I think the unwillingness to admit to socialism is more of an American thing: here in Oz, we don’t have the same cultural terror of socialism, not having had our bejeezus scared out of us during the Cold War (duck ‘n’ cover, anyone?). Goodness, there’s even a Communist Party here, or at least there was.

And if you look at trusty Wikipedia’s List of Australian political parties, you’ll see that we have a reasonable diversity of parties, including some minorities in parliament. One of our two major parties, Labor, has roots in the trade union movement and is ostensibly social democratic, although they’ve strayed a bit in recent years. Our other major party, currently in government using a coalition with the Country Bumpkins Party, is the Liberal Party, which is probably an equivalent of the Democrats (or was, until John Bastard Howard took the reins).

My favourites, though, are the Greens (we have four Greens senators at the moment), for their politics and their honesty, and the triumvirate of The Sun-Ripened Warm Tomato Party, The Surprise Party, and the Party! Party! Party! Party. Homage to Monty Python and all that.

Sadly, I am many, many years out of date. Alas, I still even say “groovy” in a non-ironic fashion. And, old as I am, I was still in diapers the last time it was possible to say “groovy” without sounding like a fool.

But I still think most of the folks around here are probably closer to socialists than democrats – they just don’t know it.

Has anyone else noted the confluence of authoritarianism and their need to give themselves manly, ever so studly site names like “powerline”? Can it get any more Freudian than that? Crap, it’s probably already been discussed to death here and I missed it.
Please resume intelligent conversation about changing the legal status of corporations…

Hey, I resemble that remark!

I used to be a Sensible Liberal (read: Eisenhower Republican). Bush 41 & 43 have radicalized me. I would love to be a Sensible Liberal again, but first we have a kleptocracy to break. If that means overcompensating to the leftward, so be it.

We can always privatize the oil companies after they have been defanged and set on a course of producing energy from new sources, not just militarizing the oil zero-sum game. These companies owe their legal status to the government, and when they corrupt the government and and promote war, they lose any moral right to exist as independent, privately held entities.

Got news for you, Jillian: (1), the Political Compass puts me way, waaaaaaay down in the lower left quadrant, making me a loony libertarian lefty, and (2), I’m not a brother.

In fact, here‘s what Wikipedia has to say about me in a previous incarnation. Myself and the slave are both, of course, female.

The Fourteenth Amendment, from which we derive our right to due process and under which the states (as well as the federal government) are bound to recognize people’s rights, was ratified in 1868. The purpose of the amendment was, in theory, supposed to be to make sure that the defeated Confederate states could be compelled to recognize the rights of their newly freed black citizens. The idea was supposed to be that if, for example, Alabama refused to grant a black man a free and impartial trial by a jury of his peers, he could then (upon conviction) have a clear and easy appellate case.

Of course, if you are surprised by the fact that it didn’t work out that way, I’d like to talk to you about this great bridge in New York that I have for sale….

In the twenty years between the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the end of the nineteenth century, about 90% of all cases that invoked the 14th to make it to the Supreme Court involved these newly created “corporate persons” bitching up a storm that some state had denied them their rights under the Constitution. What the African-American citizens got, instead, was not recognition of their rights, but Plessy v. Ferguson.

There’s a whole confluence of historical events that conspired to come together at just the right time to make this possible – the rise of powerful, wealthy corporations caused by the Civil War (the “military-industrial complex” is way, way older than Eisenhower), the federal involvement in the railroads leading to a series of land booms and a lot of federal legal cases over property rights (railroad easements), these legal cases leading to the creation of a new class of super-lawyer – the railroad lawyer, the rise of these railroad lawyers through the judiciary to the Supreme Court, the restructuring of certain state laws that allowed for the creation of trust holding companies, which created new kinds of corporate structures that had never been legally allowed to exist before……it’s really a perfect storm. Perhaps “perfect shistorm” is a better descriptor.

It’s a complicated story, but it’s worth the time to suss out as much on it as you can, because you can’t really grasp the magnitude of our current mess without taking some time to dig into the roots.

And if you find you sort of like the idea about getting rid of non worker-owners, I got some bad news for you, brother…..you’re about this close to being a socialist.

Once again proof that marketing is an attempt to disprove the old saw about how you really can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

On a lighter note, just in case my post does turn up, how’s this?

Honestly, the things one finds by googling “map of tasmania” + pubic hair…

A different brad, the sizeable islands off the coast of Australlia are currently being used to store unwanted refugees (sorry, sorry: asylum-seekers). Except for Tasmania, which is being used by Tasmanians. If you want that, you’ll have to fight them for it, and then you’ll have to come to terms with living on an island shaped like a thatch of pubic hair.

Mind you, Tassie is one of the few islands around Oz that’ll be above sea level in a few years, so it’s got that going for it. But it may soon be inundated by hordes of desperate mainlanders escaping the drought.

And I so hope that the preview is not a fair representation of what will show up on the page, because on checking, I found this as my first sentence:
Jillian, your comments about worker-owned businesses is right on the mark, and reminded me of what happened in pubic hair

Actually, isn’t that the definition of sociology?

The mealy-mouthed glibertarians and other sociopaths know better than to run around babbling “Crackpot ideas succeed in sociology, therefore I want to put limits on sociology”. They’ve done a pretty good job of turning the noun “politics” into an obscenity, and now they’re trying to dress up their favorite schemes for taking power away from other people to enhance their own lives as “limiting politics”.

It’s the same scam, on a larger scale, as the people who say they want to outlaw “pornography” because pornographers hurt women and violate little children, and if you don’t think filth like The Vagina Monologues and anything by Oscar Wilde should be banned, you’re no better than the other baby-diddlers, are you. Kiddy porn is disgusting and political measures can be just as vile, but anyone who talks about “banning porn” or “limiting politics” is hiding an agenda that a sensible adult doesn’t want to be associated with.

Politics is what happens, sociology describes/documents it.

And here I was thinking I might use Yahoo! Pipes to create a feed for the Tabarrok/Cowen site that scraped off the Cowen stuff like I do my boots when I leave the barn. After this, I don’t think I will.

I just don’t get how these people survive to adulthood without getting just a tiny insight into how the world we live in differs from the cardboard cutouts of Ayn Rand’s imagination.

Just sayin.

By the way, Xenos’ comments are brilliant. It’s time to start opening, or in some cases reopening, a lot of debates in this country, including whether corporations should be legally treated as people (if the answer is yes, it should be yes with substantially more limits than exist now), and whether we should directly elect the president (yes) and elect at least the head, if not the board members, of the Federal Reserve (also yes).

“Politics” is how people in groups larger than around five interact with other people.

Actually, isn’t that the definition of sociology?

</pedantic>

And *I* want to put limits on weight gain, therefore I am going to outlaw calories. Because if it weren’t for calories, nobody would gain weight, right?

“Politics” is how people in groups larger than around five interact with other people. Claiming that you can take “politics” out of the equation is either dishonest or silly, and I doubt you want to be called silly.

Diffbrad. Let’s work this. I’m an old fat longhair guy with a kind of a rumpled “worldly” sensibility. Or maybe “world-weary”. Even.

I could be our “messiah”. I wouldn’t say a lot, just your occasional non-sequiter that would sound “deep” and “primal” to our young acolytes. You’d be our high priest, “interpreting” my words for the cult to absorb and live out. We’d get high, get laid, get laid again, and hold some rituals that we’d laugh our asses off developing. Eventually NBC would do a report on all the good works we’re doing in NY. They somebody would ask about where all the cash went and we’d hightail it for some Caribbean paradise. Five years, in and out.

Set for life.

Whaddaya say?

mikey

Alas, poor Baltimore, poor Baltimorons. Oh, the humanity.