Intentionalism

Any philosophy or ideology worth its salt should bring something new to the table, I suppose. But that's not what I'm going to do.

I'm going to create a sort of position, and I'm going to call it "Intentionalism". I almost hate to give it a name, because its nothing new, and I don't want more attached to it than what I mean. Its less a new position, than it is just a common sense, factual way to look at the world. But what I want to do is deflate some of the wrong headed ideologies which today guide our culture. You might call my position an anti-objectivist position, because that seems to be a major guiding ideology of our day, and people largely take its tenants as factual or common sensical when they are neither. Because I'm using my argument as a set of arguments against Objectivism and the Market-Fundamentalism that goes hand in hand with it, and I want it to carry a certain kind of weight, I am naming it. (Though I wish I had the rhetorical talents to Rand-like have it namelessly take over Western consciousness.)

Intentionalism has as its major premise the following: When we are talking about human activity, things happen primarily because of somebody's action, and the efficacy of the action largely has to do with the intent of the action.

Now, when I say 'intent', I am using it in a fairly specific way, and that should be clear from the outset. I know I'm going to have to repeat this over and over, because it is easy for people to abuse meanings of words to dispel beliefs or to put them in a light where they can be disregarded.

For instance, somebody could cheaply pick apart my position by using the word intent in a negative way. So for instance, I could say, "I intended to practice the piano yesterday, but I never got around to it." That's one way people use the word intend. However, we also use the word to blame somebody: "He broke my dolly intentionally!" Or we might use the word as a sort of emphasizer: "He practiced with great intent (or intention)."

Now, the way we used intent in the last two sentences above is really almost the opposite of the way we used it in the first. Its still a noun and has the same denotative meaning for the most part, but the connotation is completely different. So we could even say something like, "That law had good intentions, but no intent," and it might not be clear precisely what we mean, but we wouldn't immediately think that it is contradictory.

When I'm talking about things being done well, it is because somebody put their body and soul into the operation. They thought their actions through; they've put great effort and care into it. They've done what they've done with a great deal of intention. They have done it intentionally. This is the sort of thing I am talking about with Intentionalism. Good things are not achieved by accident. A person does not get good at golf because somebody else is. That person puts their mind to getting good, and by and large, how much they invest in the endeavor will determine their results. Yes, a person might put their whole selves into playing golf and never be as good as Tiger Woods, but they will certainly be a great deal better themselves than they would have if they had gone after it half-assed or not at all.

Now, I have not said anything new, or novel yet. And, in fact, I haven't gotten into why my position is anti-Objectivist. Really, what I have said, and what I will continue to say, is not really inconsistent with Objectivism, but I think that it is something that is not used evenly across the board, and thus we have people putting undue emphasis on things like competition; they say, with great conviction, that we cannot trust any human action to be good unless it has that element of competition with it. Even if people do not verbalize that argument, it has become socially ingrained in us. My hope is, with logic, historical evidence, and even some good myth making, to eventually lay the groundwork for removing that damaging mode of belief.

Another Corporate Note

Yes, everybody rails against 'evil' corporations, and so do I. And here are some good reasons that you should, too, especially if you're a 'market fundamentalist', Tea Partier, or Libertarian.

Corporations are political entities. They are ultimately created by the state and given certain rights and privileges above and beyond normal citizens. If you think the government shouldn't be involved in the market, this should already be enough. How else does their special status effect the market? Well, by and large, mostly because they have limited liability. Shareholders and corporate managers cannot be held responsible for damages done by corporate activity. The most an investor could ever lose is his original investment; he or she is not liable for damages beyond that, regardless of how much money they have made in the intermediary. So much of what market fundamentalists argue about concerns moral hazard; well, even if you don't insulate the corporation from bankruptcy, fines, or whatever, if you don't also punish the management and the shareholders, you're maintaining that moral hazard.

Big corporations are big. This is bad. Why is it bad? Because they create faction. Because they have enough power to manipulate the government and bend it toward their own ends. This impacts both the marketplace and our control over our own government. So big corporations are not only dangerous to the market, but also to us.

Big business also skews what we mean by competition. Without actually being better, or more efficient, they can move into a local economy and dominate it simply based on the fact that they are big. They can undercut prices easily since they can absorb losses with their larger network; most people think this just makes their model superior, but this is like saying John is a better boxer than Peter, where Peter is a featherweight and John is ten heavyweights. It warps what we mean by fair competition.

Enough, this will get better over time.

California/Texas Exodus

There have been a lot of articles like this one recently. All this emphasis put on business growth while ignoring everything else.

We are importing workers with our jobs, therefore existing citizens don't necessarily have an advantage. We have been growing gang busters for decades, but our state is still broke. Income inequality gets worse. Air gets worse. Water gets worse. Traffic gets worse. Public schools get worse. The impoverished bear the brunt of growth because they must move further away from their jobs due to sprawl and pay more in gas or bus fare to get where they're going while their wages do not grow and cost of living rises.

Growth is not black and white; I don't see that its really a good thing just as a brute fact. Good growth is good, bad is bad, just as good policy is good and bad policy is bad. Maybe it's too hard to open a Carl's Jr. in Cali, or maybe there are too many Carl's Jr's there. Maybe it's too hard to build, or maybe there are too many buildings there. Maybe environmental policy is too harsh, or maybe the environment has already suffered enough.

If California's economy is weak, then perhaps it is because they have relied too much on constant growth in the past to fuel their economy. Perhaps what we will see developing out of their folly will be a more sustainable model; although considering they're looking at us Texans for ideas, I highly doubt that, since we're just going down the same path that they have already trodden.

Trickle Up Economics

I haven't heard any talk anywhere from anybody on this, but that's not to say its not out there. Certainly we haven't brought it up in this forum, so I will now.

Why not raise minimum wage?

I can hear the shrill cry that this will kill business, but I don't see why that should be, particularly since during this economic hullabaloo, big business has been setting record profits. But this hasn't benefited your average American.

Your minimum wage earners are the folks who are going to spend more money if they have it. They'll buy more goods, they'll be able to potentially buy better goods and services than they do now, meaning, ideally, more locally produced, long lasting goods. They might even gain enough of a level of sustainable reprieve from the stress of constantly living paycheck to paycheck to improve themselves or, who knows, dabble in entrepreneurship.

I think we've largely agreed that there is too much money pooling at the top, and that the trickle down isn't really working. It was just a theory after all; no reason to give it the credence that a fact would have. Over 80% of the cash in this country is tied to the very top tier of income earners (top 2%), so there's plenty of cash to spread around. And politically (to sustain (or recreate) our Republic) and economically, its actually necessary that that capital see movement and dispersal.

And what is more, people never feel quite right about taking 'somebody else's money' and giving it away, because we have this unusual notion that you make what you earn and you earn what you make (in other words, whatever you make is whatever you deserve to make). This is one thing that nobody likes about welfare programs, and something that isn't even good for the people receiving welfare. After all, they will always have that feeling that they are being given something they haven't earned, but which they deserve. Or at least that's the line. So we can get around all the necessity of social welfare programs if we just make sure people are earning enough for the time they spend so they can actually get by in the world. You won't have any complaints about people being given money by our 'communist state' for free, they're just earning what their time is worth and what they need to get by, but they still must 'earn' it. (And yes, I do actually recognize that setting wages is closer to communism than income re-allocation, a fact lost on most Americans, but this is only the 'minimum' wage, not all wages)

If the average household has more money to spend then: more money will be spent in the market place, on better goods, making demand rise, encouraging job growth and the creation of new ways for people to spend their money. (Another aside, I'm not in support of an ever growing economy as it is not sustainable, but that can be treated on later)

Compared to the complications of figuring out who deserves to receive what amount of welfare, how much money you can get back from the government for tax exemptions, medical care, insurance, education cuts, the privatization or publicazation of 'everything', et al., doesn't just raising the minimum wage seem just a little more elegant?

Taxes

Its really looking like if we want to take care of our debt, we need to raise taxes. Our tax burden isn't that bad compared to our taxes historically. One problem is that the super rich are super richer than ever before, but are paying much lower taxes (this is both a tax problem and points to a problem in the market). Another problem, as the first story below points out, is that a lot of people who should be paying taxes don't have to, thanks to a plethora of exemptions and loopholes.

Audio: Tax exemptions and loopholes

A history of tax burden

I sometimes wonder if our problems with taxes have less to do with the loss of money itself, and more to do with A) the stress of filling out paperwork (there are studies on this out there) and/or B) our increasing lack of a feeling of solidarity for the national welfare. After all, we are encouraged by objectivism, very prevalent both in the fore and background today, only to watch out for number one, and for years our presidents have been saying "The business of America is business!" instead of something more idealistic, for instance, "The business of America is Justice" or perhaps even "Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Perhaps if we stressed public spiritedness, we'd be more apt to take direct part in our government and wouldn't feel like it was this alien entity robbing us or hindering our "real" business.

Atheism as Religion

It seems we basically have one sort of atheism alive and well today. That secular humanism which is, for all intents and purposes, basically identical to most popular religions with the exceptions of its cosmology. Perhaps theres less crisis regarding homosexuality, but the trope 'i'm okay, you're okay' morality is still there.

But this is not a discussion on ethics, its aabout atheism...with a capital A. At the core of modern popular atheism is that materialistic belief, if I cannot sense it (or scientifically" intereact with it, it does not exist. Now, an atheist need not subscribe to scientific realism, nor even materialism entirely, but certainly they must (or do, rather) believe that to believe in anything which cannot be demonstrated is stupid. Now, we do have a sort of weak religious belief here, because inhrent in all this is the unspoken rule that if God confronted an atheist, the atheist would be forced to acknowledge God's existence (ignoring the fac tthat the atheist may deem himself insane first.

But that is not the atheism that that interests me. I want a truly religious atheism, one that is not merely cosmologically bound, but morally bound, to ignore God's existence, nay, to deny it, even if that God presents himself. If I knew for certain that God exists, I would still adopt my Atheism in pure defiance; and note that this is not a sort of lazy defiance, or absured refusal to acknowledge that I was wrong about God's existence. No, its a moral imperative which states that i will not be encumbered by moral norms set upon me by another power, no matter how infinite or powerful it might be. In this way, it is a sort of reverse humanism; it shockingly denies an objective or obviously human good in favor of the heroic morality of the individual.

More later

There is no Main Street

We've heard it. We have to keep an eye on Wall Street and Main Street. If you have no local economy, and by that I mean locally owned and operated businesses, then you have no Main Street. Your "Main Street" is tied to Wall Street if it consists only of large, national and/or international business; you cannot hope for it to act like Main Street, cannot expect it to act for the best local interests when it is fettered externally. The masters of your local economy--which means your masters--do not live near you.

They do not care about you.

They care about Wall Street.

There is no Main Street.

Not if there is no locally owned and operated business.