopolisation of political power by the Community Party; create a National Council (comprised of Communitarians) with an electoral and parliamentary oversight role; and the establishment of the directly elected Community Representative’s Councils.

In the mind of the dedicated Communitarian, a strong government is necessary to control state interests and limit, via regulation, the activities and attempts by the privileged class of capitalists to obtain profit and wealth from the assets and efforts of the people. The state must also act strongly to either control or regulate services that people need to maintain their daily lives in a decent manner, without exploitation.

The economic and social policy of the government must never be challenged and any such challenge must be avoided or defeated. The Community Party will be unambiguous in its intention to crush opposition to its economic and social policy. Dissenters should be removed from society and treated as criminals, as we cannot allow the questioning of policies that are designed to protect and aid all members of our society.

To promote the exploitation of any person for the purpose of private or corporate profit is criminal and must be dealt with as incitement to commit a crime.

The objection that one’s “free will” should take precedence over common mutuality is unacceptable. That negative idea of personal freedom leads to exploitation, corruption in obtaining contracts, unhealthy competition between workers, unemployment, and a general downward pressure on the wages of the great majority of workers.

All Communitarians will strive to represent the will of their community and of society as a whole. We cannot be swayed by offer or bribe and, we will not betray the hopes of people depending on us for serious social and economic reform.

Being active in political and community affairs is important for a Communitarian. We want our world to reflect or purpose; to mirror our hopes and desire; to embody the dream of equality between all peoples, freedom from exploitation, and the justice provided by a state that protects and cares for its people – not just the privileged classes.

Politics is very exciting at the moment: real thinking is taking place, words are being articulated and debated, and ideas are the bedrock of policy once more. Take the example of Roger Helmer MEP, his stupidity on the subject of homophobia had a brief moment of genius, it was an analysis of the subject of etymology in that it focused on whether meanings of words stack up to public attitudes, and also how certain attitudes may be perceived from the outside. Deeply philosophical stuff. Only it was magnificently wrong. Despite Iain Dale’s totemistic, scant reflection.

Another revival of etymology in politics surrounds the word progressivism. George Osborne hyperbolically asserting that the Tories are the only progressive force in UK politics today, and Peter Mandelson riposting back that for Osborne to think this is categorically erroneous.

Indeed for these two former yachting buddies, as one blogger puts it correctly, it is a battle of ideas, and how to put those ideas into practice, which as cat-and-mouse as it might appear, makes for interesting reading. Mandy is right to say that what Osborne thinks he means by progressive is whatever it is that the Tories stand for “this month”. It certainly feels like that anyway, that Osborne figures that if a compassionate grin emerges from his po-face as he pours over public spending reform, this will sideline what lies behind the rhetoric.

This, too, goes for inheritance tax, which isn’t thoroughly progressive.

But, for the left, is there not a sense of satisfaction in that our historically right-wing party have found solace in entertaining ‘radical’ sentiment. Firstly it was Cameron’s call for a ‘day of reckoning’ back in January, saying that the nation’s modest earners – “nurses and cleaners and [sic] teachers” – should not have to fund the “multi-billion pound taxpayer bail-out of the banks” adding “[t]here cannot be one law for the rich and another for everyone else.”

Agreed. But this, given the circumstances, would have to imply a tax raise, and I’d like to think this was the case, but it will most certainly not be, so Hopi Sen accounts.

Then this notion of Red Toryism, or Conservative communitarianism, that amounts to replacing welfare with investment vouchers, or rather, a regulated system with a rearticulation of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Progressivism is a system of formulating change, and the Tories at the moment are engaging in an exciting game of new words that would have once been oxymoronic such as progressive conservatism, but in actual fact it seems that its all talk. The Right inside the Labour camp are short-circuiting, and a shift to the left is imminent. A host of leftist elements are waiting in line, anticipating the death blow to New Labour. Why that blow has had to receive electoral punch from null Tory sentiment is beyond me, but to be sure, even if New Labour is hardly a progressive force worth defending lock stock and barrel, the Tories version of progressivism is a simple veil. Its a pity the traditional Labour base can not hold Mandy up as one of their own, in the battle of words in the new (possibly brief) epoch of political etymology.

People are being told that the crowds of people who are going to town halls to angrily protest the Democrat health care plan are “un-American” as well as being swastika-carrying fascists.  It is terribly malicious and hateful demagoguery.  It is amazing that Democrats demonize tactics that they themselves are pursuing and have been pursuing for YEARS.  And then we come to learn that not only are Democrats organizing, but they are in fact literally PAYING people to show up and fight for the Democrat health care plan.  Talk about “manufactured outrage“!!!

The Speaker of the House decided to make this a debate about who is more Nazi.  I welcome that argument.  Just look at the Democrats’ own tactics!

But there is a far deeper issue at stake when we talk about “Nazism” than mere political rhetoric.  There is a very real issue of life and death at stake.

Mike Sola angrily confronted his Congressman over his fear that the Democrat system would not cover his son, who is in a wheelchair suffering from cerebral palsy.  He has since received death threats and vandalism at his home from Democrat supporters.

Should people fear for their lives under ObamaCare?  Should people like Mike Sola fear for their loved ones’ lives?

Let’s get away from the rhetoric, and reflect on the words of key Obama health care architects.

Consider a New York Post article:

Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

So, yeah.  Mike Sola has every right to be fearful of what will happen to his son.  Just as I have every reason to be afraid of what will happen to my parents.

When Dr. Emanuel says “communitarianism,” it is impossible for me – given the man’s writings – not to think “communist” plus “totalitarianism.”

And Obama appointed this man.  How can he distance himself from a guy who he himself appointed?  As Glenn Beck put it, “I wouldn’t let these people bring me a can of Coke, much less allow them to write a national health care plan.”

In January of THIS YEAR, Dr. Emanuel – who is a principal architect of the Democrat’s health care plan – wrote:

“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”

“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.”  Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care.  Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:

When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.

Take Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulatory Czar, who wrote in the Columbia Law Review in January 2004:

“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar explains:

“If a program would prevent fifty deaths of people who are twenty, should it be treated the same way as a program that would prevent fifty deaths of people who are seventy? Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”

Which very much jives with what Obama told a woman concerning her mother:

“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”

As I wrote in my last article, “Don’t let the coffin lid hit your face on the way out, Grandma and Grandpa.”

Incredibly, that’s not all.  There are other writings that President Obama’s appointed architect Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel have said.  I thank Jeff Head for bringing his own blog citing other statements by Emanuel to my attention:

Is the “Final Solution” wording that was added to this revamped Obama Health Care graphic warranted? Some might see it as a simple play on words.

But before you decide how to consider that wording, please read the following shocking quotes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief health-care policy adviser to President Barack Hussein Obama, and (not coincidentally) the brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

From: Principles of allocation of scarce medical interventions, January 31, 2009
Also see: Deadly Doctors, New York Post, June 24, 2009

“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”

“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

“Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ‘classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,’ but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.”

“When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated”

“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”

From: Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008

“Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others”

From: Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008

“Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,”

From: What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide? New England Journal of Medicine, July 1998

(These quotes add new context to the “End-of-Life” Counseling sessions required every 5 years for all seniors over 65 in Obama Care.)

“There is a widespread perception that the United States spends an excessive amount on high-technology health care for dying patients. Many commentators note that 27 to 30 percent of the Medicare budget is spent on the 5 percent of Medicare patients who die each year. They also note that the expenditures increase exponentially as death approaches, so that the last month of life accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the medical care expenditures in the last year of life. To many, savings from reduced use of expensive technological interventions at the end of life are both necessary and desirable.”

“Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. One commentator observed: “Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better.” Some of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court expressed the same logic: “Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide” and “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.”

“Although the cost savings to the United States and most managed-care plans are likely to be small, it is important to recognize that the savings to specific terminally ill patients and their families could be substantial. For many patients and their families, especially but not exclusively those without health insurance, the costs of terminal care may result in large out-of-pocket expenses. Nevertheless, as compared with the average American, the terminally ill are less likely to be uninsured, since more than two thirds of decedents are Medicare beneficiaries over 65 years of age. The poorest dying patients are likely to be Medicaid beneficiaries. Extrapolating from the Medicare data, one can calculate that a typical uninsured patient, by dying one month earlier by means of physician-assisted suicide, might save his or her family $10,000 in health care costs, having already spent as much as $20,000 in that year.”

“Drawing on data from the Netherlands on the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and on available U.S. data on costs at the end of life, this analysis explores the degree to which the legalization of physician-assisted suicide might reduce health care costs. The most reasonable estimate is a savings of $627 million, less than 0.07 percent of total health care expenditures.”

From: Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet, Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec.1996

“This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

[....]

Do not fall for the platitudes and the revisionism or assurances of the people pushing this plan.  It is a radical plan and it will lead to single payer, complete governmental control of health care.  A command economy of health care much more akin to what someone like Karl Marx would implement to go hand and hand with his political philosophies.

The president, in a less-guarded moment before running for the Presidency outlined his true goals with respect to Health Care, and now he has the congress and the advisers he thinks will lead him there.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”

When you see “angry mobs” of Democrat health care plan opponents, realize that they aren’t angry because of “disinformation” or “fishy” emails; they are angry because of what they KNOW.  They are angry because of what Obama’s own architects have STATED.

Some of what we have seen here has far more in common with Dr. Mengele than with medicine.

The Nazis had a term, Lebensunwertes Leben, that meant “a life unworthy to be lived.”  The Nazi agenda was not about goose-stepping soldiers; it was about a complex of ideas that de-valued individual human life and exalted the power of the state to control the lives of the people.  And those who were deemed unable to produce sufficient societal benefit were deemed unworthy of life.  And the men who created this system did not regard themselves as evil men; they regarded themselves as doing what was necessary to implement their vision for their country.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel would never agree that he is a Nazi.  He would point out that he is Jewish; how on earth could he be a Nazi?  But his plan comes right out of the heart of Nazi ideology; it is Lebensunwertes Leben rearing its ugly head all over again.  Does he want 6 million Jews to die?  Of course he doesn’t.  But my question is, “Does he not want 60 million senior citizens to die?” And the only difference is that he would prefer to kill them by neglect due to rationed medical care, or due to a more humane but every bit as evil death by suicide.

The Nazis’ “final solution” was to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating the Jews; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s “final solution” is to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating unhealthy children and senior citizens.

And, again, if Barack Obama doesn’t want this vision himself, then why on earth did he appoint Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel – who has been arguing for this “Complete Lives program” for YEARS, and who has an article urging for it as late as January of THIS YEAR – to write large swaths of the health care bill?  And any of Obama’s protestations to the contrary only fly in the face of what he himself has said and what he himself has done.  Don’t trust him.

A video montage explains precisely how the Democrats have organized behind the scenes to use the currently-proposed plan to necessarily lead into the kind of system that will produce the kind of “care” outlined by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel above.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein tell us what government health care will ultimately look like; and the video explains in Democrat health care strategists’ own words how they propose to get us to that point.

Watch it – and then join the fight against this monstrosity.

I received an interesting assignment a couple weeks ago: write an explanation of the gift economy. Since the request came from my dear friend Nipun Mehta, to whom I can refuse nothing, I agreed; but I knew from the outset how challenging this seemingly straightforward task would be. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed about pornography, some things are easy to recognize and yet quite difficult to define.

The essay, now completed, is included in a new online reference, The Dictionary of Ethical Politics, a joint project of Resurgence and openDemocracy.

I have thought long-and-hard about the gift economy over the past five years, since my friend and colleague John Silliphant first introduced me to the concept. It was John who developed the Seva Café model to nurture and teach about the gift economy and to provide a space to promote and celebrate service within the everyday world. I was fortunate to be on the team that helped John and his angelic enablers, Jayeshbhai and Anarben Patel, launch the project in Ahmedabad. One of my tasks at that time was to write an explanation of the gift economy ideal for Seva Café customers.

I have also been privileged to witness the birth and success of two brilliant gift economy projects by Uma Prajapati’s Upasana Design Studio. In the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Tsunamika dolls, made from scrap cloth by women from devastated fishing villages, quickly gained international recognition as both an important livelihood rehabilitation project and a poignant reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. The subsequent Small Steps project applied gift economy principles to high-fashion environmental activism to serve as a vital reminder of the complex, often-subtle consequences of our patterns of material consumption. Not surprisingly, Upasana Design Studio met with considerable consumer incomprehension when it decided to distribute its Small Steps shopping bags under a price-free model. Once again, I was in the right place at the right time: Uma allowed me to write a short piece (which was later incorporated in the website FAQs) that would introduce people to the pay-it-forward ideal and to understand the ethical and practical consequences of engaging in this gift economy transaction.

And then there is my beloved CharityFocus, which for ten years has been in the forefront of developing creative ways for people to play in the space of service. CF has of-late been working on a number of projects designed to bring attention to the gift economy. These include publication of Works & Conversations magazine and operating Karma Kitchen, CF’s take on the Seva Café concept. Indeed, everything CharityFocus has ever done is, in one way or another, an exercise in gift economy transaction.

So, I agreed to take a shot at producing a short essay. It would be an opportunity to see if I could synthesize anything of value from my considerable exposure to such high-practitioners of the gift economy art.

Difficult as the assignment might be, there was one extremely liberating aspect: The Dictionary of Ethical Politics is a wiki. Those with superior insight will, eventually, correct whatever errors and omissions might find their way into my attempt to explain the gift economy. Accordingly, I decided to approach this “definition” as a sui generis think-piece, devoid of any research or background reading. I wanted to try to compose rules-of-recognition from scratch, without allowing my ideas about the gift economy to be colored by the conceptions of others.

And there was another reason to stay away from prior work. Over the years, I have come across a number of short essays on the gift economy – and have been impressed with none of them. Unsurprisingly, it is a topic that appeals to well-meaning, good-natured, spiritually curious people. Unfortunately, this results in treatments that are often long on fuzzy-headed feel-good and short on rigor. I’m sure there are some very good essays on the gift economy to be found with a simple Google search; but I really had no stomach for a needle-in-haystack exercise that would subject me to the level of penetrating analysis found in the average Hallmark greeting card.

So, here’s my take on the gift economy. To watch as my essay morphs over time, as others improve it, read it online at The Dictionary of Ethical Politics.

******

GIFT ECONOMY

In its simplest form, the gift economy is not hard to comprehend: it is an arrangement for the transfer of goods or services without an agreed method of quid pro quo. Indeed, there may be no expectation or mechanism of exchange whatsoever; hence, the “gift” aspect of the interaction.

But things get complicated quickly. Application of gift economy principles varies widely; and there is, perhaps, considerable disagreement about what constitutes a gift economy transaction. Is every act of generosity, in effect, a gift economy transaction? Does every transfer of goods and services that lacks a predetermined price or definitive method of exchange qualify? The assessment is sometimes complicated and confounding.

Essential Elements of a Gift Economy Transaction

There are three essential features to any gift economy transaction. The first is that there is an act of selflessness on the part of the producer of the goods or services. This does not necessarily mean that they intend to confer the benefit without remuneration, though that is often the case; but there must be some element of altruism that transcends calculations of self-interest as judged within the narrow perspective of the transaction itself.

The second element of a gift economy transaction is that it entails an element of “free play” in the transactional structure – particularly in opposition to the dominant modes of exchange in the prevailing market economy – which fundamentally alters the way in which the giver and the recipient measure value. Thus, while in the market economy prices are usually established by the provider of the goods or services, in the gift economy the roles are often reversed, with the recipient shouldering the responsibility to place a value on the benefit. Most importantly, the gift economy calls into consideration larger social objectives extending beyond the intrinsic value of the goods or services. Market-based exchange tends to focus on the inherent value of the product – measured by the material conditions of production, relative functionality or emotional satisfaction, and relative abundance or scarcity – and therefore tends to externalize both the true social costs and instrumental social benefits associated with consumption. By contrast, the producer in the gift economy is motivated by a systemic faith that giving freely strengthens the basic social fabric, benefiting everyone, even if the transaction is quite limited, specific, and without any broad, overtly social purpose.

The final component is, perhaps, more aspirational than actualized. Ideally, a gift economy transaction is not a single transaction at all; it aims to be a vector of giftings and re-giftings. Whereas market economy transactions tend to be bound within a single, reciprocal exchange, gift economy transactions involve catalyzing a process of selfless giving which induces the recipient of the benefits to, in turn, confer a benefit selflessly on another. This chain-reaction quality of the gift economy is commonly referred to by the phrase, “Pay it forward,” meaning that the moral obligation of the recipient is not to remunerate the giver, but rather to become the giver in an ongoing altruistic process.

Illustrations of Gift Economy Activity

There are a number of transaction models that are said to fall within the gift economy. How well do they fare against the rules of recognition described above?

Charitable Donation: unreciprocated philanthropic gifts of money, goods, or service. This mode displays the purest of altruism and a clear conferring of economic (or economically measurable) benefit. Donations of time or resources are clearly gift economy transactions. Ironically, these transactions generally evoke the gift economy ethos in less overt ways than the more contrived, innovative modes.

Collectivism: the common pooling of the society’s resources, redistributed without regard to contribution. Early collectivist hunter-gatherer societies are sometimes considered gift economies, but these forms of sharing are probably best described as embracing socialist ideals, rather than gift economy principles. Some collectivism falls nicely within the gift economy model, however; for example, the North American First Nations Potlach tradition or its modern, culturally agnostic, role-reversed namesake, the potluck dinner party. The differing levels of contribution people make to these collaborations reflect their differing assessment of the value of the events as well as differing decisions about how they will participate within the social networks.

Cooperativism: where individuals (rather than the entire social network, as in Collectivism) conspire to create things of social value, made openly available and free-of-charge. Famous examples include the open-source software movement, wikis like Wikipedia (and this site), citizen journalism portals, and collective volunteerism projects like charityfocus.org.

Donation Requested: where goods or services are ostensibly gifted, but come with moral suasion for remuneration. Does this mode more closely resemble Charitable Donation, Pay It Forward, or Pay As You Will? A case-by-case assessment would be required to pass judgment.

Pay As You Will: where the buyer, not the seller, sets the price of exchange. While this mode of establishing value may have an element of “free play” about it, this alone does not bring it within the gift economy. The expectation of exchange nullifies the gifting quality of the transfer and the focus remains on the intrinsic value of the goods or services, not on broader social utility. And not all Pay As You Will systems are transgressive of the market economy. Consider, for example, the common practice of tipping.

Pay It Forward: where the consumer receives a benefit with the tacit understanding that payment to the producer will be applied to the giving of similar benefits to others in the future. There can be legitimate debate about whether this conceit carriers a transaction beyond the Pay As You Will model. In cases where meaningful social contribution is significant factor in the valuation exercise and the activity involves systemic participation rather than transactional participation, this mode is an archetype of the gift economy. Where the communitarian intention of the producer, the instrumental social value in the mind of the recipient, and the incentives or inspiration to carry the gifting forward are weaker, the gift economy bona fides are also weaker and the antithetical element of simple exchange is difficult to overlook.

Portion of Proceeds Donated: where the seller pledges to donate only a part of the proceeds of the sale, usually some or all of the profit margin. This model demonstrates the difficulty of identifying gift economy transactions. Is the gift component of the transaction simply a marketing ploy to increase the volume of sales, presently or in the future, or does it represent genuine philanthropy? Variants on this mode include such things as the difference between socially progressive retooling of production or distribution methods to achieve meaningful environmental sustainability and greenmail, the exploiting of token environmentalism as an advertising gimmick. Whether a transaction under this model qualifies as gift economy depends on the true selfless intent of the producer, which be may difficult for the purchaser to divine.

Proceeds of Sale Donated: where the seller gifts both their capital contribution and profit to a charitable or social cause. This presents a fascinating example because, although it is clearly an exchange-based interaction between buyer and seller, it meets all the criteria of a gift economy transaction.

Lessons of the Gift Economy

The common thread among the various modes of gift economy transactions is that the giver of good or services contributes as much to a systemic appreciation of communitarianism and interdependence as to the individual recipient of the benefit.

The gift economy represents an optimistic perspective, engendering attitudes of compassion and generosity, favoring a outlook of relative abundance over relative scarcity, and based on faith that others will also be motivated to favor the common good over individual advantage, at least from time-to-time and in ways that are socially significant.

The gift economy shifts perspective in another important way, forcing a reappraisal of the manner in which we think about and measure value. This awareness can carry-over into to normal market transactions as well, sparking consideration of the consequential costs and benefits of specific acts of material consumption which are otherwise externalized from the price.

Finally, the gift economy reminds us of the interconnection of our lives to other human lives, to non-human lives, and to the non-living world. It offers a broader perspective on the ripple effects of our other-regarding actions, even if the specific consequences remain mostly invisible to us. It demonstrates, transaction-by-transaction, that each of us has the power to positively influence collective behavior within our communities and throughout the world.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — Thomas Jefferson, United States Declaration of Independence

I expect the overwhelming majority of English-speakers in the world will be at least vaguely familiar with the sentence above, the start of the second section of the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on 4.vii.1776. They are probably the most recognisable version of a concept that had emerged by the mid-18th century in much European political philosophy, which owed its origins to the argument of the 17th-century English writer John Locke that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”.

Locke’s position found its way into several US documents before the Declaration of Independence, not least the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in George Mason’s formulation by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on 12.vi.1776, which includes the following:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

This phrasing is altogether broader and more intricate than the famous equivalent, based on a more succinct version, “life, liberty and property”, that appears in the Declaration of Colonial Rights, a resolution of the First Continental Congress of 5.ix.1774.

It is common knowledge that the American rebels’ successful defeat of the British forces inspired the French Revolution that followed it only a few years later, and the tripartite motto evolved into liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood) in France and “peace, order and good government” as a guiding principle in the parliaments of several Commonwealth countries, most notably Canada. The exact phrase was incorporated into Chapter III, Article 13 of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, and Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has the very similar stipulation that “[e]veryone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”.

What is interesting here is quite what a range of other principles are listed alongside liberty as the perceived ‘unalienable rights’ of mankind. Starting with Locke, health can, I suppose, be retermed ‘good quality of life’, which is embodied in, and could probably be subsumed into, most modern definitions of what the US Declaration refers to as ‘Life’. This leaves possessions, or property, from which derive the property rights so fiercely defended by libertarians like Robert Nozick – what is fascinating and telling in equal measure is that the Declaration of Colonial Rights lists property as the third crucial element instead of the pursuit of happiness, while the Virginia Declaration includes both terms. Given the chronology of the three documents, it would perhaps not be unreasonable to hypothesise that the Founding Fathers debated which of the two was more important as a complaint to be held against the British Crown – a brief skim through some of the more prominent subsequent US cases that have referred back to the famous hendiatris seems to indicate that the possession of personal property came to be seen an implicit condition without which the pursuit of happiness is impossible, or at least severely impeded. Also, I suppose, the textual change was made to allow for cases in which the forcible reallocation of property ownership is necessary to achieve the pursuit of happiness – a shift from a libertarian slant to a more utilitarian one.

Equally as intriguing is the progression from the US phrase to the French variant – liberty is still included, but life and happiness have been replaced with equality and brotherhood. Equality has strong connotations of social redistributivism, or at least the deference of property rights to a conception that status as an equalisandum is a social ideal. Brotherhood is an odd term, although I guess the implications it is supposed to embody are ones of mutual equal treatment and respect, communitarianism and implicit duties of care and concern between citizens. The theorists that derived these two concepts would, I expect, argue that quality of life and happiness will automatically be maximised in a society that safeguards equality and communitarianism – much as Jefferson and the others thought that right to property is an inherent part of the pursuit of happiness.

In many ways, I think that the two mottos of the American and French Revolutions are indicative of one of the major divides that have characterised political thought: the American version highlights (in its original versions more explicitly) the need for citizens to have some base of personal property to act as material extensions of the self, from which to evolve aspirations and by which to measure satisfaction and achievement; the French version instead stresses the need for some sense of shared community or commonality within any societal structure, even at the most basic level of inter-citizen interactions. At the purest level, equality and respect for property rights are extremely hard to reconcile – and then only with restrictions on the definition of each one – but nonetheless it is probably worth remembering on days like today that the ability to debate such distinctions is exactly what the revolutionaries in Europe and America fought and died for. On which note, have a happy Independence Day!

Its important to remember that the NWO is not only about a Big Brother Super Global State, that will come after the false utopia a promise of peace and unity, thats the only way of getting people to leave their flags, weapons, creeds to the New Order.

They have a religious agenda and they are pushing it hard and well, many shall fall into that doctrine of “true enlightment”.This times we are now its to learn as much as we can about our Enemies, but as well to make choices

The Ethics of God: A beginner’s class on traditional Christian ethics.

(The new audio from apologetics.com radio.) (Click here for audio)

What are the basic presumptions common to all “Christian” ethical systems? The moral law of God and the cultivation the traditional Christian virtues.

1. The existence of God.
2. The identity of God and the uniqueness of Christianity.
3. The veracity, historicity, and inerrancy of Holy Scripture.
4. The presentation and defense of a basic orthodoxy.
5. The promotion of a healthy spiritual life in faith and practice.
6. The understanding of a consistent Christian ethic applied to all of life.
7. Communicating the coherence and defensibility of the Christian faith with clarity, kindness, and grace to any that might be inclined to hear and teaching those that desire such how to do the same.

The Classical form for Individual and Social Justice

The Moral Law of God-

“Love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself; on these hang all of the Law and the Commandments”

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“What you have done unto the least of these you have done to me.”

“Have mercy on the little children and do not keep them from coming to me for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them.”

The Cultivation of the traditional Christian Virtues-
Faith, Hope, Love, Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Self Denial

Faith- “Without faith it is impossible to please God because to please God one must first believe that He exists and that He is the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him.”

Hope- “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13

Love- “These three remain: Hope, faith, and love, but the greatest of these is love…”

Wisdom- “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

Justice- “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Courage- “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Self Denial- “Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

www.apologetics.com

Christopher Neiswonger

How to Evangelize the Emergent Generation

Christopher Neiswonger teaching a class on the current postmodern climate as it influences the Christian churches. Postmodernism reigns, but does it have the legs to last? At Cornerstone Church in Riverside California. (With question and answer)

http://apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=350:how-to-evangelize-the-emergent-generation&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=74

The Economist’s Lexington column  discusses ‘Obama hatred‘ and turns out to be summarily dismissive of Obama’s critics (see also here). Obama is arguably the USA’s first outspokenly communitarian president, so concern over this new brand of collectivism hardly belongs on the lunatic fringe.
One of the articles The Economist shruggs off is Quin Hillyer’s essay in the American Spectator titled “Il Duce, Redux?“. It makes some points similar to the ones this blog made about New Labour a while ago. Some arguments in this piece are indeed debatable: Obama’s economic interventionism, for example, can just as plausibly be attributed to a desparate attempt at fighting off depression as to an ideologically driven desire to rule the economy. Other points are harder to dismiss:
“Again and again, Obama has called not just for a change of policies, but to “change America” or to “remake” this nation. And here, from his national convention speech last August, is his notion, his collectivist notion, of change: “That’s the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
Well, no, not when it comes to state power. Government should have no authority to make us be our brothers’ “keepers,” lest the state itself become Big Brother. Obama said that “mutual responsibility” is the “essence of America’s promise,” but that’s not in any Constitution or Declaration of Independence I can find. Oh, yes, voluntary mutual responsibility is essential for a healthy civic society — but if government starts determining the shape of that responsibility and forcing it upon us, that is where freedom starts to fade.” (source)
Concern about an expansion in directive state power is hardly crazy. In placing this concern in a critique of the communitarian ascent to power, Quin Hillyer comes very close to an argument The Economist made when discussing the rise of communitarianism almost 15 years ago:
“… communitarians are by no means content to preach to individuals. They insist that
their programme is at least partly a programme for government. At once, the character of the
discussion changes. It is no longer permissible to assume that consensus exists among the
members of any putative community, as it would be if everybody was a volunteer. It becomes a
matter of the first importance, once the coercive power of the state is involved, to ask how
dissent will be dealt with.
This is the heart of the matter. Western liberalism, as a philosophy and as a constitutional
blueprint, is chiefly concerned with this very question. Its answer, in the simplest terms, is that
the individual comes first: every man should be free to seek happiness in his own way, so long
as he harms nobody else.” (source: The Economist (Dec.1994) “The Politics of Restoration” p.33-36)
The concerns of Obama critics then are very similar to the concerns The Economist used to raise not too long ago. What this shows is not so much that those who disagree with Obama’s brand of communitarian authoritarianism have gone off the rails, but rather that this new collectivist paradigm has now become the mainstream position in western politics. The Economist apparently is determined to join in this collectivist revival.