> the thing is we are _all_ liberals -- in the enlightenment liberal
> sense, yes? Lockes, Hobbes, J.S. Mills, Kant, Hume, Smith, etc. When I
> took a foundations of social theory course, the instructor made us
> read Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity and then De
> Maistre in order to understand what conservatives were in the 18th c.
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre)
>
> Everything that follows is, really, reformist attempt to correct for
> enlightenment liberalism in one direction or the other --without ever
> going to Marx or De Maistre. As such, by their very character, it
> seems to me that libs and cons are going to be captive to business
> interests in generally and, as such, there can only be piecemeal,
> reactionary writing about small fixes here, and maybe a moderate
> enhancement there. ha. in the lingo of my job: tactical bug fixes and
> tactical enhancements. little niggling fixes to make what is
> considered essentially OK work just a leetle bit better -- or
> sometimes, to intervene with a major fix because something went
> haywire -- but such a fix is just restoring thing to "normal".
I don't know about that. William Beveridge, father of the British welfare state and a liberal (in fact, a Liberal), believed that the goal of an economic policy was to achieve continual full employment, defined as more job vacancies than unemployed. In my opinion, any conception of capitalism is stupid if it can depict that state of affairs as just a slight tweaking of capitalism. (But oh, the value production!) I'm talking more about mainstream contemporary American liberal ideology - Obama/Clinton/Center for Am. Progress, whatnot.
> speaking of, I went perusing bookshelves and spied Charles Lindblom's
> Politics and Markets, which I'd been tempted to drag off the shelf in
> response to SAs tant-elemics about central planning v. markets. Which
> I'd wanted to get because I found it rather annoying that central
> planning languauge, which Lindblom avoided (as did C.B. MacPherson in
> _The Real World Of Democracy), does such a cute job of ignoring
> _politics_ at work in planned economies -- politics for good or ill.
Did I imply there's no politics in a planned economy? I surely didn't mean to.
> As MacPherson argues, what's being talked about is non-liberal
> democracies -- and not necessarily non-democratic states.
"What's talked about" by whom? What are you referring to?
> Which is also why Lindblom refuses to call it Politics and Markets --
> to emphasize the politics that take place in both systems and to
> refuse to cater to the rightist language.
I thought he did call it Politics and Markets. You mean Politics Versus Markets?
SA