See Hobbes. Note the order in which they were listed (though I should have put Calvin first).

Sorry if I misunderstood, but you did use a term, “classical liberal,” that has a specific meaning, and that meaning is what I responded to. As for whether liberal/conservative equates to left wing/right wing, that argument strikes me as just as revisionistic as the classical liberal label. The left wing/right wing scheme dates from the French Revolution, so applying it to Hobbes, Locke, Smith or Calvin (how’d he get in there?) is anachronistic. And in any case, the “left” has from the beginning been the wing of social reform and workers’ rights as against landlords’ and capitalists’ privileges. An argument like Rubenstein is making appears to me to want to detach “liberalism” from this context in order to argue that liberals ought to behave like Randian libertarians. But with liberals like that, who needs conservatives?

“Classical liberalism” is a 20th-century construction created by libertarian-leaning, market-oriented thinkers as a fake intellectual justification for their own ideology. It’s an attempt to paint their troglodytic-conservative opinions as being in the truest tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, etc. etc., and therefore the true way to true “liberty.” At the same time, it’s also a deliberate tactic meant to delegitimize garden-variety liberalism as something “new” and its focus on regulation and social activism as contrary to the “genuine” (i.e., laissez-faire free-marketarian) liberal tradition. So trotting out the concept to argue that today’s liberals aren’t “real” liberals is intellectually vacuous. But it’s certainly true that there are few left-wingers in Congress, and the “center” is increasingly skewed toward the right. That’s the main reason life for Americans outside the capitalist elite has, in fact, gotten more Hobbesian: nasty, brutish and short.

“Why do liberal activists tout EITC and ignore other, relatively less-used, poverty programs? Why do they downplay the minimum wage? Are they in league with the Walmarts [sic] and McDonalds [sic] of the world?”

What exactly, pray, are the “other, relatively less-used, poverty programs” being alluded to or implied here?

Are they of the sort which expects capitalism with American characteristics to be seen in a “Great White Father” context (cf. official United States Government attitudes towards Native Americans of a century or more ago, which excused their being housed on reservations with no realistic job or career prospects thereon)?

Are they based on the Afrikaner nationalist ideals of Volkseenheid (“organic unity of the people”). Reddingsdaad (“mutual self-help”) and Volkskapitalisme (“people’s capitalism”), the latter to be financed through subscriptions to Reddingsdaadfonds (“mutual assistance funds”) as would theoretically finance business startups among Afrikaners, only to wind up being administered through the likes of Volkskaas and Sanlam?

Are they based on “school-to-work” initiatives as are really little more than drunken, bromide-laden propaganda lectures having little or no realistic value in developing job or career skills in the vulnerable and impressionable?

Or what exactly prevents their citing specific examples? Is it because they don’t know of any as would fit in with their articles of faith?

Surprise, surprise, another far-rightie who lives on the Bizarro planet. On Earth, of course, the minimum wage was created by liberals and every raise in it since then has been won by liberals over the resistance of pro-market conservative and neo-conservative ideology-pushers like Rubenstein’s former employers.

It’s true, though, that “liberal activists” don’t believe minimum-wage jobs are a solution to poverty. That’s because the conservative opponents of the minimum wage – supported also by the Wal-Marts and McDonaldses of the world – have managed to stop it from rising enough to keep pace with the cost of living and enable workers to survive on it. All in all, it just looks like another example of the libertarian right’s blame-the-victim approach to everything.

If one wants to know who the real tax evaders are. It’s the big Republican backed American corporations that has relogated their companies in tax-free havens, i.e. such as Ireland, Switzerland, Norway etc. for the past decade or so. This tax scheme is so vast, that it ranges in the billions of back taxes withheld in accounts overseas. These billions of dollars are owed to the United States. And its why the economy has not fully recovered as we thought, is based literally on those big capitalist tax evaders–courtesy of the Republican Party.

That was a typo and has been fixed. Thanks for letting us know.

- Hatewatch Staff

EITC fraud is a REAL issue, I worked for rapid reform tax preparation firm for 4 years. We did 10k+ return per year in that market and not once did a fradulent case come from an immigrant client. It’s always citizens with fake w2s and/or claiming dependents that are not their own.

EITC fraud mostly comes down to the tax preparation industry. Citizens generally don’t dare to send in fradulent documents themselves. They do it through rapid refund services for the most part. It is NOT an immigration issue.

If any thing, like the article stated, immigrants pay into system and never get benefits of tax code or collect social security benefits, unemployment, etc.