Tuesday, March 20, 2012

A SILLY COLUMNIST CALLED NEIL REYNOLDS WRITES ABOUT CANADA'S NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S SUPPOSED OLD PURPOSE OF ERADICATING CAPITALISM




POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO'S G:LOBE AND MAIL

Never has it been the mission of the NDP to "eradicate capitalism," whatever that portentous phrase is supposed to mean.

Neil Reynolds here displays his ignorance or prejudice, and perhaps both. Certainly he presents a straw-man argument, feeble as virtually all his mental meanderings are.

The NDP is typical of the kind of social democratic parties that we've seen in Europe for many decades: parties committed to easing the huge disparities which just naturally arise under the powerful operations of unregulated capitalism.

Capitalism - in the likely case that Neil Reynolds doesn't understand the meaning of the word - involves the accumulation and concentration of capital in private hands.

It is from this concentration that we get the great investments which make our society richer in material goods over the long term.

Communist societies long ago proved that you dismantle this mechanism at your peril.

But the mechanism is so ruthlessly efficient in pure economic terms that large numbers of less able competitors are left with little, including what humane people regard as basic services.

All genuine social democratic parties represent is sufficient re-distribution through taxes to pay for social programs to prevent the natural outcome of raw, unregulated capitalism which is unarguably a tendency towards Dickensian England or the two-fisted ugliness of the Mafia.

Franklin Roosevelt's government in the United States proved, for any who care to study it, that social democratic measures can actually work to preserve the basic dynamic mechanism capitalism in times of immense stress and impending revolution.