The problem with this whole line of argument is that it is premised entirely on the idea that intellectuals know better than ordinary people what those ordinary people should want.
Obama saying the Pennsylvanians turn to god and guns only because they’re bitter, and not because they approve of those things regardless of economics, is more of the same.
That leads straight to totalitarian government. (Not too surprising; modern liberalism is all about fascism in a velvet glove.) It’s also insulting. It’s also wrong.
People who choose values and their own culture over getting more money are not insane.
You’re an idiot.
Anyway, I would say “feel free to engage in all the socialism you like, with your local government”, but the problem with that is that when it fails you’ll say “but we just need a little more help” and you’ll start agitating for state and national government to forcefully impose socialism on everyone else just to “even the playing field” or some such nonsense and at that point your silly little life has stopped having any inherent value.
So coming from you that’s what? Praising with faint damnation?
We already have extensive socialism worked into our system. The thing is, you’re so used to it you don’t even call it that anymore. How long do we have to watch median income remain stagnant in spite of GDP growth before we challenge capitalist notions that the best way to improve overall quality of life is to increase overall production. How many S&L collapses and lending crises do we need to go through before we stop “trusting the market” and realize that classical economic theory is founded on blatantly false assumptions such as “rational actors” and “perfect information”?
I’ve never seen a candidate run on the “I’ll fuck the economy but protect your guns” platform.
The argument here isn’t that voters are insane, it’s that they are misinformed about which political party is going to represent their interests more effectively. Whether the Democrats actually do so is debatable, but that’s the argument.
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Capitalistic free market economies may have issues but that doesn’t meant they should be abandoned. A properly regulated capitalism to minimize the effects of the edge cases is the best practical system anyone has come up with yet.
I never asked for that. What I want to throw out is neoclassical economics or at least to knock it off of its pedestal and let in other, more scientific approaches to economic study. These approaches already exist, are more empirically-based and aren’t afraid to gets their hands dirty with real data, imperfect actors, etc.
I consider myself a moderate socialist and a moderate capitalist. I spend about equal time defending socialism to capitalists as I do defending capitalism to socialists. Neither system is perfect and it’s really just a desire for simplicity that drives the belief that one need conquer the other. It’s that same belief which drives economists to put all their eggs into a single basket that is inherently unconcerned with real market data and believes that all economic problems can be solved by abstraction and mathematic manipulation based on unjustified assumptions.
In 2012, when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first pitched his plan to drastically slash the state’s income taxes, he promised “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” Brownback brought in Arthur Laffer, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics guru, to help sell the idea that the cuts—which zeroed out taxes for 200,000 businesses and slashed rates for top earners—were guaranteed to boost the state’s fortunes, prop up the economy, and bring in countless new jobs as businesses and individuals flocked to Kansas to escape the tyrannies of higher-tax states.
Two years later, those rosy predictions have turned to doom and gloom. Next week, when the state legislature kicks off its new session, lawmakers will face a daunting budget deficit that will require either overturning Brownback’s tax cuts or shaving hundreds of millions from the state’s budget. A recent string of court cases mandating increased funds for education will make that job trickier. Thanks to Brownback’s efforts to transform the state into the Koch brothers’ dreamland, Kansas is now mired in a fiscal disaster.
Wait just a fucking minute. Are you telling me that massive tax cuts don’t result in overflowing government coffers? I don’t understand why it didn’t work for Kansas when it worked so well under GWB on the national level.
But with the new Congress firing the CBO’s director and ordering voodoo accounting tricks. . .er, I’m sorry, I meant dynamic scoring. . .those increased deficits will magically be offset by all the new jobs created overnight when corporate taxes get zero’d out for all businesses.
A committee in the GOP-controlled Senate plans to vote Tuesday on a bill that would make “attempting to usurp the power” of the Legislature or the executive branch grounds for impeachment.
Impeachment has “been a little-used tool” to challenge judges who strike down new legislation, said Republican Sen. Dennis Pyle, a sponsor of the measure. “Maybe it needs to be oiled up a little bit or sharpened a little bit.”
I appreciate Kansas so much because whatever despicable things are going down in your local shithole, you can always console yourself by knowing that you’re not living in that one.
