Tuesday, August 7, 2018

David F. Ruccio — Socialism or truth


On truth and truthiness.

"We have the ocean in our bucket. We built a special bucket to contain it. So get lost."

Meanwhile, socialism rises.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Socialism or truth
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

8 comments:

Konrad said...

“The liberal establishment continues to mourn the death of truth.”

By “liberal establishment” the author means politically correct liberal fascists, who are mourning their loss of control over mass mind via the monolithic corporate media.

Genuinely progressive humanitarians favor socialism. Opposed to them are the liberal PC fascists. They promote Trump derangement syndrome, and they blame the resulting cacophony on everyone but themselves. They are purely Orwellian. They invert, reverse, and project everything. For example, they endlessly repeat their “holocaust”™ lies in order to program the masses. If you refuse to be programmed, they accuse you of being easily manipulated.

“Kahn-Harris plays the ultimate trump card: contemporary denialism involves doubting the existence of the holocaust, which in turn makes it possible “to publicly celebrate genocide once again’.”

Thus, if you question their genocidal lies, you are “genocidal.” Freedom is slavery, war is peace, and ignorance is strength.

It's all a symptom of a dying empire; a dying Western civilization.

GLH said...

No one who has really considered the idea of the so called holocaust for more than about five minutes would believe the lie. That is why there is such a huge attempt to prevent people from thinking about it. After that lie is realized then nothing else the empire says about WW2 or any other war is believable. I suspect that when people wake up to the game that is being played on them then the perpetrators will suffer as they always claim that they do. Also, I am old enough to remember the evening news when Viet Nam was going on and I must say that today the junk that is shown in the same time spot is pitiful.

Konrad said...

"There is enormous evidence that it happened."

There is ZERO evidence that it happened. "Extermination camps" are a fairy tale, but detention camps existed in all belligerent nations, including the USA.

In addition to the USA's ten concentration camps for Japanese Americans, the USA had 152 concentration camps for Americans who refused to go and die to make rich people richer.

Today, Gaza is a walled-in death camp for two million Palestinians. Every eighteen months or so the Israelis bomb it. One such bombing campaign lasted seven weeks [8 July – 26 August 2014] and killed thousands (including 600 children) before the Israelis declared "victory."

GLH said...

Cal: give us some of that evidence

Calgacus said...

Google is your friend. There are scads of horrible pictures and films. There is still living memory. There are books and government statements and other publications denouncing it as it happened and ones published immediately after it happened. There is still existing physical evidence. There are Hitler's & other Nazis own crazy statements.

There are pre and post war censuses. Where did all those people go?

But I think most people know this.

The people of Gaza are cruelly tortured by Israel's criminal and insane behavior. This current crime doesn't erase the existence of the earlier criminal insanity in Europe.

Konrad said...

I wrote an item-by-item response to Calgacus, but I decided not to post it.

Violating the taboo against questioning these claims can make people crazy.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Economics, too, is pre-truth
Comment on David Ruccio on ‘Socialism or truth’

David Ruccio echoes the newest post-truth slogans: “Every day, it seems, one or another liberal ― pundit, columnist, or scholar ― issues a warning that, in the age of Donald Trump, we now live in a post-truth world. In their view, we face a fundamental choice: either return to a singular, capital-t truth or suffer the consequences of multiple sets of beliefs, facts, and truths.” This, though, is not such a big concern for David Ruccio: “Me, I’ll take socialism over truth any day.”

First of all, the idiocy of the post-truth blather consists of the tacit implication that there was a period in human history where truth prevailed. This neither holds for the near nor the remote past. “We” still do not have the historical truth about the Kennedy assassination and “we” never had the historical truth about figures like Jesus/Mohamed/Solomon and their teachings. What “we” have since 2000+ years is story-telling/literary fiction/propaganda/forgeries/False-Hero-Memorials. Roughly the same holds for profane history. Herodotus, to recall, was not only called the ‘The Father of History’ but also ‘The Father of Lies’.

The exception to perennial story-telling is, of course, science. Scientific truth is well-defined by material and formal consistency and is established by rigorous proof. Fact is, however, that the brains of about 99 percent of any population have zero scientific content which means that societies are firmly at the pre-truth stage. In this respect, nothing has changed with Mr. Trump and therefore it is plain idiocy to announce a post-truth era.

This holds in any case for economics. After 200+ years, economists still do not have the true theory. Economics is not a science but what Feynman called a cargo cult science. The four main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got profit ― the pivotal concept of the subject matter ― wrong. With the pluralism of provably false theories, economics is at the pre-truth = proto-scientific stage.

Since Adam Smith/Karl Marx, economic policy guidance NEVER had sound scientific foundations. This holds for capitalism and communism and everything in-between. The scientific truth-value of economics is zero.

See part 2

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Part 2

The truth about economics is:
• Economics is axiomatically false, that is, Walrasian microfoundations and Keynesian macrofoundations are materially/formally inconsistent.
• Because the axioms are false the whole analytical superstructure is false.
• Economists do to this day not know what profit is.
• Economists do not understand how the economic system, i.e. the price- and profit mechanism, works.
• Economists fail to realize that the market economy is NOT self-correcting but inherently unstable.

To this day, economists are NOT committed to scientific truth but to political agenda pushing.#1 For them, post-truth and pre-truth is a matter of indifference, they simply keep on telling the same brain-dead stories about capitalism and communism. They do not know the difference between writing a wishlist#3 and scientific research.#4 Neither orthodox nor heterodox economists know how the economy works. They are even too stupid for the elementary mathematics of National Accounting.#5 For the time being, economics and truth cannot be mentioned in the same breath.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 There is no truth in political economics
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/03/there-is-no-truth-in-political-economics.html

Economics and truth
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/03/economics-and-truth.html

Pre-truth and post-truth in economics
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/03/pre-truth-and-post-truth-in-economics.html

Economics is not post-truth but pre-truth
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2016/12/economics-is-not-post-truth-but-pre.html

#2: For details of the big picture see cross-references Political Economics
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2015/11/political-economics-cross-references.html

#3 “… we want to build a world where everyone has a right to food, healthcare, a good home, an enriching education, and a union job that pays well. We think this kind of economic security is necessary for people to live rich and creative lives — and to be truly free. We want to guarantee all of this while stopping climate change and building an economy that’s ecologically sustainable. We want to build a world without war, where people in other countries are free from the fear of US military intervention and economic exploitation. And we want to end mass incarceration and police brutality, gender violence, intolerance towards queer people, job and housing discrimination, deportations, and all other forms of oppression.”

#4 How the Intelligent Non-Economist Can Refute Every Economist Hands Down
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2705395

#5 Wikipedia and the promotion of economists’ idiotism (II)
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/07/wikipedia-and-promotion-of-economists.html