Posted on 11/16/2004 12:12:11 PM PST by Republicanprofessor
Battling liberal analogies on Communism and Affirmative Action.
I've just had my first class discussion on Communism (as related to Humanities, but I got off the subject to discuss politics with my liberal class.) We had a good discussion and many realized the dangers of Communism.
But I got a few comments from students with which I could not argue very well. (As I said, this is not my subject of expertise.) So if any of you can come up with some good responses, let me know.
One student noted that she had been taught that Communism is fine in theory but that it hasn't found the ideal environment yet in which it could succeed. All the countries which tried it (Russia, China, etc.) were backward countries. She thought it might work in more working class countries. (To the credit of other students, they disagreed. And I countered this too, by saying that Communism depends on force to exist and that human nature resists being limited to being equal to others instead of striving to do better. But I'm interested in what you all have to say.)
And we drifted into Affirmative Action a bit, because I wanted to demonstrate the abuse of repeating lies over and over until they become the truth. (And I expect we may get some pubic hairs on the coke can lies again soon....) So I said that many believe Republicans are racist because it is repeated so often in the press. I noted that it may be because Republicans are against Affirmative Action and quotas.
So one student gave me this analogy from another teacher as an argument for Affirmative Action. Two boys are running. One is doing his very best at 8 sec. per 200 yards. The other needs to learn proper form but is doing his best at 8 1/2 secs. Which one gets the chance to be coached by the best? The one who has already reached his peak or the other who could improve much more after learning proper technique?
Now, I don't think that any of us ever peaks at total capacity, but beyond this, let me know what arguments you might come up with. It seems to be a narrow and silly analogy, but I need a definitive argument with which to knock it down.
Thanks.
Communism "works well" only in places where the desire to opt out is dealt with by internal exile, or death.
The typical liberal response is that communism hasn't worked because it's not been applied by the proper people, which is ridiculous. Those countries tried communism because they are backward in the first place.
Best suggestion - educate yourself by reading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, "Socialism" by Ludwig von Mises, and "The Road To Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. You'll never be without a rejoinder and logical argument again.
The one that has the best time. That's the way the market dictates thing and that's why affirmative action doesn't work.
As for communism, employing socialistic measures doesn't work. Look at Canada with national healthcare. It's not working. Also, if you take a peek at anything that has been government run, then you'll learn that there's always funding problems. Why? Because there's never enough money to keep up with the continuing demand in a government run system.
Look at Social Security and Medicare. They both need to be overhauled and would be championed in a communist system. That's why America succeeds so well. We have capitalism determine most things. And in that market scenario, we find a better price through competition. Without competition, there can be no success over long periods of time.
Both of the boys are going to make the team based on their performance. How does anyone know that they are doing their best? This example has a few holes in it.
Re: Affirmative Action
I think Ayn Rand came up with a good analogy:
Imagine you have a child that contracts a life threatening illness. You take the child to the hospital where two doctors await you. The first doctor earned his place at the hospital by finishing at the top of his class, the other doctor gained his place at the hospital through affirmative action.
Which doctor do you want to treat your child ?
Regarding the affirmative action issue...ask the student if he thinks it's fair to deprive the well-coached runner of a position on the team simply because the other runner didn't have the same kind of coaching. Should the first runner be punished for a problem that he didn't create?
""Two boys are running. One is doing his very best at 8 sec. per 200 yards. The other needs to learn proper form but is doing his best at 8 1/2 secs. Which one gets the chance to be coached by the best?"
Gold and Silver at the next Olympics, and a pair of faces on Wheaties with a $40 million Nike contract.
One thing we surely would NOT do is to take all slow runners and assign them to the best coaches, or look for slow runners to put into that program. If slow runners have been overlooked in the past, we MIGHT want to look for slow runners who might benefit from coaching, and put THEM into the program. But who would judge whether a slow runner was just slow, or was slow because of lack of coaching?
I don't think the running analogy is even a vaild argument. The question still revolves around who will be the best runner, and looks at ability. Affirmative action is NOT looking at ability; it is looking at things that are totally unrelated to the objective (in this case, running); it doesn't care who is the best runner, or who will BECOME the best runner with training. It looks at factors totally unrelated to the goal.
Communism/Socialism can never work... The simple reason is the rely on the good of you fellow man to do the same ammount of work as you, and it relys on peer presure to get those that are not performing to satisfaction to preform at a higher level. The concept of a economy and goods shared by all of the community is also flaw as was pointed out in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea... The power and wealth of the "community" tends to migrate towards those persons with in the community that can exercise and abuse their power to maintain control of over the bulk of the community... this quickly segregates the community into everything that Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels strove to eliminate in the Communist Manifesto... The community breaks into master and worker... Joesph Stalin was a master of this... Kim Il Jong is a master of this... Mao Tse Tung Was a master of this. There is no enviroment that communism/socialism works as a viable form of goverment due to the nature of human greed for money and power.
Does that work?
Ask your idiot, er a, naive students if they
actually think that they are the first and
only class to come up w/ the idea of communism
and altruism. Remind them that they are hardly
original in their thoughts.
Then flunk the SOBs that do not agree w/
you. Behave like Sam Kinnison in "Back to School."
First, take no sh**.
The only good commie is a dead commie whether
he be 18 or 38.
MV
Nobody could argue against communism better than somebody who was communist.
Except that this is remedial education, not affirmitive action.
Affirmitive action would be kicking the white or asian guy off the team regardless of their abilities.
On the communism thing. Each according to his needs or some such thing, right? Well, tell them to pair off, and assume that one of them has an A in the course, and the other is failing the course with an F. Now, how many of the people with A's, would be willing give up the A and get a C, just to allow the person with the F to also get a C. It should be right up their alley....
I've done a lot of thinking on this point, and I think I have it down to a simple answer:
In Communism, all resources are allocated by need rather than wealth. Unfortunately, 'need' cannot be defined and has no upper limit while resources are entirely concrete and finite: Doomed to fail, even on paper....
1. Communism is not fine in theory. It is evil in theory and practice. It assumes that there are no individuals, only classes, and that the only role of the individual is to donate his life to the state. Communist regimes generally forbid emigration, which tells you a lot about whom your life belongs to in a Communsit country.
2. Read (and have your genuinely curious students read) The Black Book of Communism, a compilation of scholarly and journalistic reporting on Communist democide. Roughly 90,000,000 people were killed between 1917-1989. If one does the math, this is almost the rate at which the Nazis killed Jews from 1941-45, only it went on for decades. It was the most monstrous evil in human history.
So one student gave me this analogy from another teacher as an argument for Affirmative Action. Two boys are running. One is doing his very best at 8 sec. per 200 yards. The other needs to learn proper form but is doing his best at 8 1/2 secs. Which one gets the chance to be coached by the best? The one who has already reached his peak or the other who could improve much more after learning proper technique?
We don't know that the only problem with the second runner is that he needs proper form. All we know is that right now one is faster than the other. What if the first runner is simply faster than the second? The coach's talent is then wasted on the weaker runner.
The reason we have races is because some people can run faster than others. I wonder if the other teacher really believes that coaching equalizes everything. If so, I eagerly await the day when it's my turn to start for the Knicks.
Sir, I am curious how you came to be a professor in a college, without having been exposed to a variety of ideas. Where did you go for your undergraduate degree and then masters?
Your student's argument on affirmative action makes sense if he is talking purely about ability, but that is not what affirmative action is. Affirmative action is based on skin color. Given that, how does it make sense to accord Michael Jordan's children benefits from affirmative action while denying them to a child who is not black but comes from a disadvantaged background. Simply put, as long as scholarships for the poor have existed so has affirmative action. It is only recently that affirmative action shifted from benefitting people from a disadvantaged background to benefitting people with a certain skin color.
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