A (successful) American politician who cries: “God is a white supremacist!”Neo-nazis in the Bundestag. The extreme right rising in Italy. Poland’s authoritarians purging its Supreme Court .
How did we get here? To a world where the forces of intolerance and indecency are on the rise, and those of decency, wisdom, and civilization are waning? Is something like a new Dark Age falling?
I think it has everything to do with predatory capitalism, and so I want to tell you a story. Of how it came to be born, in four steps, which span three decades.Eudaimonia
Umair Haque
The author lacks historical knowledge, specifically that capitalism has always been predatory, long before it was called capitalism.
ReplyDeleteSuperb article. Yep, that's what has gone wrong.
ReplyDeleteActually, the author is either totally naive, a liar or both. The whole "financialization" problem is caused lock, stock and barrel by the simply mah-velous Modern Money regime and government welfare for banks and business:
ReplyDeleteAnd then the bets went bad. As bets tend to do, when you make too many of them, on foolish things. What had the speculators been betting with each other on? As it turns out, largely on property prices. But people without the stable jobs that had kept such a huge property bubble going didn’t have growing incomes anymore. Property prices couldn’t keep rising. Bang! The financial system fell like a row of dominoes. It turned out that everyone had bet property prices would go on rising — and on the other side of that bet was…everyone else. All of them had been betting on the same thing — “we all bet prices will keep rising forever!” The losses were so vast, and so widespread, that the whole global financial system buckled. The banks didn’t have the money to pay each other for these foolish bets — how could they have? Each one had bet the whole house on the same thing, and they all would have gone bankrupt to each other. LOL — do you see the fatal stupidity of it all yet?
So in had to step governments. They bailed out the banks — but didn’t “restructure” them, which is to say, fire their managers, wash out their shareholders, and sell off the bad loans and bets. They just threw money at them — and took those bad bets onto the nation’s books, instead. It was the most foolish decision since the Great Depression.
That's Rothbardian libertarianism 101 on the first day of class. The two features this guy is whining about, fiat money loans and government bailouts, ARE FORBIDDEN by "capitalism".
RODDIS' racist hero:
ReplyDeleteRothbard called for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the overturning of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He was an advocate of unleashing the police to "clear the streets of bums and vagrants," and "allow the police to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error." He repeatedly expressed admiration for David Duke, Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Any considerate human being would be embarrassed to associate himself with such ideas.
Re Haque’s reference in his first para to the so called “extreme right” in Italy and elsewhere, there is actually no such thing as the extreme right in that the so called extreme right simply consists of people who want to preserve their own country’s culture, identity, way of life, etc, rather than have it overrun by some alien culture like Islam. And that desire to preserve the culture etc of one’s own culture is a perfectly normal and age old desire: that is, it is not extreme at all. I.e. the term “extreme right” is simply a form of abuse thought up by the political left.
ReplyDeleteBut what’s really hilarious about the political left here is that lefties are all for preserving the culture of various countries as long as the inhabitants of those countries are not white. E.g. lefties have long backed Tibetans in their attempt to preserve their culture, plus they support attempts by Kurds to do the same.
What’s really really hilarious is when doing a Ralph; There no such thing as the so called political left. It’s just people who want oppressed people to be free from their oppressors.
ReplyDeleteand the oppressors are the so-called "extreme right"
ReplyDeletePlease produce everything Rothbard wrote on “overturning of the Brown v. Board of Education decision” with quotes and links so that I can examine his statements in context. The same goes for his having “expressed admiration for David Duke, Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy”.
ReplyDeleteWhen I have researched those, I will respond to all of the claims in the comment.
I note that none of these statements by Rothbard have anything to do with Rothbardian libertarianism where, for example, the Na’vi in Avatar could keep their magic tree and land. Rothbard probably wouldn’t have personally liked keeping the minerals from the rest of society but would have supported their right to keep their land regardless.
The Irrepressible Rothbard
ReplyDeleteEssays of Murray N. Rothbard
Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/697923/posts
Exposing the Racist History Of Libertarianism And Murray Rothbard
https://www.businessinsider.com/exposing-the-racist-history-of-libertarianism-and-murray-rothbard-2011-10
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
I only see the David Duke issue addressed substantively at those links.
ReplyDeleteWhat Rothbard said about David Duke is that Duke claims to be reformed and has advanced a limited government program. Robert Byrd and Hugo Black were Klansmen but the establishment forgave them because they adopted establishment views and policies. The establishment went after Duke because of his limited government program.
They said in the 60s, when they gently chided the violent left: "stop using violence, work within the system." And sure enough it worked, as the former New Left now leads the respectable intellectual classes. So why wasn't the Establishment willing to forgive and forget when a right-wing radical like David Duke stopped advocating violence, took off the Klan robes, and started working within the system? If it was OK to be a Commie, or a Weatherman, or whatever in your wild youth, why isn't it OK to have been Klansmen? Or to put it more precisely, if it was OK for the revered Justice Hugo Black, or for the lion of the Senate, Robert Byrd, to have been a Klansman, why not David Duke? The answer is obvious: Black and Byrd became members of the liberal elite, of the Establishment, whereas Duke continued to be a right-wing populist, and therefore anti-Establishment, this time even more dangerous because "within the system."
Rothbard also stated that “pro-legalization” types should be willing to compromise by having such decisions be made on the local level. He’s not promoting a program of forcing everyone to adopt the same cultural standards. I assume that would include his harsh (proposed) police tactics. I personally prefer a program of private neighborhoods where cultural matters are determined by the inhabitants and are explicit and protected. People should be able to live in fundamentalist neighborhoods or “transgender friendly” neighborhoods as the case may be.
So far: every one of these right-wing populist programs is totally consistent with a hard-core libertarian position. But all real-world politics is coalition politics, and there are other areas where libertarians might well compromise with their paleo or traditionalist or other partners in a populist coalition. For example, on family values, take such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and neighborhoods, that is, to "community standards."
RODDIS™
ReplyDeleteapologist for racists, and all that implies
"I personally prefer a program of private neighborhoods where cultural matters are determined by the inhabitants and are explicit and protected."
ReplyDeleteWith neighborhood schools and such, no doubt. Also known as segregation.
"I assume that would include his harsh (proposed) police tactics."
So much for non-violence. Used to enforce the segregation described above.
Rothbard was a Klan admirer and apologist, and a supporter of outspoken racists. Roddis is a Rothbard cultist and a closet racist.
So much for libertarianism and the bigoted idiots who aspire to it. Let's put all the libertarians in a "private neighborhood" patrolled by violence-unrestrained police.
Since "progressives" are too dim-witted and anti-intellectual to engage in debate, their low I.Q and 4th grade emotional level result in their only possible response to ideas, and that is vicious name-calling. RACIST RACIST RACIST!
ReplyDelete"too dim-witted and anti-intellectual to engage in debate" is why Roddis didn't even attempt to address the comment about his own specific statements and the direct inferences they support.
ReplyDeleteTo say that Roddis is racist is simply the obvious conclusion based on that he has written. To say that Roddis is a mental midget would be to overstate his intellectual capacity by an order of magnitude.
Hey Bob - you're going to be late for your Klan meeting.
ReplyDelete