wes.whitman's blog

The office of the Presidency ought to be abolished. The military should be led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a consensus basis. Coming to agreement through deliberation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would act as one person, collectively serving as Commander in Chief. In place of the Presidency, we should have a "figure head" Prime Minister who has a diplomatic role but no military or executive power. Supreme Court Justices ought to serve a term of 6 years and ought to be democratically elected by the people.

Radical centrism and third-way political economy are honestly the most reasonable positions to hold. Unfortunately, radical centrism looks like extreme leftist in America because America is a nation of right-wing extremist basket cases.

There are two socialist calculation problems:

Hayek: Knowledge is distributed in the minds of individuals with specialized knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place. That knowledge can't be centrally collected and analyzed, meaning centrally-planned economies will inevitably make uninformed decisions that result in inefficiency.

Mises: With all industry owned by government, materials would be traded government-to-government, meaning there's no market for the determination of prices. Without the price mechanism, resources would be allocated inefficiently.

A lot of leftists want to reject universal basic income as a right-wing idea, because it has been advocated by Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, & Charles Murray. And, because it was advocated by the Founding Father, Thomas Paine, in the form of a citizen's dividend. But it's an idea that transcends ideologies. C. H. Douglas broke from the Fabian socialists to advocate UBI in the form of a national dividend. It was advocated by socialists like Fred M. Taylor, Oskar Lange, & Abba Lerner in the form of a social dividend as a share of the profits of socialized industry.

Why don't we have land value tax? It's universally recognized as a good idea. It was advocated by the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. It was advocated by classical liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke. It was advocated by libertarians like Albert Jay Nock and Milton Friedman. It was advocated by the most important conservative thinkers, from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley Jr.

(my response to something posted on a forum):

MMT is mostly the result of having a scientific approach to economics rather than an abstract theoretical approach. It's what you learn about economics if you look at facts and data rather than contemplating abstract hypotheticals.

Classical/Austrian/Chicago economists: "I wonder how money and taxes work? Let's suppose that Robinson Crusoe is stranded on a desert island with his friend Friday...."

Fiscal policy is monetary policy. You can't have an efficient and functional monetary system or market without taxation. The only feasible vision of market anarchism is geo-mutualist, where you have something like democratic confederalism, a sovereign money issuing bank of the people, and a system of taxation. Most modern anarchists think that geoism, Proudhonian mutualism, and democratic confederalism looks a lot like statism. Perhaps. The lines do blur. It's a spectrum, not a binary. The anarchist social democracy that I used to advocate really does look a lot like statism.

Democrats got more votes than Republicans in the Senate. However, the American system is rigged to favor white conservatives. The majority of the population doesn't want these fascist shit-bags in power, but the system is rigged in their favor. Democrats actually won the majority of the votes in the Senate race, but they ended up losing seats. This is how rigged the system is in favor of the rightwing. Repeatedly, Republicans can't win the popular vote but still remain in power. As you'll recall, Trump didn't win the popular vote either. Why was our system rigged this way?

Neo-republicanism, which tends towards social democracy, departs from classical republicanism in one important sense. Whereas traditional republicans wanted liberty for propertied white men, neo-republicans want liberty for all, which means universal healthcare, abolition of wage-slavery, etc.