The Diane Rehm Show

You really got to wonder sometimes, Harvard or take your pick of any Ivy League school or any university for that matter that produce the likes of Michael Sandal. Socialism is one of those things that looks good on paper or in a fanciful mind experiment but has been proved to never work, yet here it is again all spit shined and polished. If socialism couldn't work when virtue and a strong work ethic were the norm, except for liberal lemmings, who thinks it could possibly work in these times of laziness, personal irresponsibility and decadence. Come to think of it, the aforementioned laziness, personal irresponsibility and decadence, are the product of our own dalliances with socialism, wealth redistribution and the welfare state.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

“Economists say, if you clearcut the forests and put the money in the bank, you could make 6 or 7 percent. If you cut down the forests and put it into Malaysia or Papua New Guinea, you could make 30 or 40 percent. So, who cares whether you keep the forest, cut it down and put the money somewhere else! When those
forests are gone, put it in fish; when the fish are gone, put it in computers. Money doesn’t stand for anything, and money now grows faster than the real world.
“Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world, it is destructive.”

~David Suzuki~

partisan politics on November 27, 2012 @ 10:12 am wrote: “You really got to wonder sometimes, . . . .”

I wonder on what basis you declare this author advocates Socialism? Did you read the book (or even the excerpt posted on this page)? I know you haven’t heard the show - yet. So, is your opinion based on fact and reason, or is it just a typical knee-jerk, brain dead, conservative reaction to any suggestion that the “pure, perfect, sacred, and holy” marketplace shouldn’t necessarily control everything in our lives?

Consider this quote from page 3 of the excerpt, and tell us what about it strikes you as “Socialist”?

As the cold war ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity.

And before you answer consider this: long ago one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices (Cardozo) warned against relying solely on “the morals of the marketplace”. He was no “Socialist”.

There are numerous examples of things we don’t allow to be “bought or sold”, to be subject to the marketplace. Slavery (mentioned in the excerpt) is one example. Prostitution is another. We don’t allow contract killing, blackmail, extortion, fraud, arson for profit, selling of body parts or organs. Are laws against these things “Socialist”? Was Lincoln nothing but a “dirty Commie”?

So, pray tell me on what basis you level that charge of Socialism? I expect you to evade and avoid this question, and simply respond (if at all) with the mindless and empty ideological rhetoric that is your stock in trade. But I hope you’ll disappoint me, for once.

Over-population and human nature, of course, are never seen as factors by those who always have all the answers to any problem.

Greed, wishful thinking, and delusion trump all. Money is god in the New World.

Etaoin Shrdlu wrote: "I wonder on what basis you declare this author advocates Socialism?"

I read off site book reviews and other commentary.

You ignore the fact that there is an on going effort to call socialism by anything other than socialism. People that believe in it know the Soviet Union and Marxist connection and do everything they can to distance their beliefs and desires from it. You are of this ilk.

The problem with capitalism is that money is a contract that we treat as a commodity. An IOU for an ounce of gold, or whatever, is a contract. The value of a contract is largely determined by faith in the system supporting it, while the value of a commodity is determined by supply and demand. Banks manufacture money by issuing debt. Since there is an endless demand for money, regulation of supply has been allowed to deteriorate to the point there is enormous amounts of unsustainable debt, along with a large bubble of structured debt and derivatives, far exceeding the value of the entire economy. If people began to understand and treat money as the contract it is, they would appreciate it as a value that can only be sustained within logical limits and not try converting any tangible value into currency. This would mean keeping and storing value in the environment and social relations, rather than in a corruptible banking system.

A great topic. But I wonder what's the difference between a woman selling her forehead which is weird but done, and woman selling her body. Why is prostitution wrong but these other things are accepted?

Diane:

I serve on an Institutional Review Board with the National Institutes of Health. We are the watchdogs for the protection of human subjects. We operate under 45 Code of Federal Regulations 46. When a subject is to be compensated for participation in an experiment we have to make sure that the amount offered is not coercive.

The Health and Human Services regulations state that “An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence” (45 CFR 46.116).

Kate Reed

Mr. Sandel seems to use "market" without attention to the differences in kinds of markets. What would he say to the suggestion that the matter of "freedom" depends upon the relative strength of the players in the market. Over the course of the last half-century, the major players have become huge corporations, far outsizing the sellers and buyers we used to think of as coming to a marketplace. Has the strength of this supersized corporate form warped the way markets work, and the role they play in what he's calling a "market society"?

By paying children to read a book or clean their room, only encourages the child to do something for money. They learn that money is important and not the work. This in my opinion is where greed begins.

"What's for sale" isn't just doughnuts.
Money has social power. So we've gone from doughnuts to the source of most of the world's problems: The buying of governments, exploitation of labor and environment, the rewriting of the rules for the benefit of the few, the loss of civic attitude, the buying of our media and even opinions.
These things diminish us as people, they're unsustainable, and it's good to see people increasingly thinking about this.

I personally feel that our freedom from advertisers and overbearing commercialism by the corporate world is not protected by the 4th amendment (more in line with the topic of your last guest this morning). My question for Michael Sandel is: can money buy us privacy enough to guard against being tracked endlessly by marketing groups? If so, how much is privacy worth and where do we sign up for the privilege?

This is JD Phillips, the author of The Firewall Sedition, a novel about Firewall Economics...the idea that markets should be restricted from dealing in necessities. That is the best way to draw the line. If you can't refuse to but it, then it should not be exposed to the profit motive. He used the term desperate necessity. I like that. It's a perfect description.

I'd encourage some of you (libertarians) to take a look at the book Parenting with Dignity by Mac Bledsoe.

Motivation by money, in my opinion, is intellectually lazy. There are better methods of motivating kids to do chores and other things.