Comments on: things I don’t get

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:21:20 +0000

Also, I’m just bitter. I need to watch what I post a bit more closely though, especially at 2 am. Yes there’s been lots of success stories (like, um, the stuff that led to this machine I’m using…) but overall the last few decades of American prosperity have IMO been built on very little actual wealth creation.

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:07:25 +0000

Okay, I’d like to backtrack on that last comment a little. In attempting to be concise, I got a bit overheated.

I stand by my basic point though that the last 30 years of American prosperity came directly at the expense of today’s, and not just because of the welfare state. Not primarily, even.

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:04:30 +0000

Oy, if that was a fusion, it was a fusion of the worst of both. You really call all this swinging between asset bubbles, and systematic destruction of human capital, enabled by a fundamentally unsustainable monetary policy, prosperity?!

We’re going to need a lot more than a “substantial reform of the welfare state” to restore real prosperity.

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:51:14 +0000

I’d definitely like to read that, JB. Especially since until very recently that was how I saw things too.

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:43:27 +0000

But in a way, it’s true that it’s never been properly applied. Just like, you know, a truly 100% free market never has been. Because, you know, it’s impossible. (Of course, this is coming from someone who thinks the biggest flaw in Marxism is its historicism.)

There are all sorts of economic systems that work great at the village level that are completely disastrous at the nation-state level.

By: JosephFM

JosephFM — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:26:41 +0000

Oh absolutely. All economics, IMO, makes some pretty fundamentally misguided assumptions about human behavior, and about markets, which are - get this - made up by people!

By: aboulien

aboulien — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:05:33 +0000

As a fellow fan of big MM, I appreciated your Yglesian short sentence + exclamation point, ‘And that’s okay!’ Keep it up.

By: ThatPirateGuy

ThatPirateGuy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:51:08 +0000

I don’t think the government can make race relations better except by guaranteeing equal rights. I know it can make them worse by engaging in racist ways with the community but I think the situation is improving and that all that is required is a fidelity to the law, for private citizens to speak out when they encounter it, and time.

By: Koz

Koz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:45:34 +0000

“I went to college at ole miss and I can tell you that racism isn’t dead it is just different. Relevant events are occurring now, but thankfully most of the effects are not like they were in the bad old days.”

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? Presumably (or maybe not), you want to leverage some collective power to bring about better race relations in some plausible way?

By: ThatPirateGuy

ThatPirateGuy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:22:51 +0000

Well since I grew up white in the south and actually know modern-day racists, even love a few of them as they are in my family. It does affect me.

I went to college at ole miss and I can tell you that racism isn’t dead it is just different. Relevant events are occurring now, but thankfully most of the effects are not like they were in the bad old days.

I am of the mind-set that there are no good ole days in America’s past. Note that I don’t mean that america is and always has been evil, I mean that America is doing better now as the older culturally conservative forces lose power than it ever did in times like the fifties.

There is no previous era that I would want to live in, this one is better.