Bourgeois Liberalism

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Bourgeois Liberalism

July 2022August 10, 2022By Paul Gottfried

The current concept of what is "liberal" is a far cry from the classical liberalism of the bourgeoisie . . .

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Comments (5)

It sounds as though the good professor is suggesting that woke capitalism and its acolytes in the media and academia are winning the day. Perhaps he is right. On the other hand, what goes around comes around. I can foresee a time in the future where such forces end up consuming themselves as victims of their own excesses.

July 20, 2022 Hans Bosse Reply
Bourgeois Liberalism is a far more interesting a topic than the Old Confederacy. How do we protect and increase the middle class in this country? The most important thing people on the right should be arguing for is making the 50 states as distinctive as possible. When we talk about the founding we talk about how distinctive the states were. Too much time is wasted on arguing the South was always right and then insisting all the southern states must conform to this rigid idea of being “southern” which to me is a contradiction. The Neo-Confederates also dismiss the rest of the country altogether. There were bourgeois liberals all over the US. It was not peculiar to the South.

July 20, 2022 Louis Reply
The way to protect state distinctiveness is to rigourously apply the Tenth Amendment. The states will inevitably become more distinctive once the imperial central government is no longer imposing uniformity. The vast majority of what the imperial central government does is unconstitutional, an usurpation of state authority.
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Some suggestions for protecting/increasing the middle class (listed in no particular order):

1) Restore marriage. One man, one woman. No no-fault divorce.

2) Abolish all income taxes (federal and state, individual and corporate, including inheritance taxes).

3) Abolish all property taxes.

4) Extend right-to-work laws to cover all professions; membership in a union or professional organization shall never be required as a legal condition of employment.

5) End licensing for most businesses/professions.

6) For those professions for which one may wish to retain licensing (e.g. medicine), establish state-level standardized tests, open to any citizen of that state (the tests are to assess whether one possesses the requisite knowledge/skills, regardless of how/where one learned them). Mandate that state officials grant a license to everyone who passes that test. Treat licenses as private property, such that they never expire and cannot be revoked without due process of law.

7) Apply full due-process protections to health/fire/safety/whatever inspections (warrants, innocent until proven guilty, etc.). Put the burden of proof on the government.

8) Abolish certificate-of-need laws and the like.

9) Prohibit foreign nationals/companies from owning land in the US. Prohibit foreign nationals/companies from investing in US companies. Prohibit foreign companies (aside from transportation companies) from operating in the US (aside from simple buying and selling).

10) Prohibit US citizens/companies from owning land outside their home states. Prohibit US citizens/companies from investing in companies outside their home states. Prohibit US companies (aside from transportation companies) from operating outside their home states (aside from simple buying and selling).

11) Limit immigration to no more than 0.01% of the native-born adult population of the US (as assessed at the most recent census) per year. Deport all illegal aliens. Prohibit illegal aliens from ever being granted residency/citizenship.

12) Flatten all sales taxes. Each jurisdiction shall set its own rate, but that rate shall apply equally to everything. No exceptions, and no extra excises tacked on.

13) Establish a hard limit on patents, of 12 years. More specifically, grant inventors an exclusive right to their inventions for first six years after the patent is granted. Thereafter, grant other US citizens/companies the right to make use of patented inventions; however, require they pay ten percent of the revenue thereby generated to the inventor for the second six-year period (years 7-12). After the end of the 12th year, any US citizen/company may make free use of the invention.

14) Abolish usury (interest charged on money lent for purchase of consumer goods). Prohibit variable-rate loans.

15) Abolish public schools.
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Discussing why the South was right is not a waste of time. It is necessary to examine where the US went wrong if we are to correctly/fully diagnose the problem, which is a precondition of attempting to fix the problem. I have yet to see anyone insist that all the southern states must conform to the same mould. From what I have observed, my fellow Southerners are quite willing to work with Copperheads, so I am uncertain what you mean by saying we “dismiss the rest of the country altogether.”

July 21, 2022 Matthew Etzell Reply
I think maybe the working class is a proponent of the Right currently because they developed many of the bourgeoisie values and characteristics over time. The working class of today may be at similar levels of education and property ownership that the bourgeoisie were at in the past. So the change is natural. The middle class to upper middle class is now a proponent of the Left because they were all educated to be Marxists in universities over the last 70 years or so. They also more or less gave up religion. The working class is more religious than other classes.

That I think explains the difference between the 4th definition of liberalism and the other 3. The 4th definition of liberalism was a Christian liberalism. There was a balance of the values, freedom and order. In fact Christian theology teaches that human freedom should lead to a type of moral order. It also teaches that order, called natural law, directs humans to the freedoms found in liberalism. The problem with today’s liberalism is that it is secular.

The Ethics Of Liberty shows how natural law leads to a free society – https://thecrosssectionrmb.blogspot.com/

July 21, 2022 RMB Reply
I think you’ve correctly surveyed the Order of Battle in the struggle for reign over our present era; the broad Populist Right vs a globalist managerial Elite who were cultivated by a Woke Intelligentsia, whose foot soldiers are those they have hoodwinked into being on their side. I think it was the Executive Intelligence Review that sponsored a series of essays about our adversaries that were gathered under the heading, “The Children of Satan” (whom I would call the Father of Sinestra, the Sinister Left and The Left Hand Path). He worked his black magic on the Crowns and Thrones of the Old Order (remember The Temptation? “Bow down to Me and I’ll give you these Kingdoms to rule”? Many said yes to the temptation), causing the reorganization of society; the Liberal Order. Next the Father of Deceit turned his attention to the peasantry and later Labor class, and Peasant Revolts & Leftist revolutions followed. Now his present target is the managerial class and his pied pipers are the Woke Intelligentsia, in the form of such organizations as The Congress for Cultural Freedom, creating a Beastman who is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. The Populist Right is fighting back with the Precinct committee seat Movement, the retaking of schoolboards, and sponsoring of election integrity laws through state legislatures, and Steve Bannon is our defacto Field Marshall. But pray in right earnest and “keep your powder dry”; we are in for hard times.

July 22, 2022 Larry Bowen Reply

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