The essential human freedoms don’t change over time, driven by partisan politics. They are a constant basic foundation of our social fabric.
Please don’t forget them.
American Rhetoric: Franklin D. Roosevelt — “The Four Freedoms”
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception — the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
I read an article over on Making Light and it got me to pondering.
What libertarians (and the softheaded quasi-libertarian burghers of science fiction fandom, most of whom think the Economist is a voice of reason) need to learn is that capitalism is never about free markets, or in fact “freedom” of any sort; it’s about using the power of the state in order to make it easy for large amounts of capital to get together and rearrange the rules for its own convenience. “Privatize the profits, socialize the losses” is the logical consequence of capitalism’s prime directive. What we wind up with is socialism for the powerful, and tough shit for everybody else.
“Privatize the profits, socialize losses” seems to be a very apt description of Wall Street Capitalism. Every decade or two we seem to need to learn the lesson all over again. If rules and regulations get set up, the players learn to game the system while continually trying to undermine the regulators – Oh! they’re not needed anymore since we learned that lesson!
But I did start to ponder about the full matrix that the statement creates.
- Privatize profits ——socialize losses
- Socialize profits——socialize losses
- Socialize profits——privatize losses
- Privatize profits——privatize losses
- is straight Wall Street Capitalism
- is probably straight Socialism
- is never going to happen, or is it philanthropy?
- is complete anarchy/ true capitalism
I must continue my pondering.
When I looked earlier at LJ it didn’t have my posts for the past month and wouldn’t let you comment on the LJ test posts. Now they are all there with comments. Boy, Elaine is good. Didn’t even get on the PC and fixed the problem.
My Live Journal postings have been scarce for the past month. This has been because I typically write my posts on eg and let a crossposter put them in my Live Journal (not quite Live Journal) But, Word Press was updated and the crossposter didn’t work for a while. Elaine finally figured how to make it work. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to change the parameter that allows LJ comments to stay on LJ. It looks like for the moment you have to jump over to eg to comment.
Maybe Elaine will figure it out.
Jack
Personally, I think that the folks that say we are in a recession are optimists.
The Thoughts and Luminations of Jack Heneghan
