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Pohl posted:http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/ Definitely want to read this when I get bored. Thanks! 
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Mar 21, 2014 12:38
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BrandorKP posted:Not Kochs directly but relevant. Lot of references to Koch fund institutes (CATO pops up) though. The Mises-Paul connection is Lew Rockwell, who has been a very close Paul advisor and is also heavily involved in Mises an-cap circles.
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Mar 21, 2014 13:41
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Rockwell probably ghost wrote Ron Paul's infamous newsletters, and if you want to take a real trip down the LA riots era "oh so they want to call themselves 'African Americans' these days" memory lane it's worth checking out the Rothbard-Rockwell Report newsletters. An-caps were virulent public racists at least until the mid-90s and even to this day David Friedman spends his time defending medieval Iceland, which had slaves and a non-capitalist economy, as a paragon of ideal an-cap society.
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Mar 21, 2014 13:49
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VideoTapir posted:At first I was like "whaaaat?" (UAF grad here, not economics though I did have a few classes) This is exactly the conclusion I came to when I put this all together. The big companies like BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell, etc. all pay as much as they can to whoever is willing to take the money, but this is the first time I've heard of such blatant back-channel indoctrination and power-building. And considering how much flak the Kochs are taking nation-wide for underhanded poo poo like this, I thought it might be worth getting out there. Ironically, what got the professor talking about it was a news story about FSU that I got from this thread that I posted on my FB news feed. Caros posted:...the politics thread is seen by hundreds of goon eyes in any particular hour, while this thread has seen eight posts since February three of which are yours. Would you recommend I cross-post this in the US politics thread to get more responses?
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Mar 21, 2014 21:31
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Pope Guilty posted:The idea that Adam Smith advocated for an unregulated free market is taken as an article of faith by conservatives, including Libertarians, but it's simply false, an attempt to seize validity for their views by falsely imputing them to an authority. Examples? Outside the left in don't think anyone actually cares about Adam Smith.
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Mar 21, 2014 21:43
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asdf32 posted:Examples? Outside the left in don't think anyone actually cares about Adam Smith. You must be joking. Libertarians do nothing but quote him about the "Invisible Hand" and "Rising Tides" while leaving out everything about exploitation, poverty and the interests of the rich to screw everyone else over.
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Mar 21, 2014 21:50
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asdf32 posted:Examples? Outside the left in don't think anyone actually cares about Adam Smith. My aforementioned Koch-funded Econ professors love the guy and talk about him all the time. I think they consider him the Jesus Christ of economics... According to the way their textbooks are written and what they say on their blog, the GMU Mercatus Center boys wanna have his babies too. site fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 21:58
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What do they have to say about him advocating for a universal wage?
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Mar 21, 2014 22:07
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OwlBot 2000 posted:You must be joking. Libertarians do nothing but quote him about the "Invisible Hand" and "Rising Tides" while leaving out everything about exploitation, poverty and the interests of the rich to screw everyone else over. Well to be clear if that level of obsession exists it's idiotic. But pointing to the existence of the domain adamsmith.org isn't great evidence that it does. It's common for ideological opponents to try and imply personal obsessions where they don't exist (I.E "Darwinism").
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Mar 21, 2014 22:09
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asdf32 posted:Well to be clear if that level of obsession exists it's idiotic. But pointing to the existence of the domain adamsmith.org isn't great evidence that it does. You just haven't heard of the Institute, I take it. It is by far the most influential Libertarian think tank in the UK, and quoted nearly as often as CATO and Heritage, and has had much influence on the policy of the John Major and Tony Blair governments. Madsen Pirie posted:We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy. OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 22:18
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SedanChair posted:What do they have to say about him advocating for a universal wage? They just never bring the topic up. In every class I've had where Smith is a part of the curriculum (which is pretty much every class except for Econometrics...holy poo poo, that and Intermediate Micro are the worst loving classes ever), they've always used excerpts of his works, through print-outs, PDFs, and anthology books. They never require anyone to read either The Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations. In their defense though, only the one prof who was dumb enough to disclose the Koch funding is a (at least vocal) no-regulation Libtard. The current department head (not the department chair, which Vernon was) is the one now pushing the GMU books and blog and Milton Friedman, and made sure to get that Keynes vs. Hayek video shown to every class, but even he advocates that smartly-applied regulation is necessary. Everyone else, if they agree with their line of thinking, keep it to themselves from the conversations I've had. To balance out the negatives: one of the two Money & Banking profs (the other is the department head mentioned above) went to the University of Chicago and worked on the Chicago Stock Exchange before coming here, but advocates stronger financial regulation and my Healthcare Economics prof even went as far as to say he thought that a purely-public option should be available, but he was also a visiting associate and not a tenured part of the department. site fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 03:12
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Over the past few decades there has been an effort to highlight Smith's more progressive ideas. Eric Schliesser, an academic philosopher who works on economics, has a description of some of the folks working in the field in his blog post here that covers a recent paper on The Wealth of Nations. In case you don't want to click through, here's a quote pulled from the bottom: Eric Schliesser posted:In a way, Boucoyannis' paper is the capstone and transformation of a thirty year trend to re-discover the progressive Smith in Wealth of Nations (that can help explain why folk like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie de Grouchy, James Millar, and others could admire him so much) that was pioneered by Spencer Pack, Emma Rothschild, Sandra Peart & David Levy, and Sam Fleischacker, and those they inspired.
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Mar 22, 2014 03:32
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site posted:Would you recommend I cross-post this in the US politics thread to get more responses? Absolutely. As I said if you can back this up it certainly isn't a non-story and I honestly think you'd get at least some traction on the few left wing media sources that cover this. poo poo like this is so ridiculous that it is worth hearing about even if its hard to figure out what can be done against it.
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Mar 22, 2014 17:01
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site posted:They just never bring the topic up. In every class I've had where Smith is a part of the curriculum (which is pretty much every class except for Econometrics...holy poo poo, that and Intermediate Micro are the worst loving classes ever), they've always used excerpts of his works, through print-outs, PDFs, and anthology books. They never require anyone to read either The Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations. I think the reason is that Smith is almost Pollayanaish about capitalism in "Wealth Of Nations". If you read him next to Marx, he comes off very less knowledgeable about human nature. Smith's one of those "ivory tower" types that conservatives always rant about. There's a whole big thing about the employers in one of his examples have giant winter feasts for their employees and he thinks that's the norm instead of the exception. Also, Smith never married and the only relationship he had with a woman was his own mother. Adam Smith was a goddamn goon.
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Mar 23, 2014 00:42
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Young Freud posted:I think the reason is that Smith is almost Pollayanaish about capitalism in "Wealth Of Nations". If you read him next to Marx, he comes off very less knowledgeable about human nature. Smith's one of those "ivory tower" types that conservatives always rant about. There's a whole big thing about the employers in one of his examples have giant winter feasts for their employees and he thinks that's the norm instead of the exception. Yeah, but wasn't Marx a complete rear end in a top hat to his family and went bankrupt at least once, and then lived off handouts from his aristocratic friends and uncle, and then promoted an ideal but never gave directions for how to actually convert a society to socialism or how to run it after it happened? Calling one ivory tower and then using the other as a comparison seems a little disingenuous, although I won't disagree with your main point. EDIT: if I'm wrong because of how my curriculum has been presented, I would love to be refuted if you can present primary sources for it. And now I understand a little more about J. Edgar Hoover (because of the whole mommy thing). site fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 07:40
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Young Freud posted:Also, Smith never married and the only relationship he had with a woman was his own mother. Adam Smith was a goddamn goon. Or gay. For a lot of right wingers this might put them off Smith, I think.
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Mar 23, 2014 10:15
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site posted:Yeah, but wasn't Marx a complete rear end in a top hat to his family and went bankrupt at least once, and then lived off handouts from his aristocratic friends and uncle, and then promoted an ideal but never gave directions for how to actually convert a society to socialism or how to run it after it happened? Calling one ivory tower and then using the other as a comparison seems a little disingenuous, although I won't disagree with your main point. Oh, you're right about Marx, he's not exactly perfect: he was horrible with his personal finances and had to take loans from the wealthier members of his family. But, at the same time, Marx actually felt resistance to his political beliefs from early on and throughout his career. Part of the reason Marx got a lot of his fame and infamy was that the publication of the Communist Manifesto coincided with the series of democratic republican revolutions of 1848 that exploded throughout Europe, which he actually got arrested and tried a few times for inciting rebellion and such. Smith never so much as got threatened in his life for "The Wealth Of Nations", but Marx and his family had to flee Europe for London after the revolutions collapsed because he was such a threat to the counter-revolutionaries and the monarchists. It becomes very easy to start looking at Marx's background and see why he would come up with his worldview. The basic philosophy of Marx, pretty much derived from Hegel's dialectics, is that there's two groups that make up society, the haves and the have-nots, and the haves will do everything in their power to continue remaining the haves. Marxism, at it's core, is not about really wealth but political agency: civil rights and the feminist movements have their basis in Marxism (with the direct influence on the latter because of Friedrich Engels, considered by few to be the first feminist with the publication of "The Origin Of The Family, Private Property, And The State", where he details how women became subjugated in society). But since those who have wealth in a democratic society can lobby, bribe, or run for office and make the laws, then wealth is very much a part of the political equation.
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Mar 23, 2014 10:16
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I imagine the real difference is that Smith was writing like three generations or more before Marx, so of course he'd have less awareness of some details and emergent behaviors that Marx could have observed. If you could swap them, perhaps you'd get similar books under each other's names, and 'Smithist' would be a generic cuss word.
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Mar 23, 2014 18:14
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Nessus posted:I imagine the real difference is that Smith was writing like three generations or more before Marx, so of course he'd have less awareness of some details and emergent behaviors that Marx could have observed. If you could swap them, perhaps you'd get similar books under each other's names, and 'Smithist' would be a generic cuss word. And after an extra 100+ years experience with capitalism being the dominant economic system and examples of various attempts at actually implementing socialism, it makes you wonder what Marx might write today...
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Mar 23, 2014 18:25
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"Put me back in the grave"
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Mar 24, 2014 03:35
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Mar 24, 2014 04:20
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Nessus posted:I imagine the real difference is that Smith was writing like three generations or more before Marx, so of course he'd have less awareness of some details and emergent behaviors that Marx could have observed. If you could swap them, perhaps you'd get similar books under each other's names, and 'Smithist' would be a generic cuss word. One of the things about Maxist theory and things related to it is that they were asking "OK, so what happens after capitalism?" Smith wrote about stuff like how you get to capitalism in the first place. The other major flaw that Smith's theories ran into, though, is that he wrote centuries before current levels of automation existed and could not have predicted at all what the world would look like now. One major assumption he made was that there would actually be enough work for everybody to do which would, over time, create upward pressure on the wages of the workers and improve their lot over time. That was true to a certain degree but also partly because the workers got sick of dying of black lung at 30 or getting hideously maimed and thrown away like a broken tool at 22. Now, however, there just isn't enough work for everybody and the increased automation has eliminated vast swathes of jobs that were once done by people. One point of socialism was that automation would inevitably increase and that we should, morally speaking, give to everybody, be they employed or not, what they need once we get to the point where little effort is required to make it all. Smith's ideas were ultimately based on scarcity and, at the time, scarcity was still a huge deal. Industrialization was still fairly new and many things hadn't been done by machines yet. In Marx's time he saw factories taking over and displacing craftsmen and less and less effort being needed to make stuff. The point of communism is that, eventually, scarcity would vanish. As things got closer and closer to that point there was no moral reason to deprive anybody of the things they needed to live. What we're seeing now in the ideology of the Koch brothers and their fans is a clinging to the idea that it's still beneficial to hold the carrot over peoples' heads when we have more than enough carrots to go around. Thanks to modern technology there are many things that we have achieved post-scarcity on and, while there was a time where drat near everybody was a farmer, we can easily feed the entire population of the country with the efforts of a single digit of percent of the population. There are literally millions of people in the country that have no jobs because there is no work for them to do. We're either at, or very close to, the point where abandoning capitalism is doable but there are people resisting it.
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Mar 24, 2014 05:08
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the things about Maxist theory and things related to it is that they were asking "OK, so what happens after capitalism?" Smith wrote about stuff like how you get to capitalism in the first place. The other major flaw that Smith's theories ran into, though, is that he wrote centuries before current levels of automation existed and could not have predicted at all what the world would look like now. One major assumption he made was that there would actually be enough work for everybody to do which would, over time, create upward pressure on the wages of the workers and improve their lot over time. If you'll indulge me, I don't really know that much about Marx and would to ask a couple other questions regarding the dichotomy between him and Smith, but I think it'd probably go better in the Marx megathread, so could you follow me over there?
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Mar 26, 2014 02:14
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Go to town on that Marxism conversation in this thread if you want. Anything even tangentially related to ways to think about how attack/dismantle these Libertarian ideas is on topic. Critical theory is clearly one way to criticize the Kochs/Libertarians, and the roots of critical theory are in Marxism so discussing that as far as I'm concern is directly related. And the history (of somebody like Marx) and the criticisms the different schools of thought bring to the table are not separable conversations.Jazerus posted:The Mises-Paul connection is Lew Rockwell, who has been a very close Paul advisor and is also heavily involved in Mises an-cap circles. I'm starting to remember something about that now. Is he the guy they threw under the bus to artificially distance themselves from the newsletters? Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 26, 2014 |
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Mar 26, 2014 15:30
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BrandorKP posted:I'm starting to remember something about that now. Is he the guy they threw under the bus to artificially distance themselves from the newsletters? Yes. Rockwell was editor (I think) of the newsletters who Paul claimed ghostwrote all the horrible klan stuff which he somehow managed not to notice or hear about for years.
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Mar 26, 2014 18:35
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BrandorKP posted:Go to town on that Marxism conversation in this thread if you want. Anything even tangentially related to ways to think about how attack/dismantle these Libertarian ideas is on topic. Critical theory is clearly one way to criticize the Kochs/Libertarians, and the roots of critical theory are in Marxism so discussing that as far as I'm concern is directly related. And the history (of somebody like Marx) and the criticisms the different schools of thought bring to the table are not separable conversations. Actually, I wanted to move it so I could ask questions about what seem to be flaws with Marxism...
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Mar 26, 2014 18:49
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Maybe somebody can find the period of time in this list where Ron Paul "distanced" himself from Lew Rockwell by slackening the pace of articles he submitted to him for publication: https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/ron-paul/ I can't find it.
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Mar 26, 2014 19:24
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I don't think Paul has ever publicly distanced himself from Rockwell. He won't even admit that Rockwell likely wrote most of the infamous newsletters. Only disaffected former staff have gone that far -- I'd imagine Paul and Rockwell still stay in touch.
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Mar 27, 2014 04:47
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Yes. Rockwell ... ghostwrote all the horrible klan stuff Is Lew related to George Lincoln? 
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Mar 27, 2014 06:16
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Robert Reich in Salon on the Koch network and Koch like activities: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/27/robert_reich_billionaires_are_poisoning_american_democracy_partner/ Kind-of depressing. Pushes me towards thinking, Maybe Qiadom Viator is right.
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Mar 27, 2014 17:21
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Is Lew related to George Lincoln? No, though you'd be forgiven for thinking so.
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Mar 27, 2014 17:56
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BrandorKP posted:Robert Reich in Salon on the Koch network and Koch like activities: That's about the nicest thing about my politics that anyone's said on D&D. Thanks. There's all this talk over in the 2014 March politics thread about how all of the Republican front-runners are in line to kiss Sheldon Adelson's ring right now, and how he's spending millions of dollars on House races. I seriously hope that this torrent of corporate domination increases quickly enough that people get genuinely angry. Maybe Hobby Lobby will win 5-4, and corporations will be able to declare a religion. Maybe smart corporations will declare themselves Christian Scientists, so they can aver that they don't believe in health care at all, and therefore don't have to offer it to their employees. Do I really sound that crazy, considering that these motherfuckers are straight up buying university Econ departments and purchasing politicians outright? By now, it should be clear that we're at a kind of global inflection point. What I haven't heard from any of the people who call me hallucinatory, offensive, or downright crazy is how we actually roll back this past 40 years of depredation, rape, and acquisition of governmental power by corporations from within a system they now own. I say as I always have that we should let them accelerate their madness until the whole thing blows up. My position hasn't changed.
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Mar 27, 2014 18:45
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Quidam Viator posted:That's about the nicest thing about my politics that anyone's said on D&D. Thanks. There's all this talk over in the 2014 March politics thread about how all of the Republican front-runners are in line to kiss Sheldon Adelson's ring right now, and how he's spending millions of dollars on House races. I seriously hope that this torrent of corporate domination increases quickly enough that people get genuinely angry. Maybe Hobby Lobby will win 5-4, and corporations will be able to declare a religion. Maybe smart corporations will declare themselves Christian Scientists, so they can aver that they don't believe in health care at all, and therefore don't have to offer it to their employees. Do I really sound that crazy, considering that these motherfuckers are straight up buying university Econ departments and purchasing politicians outright? I'd like the think that acceleration-ism is not the way to go since it pretty much screws over people horribly but honestly at this point where you have a party participating in a talent show for one rich man to determine our most powerful single politician, the SCOTUS is on the verge of a 5-4 decision to determine that a faceless entity can have sincerely held religious beliefs (which will invigorate a whole ton of laws to set in motion theocratic rules and exceptions), the party that caused six years of pointless gridlock while screwing over anything that could help the average person is looking to get even more power, and the only realistic counter is to support the opposite party which is just as in bed with the monied interest but isn't as in your face evil I really don't see what the possible alternative is. This frog cooking slowly in a pot seems like it's resulting in Americans accepting this horrible state of affairs as a confirmed eventuality and it's really, really depressing. Eggplant Squire fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Mar 27, 2014 |
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Mar 27, 2014 18:56
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That's exactly the reasoning that's brought me over to the side of accelerationism. Your metaphor of the frog being slowly cooked to death is perfect: it's the slow, gradual deterioration of trust, stability, and rights that is killing us, and part of me feels bad that I've been part of the force trying desperately to slow it down to save people. I was an Obamatar in 2008. If you transported me instantaneously from that election night to today, and had shown me and everyone else who was so enthusiastic, so convinced that we'd have a real change that Obama would have failed to stop TBTF banks in any way, that his administration would have presided over Citizens loving United, that he would pass a toothless health-care reform bill that just feeds insurance companies, that Guantanamo would still be open, and we'd still have troops in Afghanistan, and that he maintained, if not amplified the surveillance of Americans we saw under Bush... if you had showed me 2014 in 2008, I would have been out in the streets with a loving pitchfork, and I'll bet I wouldn't be alone. The secret to all this success from the Kochs and Adler and their ilk is that they slowly and carefully turn up the heat on us, using what opposition there is as cover. I say it's time for judo. Let them push some ridiculously horrible presidential candidate, let them get their way WAY ahead of their schedule. Turn the heat up all at once, and maybe the frog-like electorate will actually get uncomfortable. I mean, for fucks sake, unemployment, wage stagnation, and corporate corruption and collusion are crippling this country, destroying lives, and nobody is upset enough to do something other than post on Facebook?
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Mar 27, 2014 20:41
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Quidam Viator posted:nobody is upset enough to do something other than post on Facebook? Television is reality, and reality is less than television. Keeping people out of the streets has been a high priority to the Establishment for the past 100 years, and I fear that bad times will make us even more like Russia, not less.
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Mar 27, 2014 21:10
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Accelerationism is basically desiring the suffering of millions of people for the chance that they might wake up one day and do what you want. It's lazy awful garbage, a justification to resolve whatever moral qualms you might have about enjoying your middle class 1st world lifestyle without actually raising a finger to do anything, nothing more.
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Mar 27, 2014 21:12
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rscott posted:Accelerationism is basically desiring the suffering of millions of people for the chance that they might wake up one day and do what you want. It's lazy awful garbage, a justification to resolve whatever moral qualms you might have about enjoying your middle class 1st world lifestyle without actually raising a finger to do anything, nothing more. So, as I said before, give me a valid, believable option for how we can achieve real change in TYOOL 2014, given that you have a political class owned completely on both sides by immense corporate wealth in an electoral system that makes third-parties impossible. What's your suggestion for taking power away from Adelson and the Koch brothers WITHIN this system, which they clearly own? I promise to change my view the instant you give me a viable, working solution. Fake Edit: Don't forget to take into account that the "free press" is also completely corporate-owned, along with the educational system, the banking system, and that freedom of assembly is increasingly restricted by militarized police forces. The basics of democracy still exist on paper here, but in practice, every outlet has been taken away from us. WHERE WILL CHANGE COME FROM? Convince me, and I will stop wishing for people to wake up to what's happening to them when the right wing gets its way. You do know they're going to win again eventually, right? Quidam Viator fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Mar 27, 2014 |
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Mar 27, 2014 22:53
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We can achieve real change by working for it. Accelerationism is stupid excuse for lazy smug deadbeats to do nothing?
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Mar 27, 2014 23:02
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Tias posted:We can achieve real change by working for it. Accelerationism is stupid excuse for lazy smug deadbeats to do nothing? That's your plan? We can achieve real change by working for it? It seems like I heard those same bland platitudes from Obama six years ago. Real change by working for it. What world are you living in? The point of this thread, and many others, is that we have immensely rich and powerful corporations and individuals pulling the strings of every natural outlet of democracy. And all you can do is call me a lazy, smug, deadbeat? Someone else just wants to write me off as simply enjoying my 1st world pleasures? I am proposing a terrible path of action here because just as I said before, you don't have poo poo. You have no plan, no party, no power, no liberty, no wealth, no voice, no escape from this system, and most of all, no willingness to acknowledge that the system meant to guarantee you these rights has been bought and sold right out under from you. My plan is to vote Republican AGAIN here in Florida and encourage as many people as possible to do so as well, on the "Allow the GOP to Kill America" platform. What's your plan? Detail an actual PLAN, and I will switch sides.
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Mar 27, 2014 23:30
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If the current system isn't amenable to your demands, create your own. Create your own parallel institutions of social support however you desire. Go out and actually help people. Drive old ladies to the grocery store or to church. Advocate for the causes you believe in. Volunteer for political parties that match your beliefs. Realize that failure is a probability but it's not the end. Try harder, fail better. Whatever you do, don't be so afraid of failure that it turns you into a cowardly whinny little poo poo, because that is the only thing that will ensure that the future that you want to see will not happen.
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Mar 27, 2014 23:49
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