"$3000 rebate for buying a car made in America "
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I know we don’t like to get into the weeds and details here, but weren’t people on here the other day bashing Obama for language in the bill suggesting purchase of American made items? I guess if you can document that the car was 85% made in the U.S. it gets 85% of the rebate. Or something like that.
“I gave a hypothetical in which the ideology was not allowed.”
“Ideology” is just a pejorative word used to designate the ideas that people have about the real world, particularly when one disagrees with those ideas. Saying that ideology is disallowed implies that we’re supposed to forget everything we know about how the real world operates. If that’s what you really meant, that I’d rather play checkers.
OTOH, yuck, chess is much more interesting! 
OK, how about $3,000 on any new car? Although the profits go back to the home country, a lot of the payroll is here.
Pejorative??? Calling something an ideology would only be pejorative if it was, in fact, not an ideology. For example, the Theory of Evolution is not an ideology. Libertarianism IS. That’s exactly what it is.
An ideology is a set of aims and ideas, especially in politics. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society below) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer change in society through a normative thought process. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought (as opposed to mere ideation) applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought.
I’m sorry, but any pejorative connoations were infered on your end, not mine.
And no, I’m not asking you to forget everything about how the real world operates. I gave you two options. It would be as if we were to compare China’s version of Communism to Russia’s. You don’t have to forget what you know about Capitolism and Democracy…you just answer the question…or you derail the discussion and talk about what you want to talk about, but I thought that’s what new thread were for.
And you are right, chess IS much more interesting…which is why I made you checkers! ; ^ )
BarryP, savers like me would revolt. I would be funding someone else’s frivolous purchase. People would be incented to go beyond their means, borrow as much as they could and then default. Back where we started I guess.
When I spoke of the term “ideology” as pejorative, I should have been more specific: I don’t necessarily think of ideology as negative in my own mind, and maybe you don’t either, but it seems as if most people do nowadays. Perhaps I should have said “often pejorative.”
The Wikipedia definition, which you quoted without attribution, is somewhat different from the one in my dictionary, inasmuch as Wikipedia sees an ideology as including “aims” along with ideas. If that’s what you mean by an ideology, then I’ll grant you that libertarianism is an ideology, along with socialism, communism, and the advocacy of mixed-economies (whatever one wants to call the latter ideology). OTOH, free-market theory is not an ideology at all by that definition. Free-market theory is based on praxeology, which is Wertfrei. Free-market theory merely describes how things operate in the free market, and the political-economy portion of that theory also describes how things operate when governments intervene into the market in various ways. It makes no assumptions about what ends are desirable (that’s the province of ethics, not praxeology) and it draws no conclusions about what policies should be in place. It can describe what policies are consistent with a free market, but by itself it cannot tell us whether the free market is the best thing since sliced bread or the worst thing since Adolf Hitler.
My previous response to you wasn’t based on libertarianism per se. It was based on free-market theory, together with a few assumptions about certain ends I figured we might both agree are desirable (e. g., well-paying, sustainable jobs).
When I spoke of your rejecting a system as “ideology,” I was using the term “ideology” in a broader sense than Wikipedia’s, to refer to the Wertfrei study of market operations. IOW, it seems to me that you are too quick to dismiss ideas about how free markets actually operate, as well as how interventionist systems operate, perhaps because you are unfamiliar with the reasoning behind those ideas and therefore assume that they must be based on ideology. (I believe you have also used the term “faith” in the past.)
One more thing, if your hypothetical has tax breaks for specific actions, mainly purchasing certain goods and services, why don’t they just have a national sales tax instead of a income tax (encourage people to try to earn more, and spend less) and then eliminate the national sales tax on things they deal “stimulating” to the economy, like cars and houses etc? People then are encouraged to take more career risks and try to be creative and productive to earn more (since it isn’t taxed) and also to spend on things they will create more jobs…seems like a nice circle of events…then a national sales tax on everything else…or minimal 10% income tax on everyone and national sales tax…just thoughts.
I prefer a coffee can in the backyard or politicians prefer the freezer…or so I’ve heard.
~Matt
I’ve tried a coffee can in the backyard, but I keep forgetting where I buried it!
BarryP, I am with you and have discussed this with a former econ prof of mine. The most dangerous aspects of this recession is the growing unemployment coupled with a massive loss of wealth especially among white collar Americans. Sadly, we are in a circle jerk and need something to throw us off the tracks.
We need people gainfully employed to buy shit, lots of shit. Those companies turn a profit, lenders re-inject capital everyone is happy. Unfortunately, we have lenders protecting capital, people losing jobs/wealth and nobody able to buy shit. So what do you do first? Instead of throwing money out with no plan, why not set it aside and give dollar-for-dollare tax breaks for those companies that create jobs. It costs them nothing and puts money back into the economy so people can buy shit. There has to be an identifiable revenue stream coming back on the $1 trillion. My own company has laid off 30,000 people and taken $45B in TARP money. Why doesn’t the government mandate that $3B of that tarp money be used to keep those 30,000 people gainfully employed?
All of
I’m not dismissing free market theory at all. Again, the hypothetical situation is akin to discussing which offenses and defenses would best accomplish your goal in the game of chess. Whether you’d win faster or more often in checkers is a different topic altogether.
What I’m talking about here is, for lack of a better term, economic engineering. LTin83 probably gave the simplest example of what I’m talking about.
I think at the end of the day the reason something like this won’t work is because it doesn’t appeal to any special interests. If you let the left run things, government grows and pet projects get taken care of. If the right does things, taxes get cut a little bit for most while the get cut a great deal for the wealthy. Argue those points if you wish, but I have little faith that anyone is doing whats in everyone’s best interest.
We’ll see.
“I’m not dismissing free market theory at all. Again, the hypothetical situation is akin to discussing which offenses and defenses would best accomplish your goal in the game of chess. Whether you’d win faster or more often in checkers is a different topic altogether.”
I think you missed one thing in my post: The term free-market theory, at least as I was using it, included political economy, which studies how markets operate when governments intervene into them in various ways. In that broad sense, it tells us how all market economies operate, not just free markets. Perhaps I should have used the term “market theory” instead of “free-market theory.” (Usually, the analysis begins with analysis of the free market–with several stages of analysis within that–and then proceeds by comparing the effects of various kinds of intervention vs. the free market, which helps to explain the terminology.) In any case, I was really talking about something that affects our analysis of chess as well as checkers. In the world of games, of course, the rules of checkers may be essentially unrelated to those of chess, and the successful strategies may be totally different. In the world of economics, OTOH, chess (mixed-economy operations) and checkers (the free market) both involve the actions of human individuals and therefore can be successfully analyzed by a common methodology.
Sorry about my delayed response, but I was just catching up on my old e-mails and saw that you had responded.