Vox: Corporations aren’t individuals. The sacrosanct right of the individual to form a contract should not be confused with the right of a government formed, licensed and regulated creation to do so, historic legal fictions notwithstanding.

This smells of a red herring.

Not all illegal immigrants are hired by corporations. If I, as an independent private contractor, chose to hire an illegal immigrant, would you support my sacrosanct individual right to form a contract then?

If you would, then doesn’t Goldberg’s argument stick, at least on that point, for non-corporate employers? If you wouldn’t, then why mention this distinction in the first place?

Paul,

The method that Popper suggests is perfectly reasonable, if your interlocutor is using language clearly and consistently, and if the terms she is using do not presuppose something that is false. But the linguistic situation that Roderick’s addressing isn’t like that: his claim is precisely that the words “capitalism” and “socialism,” as commonly used, don’t have a clear and consistent meaning, because they are defined so as to have an internal inconsistency, and to rest on a false presupposition (viz., the identity of the free market and actually existing neomercentilist outfits). If someone is using language unclearly or inconsistently it does no good to accept their terminology as-is in an attempt to get down to the factual questions, because there is no way to get down to factual questions through nonsense. Hence the point of using techniques like precisifying definitions, analytic distinctions, simple abandonment of some terms in favor of others (e.g. “capitalism” for “the free market” or “laissez-faire,” etc.)

Of course, you may disagree with Rod that the situation with “capitalism” and “socialism” is what he claims it to be, but then that’s a substantive disagreement over how people are in fact using the terms, not a disagreement over the method of criticizing unclear or inconsistent usage.

Kennedy:

There’s no private return for thinking clearly about such things and no private cost for getting it wrong.

Isn’t there?

Kennedy:

Long says most people don’t know what they’re talking about when they discuss capitalism and socialism. That will remain true no matter what he does.

So what?

Don’t you have reasons for trying to think and speak clearly, whether or not you expect it to affect other people somehow?

Kennedy:

There’s no private return for thinking clearly about such things and no private cost for getting it wrong.

Isn’t there?

Kennedy:

Long says most people don’t know what they’re talking about when they discuss capitalism and socialism. That will remain true no matter what he does.

So what?

Don’t you have reasons for trying to think and speak clearly, whether or not you expect it to affect other people somehow?

Jonathan: That’s basically what a union does: negotiate terms of employment in bulk. There’s no reason why “team buying” can’t happen in healthcare without the government’s help.

In point of fact, mutual aid societies in the U.S. and the U.K. were doing exactly that around the turn of the 20th century, through the institution of “lodge practices.” Care from a G.P. under a lodge practice contract typically cost about one day’s wage per worker per year.

Until the government and the government-backed doctors’ guild destroyed them, that is.

David,

Here’s an example from around when the Passion came out:

“‘YOU’RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?’ Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader’s Digest for March.

Gibson: ‘I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.’”

The phrase “The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives, especially when followed by the gratuitous change of subject to the horrors of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century, minimizes and obscures the nature of the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime. It is also typical of the kind of weaseling routinely engaged in by Holocaust denial outfits such as the IHR (in which something called the “Holocaust” is sometimes admitted to have happened, so long as the word “Holocaust” is revised to mean something other than what everyone else means when they say “the Holocaust”).

It is possible that Gibson could utter something like this without intending to go on record as denying or minimizing the Holocaust, but given the conversational context of the question (including accusations of anti-Semitism and the controversy over his father’s clearly Holocaust-denying views), Gibson certainly should have known that such a weasel-worded statement would be understood as Holocaust denial, and the fault for the misinterpretation, if it is a misinterpretation, lies on him, not on the reader.

David Bernstein has a good discussion at Volokh Conspiracy ( http://tinyurl.com/z74wt ).

If you say so. The point is simply that the passage is universally applicable, even though Aristotle happened not to recognize that it was.

At one point, one of the white dudes said something to the effect of “We have never witnessed a wage increase due to illegal immigration.”

Ah, nativism.

Of course, immigrant workers’ wages increase from “illegal immigration”; it’s precisely for the wage increase that they immigrate. Nativist bully boys would like you to believe that they are merely looking out for the little guy; it always turns out, however, that they are avoiding a real discussion of class and labor in America, and trying to prop up the Anglo-American little guy’s standard of living at the expense of other workers who are even worse off. It would be ridiculous, if real people’s lives weren’t at stake.

Holocaust denial is a pretty rough edge.

Bithead: Look, John, that infrastructure was set up by mutual agreement within this society, within this culture, within this country…. years before any of us were born.

The decision to fund that out of public monies was done long ago. That choice is now part of that society. Call it baggage, call it history, call it what you will, it is part and parcel of what the society has become, so far.

I think this is perfectly absurd. Even if the decision to fund roads by coercive taxation were legitimate then, I don’t see how that obliges anyone now, who (ex hypothesi) wasn’t party to the “mutual agreement.” But let’s pretend for the second that that’s not so. Let’s go ahead and suppose, with you, that using government roads involves you in an obligation to pay taxes.

Fine. I’ll swear not to use government roads, if it means that I don’t have to pay any tax anymore. Will you support my right to refuse to pay taxes as long as I don’t use the roads?