Category Archives: Economics

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy

Thanksgiving Thoughts On Marxist America

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We have lost the balance:

Here’s what Marx said:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”

Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.

This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.

And naturally this system will make the economy grow (“increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”) rather than collapse because the people running the state know nothing about creating jobs or meeting a payroll or actually producing anything.

Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:

“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.

And those who seek political power, with few if any exceptions, are people set on accumulating power, glory, and wealth. All the more reason to limit what they can do.

Nevertheless, this grasping elite views itself as disinterested. It does not act from selfish motives but because it knows better than anyone else how to promote the public good. And even with the best will and highest morality that mortals are capable of achieving, political leaders and bureaucrats are still limited by their own worldview, life experience, and specific role (where you stand is where you sit, as one popular Washington, D.C., maxim has it).

There’s nothing here that would surprise America’s founders, who knew that freedom always depended on restraining such people.

Let’s hope we’re not too far gone.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Ironic Presidency

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The difference between 2008 and 2011:

The one constant here is Obama’s false pitch in 2008 that everything that came before his hope-and-change elixir was simply awful and everything after would be wonderful, from a cooling planet to falling seas — all delivered in teleprompted mellifluousness with a new post-racial cool. In 2008, for a conservative critic to suggest that the former Chicago community organizer was a glib rookie senator — without any experience in national politics, clueless about the private sector, with no prior record of industry or inspired legislation, and with a mostly unknown and poorly researched past — was to earn the charge of racism; in 2011, for a liberal to do the same, I guess, will be seen as sober and judicious bipartisan reflection.

And they’ll still call us racists.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Avastin Decision

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Did the FDA do the right thing?

The Wall Street Journal, and others, have denounced the FDA’s move as “a chillingly blunt assertion of regulatory power.” But my Manhattan Institute colleague Paul Howard is the guy who gets it right, in a blog post for Medical Progress Today:

If you think (as I do) that the FDA should be expanding the accelerated approval pathway and allow more drugs to get to market based on promising early studies. rather than waiting for large Phase III clinical trials that can take years to complete, you can argue that this outcome actually strengthens AA. Critics have charged that AA is sop to industry, and that companies never do the follow up studies to support AA. Avastin proves them wrong.

This is exactly the point. If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren’t as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.

Yes, this is better than the way they’ve done it in the past, but this argument presumes that the FDA should have such regulatory power in the first place. It’s one thing to provide data on efficacy. It’s another to prevent people from making their own decisions about what drugs to use for which ailments.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Good News For Space Startups

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And not just space startups: the House passed a bill to allow non-accredited investors to invest up to ten grand in startups. This would undo some of the damage caused by Sarbanes-Oxley, though that still needs to be repealed as well (one of the many disasters of the Bush administration). It would also be a huge improvement over decades-long SEC rules that have prevented space entrepreneurs from easily raising funds. And yes, of course, there will be some bad deals. Caveat emptor.

And of course, it isn’t law yet. It still has to get through the Senate and signed by the president. I won’t hold my breath.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

What The Occupiers Believe And Why They Believe It

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It’s indoctrination:

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.

To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.

Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”

These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.

The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.

[Update a while later]

“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Rick Perry Is An Idiot

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At least based on his interview with O’Reilly.

No, the Occupy Wall Streeters are not looking for jobs, Rick. They’re looking for a big paycheck to cash in on their worthless college degrees, if they even have them.

But even worse, knowing that you were going into that interview that you would be asked about the president’s comments about “Americans being lazy” and knowing that your commercial had taken him out of context, in that he was talking about us bringing in foreign investment, did you point out that in fact that the president was wrong, and that there has been abundant foreign investment in the US because much of the money has nowhere else to go?

No, you just double down on the stupid.

Here’s some advice Rick Perry. Either listen to your political advisers, or fire them. Because this was a huge blown opportunity.