It's in the language

I still can't clearly define an opinion about the failues of the Democrats, but the idea of abandoning politicians who are Repubs in Democrat clothing has been with me since the days of Jimmy Carter, when MLKs', McGovernists' and other strongly liberal peoples' popular ideas were "appropriated"- nee commandeered- by mainstream party hacks, only to be so weakly supported during the Carter presidency that within the span of less than a decade the reactionary Reaganist platitudes were enabled and have managed to bring our country to the point it is today with the looming- no, impending- SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) ultra-conservative gang of four.

It is obvious to liberals that the language of orthodox political economy is rooted in greed. This is the front in the battle for the standing of the United States as a Godly nation.

I consider BushCo dogma to be the antithesis of freedom. The SCOTUS gang of four will work for years to make this dogma into permanent law.

Here is one example of how dogmatic economic doctrine has worked: The "law of supply and demand" is not a law in any sense of the word, yet it has been behind the oppression of working people since the days of Adam Smith. It is not a law of Nature, as the pseudo-scientific mainstream economists would have us believe, and is how it is taught. It is not a constitutional law of the land; not a statutory law, not a mass local ordinance, nor even a case law. It is merely a doctrine of belief that underlies our capitalististic system- a doctrine, and one, I would like to add, that does make sense to most people in the light of freedom. For example, it can work very well to determine the best allocation of resources, given current social economic circumstances. It can also be shown to work very poorly in far too many cases, though. Thus, it is easily made a vassal of free enterprise (make that cotton into denim dammit!), but just as easily invalidated by common sense (too many plastic flowers, not enough cheap heating oil).

However, the most glaring example of the failure of the law of supply and demand in the course of human events is when it comes to determining living wages for human beings. Here, the law of supply and demand serves to enable managers to justify their awful pay rate decisions on the supply of workers, rather than on the needs of the workers. People are being treated as just another factor of production, like steel, or grain. But steel and grain do not need food, clothing, and warm shelter. As liberals, we bemoan the lack of living wages for so many workers- a crisis further confounded by the labor arbitrage available through globalization. Corporate heads, whose decisionmaking serves stockholders first, won't even consider honoring a living wage for their employees, because it violates one of their "laws"- the law of supply and demand. Too bad for workers, say the corporadoes, we MUST OBEY the "law". See how it works?

If liberals want to really make the idea of a living wage a real law, as in a legislated statutory law, then we must popularly "decertify" the dogmatic law of supply and demand for human beings and certify living wage levels.

Who is up for this? I fail in even clearly expressing it in writing, let alone in a heated debate! But one thing I am sure of, it has to be done. Let the enemies of a living wage attack the idea, but there must be a consensus formed that a legislated living wage does not violate any "law". Opposing it, however violates the code of human decency. The issue has to be framed this way to make any progress.

It's all in the language. And freedom is in the truth.