Why They Fight.

Filibuster Update: The Democrats have offered a compromise whereby three of the seven judicial nominees they find objectionable would get floor votes. Republicans have rejected this offer. As the nation prepares for a showdown over the "nuclear" "Constitutional" "New Ponies For Everyone Option", it's time to stop and consider who these worthies are for whom the Republicans in the Senate are prepared to scrap the filibuster and do battle. And right on cue, Janice Rogers Brown pops up to remind us:

"Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech. (...)

"There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate.

"These are perilous times for people of faith," she said, "not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."

A spokeswoman for the California Supreme Court, Lynn Holton, said no text was available because "it was a talk, not a speech." Brown's office did not dispute the newspaper's account.

The Advocate quoted Brown as lamenting that America had moved away from the religious traditions on which it was founded.

"When we move away from that, we change our whole conception of the most significant idea that America has to offer, which is this idea of human freedom and this notion of liberty," she said.

She added that atheism "handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom…. Freedom then becomes willfulness." "

How nice to learn that a nominee to our courts feels that she is in a war against, among other people, me. But how odd to learn that she feels imperiled as a person of faith. Offhand, I would not have thought that this was a time of great danger for people of faith in general, or for Christians in particular. It's certainly not like the years after the church was founded, when Christians were thrown to the lions and broken in Roman prisons. It's not even like 1960, when it was not clear that a Catholic could be elected President. It's today, when we regularly read stories like this:

"Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.

An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts, in an effort to hinder their work."

But Janice Rogers Brown is used to feeling imperiled at unlikely moments. As I noted in an earlier post, in 2000, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she said:

""There are so few true conservatives left in America that we probably should be included on the endangered species list. That would serve two purposes: Demonstrating the great compassion of our government and relegating us to some remote wetlands habitat where — out of sight and out of mind — we will cease being a dissonance in collectivist concerto of the liberal body politic. In truth, they need not banish us to the gulag. We are not much of a threat, lacking even a coherent language in which to state our premise.""

In the same speech we learn that socialism has triumphed in America:

"Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice — including our freedom. (...) The revolution is over. What started in the 1920's; became manifest in 1937; was consolidated in the 1960's; is now either building to a crescendo or getting ready to end with a whimper."

And:

"I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth"

Those of you who are not lawyers may be wondering why she keeps talking about 1937. The answer: in that year the Supreme Court upheld FDR's New Deal programs. It might not be obvious that this constitutes "the triumph of our own socialist revolution", but as Brown has already told us, "appearances can be deceiving."

So as the Senate leadership prepares to do battle, bear in mind what they are fighting for: the ability to place on the Appellate Court someone who believes that socialism has triumphed in the United States, that four years ago she and conservatives like her were about to be herded off to gulags, that these are dangerous times in which to stand up for the gospel, and that we should roll back jurisprudence to a time when it was thought to be unconstitutional to pass minimum wage laws.

And who also believes that she is a soldier in a war against those of her fellow citizens who, for whatever reason, are not what she would call 'people of faith'. "It's not a shooting war, but it is a war." I do not regard her as my enemy, but apparently she regards me as hers.

Comments

[rilkefan]

Wow, for a moment there I thought everybody had decided to retract what they'd written...

[hilzoy]

Sheesh! I corrected that in the absolute minimum time possible, but I can't get anything by you...

[rilkefan]

Just a timing glitch. Let me tell you about long multi-section cables some day.

Check out Dole's NYTimes op-ed. I keep trying to like him, and I keep finding him shameless.

[rilkefan]

Anyway, who cares about insane federal judges - Bolton may have been using the NSA to spy on Bill Richardson, and the cauldron is coming to a boil...

[hilzoy]

I respected Dole once, but gave up on him sometime during the Swift Boats scandal.

[rilkefan]

Terri Gross made him quite uncomfortable about that the other day.

On the off-chance the Dems need 3rd-grade taunting advice, I suggest the next time that Orin Hatch or whoever says they're racist for opposing Bush's Hispanic judges, they can say At least we didn't spy on them.

Btw, shouldn't you be blogging on the stem-cell article on the front page of the NYT?

[hilzoy]

Yes, but I need to read the whole report first, and for various reasons, most involving a talk at the NIH tomorrow (yikes), I can't.

[Opus]

Terri Gross made him quite uncomfortable about that the other day.

Ooh, do tell! (or give me the minute-marker so I can listen myself) I was so disappointed in him over the Swift Boat nonsense. I'd love to think that he showed some shame about it.

Meanwhile, hilzoy, will you marry me?

[rilkefan]

Minute-marker - well, I was about at Embarcadero and Middlefield, so... Sorry. - Gross just kept calling him on his participation, and he kept making shameless replies (though I thought with some self-consciousness), and after a while he got tired of being interviewed without adulation and awkwardly turned the subject.

[hilzoy]

Opus: but I scarcely know you.

However: How large is your estate? Have you ten thousand pounds a year?

[hilzoy]

And by the way; there's a typo in this post that I've been trying to correct for about an hour, but Typepad is down, so no such luck. In any case: thank heavens, Janice Rogers Brown has only been nominated to the appellate courts.

[rilkefan]

hilzoy, the amount is useless to know without its provenance...

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I was wondering about the Supreme Court thing. :)

[John Thullen]

Opus: You must also return to Sebastian's dating thread, answer the questionnaire in triplicate, read all of the funny comments, then return here to repop the question.

If you have the ten thousand pounds a year, you may marry my wife, which would leave roughly 3333 pounds annually for each of we happy three.

More "War" talk from the delightful, deeply endangered romantics now running the show. I think "Harpers" has a couple of articles this month on members of this crew, including some comments made 25 years ago by a Harvard Divinity school professor predicting awful stuff down the road if Robertson and ilk have their way.

Too tired to fulminate, now.

[Slartibartfast]

If you have the ten thousand pounds a year, you may marry my wife, which would leave roughly 3333 pounds annually for each of we happy three.

I shudder to think of what your BMIs must be.

[CharleyCarp]

Thinking about what it is that the DC Circuit does day in and day out, I have to say I really don't understand why conservatives are so hot to get the woman there. Is she going to be ruling in favor of the government in cases from EPA, FCC, FERC, the Surf Board, and on sentencing? WRT agency appeals, the government's actions are often challenged as beyond the power accorded by statute or Constitution. Justice Brown doesn't sound like she'll be very friendly to the government.

[wilfred]

well said, as usual Hilzoy. What diet of bilge do people like Janice Brown ingest in order to come up with these conclusions/delusions?

[Tad Brennan]

Hmmm--

I don't mean to be disagreeable, but I do want to advocate for clarity here.

When J.R.B. says that the New Deal was an intrusion of socialism into the U.S. system, I think it would be a mistake to respond by saying that she is delusional.

It seems to me that on perfectly cogent and workable definitions, such systems as Soc. Sec. are socialist--not to mention the WPA, CCC, and so on.

Stronger than that--it seems to me that any definitions of "socialism" etc. according to which these did *not* count as socialist institutions would have to be so ad hoc and tendentious as to play no useful analytical role in political theory.

The right response to JRB, then, is not to deny that the US is more socialist after '37 than it was before '37.

The right response is to say that the US now has nearly seventy years of experience with the introduction of limited, piecemeal employment of socialistic programs, and we like some of them just fine.

They have not led to a Bolshevik overthrow. They have not led to the breakdown of public morality. They have saved millions of lives, improved millions of others, and been a damned smart investment in the country's greatest productive assets, its people.

Of equal importance, they have not crept. Those who fear any taint of socialism are often concerned about "creeping socialism"--allow a single piece of child-labor legislation in, and pretty soon they'll be collectivizing the farms. But there has been surprisingly little creep so far. Yes, the Great Society introduced Medicare and Medicaid. Those were further experiments with socialism. And you know what? They are so politically popular, that Bush thought he could win the senior vote by expanding them. (Of course, he screwed up the implementation, so as to conform to D^2's law).

The thing to point out here is that we do have a few socialist institutions in our society. (We have to stop flinching at that word--remember when they made us flinch at the word "liberal"?) But by comparison to other modern first-world democracies, we have fewer than most. By looking around the world, we can see what would happen if we took another step or two down the road: not much, really. Social democratic states are not communist totalitarian states.

In America, our socialist institutions are limited, and present no danger to our republican form of government or our capitalist economy. These institutions are popular, and represent the will of the majority.

JRB's nomenclature is correct, I think. But by opposing the few socialist programs the US has, she is showing how out of touch she is with the electorate. And the constitution-in-exile crowd who want to rescue the US from socialism exactly *because* it is so popular with the voters strike me as fundamentally undemocratic in their outlook--as undemocratic as a bunch of Bolshevik's telling us that we need to be rescued from our love of capitalism against our will.

[Dantheman]

"It seems to me that on perfectly cogent and workable definitions, such systems as Soc. Sec. are socialist--not to mention the WPA, CCC, and so on.

Stronger than that--it seems to me that any definitions of "socialism" etc. according to which these did *not* count as socialist institutions would have to be so ad hoc and tendentious as to play no useful analytical role in political theory."

I'm going to disagree. My dictionary's definition of socialism requires state ownership of the means of production. Social Security, Medicare, etc. are not that.

More importantly, Brown is also saying that this was a revolution. The act of upholding laws enacted by a duly elected Congress and signed into law by a duly elected President don't come close to meeting that standard.

[Edward_]

awesome post hilzoy.

regarding Dole...any stateman who'll flog Viagra will clearly stoop to any sales pitch...his opinion piece in the Times suggests there's still not the much blood reaching his brain.

[Ken]

"The right response is to say that the US now has nearly seventy years of experience with the introduction of limited, piecemeal employment of socialistic programs, and we like some of them just fine.

They have not led to a Bolshevik overthrow. They have not led to the breakdown of public morality. They have saved millions of lives, improved millions of others, and been a damned smart investment in the country's greatest productive assets, its people."

Saved millions of lives how, exactly?

(Just to make up for the FDA, the other socialist institutions would have had to work freaking miracles just to break even in terms of lives lost/saved...)

We can't even clearly see the wonders that we're missing out on due to the fact that so much of our industry has to play endless rounds of Mother May I before introducing anything new, or because regulatory agencies routinely suppress upstart competitors as a way of "protecting" consumers. We can't see the lives that would have been saved by medicines that don't exist, for instance.

So, you can't just wave your hands and talk about "millions of lives saved" and expect us to believe that just on your say-so.

"Of equal importance, they have not crept. Those who fear any taint of socialism are often concerned about "creeping socialism"--allow a single piece of child-labor legislation in, and pretty soon they'll be collectivizing the farms. But there has been surprisingly little creep so far. Yes, the Great Society introduced Medicare and Medicaid. Those were further experiments with socialism. And you know what? They are so politically popular, that Bush thought he could win the senior vote by expanding them."

Yeah, but they'll keep getting more and more and more expensive, apparently without limit. The creeping isn't nearly done yet.

"JRB's nomenclature is correct, I think. But by opposing the few socialist programs the US has, she is showing how out of touch she is with the electorate."

Good for her - in our system, judges are supposed to be somewhat out of touch with the electorate. They're supposed to strike down government exercise of power not granted to it under the Constitution regardless of how politicially popular it is or how "out of touch" the actual provisions of that Constitution is with the electorate.

[CharleyCarp]

JRB is not going to asked whether to strike down the Soc Sec system. She's going to be asked to uphold decisions of the Soc Sec Admin, and the Sec of HHS, interpreting the statute and their regulations. Why would the Executive want someone who's anti-Executive making these judgments?

I have always thought that the nomination of JRB is purely political, and that the opposition to her nomination has been the whole point of the exercise, from the Admin's perspective.

[Freder Frederson]

The only truly major "socialist" program that came out of the New Deal was the TVA and other similar big public works programs, which of course didn't take over or nationalize an existing private industry, but created a public institution where private industry refused to tread,lifted millions of people out of abject poverty, and benefitted private industry. Damming the Columbia and Colorado Rivers and rural electrification are more examples of "socialist" programs carried out by the Federal Government. Today the only socialist programs in the government are the remanants of the New Deal and other newer programs like NASA, hardly posing the threat of a Democratic Government nationalizing GM, Chrysler and Ford.

[Edward_]

Good for her - in our system, judges are supposed to be somewhat out of touch with the electorate.

You might want to tell Frist that. He seems to think the opposite position is important:

"When we think judicial decisions are outside mainstream American values, we will say so," [Frist] said.

[NeoDude]

Right-Winging Christians are cute when they are paranoid.

Anyway, I thought capitalism was a product of the Enlightenment? Are fundamentalists taking credit for that now?

[NeoDude]

And when did Keynesian solutions turn into socialisism?

There is no doubt that many liberal capitalists and most social democrats agreed with FDR's solutions...but they were not socialist solutions.

[Katherine]

She's awful awful awful. If I had to get rid of one of these nominees it would be her. She thinks that Lochner was right, AND that the Bill of Rights shouldn't restrict the states, AND this religious war meshugas. And since she'd be appointed to the D.C. Circuit, and since Bush et. al. think that they can paint any opposition to any female or racial minority as racist & that Catholic Senators oppose Pryor because he's Catholic--they seem to think that Brown is the BEST judge to trigger the nuclear option over, figuring people care more about the color of a judge's skin than the content of his/her character--the possibility of a Supreme Court nomination is there.

And hey, speaking of race....you know how I feel about the Family Research Council, its President Tony Perkins, and the GOP's willingness to jump into bed with the organization, but this surprises even me:

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

[KCinDC]

Any remaining respect I had for Bob Dole evaporated in his despicable appearance on Wolf Blitzer on August 22, 2004:

And here's, you know, a good guy, good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. [...]

I don't quarrel with that. I said John Kerry's a hero. But what I will always quarrel about are the Purple Hearts. I mean, the first one, whether he ought to have a Purple Heart -- he got two in one day, I think.

It's a strange way to treat a "friend" and "hero" -- lying about his war wounds because they weren't as bad as yours.

[Jeremy Osner]

What Slarti does not know is that John and Mrs. Thullen are very, very tall.

[NeoDude]

Didn't Ann Coulter mock Bob Dole's wounds...back, when right-wing nihilist were puting the conservatives, within The Party, in their place...the 90's, I think...anybody remember?

[John Thullen]

Well, Mrs. Thullen would like me to set the record straight and verify her 5'4", 124 lbs. and that she is worth her weight in gold, and if not, she is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government.

Me? I'm skinny. Now, that leaves Opus at about 9715 pounds, just about right for an opus.

Janice Rogers Brown's views depress the scales with infinite poundage, like a black hole dragging us all inevitably to some very heavy end. It's not a shooting war and she's not Hilzoy's enemy, but I hope no one minds if I dig the foxhole a little deeper.

[hilzoy]

Tad: I hate to say it, but I'm with Dantheman on this one: I think socialism has to do with government ownership of the means of production, not with social welfare programs. So I think the TVA counts, but Social Security does not, still less the minimum wage.

And Ken: leaving aside the effects of the FDA, about which all I can say is that I completely disagree, I agree with you that judges should decide cases based on the law, not the whims of the electorate. One of the reasons I am opposed to Janice Rogers Brown is that I find her ideas about what, exactly, the Constitution requires wrong -- and not just wrong, but so utterly wrong as to raise real concerns about what on earth she would do as a judge.

I mean: there are lots of judges whose views of the Constitution I disagree with, but for whom I have great respect. But there are limits to the sorts of disagreements one can respect, and while intellectual generosity should push those limits out, it cannot obliterate them. Someone who ruled that the first amendment protected only our right to speak about leprechauns, for instance, would have dropped off the edge of the 'interpretive cliff. Brown's views aren't as nuts as that, but they are also, imho, past the point where respectful intellectual disagreement is an option.

I finally fixed my typo!

[Dantheman]

hilzoy,

"I hate to say it, but I'm with Dantheman on this one"

Exactly why do you hate to say that? Is it because I'm already spoken for, and can't add to the numerous marriage proposals you are fielding?

[hilzoy]

Nah; it's because I like Tad. If I had had to agree with him against you, I would have hated that too.

[praktike]

Wow, I knew she was cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but it's another thing entirely to read the original quotes. Who knew we were living in abject tyranny all these years? To the barricades!

[Donny]

This woman is manifestly unfit to serve as a judge because she is not a constitutionalist. The U.S. Constitution is in every respect a product of Enlightenment thinking. No Enlightenment, no United States. The American people must be educated on the centrality of the Enlightenment to our system of governance. These people calling for a repeal of the Enightenment are actually calling for the dismantlement of constitutional goverment. The modern Republican Party is neither republican nor democratic. It has become a threat to the Republic.

[hilzoy]

praktike: I very much recommend reading the entire speech, which is here. Mere excerpts cannot convey its hallucinatory quality, or its sheer unmitigated nuttiness. (The Procol Harem quotes alone...)

[Tad Brennan]

Hilzoy--

No need to for you to regret disagreeing with me. I am no expert on either political theory or lexicography, so if "govt ownership of means of production" is how the relevant experts use the term, then I stand corrected.

On the other hand, I suspect that the argument *for* calling these institutions socialist gains some strength from the idea that "ownership" of some resource is inseparable from the right to control its distribution and expenditure. So when the govt. can commandeer large proportions of the outputs of the means of production, that is near enough to ownership--or near enough when viewed from the distant perspective of a libertarian. (I should say that I am not one, and I'm only guessing that their argument might run along these lines). It would be good to hear from Ken, who seemed to endorse at least that part of my view.

To recap: TB said "sure they're socialist, but they're good!"
Dantheman & Hilzoy say "naw, ain't socialist"
Ken says "sure they're socialist, and they're way bad!"

In order to avoid a general descent into lexicography, I'll drop the question of socialism. It does seem more to the point to say that the New Deal & Great Society, however one characterizes them, are immensely popular. JRB sounds quite serious about her desire to roll them back, to the extent that she is able to do it.

2 questions:

a) If one is a temperamental conservative (deference to tradition, stare decisis, etc.) how do you view her proposals? Is a return to pre-'37 a conservative return to the tradition of our elders? Or is the very act of proposing that return, at this stage in our history, a deeply unconservative, radical, tradition-defying move?

b) I take Ken's last point, about permissible judicial anti-majoritarianism, as a serious point for liberals like me. I am quite complacent about the courts' striking down miscegenation laws decades before there was even a majority in favor of doing so (indeed, they were struck down at a time when an appalling majority still approved of them). And I would justify the courts' actions by saying that they were keeping the country on a firm constitutional path that popular sentiment had deviated from. So if one thought (as I do not) that the New Deal and Great Society legislation, or everything that relies on an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause, were popular but deeply at odds with our constitution, would that not justify the courts in rolling them back?

I'd like to hear some ideas about why we should treat these cases differently (if we should). Ad hominem observations that Frist et al. have flip-flopped on this point are good politics, but I like a good argument even better.

[NeoDude]

a) If one is a temperamental conservative (deference to tradition, stare decisis, etc.) how do you view her proposals? Is a return to pre-'37 a conservative return to the tradition of our elders? Or is the very act of proposing that return, at this stage in our history, a deeply unconservative, radical, tradition-defying move?

I think this is called reactionary. It is the opposite of progressive.

[nous_athanatos]

Donny-- These people calling for a repeal of the Enightenment are actually calling for the dismantlement of constitutional goverment.

Pretty much. Here's a bit more from the LA Times story Hilzoy linked to:

Brown's remarks drew praise Monday from one of the nation's most prominent evangelical leaders, Gary Bauer, president of the socially conservative advocacy group American Values.

"No wonder the radical left opposes her," Bauer wrote in an e-mail to supporters. "Janice Rogers Brown understands the great culture war raging in America. That is why the abortion crowd, the homosexual rights movement and the radical secularists are all demanding that Senate liberals block her confirmation."

Yeah, the 'abortion crowd' and the 'homosexual rights movement' are standard tropes for the evangelical right. The one that gets me is 'radical secularists'. Doesn't that sound scary? Sends a chill down my spine.

What exactly is a radical secularist? My (decidedly biased) definition of it would be 'someone who believes that any democratic community must maintain a pluralistic public sphere'. As Jurgen Habermas puts it in Philosophy in a Time of Terror:

Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations. Certainly, to tolerate other people's beliefs without accepting their truth, and to tolerate other ways of life without appreciating the intrinsic value as we do with regard to our own, requires a common standard. In the case of a democratic community, this common value basis is found in the principles of the constitution. (Borradori, 40-41)

I am deeply suspicious of any rhetoric of tolerance which refuses to accept pluralism as a precondition for any sort of democracy other than mob rule.

[Anarch]

Yeah, the 'abortion crowd' and the 'homosexual rights movement' are standard tropes for the evangelical right. The one that gets me is 'radical secularists'. Doesn't that sound scary? Sends a chill down my spine.

See if you can catch the Daily Show's clips from Justice Sunday (or whatever that evangelical crapfest was called). [Better yet, of course, would be to get full excerpts from it, but a) I don't think those are available and b) your brain would dribble out your ears if you watch too much of it.] There's a very similar refrain that makes it, um, mildly disconcerting to watch.

[what]

Social Security:

The government controls how much of my check is taken to help pay for the program. The government controls how much of the money I get each month after I retire. The government controls the age at which I can start collecting the money. The government controls to what extent those distributions are taxed. As if that's not enough, SCOTUS has ruled that, since the money is collected via taxation, I have no legal right to any distributions.

How is that not a socialist program?

[Dantheman]

what,

Because it doesn't meet the dictionary definition of the term socialism. For example, here is the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary (through dictionary.com:

"so·cial·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ssh-lzm)
n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved."

The critical point is that the means of production are owned by the government. Social Security does not due that. Your points would be true about any governmental assistence program, from farm subsidies to food stamps. Unless you are suggesting that all such programs are socialism (which is contrary to the commonly accepted definition), then Social Security is not socialism.

[hilzoy]

what: socialism refers to government ownership of the means of production. Nothing of the kind is involved in Social Security.

Moreover, as best I can tell, you're using 'socialist' to refer to any program that the government controls, which is to say, to most programs. I can't see why, with the definition you seem to be using, it wouldn't be right to talk about the "socialist" traffic laws ("the government controls what side of the street I can drive on, and how fast; it tells me at what age I can start to drive, and claims the right to take my driving privileges away if I get too many DUIs...") Such a definition of socialism would be much too broad to be meaningful, and lots of perfectly good laws would be "socialist", so you would not be able to use "socialist" as a term of disapproval.

[what]

There is obviously a POV problem as I can't see how the following
doesn't support classifying Social Security a socialist program.

"so·cial·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ssh-lzm)
n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy."

[Barry]

Read it again.

[Bernard Yomtov]

What's the point here? Are you claiming that if there exists a definition of socialism under which Social Security is socialist then that automatically makes it bad? That's ridiculous.

[praktike]

social security would be socialist if, say, the trust fund were invested in the stock market or in non-gov't bonds.

[praktike]

hilzoy, this quote is a gem: "'A Whiter Shade of Pale' is an old (circa 1967) Procol Harum song, full of nonsensical lyrics, but powerfully evocative nonetheless."

Funny thing is, Procol Harum's lyrics are downright prosaic compared to her speech. Back to the gulag with her, I say!

[sidereal]

"Are you claiming that if there exists a definition of socialism under which Social Security is socialist then that automatically makes it bad? That's ridiculous."

Of course. You aren't familiar with shibboleth dogma?

[ral]

parktike, well, at least she likes good music.

[I read that speech when hilzoy linked to it a while ago -- eek.]

[ral]

(arrgh, my typing is getting worse and worse!)

[Dantheman]

what,

"There is obviously a POV problem as I can't see how the following
doesn't support classifying Social Security a socialist program.

"so·cial·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ssh-lzm)
n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.""

I am not following you. What in Social Security provides for the means of producing and distributing goods to be owned collectively or by a centralized government? Social Security does not nationalize industries or put them under government planning and control.

[Catsy]

I am not following you.

It's called assertion by argument. :>

[Catsy]

Argument by assertion, even. Dyslexic fingers today.

[ral]

Fafblog interviews the Constitution (in exile, it would seem).

[John Thullen]

"The government controls ...etc." AND "Social Security is socialism....," etc"

Yeah. O.K. Seems like it works whatever we call it.

How about this, too? The government controls my money to rebuild Iraq (parts of it many times). Some of that air your breathing and water your drinking is a socialist product, too, and don't get me started on the National Parks, which I consider part mine, so don't camp on that part, O.K., or like Trotsky, you'll have to become a globe-trotting fugitive.

Did I mention collective bargaining? There are those in the Republican Party, probably some now up for judgeships, who want to get rid of collective bargaining and unions with the same fervor as did Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin after they gained power. The similarities are stunning, but what should we call it?

So, yeah, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are socialism. Viva socialism!

[Ogosdinos]

Hilzoy, there really ought to be a specific name for the condition in which people believe that possible worlds are divided up between either those in which they are in total control or those in which they are being persecuted.

Oh, also, can I throw my hat in as one of the suitors, along with Opus?

[hilzoy]

Sheesh: maybe I should just auction myself off for charity ;)

[Jay C.]

Great, hlizoy: where does the bidding start?
(And is there a picture in the catalogue?)

[Bernard Yomtov]

So I guess a dowry is out of the question?

[Ogosdinos]

Just tell us you'll decide after you're done with that weaving you had to get to . . .

[Catsy]

Sheesh: maybe I should just auction myself off for charity ;)

I can't decide who'd be luckier--the winning bidder, or the charity who won the inevitable jackpot. ;)

[Ogosdinos]

I don't think its *preposterous* to associate socialism with something other than public ownership of the means of production. Imagine, for example, a state which allowed private ownership of resources and then slapped onto it a %100 tax on income with, of course, massive redistributive egalitarian transfer payments. Of course, in our current Constitutional climate, we'd run afoul of Fifth Amendment issues, but perhaps not (if courts considered egalitarianism a suitable public purpose and if transfer payments met the just compensation requirement). You might argue that such a state doesn't really have private ownership of the means of production, but there are all sorts of other rights that accrue to property owners, and those might still be preserved. I don't think it's nuts to call that socialism.

[John Thullen]

I would suggest we all get a room, with the exception of Ms. Brown.

O.K. I take it back.

[CharleyCarp]

Ogo: seems to me that your 100% tax isn't a takings clause problem so much as a substantive due process problem. Even if one uses the most lenient definition of socialism consistent with the meaning of the word, Justice Brown's assertions are way out ahead of reality.

[Jesurgislac]

I can't decide who'd be luckier--the winning bidder, or the charity who won the inevitable jackpot. ;)

The winning bidder. *buys hat in order to throw it into the ring* :-D

[hilzoy]

If anyone is interested, and I have no idea why they should be, the case in which Janice Rogers Brown wrote that "we cannot simply cloak ourselves in the doctrine of stare decisis is here. (p. 71.)