A sample of Utopian leftist thought today: Part I, Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists
Utopia for Realists. If that book title sounds like an oxymoron, it certainly doesn’t to its author Rutger Bregman:
Imagining utopia, writes Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, “isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our minds.”
Sounds a bit like Marianne Williamson recast as a more policy-oriented semi-intellectual. I say “semi” because I expected that, when I looked him up, he’d be an academic of some sort, but he’s not, although he got a Master’s in history. Bregman’s a prizewinning Dutch journalist and author, and he’s thirty-one years old. And he was even younger—twenty-seven—when the book came out.
And yet he’s regarded by a great many people as a deep and important thinker/philosopher. It’s certainly possible at that age—there have been some—but I don’t think it’s likely. The Vox interview has so many errors of judgement that I was thinking of fisking it line by line, but that endeavor made me weary. So I’ll just take one especially fascinating paragraph from a different interview with Bregman that I found, and let that stand for the whole.
I’m not sure when this interview with Bregman (and many others) happened because I can’t find a date. But it was probably some time after Utopia for Realists was published:
Rutger: Income is associated with working, right? And we have — most people — still have a very narrow definition of work. And it might be hard to change that. Now, if you were to use a word like social dividend, or I don’t know social grant, or dividend of progress, or whatever, then most people would understand that this doesn’t have to do anything with working. That’svery important, you know, the way [people] perceive the money. They should really perceive it as a right — not as a favor — it’s their right, you know?. Just like the freedom is a right, freedom of association is a right, and maybe a very promising way to do that is to do with with a carbon tax…So the idea would be to introduce a carbon tax and to give the money to the people — I think that could be a very promising way forwards. And it’s also a way to get around the pretty difficult, strategical or political issue of how people will perceive this money. And maybe income isn’t the right word, maybe we should use the word dividend — social dividend.
Hey, let’s call it a salary! A salary for living! Let’s call it macaroni!
Semantic smoke and mirrors. If you call it the right thing, they will come. Change the label and people will accept it. So according to Bregman, it seems that not only do rights not come from the deity, they can be newly created by words cleverly chosen so that the people will accept them.
[Part II coming tomorrow.]
Erase the past, “unlock the future”.
Translation: Be ignorant, stay ignorant! Join me! It’ll be great if we do this together!
I prefer Eugene Lyons book “Assignment in Utopia”. Lyons was a great believer in the socialist (Communist) utopia until he spent some time in the USSR in the 1930s. At first Lyons refused to believe what he witnessed but eventually he could not deny reality.
To the leftist mind (moral nihilists in an objective sense) , moral principles are somehow arbitrary “inventions”; or mere cultural happenstances conditioned by the local environment; not, discoveries and inferences deduced from some universal human telos.
Hence their never-ending references to special creativity and world-shaping powers which they credit their own minds possessing in unique abundance.
You don’t need, they reckon, to have any experience in actually producing sound material goods with utility, or exchange value; you don’t have to have any experience or knowledge of how a healthy human being grows or develops normally in order to proscribe or command. All you have to have is an imagination like theirs, and a desire and a conviction that reality must be conformed to your imagination.
The world and all in it, are after all, your playthings to be cherished or dismissed based solely on your inchoate, free of justification, and never deeply analyzed feelings — Sacred feelings, arising in the service of we know not what, or why, … except that it is progress and holy. Yeah, evolution, or destiny or something like that maybe …
What these people (commie utopians) don’t get is that the government has no money. It’s money comes out of the pockets of the citizens. The more they take from the citizens, the poorer the citizens become. A carbon tax raises the cost of energy, which cost comes out of the citizens’ pockets. Processing it through the government means redistribution of the citizens’ money – less a fee for the government’s service in doing the redistribution. It is worse than a zero sum game because the amount the government takes off the top is wasted on paying a non-wealth creating entity – the government.
But the commie utopians exclaim that the Federal Government can print money. Yep. But only to a point that is in line with the wealth creating capacity of the nation. If money printing was the path to economic success, Venezuela and Zimbabwe would be wealthy countries.
The only path to economic success is to promote wealth creation that promotes job creation. A job for every self reliant citizen to be able to live a middle class life is the only economic utopia available to humans until someone discovers a way to change human nature.
I bet this guy was an “extraordinary child.” He precociously repeated and/or paraphrased things he heard his adults saying and was rewarded and promoted for it by these same adults. Now he has to make it in the real world and all he’s got is the same old same old dreary collectivist drivel dressed up in new words which, in itself, is just the same old thing they’ve always done.
You may assert you have the right to money, but money only has value if there is stuff to buy. That stuff, to the left, is magically created by the kind of people they wouldn’t want their sister to marry.
Great Courses DvD, “Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century”. Expensive, but I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Oddly enough, I am not entirely opposed to this concept, but only if we eliminated ALL other aid, grants, and welfare programs along with their associated bureaucracy. Plus, it would have to be paid to every citizen without any needs requirements. Whatever else you earn is yours to improve your standard of living above that minimum.
I think most people would choose to work instead just living off the Dividend, and I think that a stigma against living solely off the dividend would develop.
I suspect that it could be done with a net savings to the taxpayers over what we are doing now.
J. J. said “Venezuela and Zimbabwe would be wealthy countries.”
Well, everybody in Zimbabwe was a millionaire thereby demonstrating that Communism was a great success. See for yourself.
https://zimbabwedollars.net/
I call attention to this politico-economic analysis by Sundance, linked below, which makes a lot of sense to me.
It explains why, for instance, in the midst of a generally roaring economy, we are—all of a sudden—starting to see talk coming from seemingly every economically oriented talker out there about the coming “recession,” and how the Democrats and their economic allies on Wall Street and in Big Business are quite willing to tank the economy—with all the misery that will cause for ordinary Americans—if such a sharp economic downturn will result in Trump losing the 2020 election.
This sudden appearance of widespread talk of “recession” is the opening gun of their campaign of sabotage.
Gee,I wonder why, all of a sudden, everyone is talking about “recession,” its almost like they all got together somehow, and decided on a common agenda and the talking point to go along with it, everyone got the memo, and started to spout.
See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/16/politics-to-support-wall-street-multinationals-democrats-plan-to-block-trump-trade-reset/#more-168409
Your readers might be interested in this modern-day Eutopia (from the Greek Eu, good + topos, place; hence “good place”). A Eutopia differs from a Utopia (“no place”) in being a possible as opposed to an impossible ideal, given the existing state of a society’s political, economic, and technological development.
https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07TMMLDNF&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_LZZvDbW5GR5A3
J.J. on August 16, 2019 at 2:01 pm said:
What these people (commie utopians) don’t get is that the government has no money. It’s money comes out of the pockets of the citizens.
* * *
How do you know you’re talking to a Leftist / Democrat / Progressive?
They don’t understand Economics 101.
A picture is always worth 1000 words, and this is a BOGO event.
https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/08/Screen-Shot-2019-07-31-at-1.32.49-PM.png?w=1002&ssl=1
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3e9a0f589d008e618b49a17b23de18dbe37bed66ff7392063fcfa41afdaf1078.jpg
Don’t we all have a right to live in a big comfortable house with a swimming pool and a home theater with a 99″ plasma screen? (I could go on, but let’s not be greedy….)
Steven Hayward earlier this month:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/axioms-and-animadversions-3.php
Ray: 🙂
Snow on Pine: The yield curve is inverted. That’s a sign of a possible recession looming. Yes., the Dems are hyping it in hopes they can bring Trump down. But the Fed has started cutting rates to get the curve back to normal. The rest of the world is slowing economically. Can we avoid it? Trump will do his best to keep things moving upward. We can bet on that.
AesopFan: 🙂
Cargo cult. Build the fake plane (or name the fake “dividend”) and prosperity will result. As always, it just shows a profound lack of understanding of the system they want to replicate. But at least the islanders who tried it presumably figured out pretty quickly that the wooden plane did not, in fact, summon the gods; the people who insist on renaming handouts and safety nets as “fundamental human rights” and “dividends” and “social credit” (the old “social credit,” from Heinlein’s silly salad days back when he was campaigning for socialists, not the Chinese version) still believe that the prosperity is coming if they just pray hard enough, it seems.
In addition to my comment above, I am totally against a Carbon Tax. What an ill conceived monstrosity that would be!
My preference for the raising of government revenues is the VAT tax. VAT taxes have a number of advantages for me:
– It is relatively simple to administer.
– It is very difficult to avoid paying.
– It taxes consumption instead of production.
– It can’t be “tweaked” for the purpose of social engineering.
As Jamie noted, Bregman may have cribbed this from Heinlein’s novel, “Beyond this Horizon”. He later regretted and repented many of the views expressed in that book.
Still, as human productivity and automation increases and the amount of work required for basic survival decreases, a system such as Basic Universal Income may one day make sense. To me, the attraction is eliminating the vast and intrusive bureaucracy of the welfare system.
Roy Nathanson: “VAT taxes have a number of advantages for me:
– It is relatively simple to administer.
– It is very difficult to avoid paying.
– It taxes consumption instead of production.
– It can’t be “tweaked” for the purpose of social engineering.”
Simple to administer. Yes.
Difficult to avoid paying. Yes.
It taxes consumption instead of production. Yes, but therein lies the problem. Humans react to financial incentives pretty quickly. Since the VAT is paid only at the first point of sale, it incentivizes people to buy used (autos, houses, appliances, tools, all durable goods) whenever possible. Soon, the demand for new products falls (What demand remains is mainly fueled by the wealthy.) and production decreases accordingly. VAT taxes are major drags on the economies of Europe, Canada, Australia , and New Zealand.
It can’t be tweaked for the purpose of social engineering. Don’t know about that. There is no form of tax that can’t be used by determined governments to do social engineering. In fact the VAT’s affect is to discourage consumption. Is that not itself a form of social engineering? Without the VAT, (And the U.S. paying for the lion’s share of NATO’s costs) Europe could not have done the social engineering they have embarked on since WWII.
All taxes are bad. But if we are to have government, some are necessary. The more transparent and simple they are the better. Our present tax systems are not simple or very transparent, though Trump took a small step in that direction with his tax cut. The VAT is a disguised sales tax, but is much more deceptive because it is disguised in the price of the goods.
J.J.,
Is it not wasteful of resources to produce new goods, when the old ones are still serviceable?
VAT (everywhere I have seen it) is added to the price paid by the buyer, just like a sales tax. The receipt shows the VAT tax paid. The difference is that in a sales tax, the same item is taxed at each step in the supply chain. With a VAT, businesses deduct all of the VAT tax they paid to produce the goods or services and pay only the tax on the “value added”. At the end of the chain, the tax is paid by the final consumer and the total price of the good or service is only taxed once.
In theory, if it was the only source of revenue, the VAT rate would be the percentage of GDP consumed by the government.
What the government doesn’t like about this concept is that they would be unable to disguise the percentage of GDP that they consume.
Roy Nathanson: “Is it not wasteful of resources to produce new goods, when the old ones are still serviceable?”
How about houses? One of the few areas of inflation in this country is in housing prices. We aren’t producing enough new houses to satisfy the demand. A big reason for this is that governments at all levels have made it more difficult and expensive to build new houses. In Washington state we have a “Growth Management Act,” the purpose of which is to slow down home building and other development. As a result, housing is in short supply and prices are through the roof. The government will not allow builders to build manufactured homes set on foundations (About 50% cheaper than site built homes. and now better built than most stick built homes.) because it would result in faster growth of housing stocks, which they are dead set against.
The two other major areas of inflation in our economy are higher education (Too much money (student loans) chasing enrollments that are rationed out through byzantine admissions policies.) and healthcare. ( Government meddling at all levels of the process, which drives supply down and demand up.)
We have little inflation in manufactured goods, services, and commodities because the supply of most everything meets or exceeds demand. And that’s a good thing.
J.J.
No argument at all on your last comments. In my medium sized town, federal and state governments are preventing us from expanding our city limits even though we have a housing shortage. The result is an artificial increase in both housing costs and rents.
Political power and decision making needs to be decentralized.
Carbon tax, income tax, value-added tax; even land value tax (my favorite) or wealth tax. Who pays how much in taxes is a big part of politics. We could use more honest reporting about it. All have some bad unintended consequences.
Roy’s partial support of Universal Basic Income, to replace all other gov’t programs, is so stupidly naïve as qualify to be a Lenin labeled “useful idiot”. Most need-based gov’t programs are NOT going away, even with UBI, even if politicians promise they will go away. Just like VAT would NOT end the income tax or any other tax.
But the real key is the difference between a “right” and a “civilization benefit”. Lots of tax-funded benefits are civilization based, and should be called that. Venezuela’s “democratic socialism” is destroying its benefits system — and disproving the Hugo Chavez supported idea that free money is a “right”.
The policy we need is a gov’t supported Job Guarantee — so everybody willing to work is told what to do for 8 hrs a day. Thereby EARNING an income. The Big Lie of the socialists, so attractive to useful idiot professors, is that money income can and should be separated from work and earning.
No society can give a person self-respect. Each of us has to earn it themselves. Most of us need a good amount in order to get and keep a job — but doing the jobs allow us to keep earning that self respect, as well as producing the goods and services. Bregman fails to see the connection, fails to see reality.
Tom G.
That is a little harsh…
Just because I think something might be an idea worth pursuing doesn’t mean I believe that it will happen.
I do think that taxing income is bad policy and I think that funding government with a VAT tax is a better policy. Unfortunately, I don’t see any possibility of that happening. Stating my opinion in the matter doesn’t make me naive.
This is what ancient idolatry and polytheism must have been like. Money comes from the gods, who must be appeased by appropriate levels of slavishness to wokedom.
Luke Lea- the same Luke Lea who posted comments in favor of Chavista Venezuela?
His Good Place winds up being very much like The Good Place…
https://www.nbc.com/the-good-place
J.J.,
Is it not wasteful of resources to produce new goods, when the old ones are still serviceable?
This depends entirely on a number of things:
1) define “serviceable”. Is a functioning toaster that is “grody” and would cost me one labor-hour “better” than a nice brand-new toaster that costs me 1.5 labor-hours?
2) is a good which exactly suits my current needs/wants “better” than an existing one that offers 80% of them? At what price differential?
3) is a 1998 Toyota Corolla better than a 2015 Toyota Corolla?
https://youtu.be/xidhx_f-ouU
There’s no commentary (i was looking for a similar vid w/ commentary), but the engine in the 1998 gets rammed into the passenger compartment (notice the massive dashboard displacement in the 1998 interior shots)… The 2015’s does not. Newer cars have vastly better survivability.
The point, is, mere sunken value is not the only valid metric to be used. You are correct, it should be considered, but is not even the dominant decision factor.
“…So according to Bregman, it seems that not only do rights not come from the deity…”
You profess faith in owing what we have to a god. Bregman believes such rights are bestowed upon the people as a group, by the government.
Very flawed and narrow views on both sides
The economic ignorance is astounding.
“Income is associated with working, right? And we have — most people — still have a very narrow definition of work.”
Duh. Why is income associated with working? Because working produces value. Value is where income comes from. Disconnect the income from the effort that produces the value and guess what happens? People stop putting in the effort to produce the value.
What does that look like in practical terms?
Venezuela