Ryan’s World
From all the press coverage over the weekend, you would think that Paul Ryan was at the top of the Republican ticket. For those of us who have been having an intellectual battle with Libertarians for the past few years, it seems like this election might really be a referendum on the Koch Brothers Anarcho-Capitalist philosophy. Certainly Ryan is their favorite politician and water carrier as the Times points out this morning.
Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.
Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of climate change.
But it would be a mistake to focus on just Ryan’s efforts to bring an Ayn Randian philosophy to government where the Vice President would lecture the welfare “looters and moochers” in the language of John Galt, “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” Ryan’s view of America as the continuing unpaid policeman of the world is pure Neocon, as the Wall Street Journal points out with pride this morning in a piece called “Paul Ryan’s Neocon Manifesto”.
Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.
It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”
But as Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman points out this morning, the Ryan-Romney continuation of Neocon vision is a one way trip to nowhere.
Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.
Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.
Ryan may be put forth as the soul of midwestern Catholic probity, but even in this pose, questions are being raised.
Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, sold stock in US banks on the same day he attended a confidential meeting where top level officials disclosed the sector was heading for a deep crisis.
The congressman on Monday denied profiting from information gleaned from the meeting on 18 September 2008 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, then treasury secretary Hank Paulson and others outlined their fears for the banking sector. His office said he had no control over the trades.
Public records show that on the same day as the meeting, Ryan sold stock in troubled banks including Wachovia and Citigroup and bought shares in Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s old employer and a bank that had been disclosed to be stronger than many of its rivals.
If Ryan’s excuse that this was not insider trading was that the trades were executed by his representative, can he swear that he had no communication with that representative after the meeting with Bernanke and Paulson? Ryan has boasted that he is an active investor and trader. Why all of a sudden does he act like his assets are in a blind trust? He will need to answer these questions.
As I said at the top, I welcome the addition of Ryan to the ticket. Romney was a total mushburger on policy, hoping to coast to the Presidency on Obama animosity. He realized that strategy was not working and has now thrown his fate to the ideas and pocketbook of the Koch Brothers. The election will decide whether we live in a democracy or an oligarchy;in a 21st Century world or a 19th Century fantasy.
@Rick Turner
And if you want more details of what that Libertarian world would look like, can I suggest (once again) a neat, largely-unresponded-to-by-the-usually-explosively-voluble-Libertarian-types series of sketches written by one Andrew Dittmer and published by one Yves Smith in her nakedcapitalism spot: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html I guess the Libertarians figure if they ignore the Picture of Dorian Gray, it will go away…
JP pins David Graeber as an anarchist, a wonderfully obscure term that tarps over a pretty broad range of thought and behavior. The thing I like about Graeber is that he goes back and looks at what humans have actually done in creating their socio-economo-political situations. He points out the fundamental flaws and ignorance and ignoring of actual history when it comes to how “economists” have created their postulates and the obviously failed and dishonest theorems and spins that flow out of them like a river of toxins.
Economists almost uniformly hold that “barter” was the first kind of economic behavior — an extra pair of shoes for a kopek of wheat, all on the way to the myths of Libertarians about self-interested arms-length “money”-mediated transactions as the basis for everything. He points out that earlier, even fairly large and complex social groupings, had many ways of organizing the creation and distribution of necessities and even fripperies, and that in many cultures esteem and position arose not from taking everything not nailed down from everyone else in the neighborhood, but by various forms of generosity (albeit sometimes pretty pathological from our viewpoint), to the point of doing what Jesus reportedly said was the only way to Heaven: Giving it all away.
What I like about “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is that Graeber really looks at the ranges of possibilities for organizing human groupings in ways that are less destructive and predatory, based on actual scholarship about how it’s actually been done. There’s a lot of food for thought in even the first few chapters, for anyone serious about what might come after the Interregnum/Ragnarok and what might be done to catalyze changes of state and energy that our survivors, heirs and assigns might actually thank us for. As opposed to the world that Papola’s “free market” would give us, complete with “government-like organizations” from whom you would have to buy your “protection,” just like a shopkeeper in Al Capone’s South Side of Chicago.
SOMEthing is going to happen. Near 8 billion people all wanting “a better material life” are not likely, en masse, to come to an agreement that there really is enough to go all the way around the table, as long as the shrewd pigs don’t take most of it for their private pleasure. Not without some kind of change of heart, or some G-d the Father or Hypernanny to wag a finger and slap down the greedbrains whenever they start to become to massy…
P.S.,
Why we are fucked:
Comment (one of lots) from the new viral Youtube “Shitboat” video that Tells the World about how Obama is a commie Muslim traitor, who betrayed the Really Brave Guys Who Are Protecting Our Way Of Life, and all that:
That, and all the content if you want to dig it up, along with 1,590,000 views, for that “Dishonorable Disclosures” thing. Looks like the lizardbrains are gettin’ their shit together, got a rallying point.
Gettin’ to the point that the only response for folks like me is gettin’ to be “I don’t care. You people can have it.”
ah yes, those cavemen had much to teach us…
@JTMcPhee
@Rick Turner
Since you packed so many tropes into one post, I’ve decided to give you the Alex Bowles treatment and parse the ever-living-hell out of it. Just know that I’m doing it because I love you and not because I think your some cuss-laden attack (so it’s not the FULL Alex Bowles treatment, since nobody here deserves THAT).
Compared to what, Rick? You’re not demonstrating a particularly sound grasp of what real, consistent libertarians actual study, propose and support.
Libertarians are broadly supportive of very open immigration policies. Most favor returning to pre 1924 policies of essentially open borders. Anti-immigrant nonsense flows out of the left and right in spades.
Gee. Lowering the price of goods we buy, thereby raising our real wages AND enabling new businesses the opportunity to form through the surplus purchasing power unleashed? Yes. Yes that is great for consumers, rick. It’s hard on PRODUCERS to compete. But any given producer is generally going to be a tiny minority compared to the great number of their customers. It’s time you upgrade your understanding of trade from the mercantilist era.
Who said eliminate workers’ comp insurance? You do realize the prior to these government programs, there was an entire ecosystem of privately provided safety nets through mutual aid societies and trade organizations which offered responsible unemployment, health insurance and worker’s compensation. But that’s just, you know, actual American history. I can’t speak to OSHA other than to note that workplace risks and injuries had been declining steadily throughout the 20th century prior to the creation of OSHA. It may have helped. It surely added lots of unproductive, expensive and calcified rules on top of whatever benefits.
I don’t know what the CPB does, but it’s demagogic name tells me nothing. The FDA works principally as a cartel protecting large firms from domestic and foreign competition. But hey, if you like thugs pointing guns at consenting adults buying raw milk or keeping out decades-proven medicines that have saved people pain and death in other countries because they haven’t been “FDA Approved”, be my guest to defend that mess. Meanwhile, um, we STILL get poisoned foods and drugs even with this giant, captured beast of corporatism in place. Net benefit? I doubt it… unless you’re a big Pharma corporation.
Oh, and how can we forget how this wonderful consumer-protecting government intentionally poisoned 10,000 Americans:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.html
Prohibitionism is among the most destructive forces unleashed by state power on peaceful people seeking to harm no one both some grotesque totalitarian thug busybody’s sensibilities.
Hell yes. Mandates don’t create anything, they just push the costs on to other people. Nobody in America needs an extra incentive to seek more fuel efficient cars. If such mandates worked on their own, we should just mandate global prosperity in a “full satisfaction law” and then go on vacation. If you want to capture the eternality of auto emissions, there are better ways to do that than CAFE regulations.
I didn’t know you loved the military industrial complex, Rick. But okay. Defend it if you must. Basic research is among the least-worst stuff that the state does, and DARPA seems to have been a real diamond in the rough, though I’m fairly ignorant of the full story there. Still, this is a pittance in the spending picture. And some prominent libertarians even argue that if we could shrink the welfare/warfare state, it may be worth INCREASING basic research.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/the-innovation-nation-vs-the-warfare-welfare-state/251984/
PS. note that I believe the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a private grant making research foundation, appears by some measures to have a superior track record to the National Institute of Health. Private action has, can, does and will continue to perform these sorts of public-goods-creating services.
Farm subsidies don’t help many small farmers anyway since many are renters and see land values rise to capitalize the subsidies. This is great for speculators and fat cats. Bad for many farmers.
http://www.postbulletin.com/news/stories/display.php?id=1505552
Meanwhile, New Zealand ended all farm subsidies and saw the farm industry prosper. No devastation. No dooms day.
http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features/0303/newzealand_subsidies.shtml
But hey, that’s just actual real work results from a nation-wide change in policy toward libertarian ideals in a agriculture-rich country. Why pay attention to that? Oh, and I’m sure you already know that many of the foods you buy are NOT subsidized. Do you remember the last strawberry or banana crisis? Yeah, me neither.
You do remember that private firms built the railroads, subways and many of the roads in this country right? No, that story isn’t perfect, as there were some real land-grant and subsidy problems with the rail tycoons. In fact, the subsidized railroads appear to have suffered more crises and over-production-related bankruptcies. Where have we seen THAT story before (*cough) solar power (*cough)
Oh, and are you so sure that our interstate highway system was a net positive? Do you like suburban sprawl? Are you happy that passenger rail was reduced to a non-viable government-run boondoggle? It may very well be that the interstate highways produced more harm than good. And, even if they didn’t, I believe gas taxes paid for them, which is a pretty direct-user-fee-for-service kinda-libertarian-ish approach to provision of government services.
Canada, which is now quite a bit more free market than the USA, privatized air traffic control and it’s now better than the US, which is still stuck in 1940s radio technology, unable to upgrade to GPS due to crippling bureaucrat sclerosis.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/canadas-private-atc-wins-award/
There’s still Canadian intervention in airlines. I’m not saying it’s anarchist. I’m saying it’s much more market-driven AND working BETTER.
Yes, because LIBRARIES are what every serious libertarian is worried about. Not the drug war. Not the foreign adventurism. Not the fiscal crisis. Nope. We all holler about libraries. I remember that anti-library tirade Ron Paul went on… oh… that’s never happened.
Again, who exactly are you arguing with right now? The GOP? They aren’t libertarian. Is this about Anwar? Whose platform is advocating the wholesale sell-off of the national parks to the oil companies? And, btw, the enormous increase in open space over the past 200 years in developed nations is due principally to urban density and income growth. We don’t need the land and we can afford to care about keeping it beautiful. The state plays a role, but not the only one.
Oh… and are you at all familiar with the ecologically DEVASTATING history of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation? If you were, you’d be a little more hesitant to celebrate the Federal management of so much of our country’s land. I’m in Texas. Our water shortages are in part thanks to this runaway nightmare organization whose make-work efforts to damn every waterway it could find left disaster after disaster in its wake.
This is downright ignorant. Only anarchists argue to eliminate ALL taxes. And, um, you clearly don’t seem to know that it was libertarian juggernaut Milton Friedman who CAME UP WITH VOUCHERS as a solution to our utterly failed and systematically racist/segregationist K-12 disaster. So you can THANK libertarians for putting forward the only systematic school reform concept with a real shot of both lifting the poor students of places like Newark, NJ (of which I am familiar) while also systematically
This is nonsense. Libertarians don’t want people to die. In fact, the libertarians I know all concern themselves principally with the how we can have more just system that helps the least of us rather than the current corrupt crony boondoggles we have today. We didn’t have masses of people dying in the streets in 1955. We still to this day have hundreds (thousands?) of catholic and non-profit hospitals. Both of my grandparents were doctors (they each passed this past year) and they would take STRONG EXCEPTION with your portrayal of reality outside of the state.
Government is not altruism. It is not kindness. Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force.
Given that. Let’s return to the political and jontaplin.com community reality.
There are two prominent libertarians in this election cycle: Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. Both have focus FIRST on the need to end the wars. Both have emphasized that their priorities are to ensure that provision for the needy is preserved as we restore fiscal sanity. Ron Paul has attacked Paul Ryan’s plans because they increase military spending while cutting medicare, saying he wouldn’t touch medicare until he’s cut the wars and the corporatism and boondoggles. Gary Johnson has two terms of executive governance in New Mexico, where he won re-election in a democrat-dominated State. The guy reformed Medicaid in his state, changing it from fee-for-service into a managed care plan. The last time I checked, that isn’t saying to the poor “go shoot yourself”.
Now, there are two libertarians who frequent this blog, Morgan and myself. Both of us advocated repeatedly (as did libertarian icons Milton Friedman and Hayek) some form of guaranteed minimum income to replace the current welfare state. This isn’t “kill the poor”. This is “make sure that nobody goes hungry or dies in the street in a country as rich as ours”.
Are there libertarians on earth who play right into your caricature? Sure. Every group has their harsh voices and thoughtless jerks. Some on the right seem to truly hate the poor. Some on the left seem to believe that everyone but a narrow governing elite (ideally “independent” of politics/democracy) is capable of making any decisions of significance. Do these facts give either of us good reason to use the worst examples from our respective “teams” as models for the whole? No.
The libertarians on this blog, some of the biggest icons who most libertarians adore AND the two most primary libertarian politicians all fail to live up to your (and others here) characterizations. Don’t you find that a little weird? Perhaps you all should stop conflating jerk republican politicians with your fictional notion of “libertarians” as a whole or as a philosophy.
Exhibit Z for “Paul Ryan is not a libertarian”.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/18/gary-johnson-on-paul-ryan-he-is-anything
I disagree, I think he’s a text book Randian.
I think, because I too get irritated by busy bodies and authortarians, that a person can rationally be a libetarian for good and moral motives.
But not a Randian. Ayn Rands philosophy and arguments are base dishonest self serving egotistical nonsense and exactly the soil out of which a faux conservative etheral pretender to self reliance and individual liberty grows and tries to draw around themself as shield against light which reveals their dishonest efforts to theive.
(I type this on my phone, so I expect poor spelling and grammar to sneak through – I’ve been evicted from my home so it can be repaired of its earthquake damage and are enroute to Tonga, hopefully to swim with humpback whales)
@JTMcPhee If you’ve been reading ‘Debt’ here’s something you’re really appreciate.
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/financial-predators-v-labor-industry-and-democracy/
This is a transcript of a lecture, not a blog post, so it reads long. But Hudson’s got a book’s worth of material in mind, and the salient points are all here. I won’t do it the discredit of further condensation, but I will highlight a few of the lines that really jumped out for me.
We’ll start with current events.
As it turns out, those gains are the least of it.
“But what’s the problem with that?” you ask.
Banks, in turns out, desire the precise opposite.
In other words, taxes – far from being the wealth destroying loss that so many on the right make them out to be – are actually a form of savings. Not savings in the savings account sense, but savings in the sense that this is wealth being saved by placing it beyond the reach of predatory interests that would take what is already owned by the public and rent it back to them at an ever increasing costs that they’re happy to issue interest-bearing credit to pay.
The notion that European social welfare states are at the root of their financial troubles is nonsense. The real squeeze on public finances is coming from the rentier class – which turns out to be the very last group you want anywhere near public finance.
In the absence of credit write downs, this situation results in cuts to public services that nevertheless become more expensive now that their costs have been heavily loaded with interest payments. Without effort or risk, the rentier class and their heirs grow substantially richer, even as the overall economy shrinks. Historically speaking, a move in this direct represents an extraordinary and exceedingly undesirable shift.
It also runs counter to the very essence of what a bank – in a healthy economy – is supposed to do and to be.
The moral aspect of this crisis isn’t limited to salubrious way that money is being made. It extends to the reckless indifference shown towards those who inevitably suffer.
There’s more (much more) and you really should read it properly, noting, as Hudson does, that “Not since the Middle Ages and colonization of the New World, Africa and Asia has the world seen so aggressive an economic warfare.”
If there’s single, overarching point in all this it isn’t simply that credit write downs are the fix. Though essential, they simply undo some of the damage that has been done, and prevent further damage from taking place in the immediate future. But stripped of a moral dimension enshrined in theory and law, these write downs would do nothing to keep the horrible situation we’re facing from occurring again and again. For that, we need to become much clearer about what banking and investment are actually for, and moreover, what constitutes just and unjust taxation.
I’ve probably covered more than enough, though there’s far more to it that what I’ve excerpted. Really, this piece is one of the most illuminating things I’ve read in ages. If you can look past the some of the redundancy that’s par for the course in lectures, you’ll find a very clear view of an extraordinary moment in human history, along with what seems like the essential frame for addressing it properly.
@John Papola Of all the words you could use incorrectly, “parsing” has got to be among the funniest.
Oh Alex,
You’re parsing my use of the word “parsing”. How ironic.
I went through Rick’s comment line-by-line analysizing for its implications, as you have done to me. You’ve added in the flourish of harsh, cuss-laden personal attacks, which isnt “parsing” but rather just being a jerk.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parse
See definition number 3.
But what do I know? In your eyes, I know that I’m just a “fucking idiot”.
John Papola
You got to chill out, Señor. I think I understand your deep concern for this community. There was a cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago- a wife was standing over her husband, who was seated at his computer in a state of obvious agitation, and he was saying, “I’ll be down to dinner in just a minute, there is someone on the internet who is wrong!
You seem like a decent fellow. Alex Bowles is a good guy himself. You might consider that you pushed things too far, you might look at your own self, and see what you might have done to bring about Alex’s reaction. Check out your own tone before you correct his. That is usually good advice in any disagreeable situation in which one finds himself. All this stress is not great for one’s health. Please let this go.
All the best
T Bone Burnett
Go away for a day to take the baby to her first day of college and come back to the fight of the century. Wow!
On review, despite the vitriol with which y’all jack up your endorphins, this is a very intelligent discussion particularly compared to others I read. You should congratulate yourselves and each other on the depth of knowledge with which you support your belief systems. Impressive.
I’m not well-studied enough in economics to participate in a blow to blow of economic theory. Behaviorally one point: it is obvious that libertarians have the same problem with the Republican party as the Christian progressives do with their right wing ideologues: they are being hijacked and their core beliefs are being perverted. A Christian coalition has been founded to fight that and take back Christianity. Libertarians may in fact be trying to do that but perhaps it hasn’t gelled. Good luck in both cases. It is time for the saner voices to be more assertive. The extremists run the parties because they are the ones who show up at their own events.
Hopefully it can be done in both cases without losing the country and the church we both love and need for the pursuit of happiness, a right which I think we should all fight for and ensure each have. If that is a hippie thing, well, the hippies are right about that one.
And T-Bone is right. Stress is cancer food. Step away from the trough. There are more adventures to be lived and you can’t enjoy them from the chair with an IV plugged in. On this I am well studied. For what it’s worth if you are enjoying the combat more than you want an end to a war, you may be addicted. There is actually considerable common ground here as I read your posts.
Have a great day. I’ve some homework to do for a friend.
@fentex: Sorry to hear about the house. I was worried about you when the news of the last quake came. Good luck and have a great time with the humpbacks. I’d like to hear about that when you dry off. THAT is an adventure.
@Alex Bowles
As usual, I am abashed by your breadth and depth. Thank you so kindly for the reference. I’ve skimmed it and am headed back for a longer read.
Some folks here (and everywhere else) are groping for an accurate diagnosis of one huge freakin’ pandemic, and praying for a cure. Others are more interested in finding an edge in the gain game, one that fits with their personal “betterment” and carefully cultivated identities. The pain a lot of us are suffering comes from a lot of sources, of course, some in our personal economies and some in our souls, knowing that maybe there is no “fix” or panacea for any of the planet’s ills, fearful that maybe we and our offspring and the stuff we value that’s actually worth something are about to get flicked off and flattened, like a roach caught in the middle of the table with nowhere to scurry when the bright lights come on.
I’m stuck with my tendency to see physiological parallels in the wider world, one of the themes that Papola and other mini-economists decry as being nothing more than one supposed logical fallacy or another. It’s no news that the disease Hudson and others so acutely assess and diagnose is horribly like a virulent and malignant and metastatic cancer. Once the oncogenes have been turned on and expressed, the “remedies” are often either unavailable, unappetizing, or ineffective, and the disease process runs its course until the “successful” freakin’ tumor cells use up all the available energy and kill the host. All that stuff, from the artful hiding of the real mortal nature of the tumor from the immune system that otherwise would recognize the evil for what it is and engulf and break it down into its constituent molecules for healthy re-use (see the smokescreens and ink-squirts emitted by “economists” and apologists), to the angiogenesis trick of suckering the body into growing ever larger arteries directly to the tumor, arteries that feed ever more of the vital substance of the body to that “successful” set of cells, to the splitting off of little clumps of cells that metastasize the sickness through the whole of the body — stuff like the bubbles and of course the whole COUNTERFEITING horror that is securito-derivitzation. (My mother died of ovarian cancer; she weighed about 170 when healthy, and barely 65 pounds when she finally died – like so many of us who struggle to feed the tumors enough to keep ourselves going until finally the sick tissue displaces something really vital, like us “muppets,” us “dumb money” debtors who keep on trying to maintain our “reputation” and “credit-worthiness” by all the stratagems the bankstas trick and force us into. Graeber, of course, explores and debunks the whole notion of “debt” in his oeuvre, and even offers some views of different ways to deal with the oppression. Jubilee, anyone? http://www.jubileeusa.org/get-active/jubilee-congregations/faith-worship-resources/debt-cancellation-the-biblical-norm.html)
The tumors get the best of the rest of us because they’ve hijacked the immune system, the governance that’s supposed to police them and keep them in check and protect us, and co-opted our tissues and organs to feed their every ridiculous whim and demand. There’s a lot of folks who are aware of the disease process, and are crying out for some kind of remedy (or just losing themselves in various anodynes, of course). Or, of course, buying into the scapegoating and spinning and arrant bullshit that clever folks, the rich folks’ “people,” come up with, to divert the flows of energy that might actually challenge the disease and restore a healthier homeostasis. Bearing in mind that the oncogenes we have always with us… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncogene
Well folks, I need to divert my own attention back to what I was doing in 1968 for a while. My musicianly past has caught up with me, and I have an album to re-master and a band authorized bootleg CD package to prepare and get out. Found a studio copy of the mono master tape; it’s in pristine condition. Bandmates found photos of the band. Ed Ward just profiled us on “Fresh Air”. Time to limit my multitasking for a while and practice guitar again for a possible reunion. We may be going for Guiness Book on length of time between gigs for all original members of a vanished band…45 years…
I’ll be voting for Obama, though not particularly liking it…
@T Bone Burnett
T Bone,
That is good advice, and I bet that Alex is a great guy in person. But you should go back to his repeated PERSONAL attacks against me in prior threads where he devoted extensive comments to explaining why I am a “fucking idiot”. It came out of no where. I do come down strongly on ideas or assertions which I disagree with. But I really don’t hold any ill feelings towards anyone here personally and certainly never to the level Alex has taken it with me. I’m one of a few occasional dissenting voices here and routinely get piled on with “you’re from the clan of racists who hate the poor” style attacks on my ideology. It’s fine. I’m a big boy. It’s just lame.
@JTMcPhee
JT,
There’s another kind of Jubilee which myself and most libertarians have been pleading to have happen since day one of this crisis: bankruptcy of parasitic, predatory firms. The problems of the class of “rentiers” is that the state has kept them alive with perpetual easy money and bailouts while the people who compose the “market” were prepared to pull the plug on these institutions. Things would look a great deal different had that happened.
Neither myself nor any real libertarians represent apologists for a financial system which has become overwhelmingly corrupt and predatory by way of it’s access to the public purse.
A complete jubilee would surely harm just as many normal folks as it would help. There are millions of good people out there who have bought bonds as way of earning interest on their savings and using it for their retirement. A jubilee would wipe these folks out and they include a great many members of the 99%.
I realize that the (metaphoric) nuke-the-planet-and-start-over approach has a great deal of appeal from many people. But I don’t see why we should believe such a reset would lay the foundation for anything better emerging in the aftermath. As radical as my own ideals are, I acknowledge that there is just as much if not more likelihood that a perversion of my ideals in implementation could not only make matters worse but also poison the well for the good reforms. All of that is simply to say that there is no easy solution here.
But one place where we could start would be to no knowingly assert or repeat propaganda and political lies (like the idea that Paul Ryan is a libertarian). If we aren’t even dealing in the easily-verifiable truth, how can there possibly be any hope for progress? It’s as if we’re trying to get to a destination with a map from the wrong country.
@Fentex
Fentex, good luck on God bless as you deal with the chaos in you home situation. Enjoy the whales.
@John Papola
I may be missing something in all your writings here, but don’t you kind of follow the libertarian idea that each of us is on his own, when it comes to personal finances and arm’s length business dealings in a Free Market, and success and all that?
Are you really concerned about the 99ers who might have bonds in their portfoolio (intentional spelling, given the reality of The Market)? First, what percent of the 99ers has any kind of portfoolio, anyway, let alone one built around bonds? My financial adviser person has basically said, along with others, that in the present world all that advice about spreading your investments in equities and bonds is meaningless any more, anyway — the game is totally rigged, and us little folks who can’t high-speed trade are nothing but Muppets On A Spit. Bet it’s a pretty small bunch who’s holding bonds, when you get down to it, and yes, there would be some pain for some of The Rest Of Us, but how does that stack up to keeping on feeding the ripoff, fraudulent-foreclosure, counterfeiting Bankstas and the pain that Alex points out (along with many others) of that fraud called “austerity?”
And as pointed out in Taibbi’s works and the article that Alex links and Graeber’s observations, Jubilee writ large, a haircut of the bondsters and banksters right down to the collarbones, might be the only way out of a mass dispossession of the most of us, along the lines of what Henry Potter planned to do to Bedford Falls. And we don’t have a Bailey Building and Loan or any reserve of personal wealth to make the magic of “It’s a Wonderful Life” happen…
I might offer that the global sense of empathy might benefit from a bit of calibration — big pain kind of trumps small pain, in my value system at least.
Maybe you have some bonds in your portfoolio… and maybe you are a Wise Investor who sees and believes, and lives what he sees and believes, and wisely divests those shaky bonds, built in large measure on the frauds and thefts you decry by those predatory vultures and vampire squids, right out of your portfoolio? And isn’t that what other people are also supposed to do, in the world of self-reliance? Since the promise that is a bond, the promise to pay, is for so many of those predatory bond issuers nothing more than a big fat sucker punch? And don’t tell me how important the ability to issue bonds is to corporations that are sitting on trillions of dollars of unspent, fertile money, like a bunch of hoarders squatting on a pile of dirty dishes and cat crap.
@JTMcPhee
I don’t believe in atomistic individualism, JT. Social order is a complex fabric of community, rules and institutions and cultural norms. No man is an island. What I believe is that bottom-up emergent order operating in an environment of broadly classical liberal general rules (such as reasonable expectation of contract and private property) is the absolute best environment for human flourishing. Freedom, in short, is good for everyone. The economics of all that is something I have a particularly intense interest in, but the ethics are what animate me. And the ethics are that of peace and equity under the golden rule. I have an intense concern for justice and fair play.
That’s my deal, JT. I don’t have any interest in seeing people suffer or moralizing about those who have not.
I am, however, methodologically individualist. I don’t believe it’s right to treat large groups with the same brush nor treat groups as if they can act or choose. People choose and act. Groups do not in a strict sense. So while I do think it takes a team and often a community to make things happen, and the whole does amount to more than the sum of the parts, that result does not translate into “collective choice” or “collective action”. Those ideas are purely linguistic constructs for me that tend to be used as tool for socializing responsibility in a way that ends up socially destructive. Class judgement, including judgement of all people in a profession be them doctors, lawyers, teachers or bankers, is equally dubious to me. It’s ultimately a kind of bigotry.
I’d have rather seen a jubilee of some kind than the banker bailouts. That is for sure. But I don’t see a jubilee as any sort of salvation and the romantic appeals from Graeber and others to some ancient simplistic social wisdom seem to be wrapped up in notions that socialism is the solution. Why? Because you need investment in order to build the kind of prosperous world we have. You need risk. You need someone willing to put up the money for you to eat while you build your new invention that makes life better for everyone but may very well fail or not work. If the evil money lenders, who should just be useful middlemen between savers and borrowers, are cut out of the picture, who will allocate our savings such that progress can occur? Well, Graeber would have it be the collective in some form, through central planning of a sort. He calls himself an “anarchist” because he rejects the state, but he replaces it with a democratic collective whose function sure sounds like a state to me.
This is a bit wondering. My point is that human progress through peaceful creativity and exchange is my ideal. Force and war and theft are the enemies of my ideal, even if that force is executed by a majority in the name of some alleged “public good”. Public rules should apply to all of us equally as individuals, a kind of governance categorical imperative. If they can’t without the whole framework collapsing, then they fail the Kant test.
But you should go back to his repeated PERSONAL attacks against me in prior threads…
No, I definitely should not. Nor should you.
@John Papola
Regarding this:
The question is “What motivates this”? Judging from the agreeable and largely uncontroversial set of beliefs you’ve just expressed, it’s hard to say that they’re the cause. After all, the bulk of these values are well-founded and widely shared. Assuming you’re being sincere (and I think you are) we’ve got a lot in common.
I’d like to suggest that something else is at work, something that has less to do with substance and more to do with a sloppy yet combative style. The practice of commenting on (or worse, “correcting”) things you’ve skimmed lightly at best isn’t beneficial, least of all to yourself. The spectacle of glaring error combined with badly aimed bombast grates on most people, and it’s certainly derailed its share of conversations.
In other words, if you think the resistance and rejection you encounter is simply evidence of bias against your ideas, you’re deluding yourself. For my own part, I’ve got some deep misgivings about pivotal aspects of libertarian thought, and these make it hard for me to treat the larger edifice warmly. But to think that friction is rooted in these reservations alone is a real mistake. I assure you, they are absolutely not the source of my harshest and most regrettable comments.
No, the real irritation comes down to something far more basic. Principally, it’s the lack of careful attention paid to what others are saying combined with a tendency to ignore all that you don’t understand. I won’t itemize the problems this creates. Instead I’ll simply ask that you please, do everyone – yourself included – a real favor by simply restraining yourself from commenting on anything you haven’t read in full, fairly slowly, more than once. If you find your understanding changing on the second pass, you’ll know you’re doing something right.
Maintain this discipline for three months, and see how much easier it becomes. I honestly think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. In the meantime, accept my apologies for the most personal polemics.
you are a bunch of old men, the fist generation who has eaten FAR MORE than you ave sown… the greatest lesson you have to teach, is how not to be.
Before you were indeed cavemen, they were stupid, and racist, and sexist, and they did not leave you with a pile of debts they became frail and helpless and shriveled.
T Bone, you show me your song called, Prodigal Dad, it goes… “I’m sorry Son, I fucked your life up, and now I need to be forgiven and sustained…
Oh, you haven’t written that song?
HAVE ANY OF YOU???
The best thing about old men, is that they die, and we forget them.
In 2012, you have nothing to teach 40 years olds with children, have the good sense to admit it.
@John Papola
You may not believe in “atomistic individualism” for purposes of this tiny corner of the ongoing argument about What Ought To Be, but I for one am sure left with the overall impression that that is one pillar of your worldview. And as to the particulars of a Jubilee, why not address the questions I have, as in how many people amongst the 99ers actually are in a position to own bonds of all the various sorts there are out there, as opposed to the bondsters who are screwing the lending part of Europe’s and our economy, demanding payment on risk, yes, RISk-based instruments that largely have no value because of what they and others of their breed have pulled off in the huge financial coup that’s still growing? There’s no freakin’ guarantee that bonds will ever be paid as per that contract thing — that’s why they carry a risk premium, except for maybe treasuries bought by Bankstas who know (and here we have bits of agreement) that the Current Powers that Be will pay off, using the wealth of the Collective. If people start talking up a Jubilee, and thinking about how it might work, and what it would cover, that might lead to something healthy and sustainable. At the very least, how about student loans (I paid mine off,working several jobs, generations ago), which are a fixed racket if ever there was one, with no way of escape from the rentier grip even in bankruptcy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-bauer/student-loan-debt_b_1403280.html And one can argue the “equities” of people trapped in sinking, upside-down mortgages all day long, but you want there to be “liquidity” and capital formation and as Alex’s post above makes very clear, the entire system is captured and on its way to making rent slaves of most of us. Along, of course, with the effects of “globalization” and the taking, by the less than 1%ers by force and stealth, of all the real increase in wealth created by working people over the last what, 60 years? Cementing their oligarchy and hegemony.
There might be a parity in absolute numbers of individual “retirees” who are “invested” in bonds, with the absolute number of Bankstas and Far-Less-Than-One-Percenters who are demanding priority in a slow inevitable bankruptcy. But cutting all those folks off will cause a lot less pain and horror than doing what is happening now. As I and some others see it, of course. Once again, bonds are RISKY INSTRUMENTS — it says so right in the fine print on all of them. There are no “contractual rights” to absolute payment — it says so right in the contract.
You have a pretty naive view, as I see it, of the “beauty” of your idealized capitalist-or-whatever-precise-definition-you-give-it system, where magical allocations of resources via self-interested transactions bring about all those wonderful innovations that make life so perfect. Like fracking, and substitution behavior like burning methane rather than coal since the former has gotten fortuitously way cheaper and then crowing about a “20% reduction in CO2 emissions” from US industry and power plants, and how that is making everything better after all? 20% off the top of way too much is still way too much, if you look a little further, and in the real world, the way resources get allocated and “developed” has everything to do with greed and damn little to do with continuation of the species (that master collective) or continued habitability of the planet for us and other critters.
Seems to me you have crafted a brilliant and brittle identity for yourself, one you want to “extend” to others. As others here have said, there are areas of agreement on bits of policy and behavior and remedy that might be built on. But there’s an unstated condition I hear in most of your stuff — agree with you on this set of items, and look! we-all MUST agree to all the other stuff that makes up your carefully crafted structure. You want others to be “flexible” and “open to your ideals,” but that’s a one-way street in your downtown.
My broader readings show a lot of nominal Libertarians who at root seem simply apologists for the behaviors of those folks who are stealing, big time, from the rest of us. Talking now about those humans who have figured out how to amass huge, UNPRODUCTIVE piles of “money” that they use to satisfy every little frisson and whim of their pleasure centers and the other parts of their limbic systems, and who know deep down that they can do and get away with ANYTHING predatory and parasitic, and die comfortably and be beyond any retribution or restitution. Your system, far as I can tell, wishes that were not so but has nothing in it to limit or stop the stuff that’s bringing us to the promised land of Soylent Green.
Arguing history and economics and anthropology and the nitty-gritty of human nature is great stuff. But we humans do actually seem to be facing an existential choice, and mixing in all the flavors of identity and philosophical tribalism and cult cant from all sides with the concerted efforts and actions that seem to be needed NOW, and not dealing with the selfish and “Apres moi le deluge” parts of the beast, ain’t gonna get my grandkids food and shelter on the other side of whatever tipping point triggers the Mass Change.
Rather than the labeling game of ideologies, a model worth discussing is the principal agent problem where political efficiency and economic efficiency are at odds. This is particularly active during times when the budgets shift left (not political left but procurement left). This puts rent-seeking at odds with innovation.
@len
Some thoughts from a person a lot smarter and deeper into the mosh than I’ll ever be, on why it’s so darn hard to get any useful motion in healthy directions on great big fundamental economic issues. True Belief and undisclosed interests keep getting in the way…
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/is-an-anti-austerity-alliance-of-left-neo-classicals-and-post-keynesians-possible-is-it-desirable-part-1.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
And of course the angels dance on the pinheads, while ordinary people, to buried or too busy or not adapted for understanding the Financial Froth that’s choking off their air, work busily away, work hard, work productively, at creating actual wealth that can be skimmed and scammed right out of their hands.
It’s all just too complicated, isn’t it, except for the relatively few Players who know how to game things. Up to the point that like the people of Watts and Detroit, the unfocused but gradually building angst and anger boils over and they burn down their own house. So there.
In the meantime, more reassurances for the post-national corporations that run the Milo Minderbinder MIC, reassurances that they will feel minimal effects on their bottom lines or business as usual from any “austerity” that starves the rest of us…
They can’t, JTMc, at least in the MIC side for certain systems. They built considerable capacity and are facing reduced demand. It’s a classic left-moving budget cycle with uncertainty and missing information or faulty information. Commercial providers try to exit the business to pursue faster buy cycle opportunities in commercial industries (the govt looks like a big customer for say transmissions but the commercial industry say car manufacturers is much bigger). They will be setting lower stock levels, decommissioning or resetting existing systems, they have a lot of quickly bought for specific mission systems they have to either lose or downsize considerably and they are squeezed by the fact that the loss of expertise is signifcant as they do. So the national corporations will be setting their own agendas and many of them will exit the businesses they are in while smaller more nimble ones get in at the risk of stranding capital.
Classic principal agent dilemma. Yes, the politics of reelection and the goals of budget management are at odds. There is no free lunch; just free invitations.
Sometimes the best way to further a conversation is to focus the topics on smaller problems that can be solved. Less invective; more selective.
Sure.
“Curses, Foiled Again”, “Pirate Polifix” “Green Beasties”, “Occupy the World”, “My Son’s Time to Go” but the first two assess the problem. There is another but it won’t see the light of YouTube because it’s a suicide mission.
Morgan, you think two-dimensionally. Any reality-shaping art will be Rashomonic. Dylan gets that. So do others.
@jtmc:
A definition you may want to study: monopsony (one buyer; many sellers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
Essentially the opposite of monopoly (one seller; many buyers).
Examples are DoD, single payer health systems, Wal-Mart, Apple and so on. These markets behave differently with regards to employees vs employers receiving market gains as the market moves left or right. Apple is right moving. DoD is left-moving. In a monopsony, the employer has much greater power and wages tend to fall. One could say (perhaps inaccurately) that market agendas that tend toward monopsony tend to produce the 1% and this is the goal of the 1 percenters but this is at complete odds with their professed aversion to big government. The devil is in the details of transparency and political efficiency and that is what no one wants to talk about openly.
I’m with you Mogan! Euthenize the Boomers. They have outlived their usefulness if they were ever useful to begin with.
@len
Seems to me that part of the business model for the MIC behemoths is avoiding the monopsony corner by taking their wares to the various international “expos,” and doing “business development” here there and everywhere. Expos where buyers from all over the planet come to select toys for their national militaries and state security apparats, clearly a growth opportunity and area. The money from US is big, but hey, if you can gin up war departments in other lands with exploitable resources and tribal issues and casi belli, doing partnering with more local war profiteers and all that, you can stay in the game.
Sometimes, the only way to win, over the long haul, is not to play. But of course that kind of talk is neither “serious” nor “realistic.”
It’s not like “our” loyal war industries don’t sell their stuff (sometimes via assistance from Bankstas) to present or future “enemies.”
@Bud Frawley
You guys keep forgetting to type out the whole phrase: “Euthanize the Boomers and steal their stuff!”
They stole our stuff. We are going to take it back by force. Whistling a happy tune.
Poor Epimethius. He doesn’t know Zeus can see him coming a mile away and is cooking up something pretty for him.
“Hey Snooky!”
It’s not that simple. Some systems types have only the government as a customer (say tracked vehicles) so few suppliers. Others have more buyers (say wheeled vehicles) so more commercial suppliers. The behemoths don’t like sales that have less certainty for the programs so yes, they like to sell overseas. There are onerous restrictions on that as you know. DoD is not strictly monopsonist. It is a mixed bag of models depending on systems, where manufactured, where maintained, composition of parts and so on. And any overseas sale has a State Department component to the deal. Very administration heavy and competitive and requires well-orchestrated partnerships industrially and politically. These are games and business models where the timid (say Frawley and Morgan) should not play.
@JTMcPhee Glad to see someone else is picking up on the whole debt thing. The depth and centrality of this problem is just starting to dawn on me. I mean, I was really focused on the corruption of the political process, and how that had enabled the trauma. Your (exceptional) cancer analogy made me realize that this aspect of the problem was akin to the way a tumor tricks the body into supplying it with more blood. So yes, obviously a huge issue, but conceptually speaking, it’s not the heart of the matter.
Debt, on the other hand, is. Much of this was allowed to accumulate in inverse relation to the supposedly healthy “trickle down” notion that justified extreme concentrations of wealth at the top. Well, judging from the velocity of money, the operative word really is “trickle”. And following the Great Implosion, the flow has dropped past Great Depression levels.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-shhhh…-it’s-even-worse-great-depression
I don’t quite understand how this fits, but it seems to be a big part of the puzzle. And in terms of sales being the thing that creates jobs, it helps explains why the employment market got so harsh so fast and why it remains so anemic today.
Separately, the steady deceleration in the velocity of money that began under Reagan maps very closely to the inflation of the credit bubbles that began forming at the same time. My very rough impression is that a (calculated?) slowing of money’s velocity – which also coincides with the onset of long-term wage stagnation – was an essential prerequisite for a shift towards a credit fueled economy. And we’ve seen how well that works out. We’ve also seen that concentration sharp enough leads to a full-blown stall at 50,000 feet.
In other words, the idea of “productive use of capital” doesn’t necessarily mean big investments made by a few especially well-endowed players. Rather, it means spreading it broadly and circulating it quickly, which is an idea that runs directly counter to the established view that sees concentrations of wealth as the most economically beneficial distribution.
This is not to say that private capital can’t do exceptional things (Elon Musk comes to mind), just that (a) a much greater portion needs to be in general circulation and (b) the concentrations that do exist need to be serving economic development directly, rather than rent-seeking (i.e. inflating credit bubbles) and stock speculation (i.e. gambling).
I know this will provoke a hue and cry from those who say that redistribution of wealth is a moral catastrophe. This should be taken with a grain of salt, given their reluctance to take any firm and principled stands when they were busy
lootingredistributing money from tax receipts and corporate earnings, removing it from the hands of states and workers, and placing into private accounts that cannot be credited with a whole lot of broadly productive value.It should go without saying that the October Revolution is a bad blueprint for what needs to be done. As the Michael Hudson piece notes, there’s a much better reference point in Germany, 1947.
@Alex Bowles
Your contempt for my tone and “bombast” as well as occasional mistake does not appear to be driven by a standard for civil discourse you apply to others. I agree with your criticism of some of my posts. I think it’s good, constructive criticism. It is criticism which could be applied to others here, particularly in the slap-dash way they treat their opposing ideas. And yet you don’t offer such criticism. You are uniquely, intensely interested in improving MY approach and completely satisfied to ignore the rest, no matter how combative or bombastic it may get. I’m sorry if my take away from that is that you’re applying a double standard.
You know, these are blog comments. I often read them and reply on my phone. I don’t always study them with the academic intensity. Perhaps you should lighten up a bit.
The thing about revulsion revolutions is that they are like what I as a casual reader of Scientific American understand as the pre-Big Bang: Something sets some initial conditions, everything passes through the singularity, and then eventually we humans get to crow for a couple of millennia about how we are the center of the universe and G_d’s Special Creation until we learn about a more accurate quantized cosmography and even for some of us there’s the joy of knowing that all of us, particularly the heavier atoms, are born out of a Grand Main Sequence Magical Fusion in the belly of some star gone nova. There’s no controlling the initial conditions of the End of the Interregnum or Ragnarok or whatever you want to call it, just maybe opportunities to nudge and influence.
Re debt, mini-economists want to blow off any noise about debt, which is the obverse side of “money.” And since waybackwhen, one of the ways that elites put the rest of us, ah, in their debt. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Not.
Graeber highlights the nature and sickness of debt and the fundamental intellectual fraud at the heart of “economics,” the real history of “money,” and gee whiz, actually talks about the notion of forgiveness of debt, the presence of the concept called Jubilee in a couple of our “caveman” precursor societies, cultures which turned out to be as evanescent as our own is about to be but which seem to have had a whole lot less of the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” that our culture is trending toward.
And don’t forget that little exegisis I’ve linked a couple of times, that lays out the real nature of the “future” that libertarians would bring us.
There’s all this lost motion and brouhaha about little bits and corners of the whole seamless mess, libertarian debate team members wanting to control the discourse via imposed definitions and “rules of forensic polemics.” And there’s even some more or less sincere invitations back and forth between a few of us confused or cock-certain souls, looking for common ground in putting together some kind of “front” against a tumor that does not give a shit what the body thinks about its presence and ascendance.
There’s more to the cancer analogy than just the angiogenesis, the growing of arteries to feed the horror. The tumor cells persuade the immune system that they are “just like us guys,” so they can hide from the immune system’s cellular defenses, the “regulatory” parts and the “police” and “emergency responders” who in a healthy organism keep the cancer, the inevitable cancerous cells that each of us generate every day, in check. Think “Geithner” and a bunch of others, perverters and obscurers of the antigens that should have summoned hordes of macrophages and T-cells to engulf and re-purpose (at the very least) all those fucking Bankstas and lobbyists and the regulators who spent their work days and lunch hours hitting the tumors up for jobs.
And many cancers actually co-opt the immune system to help them profit and grow. Think “regulatory capture,” in all its wonderful variability. And “growth,” unbridled, unconstrained, unregulated “growth,” is what is mortal about cancer and, in my notion, what’s wrong with too much of what people think of as the way to “grow” our way out of the “dip on a graph.” There are, as pointed out 40 years ago, “Limits to Growth.” And if the apocalypticists among the climate scientists and tree huggers and “rogue economists” are right, we humans have just smacked hard up against them.
The MIC will keep generating deadlier and deadlier and eventually uncontrollable weapons. The Kochers will keep extracting until there’s nothing left to suck or dig and burn. The ethanol lobby will sue EPA to force rulemaking that increases the demand for their product exponentially, so what if people starve and engines that ingest the liquidated corn choke and grind. The “financial” elite will keep making fraudulent bets that other ordinary people have to pay off on without even the sick thrill of sitting at the table and calling for cards, and counterfeiting quadrillions of dollars. There’s a million other little scams and niches where the tumors are growing and metastasizing and invading what I for one would consider healthy tissue, and the brains of all those humans who might, if given the right information, find some Better Way, will instead play out their lives like the shits from MIT who put their Big Brains to work creating wacky complex math that obscures the nature of derivito-securitization and makes the whole suck-up-all-the-wealth-for-a-tiny-narcissistic self-indulgent-few thingie seem positively benign.
So what’s next? he asked. I sure as hell don’t know.
Vampire capitalism: keep the host alive but just barely. Otherwise, you have to compete with it for human blood and diminish the ready supply. Occasionally turn one for your own amusement but remember you have to sleep by day so have a limited time and some of the supply is only available if like yourself, it comes out at night.
The solutions for macroeconomic problems are mostly microeconomics. Work by day; sleep by night; keep a ready supply of your own blood in the bank, or at least that worked until the banks starting trading with the vampires using your blood. Restore separation of commercial and speculative blood. You’ll stay healthy and the vampires won’t grow at such a catastrophic rate. No free lunch.
Oddly enough, the MIC will change directions for the so-called “uncontrollable” aspects. They feel the left-leaning budget just as the rest of us do and oddly, they understand and plan for it better than most of us do. If one can separate abhorrence of the application, you may be surprised to see how some of that kind of planning might be better than what the extremologues here and elsewhere are proposing. It is concentrated on what you need to thrive, what you need to cut, what you need to burn and what you need to keep warm.
How can economics compete with science? Well, how does science compete with science?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions
@len Flagrant abuses aside, Kuhn provides an indispensable idea that seems like it’s been around forever when in fact it hasn’t. That’s a nice write up, by the way. And it ends on an especially accurate note.
Yes it does and the interesting aspect is you can apply this to processes in general, accepted practices and belief systems. If it disturbs science it is that it reduced it to a belief system where the beliefs are repeatedly tested by a rigorous method.
Would that economists would pay better attention to data and behavior. One reason militaries dominate societies is they do precisely that. It is quite difficult to shape a culture away from militarism but that is exactly what we need to be doing and to do it, we have to understand the means and rewards of militarism. We tend to think of it in terms of satisfying the elite but that isn’t quite accurate. It is an elite-generator of it’s own design and then the tendancies of elite networks to network does the rest. The politicians are simply proxies.
Paul Ryan explains to women Todd Aiken’s grasp of their physiology while the party faithful watch and interpret.
Ladies, it is what it is.