alexandra said:
IMO, Russ (and this can be seen in the subtext of all my posts), the first statement you make above is a commonly-held fallacy. It may be the case that the US Constitution asserts that the US government exists for the benefit of the citizens of the US - my understanding, however, is that it exists to secure and further the interests of a particular class of very powerful and very rich citizens in the United States, not all citizens.
Now you are contradicting yourself
and getting off point. Let's go over your main thesis again: You said that people (who, you did not specify) are hypocrites for saying that the US exists to spread capitalism, but the US Constitution (not to mention the Declaration of Independence) is clear in saying that that is not the case. Thus, your assertion is clearly
false (ironically, it's clearer that your assertion is false than your assertion is clear).
Your second statement is incorrect. It is not my intention to do 'baseless USA-bashing'...
So please don't accuse me of 'baseless USA-bashing'; it's not what I do.
When so much of what you say is
factually wrong,
heavily biased, and
phrased generally or as questions instead of specific, declarative statements, the only thing we end up seeing here is baseless USA-bashing. I cannot believe such a writing style would go over well in your political science classes.
We are trying to enforce standards of quality here - that means that the OP must make a clear thesis (not ask leading questions without answering them) and then
substantiate it. You did
neither (though you did sort of provide a thesis in your second post).
[edit: This may sound paternalistic, but I expect more from you than I otherwise would because I know something about your background and I know what you are - or should be - capable of. The scientific areas of this forum see posts of high quality because people who have knowledge of those fields posts high quality posts. The politics forum is a
cesspool because people - even those with some knowledge and intelligence - post
crap.
Show me that your intention here is not simply spewing crap: start over from scratch and write out a post in essay format. Start with a brief introduction, then state a coherent, declarative, specific thesis, then defend it. Otherwise, it just looks like you read an article that said something you didn't like and you jumped straight from that to a vague generality about the USA and capitalists, without any coherent thought process in between. ]
Again, I would prefer us to focus on the underlying issue: how 'free' is the so-called 'free market'? As stated above, the most counter-examples that exist to counter the argument that capitalism is about free markets come from the US government's actions as this is the administration that is supposedly on a mission to liberalise the whole world and 'free' its markets.
Again - you are asserting a contradiction where
clearly one does not exist. Perhaps you could provide us with some
evidence to back up your claims from the op and subsequent posts:
So-called "free trade" is one of the holy grails of capitalism, is it not? And the USA takes the lead in creating and defending free markets? How, then, does one explain this?
...this would be ok, were it not for the hypocrisy, the ideological obscurantism involved in claiming that one is promoting 'freedom' when one is, in fact, not.
In declarative form:
1. "Free trade" is one of the holy grails of capitalism.
2. The USA takes the lead in creating and defending free markets.
3. (implied) The US
always/never acts in defense of capitalism, even globally.
4. Someone (who, you do not specify, but the USA as a whole is implied) is hypocritical by saying they act for free trade, but not actually acting for free trade.
Statement 1 is far too general to really be useful, but yes - in general, free trade is a good thing to a capitalist. In points 2 and 3, you are trying to create absolutes so that you can knock them down with one piece of evidence. You need to prove that those absolutes exist. Ie, you need to prove that the US always
claims to be acting in the name of capitalism, even internationally. That'll be the tough one since, as my conversation with El implies, what is good for the country and what is good for the world are often in direct conflict with each other. You could argue that the USA (again, the USA is not a person) claims to act
more for capitalism than against or that the USA is the world leader in spreading capitalism, but then you would lose the contradiction that you are looking to show - that would just be an argument over how successful the US is in achieving its goals. And in point 4, you must be specific about these so-called contradictions: who said what, exactly, and how did they act differently? If you aim to prove that Bush is a hypocrite, you may just succeed, but you'll need to start going through his speeches and finding specific statements that he said that he didn't follow-up on. If you aim to prove some broader contradiction...well, that's already been proven wrong.
If you are not interested in making logical arguments and more importantly, providing
factually accurate evidence to back up that argumet, then we come back to my previous point...
)
I'm focusing a lot of my research on what's happening in Latin America at the moment, so that's why I used that particular article. What I want to discuss is the notion of 'free markets' in general - particular examples are brought up to focus the discussion in reality rather than just leaving it at the level of theory.
