Re: Re: Re: [Pen-l] Green Public investment

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

David B. Shemano wrote:
> When people use the word "ideal," or "utopia," there are two possible ways to think about such topics.  I could say that in my ideal world, people have wings and can fly.  However, such a world is fantasy and unrealistic.  Alternatively, I can aim lower and take into consideration practical constraints, and say that in my ideal world, everybody has clean water.  Such a world is achievable.<

Given the way that the constraints on human activity keep on changing
(some getting tighter, others looser), it's a mistake to be overly
concerned with "practical constraints." It's good to keep them in
mind, because people don't have wings. But just a century or so ago,
people were apt to say that people can't _fly_ without balloons of
some sort, which isn't true. (It's possible that genetic engineering
could give people actual wings, but I'm hoping that it never happens.)
Excessive concern with practical constraints -- or taking them for
granted, as somehow all natural and permanent -- restrains thought.

Just a couple of decades ago, a lot of people (including a lot of
people in the so-called "West") thought that the USSR's autocratic
system would last forever. This cramped their thinking. And that
system didn't last.

I don't see utopias (such as Thomas More's original or William Morris'
anarchosocialist one) as blueprints to be imposed by some architect
(as Charles Fourier, for example, seems to have seen them). Rather,
they are grist for democratic debate, a way of clarifying collective
goals, and part of education.  The better ones actually give a sense
of how the utopia would actually work, sometimes suggesting practical
ideas that might apply even given the current balance of political
power. But they are not recipes.

I also don't see utopias as a description of the empirical reality
that would exist absent the evil influence of government, the way some
economists do (some of whom identify their school with a certain
central European country that speaks German but is south of Germany).

> I am trying to figure out where in the spectrum your ideal world exists.  To me, lobbyists exist because (1) people have conflicting interests,(2) legislators have the ability to pick and choose which conflicting interest to favor and which to disfavor, and (3) most legislators want to remain legislators -- lobbyists exist because inevitably a subset of the populace organizes to influence legislation.  I cannot conceptualize how lobbyists could not exist if 1, 2 and 3 do exist.  I suppose Marxists could resolve this dilemma by arguing people do not necessarily have conflicting interests, but personally, that to me is closer to flying people than a world of clean water.<

To start off, I don't speak for "Marxists." I only speak for myself.

To my mind, it is quite likely that there will be conflicting
interests for the foreseeable future. But I see a significant
difference between conflicts under capitalism and those with
(democratic) socialism. Those under capitalism involve a heavy bias
toward serving the interests of those with lots of money, who are able
to hire people (including politicians) and order them around, getting
them to do the dirty work and to make further profits for them. On the
other hand, those in a socialist system generally involve conflict
_among equals_ and a conflict between individual interests and the
public (collective) interest. Part of the latter is the actual
definition of the "public interest," which cannot spring full-grown
from someone's cranium but must be created via democratic debate and
decision-making.

The second (socialist) kind of conflict may seem a bit utopian, but
it's identical the dominant liberal vision of pluralistic conflict.
That so many people think that this is a reasonable type of conflict
suggests that instituting it is not an impossible goal.  The
difference is that liberals see this kind of conflict among equals
(i.e., competition) as applying here and now. (To some of them, it
seems, the definition of the "public interest" is self-evident.) In
contrast, I think class institutions bias the whole process and need
to be abolished.

This, of course, gets me back to what I said before: the point is to
>to level the playing field, so that lobbyists do not have any special
advantage over the non-lobbyists.< The abolition of lobbyists would
involve the abolition of the societal distinction between lobbyists
and non-lobbyists.

In my utopia, people would read what I write. ;-)
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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