American Truths (Updated)

If we are going to have a country at all, there are some things we should agree on. There are some self-evident truths about America and the world that ought to be delineated and canonized* so that when opposition to those agreed upon truths "rear their ugly heads" we can be confident they will be corrected.

We, alone and with others, have corrected some in the past, and they have been accepted to such a point that to favor or posit them now would seem ridiculous. They are truths. American truths. Things we as Americans hold true. Not coincidentally, most of the world does as well.

Some of these American truths have made their way out of American wars, social upheaval, advances in science and technology, archaeology, and paleontology, physics, law and life. Some of the most accepted I will list here, then we will see which ones are now loudly and frighteningly under attack.

Self-Evident American Truths:

• Slavery was immoral
• The earth is round
  
• Women should vote
• So should black people
• Blacks and whites should be able to marry
• The universe is really old
• Hitler was very, very bad
• It's good the Union prevailed in the Civil War
• Nazis are assholes
• There is no difference in potential between races
  
• Communism failed
• Medicare is Socialized Medicine
• VA is Government Run Health Care
• Private health insurance provides no social good (since it can be done cheaper by the government)
• The rich are getting richer
• Evolution is theory, like gravity, and they are both real
  
• The poor are getting poorer
• We owe China like, a lot of money
• Poor people in America die of hunger and lack of health care
  
• You don't heckle the POTUS in the Chamber
• Gay parents are like your parents--warts and all

Okay. You right-wingers may argue with a couple, but you'd be wrong, so shut up. Indeed, that is the point here. There are things on this list that are being challenged, and it needs to stop. Stupidity ought to be unAmerican.

Anyone comparing our President to Hitler should get arrested. Or at least beat up by a progressive. A big, gay, progressive. There is nothing Obama is proposing that is in any way similar to Hitler or Hitler's policies. Hitler, you see, was a fucking psychopath and murdered millions of people, many because they were Jewish. He was nothing like Obama, who seems pretty stable. And Obama is a Democrat, not a Nazi. Google it. Hitler was bad, America fought him in WWII, we defeated him with the help of some of our greatest generals and soldiers, the whole country sacrificed and rationed, and no American president should have to tolerate being compared to Hitler. That's an American Truth. Assholes.

Insurance companies exist to make money, not provide health care. Anyone who says otherwise (not that anyone has) is wrong, or stupid, or lying. Medicare proves that a government run "single payer" can be far more efficient delivering the commerce of health care than insurance companies, something like 30% operating cost versus 4% or something astounding like that. Anyone who can't see that insurance companies have to charge more so they can pay for commercials, and planes, and bonuses, and CONGRESSMEN, and hookers (okay, maybe not hookers. NOT!!) are just blind, or stupid, or get their money via an insurance company. It's an American, capitalist truth!

The universe is old, and Earth is too. It's in the billions, not the thousands. We are related to monkeys. And fish.

*Update: I've had a good response from this post, though there's a quibble.  The quibbler (who I love) doesn't like the word "canonized" because it is too Catholic. I agree, so here are some options: declared, adjudged, held, lauded, extolled, exalted, glorified, and last, proclaimed.  Those were from Synonym.com.

Feel free to add your own in comments.

I Think I'm A Communist!

Karl Marx The Concentration and Centralization of Capital

Although the basic Marxian model assumes perfectly competitive markets with a large number of small firms in each industry, Marx was aware of the growing size of firms, the consequent weakening of competition, and the growth of monopoly power. He concluded that this phenomenon derives from the increas­ing concentration and centralization of capital. Increasing concentration of capital occurs as individual capitalists accumulate more and more capital, thereby increasing the absolute amount of capital under their control. The size of the firm or economic unit of production is increased correspondingly, and the degree of competition in the market tends to be diminished.

A more important reason for the reduction of competition is the centralization of capital. Centralization occurs through a redistribution of already existing capital in a manner that places its ownership and control in fewer and fewer hands. Marx maintained that larger firms would be able to achieve economies of scale and thus produce at lower average costs than would smaller firms.

Competition between the larger, lower-cost firms and the smaller firms would result in the elimination of the smaller firms and the growth of monopoly.

The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller.

The increasing centralization of capital is furthered by the development of a credit system and of the corporate form of business organization. Although the corporation was just beginning to assume importance during Marx's time, he demonstrated a remarkable insight into some of the long-run consequences of the growth of the corporate economy. Corporate capitalism is characterized by the fact that its enterprises assume the form of social enterprises as distinguished from individual enterprises. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production itself. Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, an administrator of other people's capital, and of the owners of capital into mere owners, mere money capitalists.

Marx's view was that capital accumulation, economies of scale, the growth of credit markets, and the dominance of the corporation in business organization would lead to the concentration and centralization of capital into fewer and fewer hands. Competition would end by destroying itself, and the large corpo­ration would assume monopoly power. With the large corporation would come a separation of ownership and control, along with a number of undesirable social consequences:
a new aristocracy of finance, a new sort of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation juggling, stock jobbing, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.

Possibly no other vision of the future of capitalism advanced by Marx has been more prophetic than his law of the concentration and centralization of capital. Yet this prediction was not backed up by any substantial reasoning, for Marx did not fully develop an explanation of the forces that would bring about the growth of the corporation and monopoly power. According to Marx, the growth of the large firm with its monopoly power is merely another example of the contradic­tions within capitalism between the forces and relations of production that will lead to the ultimate destruction of capitalism.