Rentiers are the new aristocracy. Libertarians fall all over themselves to get a taste of the new anti-meritocracy. Failing that, they suck up to them what found a loophole and made it.
Capital is only one of many vital social institutions. To name the new aristos “capitalists” is to elevate them to mere equality with Bolscheviks. “Capitalists” are simply Bolscheviks who’ve chosen the other team. Mix in some hippie Satanism and you get the most acceptable form of libertarianism allowed by Gen-X billionaires.
Near the beginning of the Wealth of Nations Smith distinguishes between three things that constitute the cost of anything: wages of labour, profit on stock, and rent. Two things stand out about it. First, why is profit exponential while wages are linear? Second, what the fuck is the rentier doing in this equation?
It’s absolutely horrid. and heartbreaking. I don’t want those responsible sent through the US Justice system - I want them to be tried by an international court for crimes against humanity.
That’s how I’d Make America Great Again - Zero Tolerance for Official Incompetence.
Of course they won’t be tried… I mean, “mistakes were made”, but you know, no one is actually responsible for their actions. In fact, it’s probably the fault of the people who live in flint, because how dare they be black and poor! /s
It’s depressing that no one will be held responsible for this. The best we can hope for is some lawsuits, where the people impacted get some financial compensation. But, as much as it is a crime against humanity, no one is going to get in trouble, I’m afraid.
Skousen also believed that he was an LDS prophet, because nothing says “Hey I’m not insane!” like thinking you’re a prophet. He languished in obscurity until being promoted by Glenn Beck, another totally-not-insane conservative with a very shaky grasp even on his own religion.
Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macroeconomist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. Starting at the height of the dot-com frenzy, he has repeatedly called for perspective: Developments in information and communication technology, he has insisted, just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically, he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.
In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.
[…]
Meanwhile, backbreaking toil both in the workplace and in the home was for the most part replaced by far less onerous employment. This is a point all too often missed by economists, who tend to think only about how much purchasing power people have, not about what they have to do to get it, and Gordon does an important service by reminding us that the conditions under which men and women labor are as important as the amount they get paid.
Our only hope is for a revolution, or to win the PowerBall.
gaaaaah the stupid it burns! holy crap that makes the nuttiest stuff I heard on coast to coast seem logical and sane.
ETA gonna take awhile for my recommend videos on you tube to recover from that… sigh.
This is seriously hard to watch. I grabbed my bug-out-bag at around 4 mins.
But I did get bemused by the bit at 3:20, where he clarifies that by saying “girly boys” he doesn’t mean to imply they are homo, but to say that the military leaders are weak like young females. Or demons.
The illegal occupation of the refuge was about much more than federal regulation. It was also about maintaining gender. It was about reinforcing a masculinity that is tough, defiant and violent, and a femininity that is supportive and submissive. It was about reinforcing men’s sense of self as powerful, dominant and self-determining, and keeping women and nature in their place – serving men’s needs and being the helpers in the background.
From the outset, the Malheur incident was curiously absent of any significant stakeholder engagement in the local community. That prompted us to look for some broader political perspective in our first post on the topic, and we found some commonalities with the “states-rights” agenda of ALEC, the powerful Koch-backed lobbying group.
Our Feb. 1 post on the Malheur takeover took a deeper dive into the ALEC connection. Based on local reporting and public record, we reached the conclusion that Ammon Bundy targeted Malheur for an extreme action not because federal policies in the region were demonstrably misguided, but for the exact opposite reason.
Back in 2013, local stakeholders — including the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association — reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Land Management that established a collaborative system for land use in and around the Malheur refuge. According to local accounts the 2013 agreement was working, and it was being held up as a model for other regions.
That kind of stakeholder engagement is a direct threat to the ALEC states-rights agenda, which calls for turning over federally-owned public lands to the states, as a first step to private ownership and more intensive development.
