Hey, I have an idea, lets just put cameras everywhere.

That's in the paper too!

If you see something, say something.

So recently the Unite the Right people wanted to come back to Charlottesville and the city denied the permit. They're claiming they'll sue, and they'll probably win. People think it's "stupid" for the city to do that, but the point to people who are cognizant is to show disapproval and dislike for white supremacists.

But my oh my, just wait until you see what the Reddit crowd has to say! The internet's version of events that happened that day were so horrendously off base, and the amount of times I saw bull**** arguments in favor of "FREE SPEECH!" that the right loves invoking was making my head spin.

Why's that? Do you hate free speech, Reid? No, the point is that Charlottesville denied the permit based on safety reasons. Yet, somehow, people believe that the guy who murdered someone with their car is basically "the only" person on the right who committed violence. Some people literally said that. Some people said it was antifa committing all of the violence. Also wrong.

People don't seem to remember that the various right-wing groups all arrived carrying clubs and shields. Different groups came similarly prepared. What does this signify? To anyone with a brain, it means there was centralized discussion about bringing weapons for the purpose of doing violence. And that's not fairytale, people on the right-wing side fantasized and prepared for violence for weeks.

It's not even just ignorance, online keyboard warriors are willfully ignorant about the role and intentions of literal neo-Nazis, and work very hard to defend them against perceived insurrections of an antifa specter that's more imagined than real.

Oh, also got called a fascist for saying hate speech should be illegal in America. Which I guess logically implies Canada is a fascist nation. Cool, thanks for the learning experience, guys.

So in case y'all wondered about what kind of man Milton Friedman was personally.

I guess this explains why neoliberalism doesn't speak much about colonialism.

What was I supposed to learn about this man's character from that video?

That he denied the abuse and exploitation of slaves and colonized peoples.

That he believed Western European hegemony was a net positive for those colonized peoples.

That he minimized American colonialism on the basis of its form, rather than substance.

All beliefs that are... well, wrong, and also not socially acceptable to have.

A man who was educated in the 1930s held views about the legacy of imperialism in 1978 that seem regressive in 2017? Who'da thunk?

Okay, but how many libertarians don't take his ideology at face value?

Hell, you've also got conservatives, who take at face value the statements of men educated in the 18th century.

Even in 1978 that view is pretty stark.

Aren't they entitled to? Sorry, but I don't see the fact that people disagree with me (and us) on these issues as a moral failure on their part. At least not always; it certainly can be.

Certainly seems that way given the audience's reactions, doesn't it?

There are also plenty of people today who'd clap, if you selected the right audience members.

Leave it to Eversor to defend the person defending colonialism for no good reason, for no good reason.

There were people even in that audience who did.



Where did I say I was defending him? I just don't think his ignorance on these subjects is a moral failure. It's an epistemic failure.

He has reasons for "defending" colonialism (although, I should add, that's not exactly what he's doing). They're bad reasons, and they rest on all sorts of untruths. But he's not so much praising colonialism as criticizing planned economies. To his mind, free markets are inherently better than planned economies, so by becoming independent and by adopting socialism, it had to be a step in the wrong direction for India. That's just the story he has to tell in order for his worldview to remain consistent. He'd probably tell a very different story about India in 2017, when he could compare the relative weakness of post-independence planned economy to the more liberal economy of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s.

I'm curious what he'd say about China. That'd probably present him with a pickle. He'd probably say that the 21st century is still an American century, China be damned, or some bull**** like that.

The contribution of slave labor to both the American and British economies was well known in the 1930s, as was the contribution of colonialism to the passive incomes of the colonial powers’ wealthiest citizens. There’s no excuse for saying otherwise: he wasn’t bad enough at his profession to be mistaken about this.

It wasn't the only time the arguments he presented to the public were misleading and disconnected from his academic understanding. His arguments about the role of Federal Reserve monetary policy on the great depression were misleading and often gave people the impression the Federal Reserve caused the great depression.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/technology/net-neutrality-repeal-vote.html

It's happened! We can execute Ajit Pai now! And the cronies in the telecoms industries!

Seeing this extremely undemocratic force in Washington will hopefull motivate people to keep going out to vote in mass numbers to suppress the GOP ****ing everybody.

Speaking of which, I found the results in Alabama to be the best news we've seen in a long time. People were saying after the special gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia that those were wins that should make us hopeful. I thought they were wrong: Virginia is an increasingly blue state, and New Jersey is a solidly blue state that just happens to have had a prominent Republican governor. They aren't the kinds of states that we'd need to turn to win the House in 2018.

But Alabama is. People are saying that it was only the allegations of pedophilia that put him over the line. No doubt it was a big deal, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think what's important here is that, for whatever reason it happens -- whether because they don't like the candidate, or because of disenchantment with Washington, or whatever --, GOP voters, who are passionately anti-gay marriage, or whatever other social-cultural issue, can be discouraged from voting, and Democratic voters can be mobilized to vote, in states were Democratic would have been unthinkable even in 2016. In our era of hyper-partisanship and hyper-polarization, that's a promising development. GOP voters weren't so committed to preventing a Democratic win they felt like they had to vote no matter what.

Fivethirtyeight had a fairly convincing argument about that. Basically, had Roy Moore not been a sex offender, he should have won by 5-10%... but historically, a Republican senatorial candidate in Alabama should have won with more like a 30% margin. There are pretty huge discounts against the Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, which are even more damning considering the incumbent, executive, and economic bonuses you’d normally expect.

But, whatever. Corporations can buy off the Dem just as easily.

If there ever is another blue tide that sweeps away the current Republican majority, I wonder if Limbaugh et al. will still hang onto the canard they've been using the past few election cycles that if only they were conservative enough, they could have won (and generally trying to argue that the average American is actually far right, etc.).

In Virginia the amount Northam won by was the big deal. Most thought the race would come to a percent or two, Northam won by nine percent. Which does indicate a strong reaction against GOP politics.



I absolutely agree. Democrats turned up this time, I mean really turned up, in no small part as a protest against the Trump-style campaign Moore was running. And this is a state wherein voter rights are suppressed, particularly for black voters.

If Democrats win control of the Senate in 2018, it will be a good shift, but won't be enough. Democrats need to continue to gain power, and work to enact laws against voter suppression. Ideally, some new amendment should probably enter the constitution that protects against Citizens United bull****.

Though things look positive, I'm still a bit bearish on the future of America. Unfortunately, they still got Gorsuch, and are passing legislation rapidly and recklessly that will be hard to recover from. When economists project the tax cuts will be bad even for growth you know the GOP is ****ing up horribly.



Hopefully what this means is that some 2016 GOP voters are becoming more moderate.

This, as well. The only thing that gets popular opinion to work in government is popular activism. There's no party Americans can elect to serve them. Anything we want, we have to organize and fight for.

A constitutional convention might be interesting for you, assuming the voters control the amendments instead of billionaires and corporations. Most western countries desperately need harsh anti-corruption constitutional changes.

Pet peeve: people who use the word "invest" when talking about buying things, esp things that are just discretionary spending. There's a bug in Hearthstone, and when I went to search for information, I found this post:



You're blowing money on microtransactions in a video game you moron. It's not "investing", there's no reasonable method to return a profit.

Even "investing" in a car is dubious terminology, unless you're buying that car for your business.

It’s not “investing” when you buy stocks or bonds either. People have been grossly misusing the term for decades.

More inclined to think it's buyer's remorse among enough Republicans to matter.

Yeah, this sounds likely. The last election was a referendum on neoliberalism. What the voters didn’t realize is that the GOP is a neoliberal party, regardless of whatever campaign rhetoric they use.

Those anti-globalist, anti-multiculturalist, anti-neoliberal voices aren’t becoming moderated, they’re probably more frustrated now than ever. They’re not going to regret what they what they voted for, and the GOP’s failure to provide it isn’t going to convince many people to vote for the opposite.

Ironically, if they want meaningful change, they really should be voting socialist.

Also, where's the ****ing wall?

It's been in our hearts all along.

The past few days, in my off hours I've been putting more time and thought into reading about Milton Friedman, the history of neoliberalism, and I'm trying to find where it stands today.

My impression overall is that, Friedman the academic economist is worlds apart from Friedman the policy advocate. Friedman the academic economist was pretty good. He came up with plenty of good ideas, understood the nuances of economics, and his framework was essentially Keynesian: his most important and long-lasting policies were modifications of the view on monetary policy (and some places of microeconomics). Essentially, what happened in the 1930's was governments became more concerned with fiscal policy (spending) rather than monetary policy (central bank actions). Friedman predicted, through mechanisms I'm not sure enough about to redescribe, that certain Keynesian policies would lead to a period of increased inflation and high unemployment, due to the "natural unemployment level". This turned out to be a good prediction (though one can wonder how much he understood the mechanisms of stagflation, rather than being right for the wrong reasons).

Once Friedman predicted stagflation, he sort of became a patron saint. He prescribed monetarism, which de-emphasized the role of fiscal policy (again, spending) in favor of controlling the money supply. This was such a drastically poor policy that it was abandoned within a few years. He then became economic advisor of Reagan, during which time his policies oversaw the rise of a brutal dictator in Chile, failed to predict and address many economic events of the 1980's, and became more of a raging pro-liberalization zealot that informs people today. The same sort of Reaganomics policies he advocated influence people like Greenspan, whose actions led to the 2000 recession.

This version of Friedman sucked. If he became only as important as "Keynesian economics needs to address monetary policy as well", it would have been an appropriate moderate reaction against the failings of Keynesian policy in the 1970's. However, his policies have led to a sort of religious cult about the role of governments, liberalization, and growth that don't add up to the observable facts. For instance, as I've been discussing previously in this thread, it's not true that simply increasing wealth for all people makes a policy good. Inequality seems to do harm matter no matter what, which goes against some of Friedman's core policy positions. It's also easily observable that zealous liberalization of all aspects of an economy do not result in growth and development. It seems to have worked in Chile, right? But has also failed many places, and there are many places where more interventionist governments work.

You see, the thing neoliberals don't get, is that Keynesianism was already liberal. So when China liberalized, theyshifted not from some sort of Chinese Keynesianism to neoliberal policies, but from socialist policies to Keynesian policies. Many on the neoliberal end who religious devotees simply refuse to acknowledge this obvious, plain fact, arguing by some delusion that China became "neoliberal". China can't be neoliberal because they weren't liberal, as I suggested before, neoliberalism is a reaction against certain failed policies of state intervention.

Where does neoliberalism lie today? Well, in the sense of neoliberalism as the policies Friedman advocated, dead in the water. I think most recognize that the problem leading up to the recession were the result of a lack of appropriate regulation, not caused by government regulation, and the response to the crisis was strongly anti free market. But then, we have a massive explosion in inequality that's resulting in policy decisions so bad it literally baffles mainstream economists. And there's mounting evidence that suggests inequality is, ceteris paribus, associated with lower growth and other problems in any country. As well, as mentioned before, re-distributive economics doesn't seem to create the growth-halting market distortions religious neoliberals believe ought to happen. Evidence suggests that the period from 1980-2010 was a period of too strong a reaction against Keynesian economics and fiscal policy. These same neoliberal policies enrich some people, and these same people as a result of the policies now wield much more power and influence in America, so changing policies to a more sensible area of appropriate interventionism seems unlikely. The neoliberal ship has sailed us so far from shore a trip back might be impossible, without some serious political changes, and that's probably going to mean some sort of real fanaticism coming from the fringes of politics.

In other words, we should eat the rich and use the government to make everybody's lives better.

On the other hand, though, some people do use "neoliberalism" as a swear word without fully understanding the realm of politics surrounding it. Neoliberalism brought some good ideas to the table, and those good ideas were absorbed into mainstream economic reasoning and are now a part of history. The problem is, people still push for many of the broken or irrational policies of the past, not realizing the ship has sailed.

Why do I always want to talk about the wall in our hearts whenever I hear about the wall?!

And yes, the Democrats still support too much irrational devotion to markets. America has a mind-parasite about freedom of markets that works contrary to available evidence on the topic.

If I can propose what I find plausible string of causation to explain the findings: the reason inequality is correlated with lower growth is that, more inequality presents some people with more political influence. Greater political influence makes it easier to rent-seek. Mainstream economics believes everything is about incentives: if you assume this, then having more political influence incentivizes rent-seeking behavior as it's less costly to extract rent than it is in egalitarian communities, so you see more of it.

Neoliberalism isn’t like economic postmodernism, where you have to be liberal before you can be neoliberal. It’s a revival of classical liberalism and it needs to be understood in the context of classical liberalism. In other words, it’s capitalist apologia. It’s also not reactionary, it is the continuation of timeless and unceasing pressure by the rich to gain the advantages of socialism for their own classes at the expense of their lessers.

Neoliberals nominally support things like free trade, deregulation, and privatization, but those policies are always structured in a way so the benefits are narrowly afforded to the super rich. The benefits of free trade, for example, are not accessible to poorer firms. Only rich firms can afford international supply chains that benefit from free trade. Consumers may have lower prices for finished goods, but that is a poison pill because an international economy of scale will eventually annilhilate the regional economy of scale that finances their consumption. And privatization means spending public (working class) money on capital, which is then gifted to whatever winner the politicians have picked; far from austerity, it is a massive investment, but the public sees none of the benefit. Similarly, deregulation is laser-focused on helping the richest people and firms, like expanding spectrum and public land auctioning; lifting restrictions that smaller firms can’t effectively profit from, like unbanning internet usage tracking and revoking Net Neutrality; setting policies that benefit only banks large enough to have both investment and commercial operations; and failing to enforce antitrust laws, which prevent the largest companies from using their money to prey upon smaller ones.

In other words, neoliberalism is not what it says on the tin. The purpose of neoliberalism and neoliberal policies is quite literally to extract as much wealth from the working class as possible, and allocate it to capital. And none of their ideas were actually any good.

I don't think it's necessarily true that every neoliberal critique is pressure by the rich to manipulate socialism, at least if we consider only the specific work of neoliberals in critiquing Keynesianism in academic works. This is, today, a rather narrow band of minor comments and refinements on policies are valid in fairly specific subjects of macroeconomics. My view is that, if the role of neoliberalism both started and ended here, it would be entirely okay.

I want to separate this though from neoliberalism as a policy advocacy of Reagan and Thatcher. In the case of Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism became a vessel to radically change policy against interventionism even when it makes sense and fixes market failings. In a sense, the policy changes of neoliberalism, which should have been far more moderate, were co-opted and used as a method of class warfare. Paul Krugman wrote about this disparity in Friedman's work, and I hardly think Krugman could qualify as an economist who advocates unrestrained capitalism.



Absolutely agreed on all counts. Globalization has primarily benefited a narrow band of elites. Any economy which wants to globalize and wants to remain strong long-term should also implement policies that disrupt the effects globalization has on inequality.

Basically, tax the **** out of the rich and use that money to benefit all people in a nation. Or, in some way narrow the comparative advantage they have on the global scale, maybe government-sponsored projects to help small companies gain access to global markets? I'm in no position to make policy pronouncements, but I'm sure no matter what policy would work, it'd be hysterically regarded as socialist in any neoliberal country.



Again, absolutely agree. Nearly all of this rent-seeking behavior is toxic and even create conditions under which markets don't perform. Markets perform best when there's open access to capital, low barriers to entry, and policies which work against rent-seeking behavior. In an ideal world, and in rhetoric, this is what neoliberals want.

The problem is, and as I suggested above, pre-neoliberal western countries already were massively liberal. I suspect the marginal benefits of liberalizing markets reduces the more liberal your economy is. As well, as with all policies, they're easily manipulated to benefit certain people, as you suggest.

In other words, the "free market" religion of neoliberals states that free markets are inherently better, rather than usually or idyllically better. And I'd argue, in the past 30 years, markets aren't becoming "freer" in any sense that much matters.



Agreed, with the above caveat that we mean "neoliberal" to mean basically Reaganomics, free market worship, irrational anti-statism, overemphasis on monetary policy and de-emphasis of fiscal policy when it doesn't make sense. Which is what "neoliberalism" actually means in policy discussion, basically GOP economics and Democrat concessions to GOP economics.

I have an interesting thought about the role of the Laffer curve.

Many justifications for the Laffer curve have come from the history of growth after past tax cuts. The idea is this: if people have less money taken away, they'll put more money to productive use, and the associated increase in volume will result in more money taken in overall despite less per person. But is it true tax cuts lead to investment? I think that's possibly not true, and growth seen after a tax cut is the result of something else. For instance, many cite the growth of the economy post 2002-2003 as a justification that the Bush tax cuts stimulated growth. However, to what degree is this investment a result of the literal statement of the Laffer curve, and not a result of meta-belief in the Laffer curve itself? If one believes tax cuts will stimulate growth, then people will want to invest more money after a tax cut to get a slice of that pie. So the Laffer curve might serve to increase growth due to people's belief in the Laffer curve, not as a result of the mere effects of the tax policy.

In other words, markets can move because everybody believes everybody else is going to move, and the specter becomes corporeal.