Here.
For those of you who don’t understand what the article is arguing for, it’s called indentured servitude. It was common in the past, but is now outlawed in most places that are not Third World ratholes, and it is now considered to be a form of slavery.
Unbelievable. I knew this country was getting more and more rightwing, but this is crazy. Are there any limits to how far right they go?
The piece was written by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl.
Weyl works at Microsoft Research and teaches at Yale. I know nothing about this person, but I assume they might be coming from a somewhat Silicon Valley Libertarian mindset
Posner is out of Harvard and Yale also. He is a Constitutional Law Professor at the University of Chicago, a bastion of reaction in the Economics Department, which birthed the economic Rosemary’s Baby named Milton Friedman, a loathsome man who was part of the brain trust behind recent mass move to neoliberalism. Friedman was basically a Libertarian. He’s widely praised all over the corporate media, but make no mistake about it, the man was a literal monster.
It turns out that UoC’s Law School is just as bad as its execrable Economics Department. Both are known as bastions of conservative scholars of both law and economics. Posner’s father was Richard Posner, a federal judge. He was a Reagan appointee and was on George W. Bush’s short list for appointees to the Supreme Court. He must have been quite conservative to make it onto Shrub’s Supreme Court list.
He recently wrote an insane article in Slate called The Case Against Human Rights arguing that we need to get rid of our freedom of speech.
Although some say Posner is a liberal Democrat, others say he is generally viewed as a conservative legal scholar. However, he seems to hate Donald Trump.
Reviewing some of his publications, I found him hard to characterize.I felt that he came across as a rightwinger. He’s not a liberal, or if he is the word liberal needs to be tossed in a bonfire and burned up forever as meaningless. If he’s a Democrat, he’s a conservative Democrat. But keep in mind that the monsters in the Killary Clinton wing of the DNC type of nightmarish neoconservative warhawks bill themselves as liberal Democrats.
N.B. I just did some more research and it appears that Posner is best characterized as some sort of Libertarian.
With his colleague and partner in crime co-author, he has written a book about International Law that seems to state that there is no such thing and that every country can interpret international law in whatever way benefits it most. Which is what the United States has always done anyway. We’ve never followed international law. Show me one time when the US followed international law to do anything.
These are the people who are shaping our country!
The other man is out of Microsoft Research. He’s apparently another reactionary, this time the usual Silicon Valley Libertarian “liberal Democrat” type. It’s beyond me how these Libertarian Democraps in Silicon Valley are liberal in any way, shape, or form.
How? Because they bellow for the rights of silly millennials to categorize their sexuality and gender as 40% this, 30% that, and 30% some other weird thing? That’s what Silicon Valley Libertarian Democrats are all about. They’re Cultural Left Democrats, but in most other ways, they are just corporate Libertarian monsters like all the rest of the corporate goons. Libertarian philosophy is the cancer of the Generation X’ers. It’s their fatal flaw. Vast numbers of them have been infected with it. Even many Gen X’ers who call themselves liberals or even Leftists often call themselves Libertarians.
I would like to point out one other thing. Both authors are out of the Ivies – Harvard and Yale.
You are well aware that the Silicon Valley Dystopia is actually the ultimate utopia of Late Capitalism. This is literally their dream society, if you can fathom that. This is as good as Late Capitalism gets. This is the hideous model that everyone else in the world needs to emulate and strive for.
And it’s complete crap in so many ways.
I have been told that the creators and promoters of Silicon Valley as the ultimate capitalism Land of Oz are mostly out of the Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Yale.
I am not sure how true that is, but if it is, then the Ivy League types are prominent in shaping our country in this monstrous direction.
Presumably, they are all tied in with neoliberalism/Libertarianism, the mindset of Silicon Valley which is glossed over with a pretty liberal Democratic paint job. Don’t be fooled. Silicon Valley is simply the latest manifestation of the endlessly shapeshifting neoliberal beast. It’s particularly dangerous because with that faux liberal Democrat sheen, it has the potential to pull a lot of decent but naive liberal and even progressive people into its foul spider web.
These two have co-authored a book out recently titled Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. It’s probably not about a just society at all, and I worry about their notion that uprooting democracy is a good thing even if that has always been the standard view of the ruling classes. I doubt if they are talking about uprooting capitalism at all. It’s probably about the promotion across of this cancer called the “gig economy” which, trust me, is a very bad thing. It’s just he latest groovy idea cooked up by Silicon Valley Libertarians. It sounds very appealing but upon analysis, it’s a catastrophe for workers. It amounts to all of us putting ourselves and everything we own on the open market for use or rental. This mirrors what Marx said workers do in capitalism anyway, but it’s never been so open, blatant and galling as this.
Here’s the blurb from the book. It’s looking bad already, and I haven’t even read one page.
It shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation.
Uh-oh.
They show how the principle of one person, one vote inhibits democracy, suggesting instead an ingenious way for voters to effectively influence the issues that matter most to them.
Here’s where the democracy hatred comes in. Well the bourgeois have hated democracy since the onset of suffrage, so this is nothing new. Remember how France revoked suffrage at the best of their ruling class in 1848 very soon after it was granted? It’s just now that the anti-democratic language is gussied up in groovy hipster talk. You won’t get to vote anymore, but that’s a good thing! How taking away your right to vote is actually a good thing for you. I can see the subheads already.
Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition.
Um, no. So the way to reduce inequality, stabilize the political system and make everybody rich is to go to a full-blown radical free market across all of society.
Forget it. This is more of the Libertarian swill they have been selling us for decades.
- The free market is never the road to reduced inequality – in fact, the freer the markets, the more the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
- The freer the markets, the more unstable the political system becomes as extreme inequality and market as politics gives rise to the Marxist prediction of the right going further right and the left going further left which the marketization of politics automatically produces breathtaking corruption in the state. Pretty soon you have the 1930’s in Europe with Hard Left and Hard Right thugs fighting in the streets. Wait. We have that in the US right now!
- The freer the markets, the less rich most everyone is. The wealth shifts up to the top 1%, while the top 20% also makes out quite well. The bottom 80% gets completely screwed. The economy becomes a board game where the upper classes spend all their time transferring more and more money and stuff out of the hands of the lower 80% and the people at large represented in the state into their own grubby hands. Racial neoliberalism results in the wild enrichment of those at the top, the decimation of the middle classes and the reduction of huge segments of society to near pauperism via economic immiseration. Free markets don’t make everybody rich. All they do is turn your country into Latin America.
The book’s got a blurb from the Indian CEO of Microsoft:
I have always been motivated to find ways to unite the power of technology and markets with the goal of creating a more egalitarian society. This book offers the most intriguing vision I have seen to date in uniting these apparently contradictory strands.
–Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft
A blurb from the head of Microsoft. That should serve as a warning. You think this Indian goon cares one whit about egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is the antithesis of the corporate ethos. If you advocate it, your shareholders can fire you for violating your corporate charter. Nadella is probably some sort of a Libertarian is what I am thinking.
Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to rethink democracy and markets since Milton Friedman…
–Kenneth S. Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash
That first sentence ought to be a giveaway for what this scam is probably really all about. Comparing these authors with Milton Friedman is probably intentional and should be a heads up to what these two sneaky chameleons are all about. I know nothing about Rogoff, but the seeming praise for the Friedmanstein human monster should be a giveaway. Rogoff is also probably some sort of Libertarian.
These two cretins recently wrote an article for the New Republic on how to reduce income inequality. I’m not far into it yet, but apparently the solution is…open borders! Now you see how Libertarian reactionary with fake neo-Centrist masks sell their poison. The New Republic is a liberal magazine. For quite some time, they went Clintonite DNC Centrist to the point where I could not bear to read them. The magazine was long run by Israel-firster (((Martin Peretz))) and ~20% of the articles were about (((you know who))). It gets annoying after a while. I am not sure where they are at now, but I am sure their politics is categorized as liberal. So a liberal magazine is running poisonous articles by two devious Libertarians deliberately designed to appeal to liberals.
See how this scam works. This is like what they did with the Council on Cultural Freedom in the Cold War. A number of magazines, often literary and political mags, were essentially set up by the CIA. A very prominent one was the Paris Review. These magazines were de facto run by the CIA for many years. The CIA used these quite liberal magazines to attack Communism during the Cold War. Many people who worked at these magazines were never even aware of how they were being turned in marionettes.
Here the ruling class – the capitalists, the corporations and the rich are trying to sell their class politics to liberals and progressives as part of a progressive project. The problem is that a lot of decent liberals are going to get fooled by this scam.
So Libertarians are arguing for the return of indentured servitude. What’s next? Out and out slavery? I suppose if two free individuals enter into a contract for indentured servitude, it’s a-ok with “No Harm Principle” Libertarians. Somehow such an agreement is not harmful to anyone involved.
Eric Posner is the 4th most cited Constitutional scholar in the US. And this is how he thinks. The ideologues who run our system are monsters.
