wes.whitman's blog

Neoliberalism is a lot like socialism/communism. It's a broad term that covers a lot of extremely different ideologies, some better and some worse. "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" is a lot like "The Communist Manifesto." When I read it, there's a lot that I disagree with but there's also a lot that I agree with. Overall, the ideology is flawed, but it makes many valid points.

Just wanted to share an insight from John Médaille’s book on distributist political economy. In the book, he distinguishes between legitimate interest and usury and this insight becomes really interesting in light of modern money theory (MMT):

Trump's decision to ignore his military advisors and withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan is a disastrous proposal. ISIS will regroup and come back in full force, Christians and Kurds in the Middle East will be slaughtered, and Islamic extremism will rule the Middle East perpetually. Trump bowed to Erdogan's will and agreed to withdraw troops. Erdogan is a supporter of Islamic terrorism and racist Arab nationalism. The only reason he wants America to withdraw from the region is so that Turkey can resume its genocide against the Kurds, which was halted when the U.S.

This is a good read. This is a more traditional conservative take on healthcare. I don't know to what extent we can turn back the clock and go back to guild and concierge approaches, although it would be best if we could do so. I sympathize with single-payer because it seems the simplest and most feasible solution...but then again, maybe something more conservative/libertarian would be easier to get support for in America.

It's striking that conservatism has a philosophy of history that is almost dialectical materialism, but dialectical materialism with some supernatural guiding light—although, the supernatural element is inconsistent here. Conservatism is rooted in Platonism, and therefore sees all "progress" as degradation and decay. Burke's philosophy of history, Santayana's, Henry Adam's—they're all basically dialectical materialist. And they seem to agree with Marx, liberalism (capitalism) is inevitably leading us towards socialism. Of course, unlike Marx, they view this as a bad thing.

Trump has laid the foundation for conservative politicians to start talking about scrapping Social Security and Medicare. Billionaires were bailed out during the Bush and Obama eras, when government borrowed from Social Security to subsidize and bail out rich folks. Trump has permanently cut taxes on the wealthy so that his rich friends don't have to pay back the money they took from Social Security.

Ayn Rand sucked at life. Her books were garbage and no one loved her, not even Rothbard. Also, "If there's one thing that will not be tolerated here, it's imprecision of language."

Harvey Beardman (Atlas in the metaphor) is the businessman with the world on his shoulders, so he decides to shrug off moral obligations and pursue "the virtue of selfishness." Atlas shrugs, ignoring the ecological impact of his actions and engages in selfish profit-seeking at the expense of the environment and the community.

A reminder that unemployment numbers are meaningless when it comes to the state of the economy.

Vaccines don't cause autism and chiropractic is pseudo-science.

Even if vaccines cause autism (which they don't), a person can live a happy and fulfilling life with autism. You can't live a happy and fulfilling life if you're dead because you got a completely preventable illness. Also, the guy that did the "research" showing a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism faked the research because he happened to own the patent on an alternative vaccine—he was just a piece of shit trying to scare people away from the usual vaccine in order to sell them his own vaccine instead.

"The Republic" is also a mistranslation of the title of Plato's work. An accurate translation would be "The State." Plato was not a republican and neither was the form of government he advocated. He advocated a totalitarian quasi-communist monarchy. His politics was thoroughly fascist. Also, "scientific racism" played a central role in his political thought.