John Rawls Theory of Justice

 John Rawls 1971 Theory of Justice, 1st paragraph

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore

in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater

injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising.

Hebermas on Equality

 Juergen Habermas on Equality

In Virgil Nemoianu's construction of Habermas' dialogue with Benedict XVI, whose name is B. Ratzinger, Habermas is not portrayed unfairly, but it may seem that he has developed a flexibility which we may find difficult to understand. 

Since ‘Theory of Communicative Action,’ 1982, and perhaps even before, the universal idea of inclusion of all viewpoints was obvious in Habermas' work.  Habermas has stated repeatedly in most of his work in the past 20 or so years, that universal inclusion is a moral necessity, all voices must be heard and considered.  

Lately, Habermas has focussed on the term, ‘tolerance,’ to describe what an actualized inclusiveness and a real equality should live up to in ‘Natural Law andReligion, 2009. 

Tolerance is the best word here for an elaborate translation or interpretation. The work of Marcuse and Brienes and others in the 60's found the meaning of tolerance to include a superiority which contradicted equality.  Habermas explains especially in his “Equality of Cultures,” talk given at NYU on Oct 12, 2006, that certain policies impact on the religious identity of individuals differentially, for example, policies related to contraception, abortion, genetic engineering, limiting their freedom instead of expanding it as the policy or norm intended.  

Habermas explains the role of perspective-taking in communication and in the development of a rational understanding through communicative action or universal discourse - the emergence of an objective awareness occurs through the coordination of the 1st and 2nd person perspectives which involves a switching of perspectives. 

Habermas raises the point that secularists are required to take the perspectives of others in terms of their religious identity in order to understand the effect of laws, norms, policies, practices, and events on those other people. Similarly, Christians and Muslims are required to take the perspectives of other sects in their own religion as well as the perspectives of people from other religions. That is, a perspective on equality is not a leveling of perspectives but an inclusion of the differences.  

Historically, it must be recognized that the civil wars in the Middle East for the past 73 years are between different Muslim sects and between Muslims and Christians, and not only between Muslims andJews..

Propaganda is the sole substance of politics

 Propaganda is the Sole Substance of Politics -

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) on Propaganda and Journalism

Lippmann is best known for his 1922 “Public Opinion” which is considered the founding document of journalism and media studies. Lippmann wrote continuously about democracy and freedom.

Lippmann (Preface to Morals, 1929) defined propaganda as deception: half-truths, lies, ambiguities, evasions, calculated silence, red herrings, unresponsiveness, slogans, catchwords, showmanship, bathos, hokum and buncombe. “They are one and all,” he said, “methods of preventing a disinterested inquiry into the situation.”

Lippmann (1929, Preface to Morals) distinguishes the politicians from the statesmen. “Candor is a bitter pill when first it is tasted but it is full of health, and once a man becomes established in the public mind as a person who deals with habitually and successfully with real things, he acquires an eminence of a wholly different quality from that of even the most celebrated caterer to the popular favor. His hold on the people is enduring because he promises nothing which turns out to be a fake. Sooner or later the politician, because he deals in unrealities, is found out.”  Lippmann goes on, “The words of a statesman have value because they express not the desires of the moment but the conditions under which desires can actually be adjusted to reality.”

Lippmann called the ‘technic of propaganda pernicious,’ and ‘pure democracy a mistake.’ He felt strongly that democracy will work if it is accurately representative. “The propaganda, the pressure groups, the formulation of a law that is higher than the Constitution, and the breaking down of the checks and balances (on the people’s will) are evidences of a radical defect in the conception of democracy” (How Liberty is Lost, 1938). 

Resistance to mass propaganda depends on individualism, on the independence of individuals. Lippmann addresses education as insufficient to protect the people from the media: the propaganda, the journalism, the lobbyists and pressure groups, and the corporations – what is required is self-education.

In “Mr. Strachey’s Case and the Law,” 1938, Lippmann discusses how the democrats believed they could tolerate any form of agitation short of open incitement to violence. However, since WWI, democrats have come to believe that an active defense of democratic institutions, e.g. elections, is an absolute necessity. He points out that the European nations have enacted laws making it a criminal offense to conduct propaganda which incites extreme hatred and thus leads to violence as when the right to meet and parade incites trouble. The democracies of Europe have turned away from the tolerance of agitation and now restrict free speech and freedom of the press when they are used to defame public authorities and to destroy the dignity of democratic institutions. Some nations have specially trained political police. 

William F. Buckley in 1974 said that free speech should be limited when it becomes licentious. Lippmann states the problem of democracy is when others come saying, “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you in the name of my principles.” He addresses the problem of free speech as license to say whatever you like!

In 1957, The Portent of the Moon,” Lippmann contrasted two options for dealing with the Russian technological advance, “One response could be to think of it in terms of propaganda, and to look around for some device for doing something spectacular to outmatch what the Russians have done. The other response would be to look inward upon ourselves and to concern ourselves primarily with our own failings, and to be determined not so much to beat the Russians as to cure ourselves.” 

He goes on to specify our failings as the underfunding of education, a primary democratic public institution, and the scandals of racial inequality, the segregation and separation that contradicts our democratic principle of equality.

Lippmann frequently uses the term ‘propaganda’ as Communist propaganda, war propaganda, unprofessional journalism and the problem of licentious free speech. In 1943, “The Fascination of Greatness,” Lippmann praised Winston Churchill as a great statesman. He contrasts Churchill’s eloquence and magnanimity with this state of affairs: “That is why our spirits languish when their daily food is only the military communiques (the credibility gap), press releases, and an absolutely intolerable flood of gossip journalism, pipe-line journalism, and intrigue journalism about who is in the doghouse now, and how the courtiers (advisors and appointees) at the palace (White House) are planning to cut one another’s throats, and how the misunderstood and underappreciated are those who hand out the dope (the fake news) to those who then lick their boots.”

“The air is foul and stale with it all.”

Cognitive Dissonance and psychoanalysis

 Cognitive Dissonance and Psychoanalysis

The theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ arises from a common sense belief that, if someone holds two ideas or desires or opinions that conflict, this conflict should cause mental discomfort and that the holder of the opin- ions will do something to lessen the discomfort. 

He or she may abandon one idea, possibly, or gain new information or beliefs to lessen the dissonance; if there is commitment to an idea, the person may adapt their belief or behavior, by forgetting, by reducing the importance of one of the dissonant elements or—in particular—by seeking to convince others whose adherence will confirm the cherished belief.

The "convincing" or persuading occurs by force of attitude or inner state versus by words, or rhetoric.

When people with strongly held beliefs are confronted by evidence clearly at odds with their beliefs, they will seek to resolve the discomfort caused by the discrepancy by convincing others to support their views rather than abandoning their commitments. They will seek, for instance, some means of re-establishing cognitive consonance without sacrificing their religious convictions or metaphysical ideas.

The psychoanalyst Langs felt strongly about this problem and presented the methodology of interpreting the interactions with a patient - verbal, behavioral, psychological - by hypothesizing an interpretation based on given evidence, and then wait for validating evidence later in the therapeutic situation before offering the interpretation. This kind of double checking provided a way of self-refuting interpretations based on counter-transference and establishing convincing evidence for the interpretation.

What Langs does, and what Popper exclaimed about, is to seek to falsify or disconfirm hypotheses that are primarily growing within the inner-dialogue between analyst and analysand on the basis of interpretations of talk.

I suppose however that over the time of a psychoanalysis a long series of hypotheses are generated, some are remaining without being falsified, and the gambit is to consider these as true or false, or as meaningless. But, the main issue of dissonance - convincing others on the basis of your own commitments - is avoided.

Lacan and Language

 Lacan and Language

One important idea that Lacan, the Freudian, disseminated is that the unconscious is language. The unconscious, in both Freud’s notions and other notions like Jung’s, includes the forgotten and the repressed, the distorted and the repeated, the relations between symptoms and language, between affect and language, and the role of language in self analysis, in therapeutic interaction, and in self-understanding, is perhaps the most important notion that Freud discovered and that Lacan recognized and discussed throughout his work. Lacan penetrates language by introducing new ideas, e.g. lack and the phallus, signification and clarifying the meanings of signified and signifier, and by providing new ideas about the most serious psychological problems, i.e. paranoia.

Firstly, the unconscious is affect and language is intricately entwined with affective experiences. 

Secondly, as an individual with a specific social location, the person is ascribed a status by her social milieu from immediate family to lineage to geography to wider social relations: political, economic, demographic and medical, etc., which may be realized or not but qualifies as an aim, an expectation and a role.

Our earliest sensations as an organism, the inscriptions upon and into our subjectivity from the earliest moments of our existence through to a mature language user involves a movement from a very immature and totally determined process of perception to a process of self reflection: a process of examining feelings and images including all sensory data, qualia, through language. 

Language has a doubled edge: clarifies but distorts. The forgetting and repressing mechanisms, which are both physiological and social, comprise the unconscious which contains all qualia, all affects, and the ways that experience has been coded, encoded and decoded in the cultural contexts of our social-historical locations.

The ways that language has been inscribed upon us as a learning process; the way language is ascribed to form our personality and social relations as attributes, speech acts and effects including lies of all kinds, and the way that language as a cultural institution dominates our social behavior, decisions and actions involves our consciousness which is impinged by unconscious mechanisms: forgetting, condensation, metonymy and metaphor, displacements and defenses inhibiting recall of affects and linguistic phenomena we have experienced!

One controversy that Lacan was involved in was his changing of the required 50-minute session length for a psychoanalytic session. Lacan explains the variable length: he states that he cuts off the session when the analysand makes the critical remark so that s/he cannot spend the rest of the session denying it. He calls this technique 'scansion.' The analysand has to deal with the event of the interrupted session! Why? Reflection may lead to some answers, the next session now has a topic! The real work of analysis, the part when self-understanding occurs, is between sessions. At issue is an expectation of 50 minutes, earlier or later leads to a quandary. The analyst is trying to say something!

Mixed economy and Monopoly of market

 Joseph Stiglitz - Mixed Economy and Money Supply

"Before the East Asia miracle there were two dominant paradigms for development, one focused on markets, the other on government and planning. The first had its intellectual roots in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" - markets lead to efficient outcomes. All that government needs to do to promote growth is get out of the way. The basic slogan is "get the prices right." With the right prices, everyone will have an incentive to make the right resource allocations. Undermining this particular religion was the disturbing observation that countries that seemed to get the prices right—to follow all the advice of the visiting preachers of the free market—too often failed to grow. To be sure, like medieval medicine, there was always the allegation that the patient had not followed the doctor's orders precisely, and it was this that accounted for the failure of the remedy.

At the opposite side were those who had little faith in the market and who looked to government to ensure through the planning process that resources were deployed in a way that promoted economic growth. The lack of success of those countries that followed this paradigm has led to the virtual extinction of this school of thought. 

Ironically, almost none of the successful industrial countries followed either of these extreme strategies. They are mixed economies in which government plays an important role. The appropriate question to be asked is not whether government should play a role, but what role and how can it be performed most effectively." Stiglitz 1996 "Some Lessons from the East Asian Miracle"



Look at the homeless, the people in shelters, first they need to get a job, then save up for a few weeks to rent an apartment. But, homelessness keeps occurring! So are these folks voluntarily or involuntarily unemployed?


Some manufacturing jobs have left the US, there has also been a huge demand for service workers at all levels. The undocumented and many immigrants are willing to take the lowest service jobs: domestic servant and janitorial and food production jobs, although most legal immigrants are skilled or professionals. Most jobs available are service jobs - jobs related to marketing, not in production, because production requires skilled labor to be efficient which involves automated equipment, installation, operators and maintenance.


The issue of underemployment is relative since the issue is the relation between a worker and the employer and the coworkers and the clients/customers, not merely wages. Wages are low: one half of households - usually 2 workers - make less than 60k!


Increasing the minimum wage in several states means that entry level positions will be more likely to provide for basic subsistence: food, housing, clothing, transportation, etc.

The US has on average a high school educated work force where those with higher education - some college, BA, graduate degree or PhD/MD/JD account for 30% of the adult population, and all of them are not necessarily working: voluntary unemployed, retired, etc. The employment rate in the US is 60% of the population. Getting a professional job is for the majority impossible.

The workforce is not “highly” educated because the university system is still too small. In PA, there are 400 colleges and Universities, 200 of which are 4 year programs. The population of PA is 13M. To accommodate this many people in colleges would require that most of them expand to over 30k student population. Not likely as most can only take around 1000/year.


Higher education is too small and extremely variable, diverse, from college to college, department to department, courses and curricula. 2/3’s do not go to college at all!


When the Fed floats a bond to cover govt payments for wages and contracts because they are not covered completely by revenue, it is called a deficit and adds to the total debt. Quantitative easing is a method of reducing the government debt which equals the outstanding bonds and interest, buying back the bonds before maturity saves the government the interest and reduces the debt. 

When a bond is floated and bought by a private individual, money is created - there is a connexion between 'paper' and money. Some of the money can stay on the books, but some of it must be printed not because of a run on the bank but because some money will be withdrawn as cash. How much varies, but a shortage of actual cash will slow the rate of circulation of money, of exchanges, and slow the local economy down. So, either cash or credit cards are necessary for daily transactions and many people still live on a cash basis.

Population increases yearly, the number of workers increases, the number of people making financial/consumer transactions increases, so more cash money is needed.


When a loan is approved, the money supply increases by that amount, the total is printed in cash. The individual bank does not cover the loan amount, it approves the loan amount which is a part of an approval process totalized by the Fed. Each individual bank may make small temporary loans, business loans, but that is not how banks make money. Banks also invest their deposits in securities!

If I sell my house, I can immediately withdraw the money from the check of the sale. Where does this cash come from - it is printed on the basis of rules related to loans under approval as overseen by the Fed.

The money supply is related to the payments for all products, wages, resources, etc., to any activities related to the production of goods. This is called the transforming of money into capital. As money is needed, credit is generated and managed by the interest rate at several levels from the local banks up to the Fed and including - not bypassing - all of the financial organizations of states and corporations whose transactions are calculated by the Fed to ensure that all loans and checks are liquifiable!  On the other side, all capital goods must be transformed on the other side into money; sales. If the production is not covered by consumption, Capital would become stagnant - product would not move!

So, the income from production requires that the population consumes it and the population must be employed to earn the money to purchase the capital. Thus, employment is the GDP and not just a spurious correlation.

The reason for the Great Depression was unsupervised banks that extended their credit AND over invested in securities as detailed by Milton Friedman in his History of the Depression!

A misconception occurs over the use of the term socialist which today refers to ‘welfare economies’ in which the government actively intervene. The term 'communist' is pejorative and not the same as socialism. The dominant ideology of the US is 'anticommunist.' Russian communism collapsed in 1989 and has been turning capitalist, China also has been turning capitalist.

To understand this difference requires knowing how communist nations operated before this turn to provide their populations with the necessary subsistence goods. They appointed commissars who calculated the population's needs and the productivity of the population, and then traded with the West to make up the difference. This calculation and the resulting distribution was always wrong as Mises and Hayek proved in their works. The closed, state controlled market interacted with the open market. Today, there is only an open market which states regulate and supervise, not only through customs, tariffs and protectionist taxes, but also through quality control: inspections, accounting, traffic control, etc.

Socialism also gets derogatory attention, as does democracy! Socialism refers to the receiving of free money or goods from the government: subsidies, housing, food stamps, unemployment comp, Medicaid, etc., a myriad of government services! The social democratic states of Northern EU afford their government services with very high taxes. However, socialist-welfare policies benefit the capitalists, owners and executives of corporations far more than the impoverished millions.


Democracy gives married folk a tax break, and parents a tax break. The government intervenes into families financially and legally. However, where the federal government gives a tax break to the married and those with children, local jurisdictions increase property taxes. There is really no tax break at all.


The basis of conservative values is DUTY: the requirement that everyone works, over-relies on their personal self-reliance!

These meanings are changing: communism is changing into the ecological meaning of concern for the common land, socialism is changing into a concern for solidarity and common values, and democracy is changing into a recognition of diversity and a universal requirement to work! That job discrimination against women and minorities is illegal! And so is class, religious and regional discrimination.

Society means 'social order' where order is the name of the game, not ideology, ignorance, or hysterical anti-state populism.

China is not economically socialist, it is obviously capitalist.

In the US, there is an obvious division between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. Conservatism suffers and lacks any credibility therefore. The same has happened to communism where socialism is like social conservatives - a set of supposedly dignified values which however belies their having to be instilled by torture and imprisonment, e.g. mass incarceration. But, the nature of capitalism varies from nation to nation.

This variability in capitalism is seen on several levels: whether the government permits, taxes or prohibits international investment! Whether the government expands social services or limits them to police! Whether exports are the remainder after providing for the populations needs, or before the population has been provided.

This latter problem is obvious in the present cataclysm in Venezuela where the oil exports keep the rich and the police in power while the population starved!

So, government plays a very important role in the economy by directing investment, employment and development, ie housing, education, etc.  The problem erupts when a nation is a client of other nations who invest in it and extract its products and profits!

US grew at over 4% in 2018 but at 1% in 2020. What exactly that means is in the shadows. To what extent does productivity, or unemployment, imply population control, incarceration, state terrorism?

Chinese GDP can grow, Chinese monetary controls can provide unlimited credit or low taxes or whatever, but the key issue is international investment.

As international capital investment - maquiladora and survival extraction - increases, the GDP increases also but at a very high risk. The stable economies around the world: South Korea, Germany, Norway, Iceland, etc., control, supervise and limit international capital investments, sometimes by taxation, by import duties even of intracorporate goods. Look at what just happened to Japan largest pension fund - caught between US-China trade war, it lost 1/4 of its international investments!

China is a nation within its borders, instead of an expanding corporate body of state-regulated corporations!

The real issue is the relation of productivity to population control.

When a govt floats a bond, they owe interest, not to mention the matured payout. Notwithstanding quantitative easing, who do you think collects the interest on these bonds?

The money supply is managed by the printing of money or the crediting of accounts on the basis of approved loans: credit. Improper procedures for regulating credit from the smallest bank to the hidden corporate financial services to the supervision of leverage in every bank leads to credit bottlenecks, loan rejections and the slowing of hiring thus the slowing of production and then the slowing of consumption. This business cycle is due to a government’s lackadaisical processing of the credit basis of the economy causing recession and stagnation, that is, the increase in unemployment.

There are many important works on this question from Schumpeter to Hayek to Keynes to Friedman.  

If during this year, 100B are generated in loan approvals, and those individuals with their loans withdraw even 10% in cash, the entire economy would then run out of actual cash and no one could get any more cash from the banks. It would be a total credit economy. If everyone could do this, no problem, but in the meantime, as loans are approved their cash basis must be realizable, the money supply must increase.

Legislation and Morality

 LEGISLATION AND MORALITY

Many laws are based on moral rules, even rights are considered to be rules. The main principles of morality like good, right, just, care, fairness, even love are coded in judicial and law enforcement procedures and statutes.

However, moral reasoning is considered to be practical in that the individual weighs the reasons for following a moral rule or norm in terms of rightness and in terms of consequences as punishment or perhaps happiness.

Where laws are like rules and rules do not quite get at intuitions or evaluation of evidence and state of mind, e.g. preponderance of the evidence or propensity of the evidence standards - two different things. Kohlberg and Piaget for example make a key distinction when describing moral development between a rules orientation and an intentional orientation. Likewise, moral philosophy contains the key distinction between utilitrianism and deontological ethics, or consequentialism vs. rightness.

The individual is always faced with the difference between "following the law" and deciding whether s/he really has to act in a certain way under given circumstances (the Normative Problem: Why do I have to do that?). This dilemma can also be portrayed in terms of positive rights to act in a certain way or negative rights to refrain from acting in a certain way.

Morality is clearly legislated and legislative decisions are usually moral. In the US, when SCOTUS finds a legislative decision suspect, it rejects that legislation as law, but on the basis of Law and not necessarily as moral depending on your moral perspective.  Since moral perspectives are plural, governments tend to narrow the moral issues down into categories or statutes, a rule orientation. But, courts must deal with interpretations of situationally conflicting values like obligations and ends and rights. The two levels of the judicial government: law enforcement and prosecution must also contend with practical discretionary reasoning or weighing of which rules and principles are appropriate in a particular situation.

Legislation addresses moral concerns which are modified by the judiciary.