"Freedom" thread or something

The thread has been resurrected yet again!

Much as the issue of taxation might be of interest on this thread, the most important thing for me is the fact that the US, the supposed "lad of the free" (yeah right) is a police state where police can get away with murder whenever they want. Police are militarized, and ready (and willing, apparently) to kill without consequences. 

Evidently murder is more forgivable then selling individual cigarettes

Well, on the subject of demand, the current crude oil price slide has the potential to improve cost conditions and give producers more elbow room to reduce prices and in this way spur demand.  This is what could and would have happened in the normal course a couple of years earlier anyway, if the G8 hadn't prevailed on emerging markets to put their economies on steroids to 'maintain' growth.  When there's a global slowdown in consumption, commodity prices start to fall and lower costs and the balance of power slowly begins to favour producers again (at the height of the boom, it's commodity suppliers who make a killing).  This is how the market adjusts but the various heads of state in their infinite wisdom have shown scant faith in it.   And by trying to pump up economies, they unwittingly helped commodity sellers keep their prices firm which was pretty bizarre. 

Edited by rogerthat - November 15 2014 at 21:10

Trickle down, as Bush sr himself put it, is just voodoo economics.  More to the point, a political sugarcoating of a market-based economic policy to get a buy-in from voters.  Since the days of Keynes, the long run has been dead so you can't tell voters that we must move to a free market economy for the sake of the long run.  Trickle down makes it sound like they might get a slice of the pie too and artificially conjures up an image of capitalism as a system with income redistribution (like socialism).  

The authors at that webzine I linked to, The Mitrailleuse, do seem to be unified by coming from a libertarian political background but all making some kind of attempt thinking outside the "homo economicus" mentality: that they do so in different directions, but with a uniformly high level of writing quality, is one of the reasons I find that site so interesting even if I disagree with most of that write.

From everyone's favorite Post-Keynesian blog! 

Edited by JJLehto - November 14 2014 at 11:22

I think this is what that blog post's purported content is: The common thread has something to do with Western classical liberalism, as ostensibly represented by NATO in proclaimed ideals if not in practice, being descended from Athenian democracy which Plato opposed with his hierarchial communitarian utopia detailed in The Republic. His fable of Atlantis was then meant as a cautionary example of what happens to a decadent civilization.

Hence, the Anglo-American classical liberal model of parliamentary democracy and free market economy comes to represent Atlantis if viewed from the outside. The openly hierarchial and shamelessly elitist in structure, yet collectivist rather than individualist in ideology, vision that Plato proposed as an alternative we can then see at work as counter-reactions in the Jacobite monarchist uprisings, the Confederate States of America, the Axis Powers of WW2 and now again the peculiar type of conservatism that dominates Russian political discourse. The United States then become the decadent Atlantis that Vladimir Putin and his allies throughout Eurasia are reacting against, pushing their societies in similar directions as Plato and for that matter Aristotle promoted. Aleister Crowley then stands out as an example of that surfacing in the least likely places, as his own political beliefs on occasion tended towards a neo-aristocratic ideal of the Nietzschean variety... which might have ended up having an influence on the more eccentric corners of the Italian Fascist movement since Crowley did live in Italy for a long time while Fascism was gestating. (and the overall high strangeness of Eastern European nationalism means that ideas either originated in or popularized by Fascist Italy have bled into mainstream conservatism in Russia)

I get the impression The Mitrailleuse's writers are trying to describe the "Whig history" narrative of civilization being driven by a conflict between liberal democratic ideals vs. collectivist authoritarianism... but from a perspective more open towards the possibility that the other side might have valid points. A sort of political Turing test, you might call it. Notice that their blogroll on the right contains not just way more far-left websites but also representatives of the authoritarian right than you would expect from a libertarian blog.

Edited by Toaster Mantis - September 21 2014 at 11:26

The T wrote: At moments I think there comes a time where extra technological advance is only benefitial to the elites and detrimental for the majority of the population.

At moments I think there comes a time where extra technological advance is only benefitial to the elites and detrimental for the majority of the population.