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this notion of "fiscal responsibility" is obviously not a free-standing idea: it makes sense only in relation to prior assumptions about, say, the role of the state in regulating dysfunctions within the capitalist system--dysfunctions that market systems tend to produce on a almost continuous basis. but even that last statement falls under the same--it presupposes a prior analytic or political relation toward capitalism.
anyway, what exactly is fiscal responsibility?
if folk were keynesian, a state deficit would not in itself be a problem simply because the state was understood to play a wide range of roles in shaping/prompting economic activity. there would be limits to this non-problem status, but in the main deficits are not in themselves an index of anything within this ideology.
where do folk position themselves in order to make the evaluation that x or y is an index of "fiscal responsibility"?
for example, i looked into the libertarian party platform---because it seems to me that evaluations concerning fiscal responsibility articulated from that position require a concurrent discussion of that position.
seretogis does not speak from nowhere.
i have to say that after reading the lp platform and a bunch of related materials (instead of doing work i have to do of course) my more anarchist side would frankly love to be living somewhere else at the time the lp came to power because it would be an interesting spectator sport to be somewhere else and watch american capitalism implode. their position has more to do with the writings of arthur darby nock ("our enemy the state") and a one-dimensional reading of hayek than it does anything that is happening in the 3-d world in anything like real time.
the structuring illusion seems to be that you can take elements of the 18th century documents that put the american system into motion and treat them as rabbitholes down which you can disappear--and on the other side, there is a kind of jeffersonian democracy---and because there is 3-d reality and that which you can derive by going down the rabbithole can exist simultaneously in the minds of members of the libertarian party, it follows that for them this yeoman democracy image is a viable alternative for the present period.
if theirs is a coherent politics of anything, it is of nostalgia, and in that they are not terribly far from very old types of left anarchism, the types you saw arising amongst skilled workers that opposed all forms of collective organization simply because, from their viewpoints, such organization was unnecessary because they assumed that the world was like themselves. the problem with this was that they occupied positions within a division of labor that capitalism was already wiping out (think the clockmakers of the jura of the middle 19th century)---and their politics were wholly reactive in that respect--but they did not understand themselves as reactive, and so ended up outlining a politics that effectively argued the distant past is the future.
in this, the lp has not even caught up with the marx of 1848 who opposed guild socialism and saint-simonian socialisms because both were effectively politics of nostalgia as well.
what the lp platform is made up of seems to be two main elements:
john locke's second treatise on government
a smattering of "free market" mythology
most of the propositions the shape the lp platform are straight locke.
that means that they actually believe locke.
have you read the second treatise on government?
do you believe it? do you believe the state of nature actually existed?
at the time it was written, the state of nature was already an ideological construct, an ideal-type, that locke made up based on information he had about america--one that existed in his mind, not the one that people actually lived in--an imagined america of the very end of the 17th century is not a viable alternative for social organization in 2006.
it was obviously an important text for jefferson. it is the underpinning for his vision of an agarian democracy made up of yeomen farmers.
this is precapitalist fantasy.
capitalism enters the picture through the phrase "free markets" and that's it. there is nothing even approaching a coherent analysis of actually existing capitalism in the lp platform--instead, you have a series of banalities about free markets that indicates that the folk who wrote the platform were unable to distinguish between the constructs outlined in political economy books and reality--which never matched up with those constructs--the former were regulative or normative visions of ideal-typical markets, not descriptions of actually existing markets--they have nothing to say about actually existing markets. the lp position appears to be based on introducing "free markets"--which indicates that they really cant distinguish normative from actual, fantasy from reality, past from present, nostalgia from engagement with real-time phemonena.
same problems obtain when you look at this extreme right viewpoint relative to the state, which exists as an abstract principle of Evil, the cause of any and all distortions in the social order capitalism has generated. it is only from this reductive viewpoint that absurd arguments like fascism and socialism are the same even begin to make sense--and if you read libertarian websites, there is a way in which this is the case--on these websites, there is only the crudest imaginable understanding of each, and any understanding, if crude enough, can make anything equal to anything else.
so it would follows that if you remove the state, we would all live in shangri-la.
i dunno, folks. this stuff is pretty loopy.
generally speaking, i think of left anarchists that the lights are on but onbody's home: but compared with this right anarchist stuff, i'd take the left anarchists in a second. at least they are honestly incoherent.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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