Death to the Keynesian Insect That Preys on the Life of the People!

Wow. I’m kinda impressed; sort of a literate tea bagger. I guess delusion isn’t simple a function of ignoring one’s education. Are we sure this isn’t a Poe?

Is that really not a parody? Really?

Actually, my favorite is the one with the fable of the fox who lost its tail; I got a bit confused about which country was which fox, but one thing is clear: the US is the “alpha-male fox.” I don’t think Aesop really got into vulpine gender dynamics and herd behavior, but in international relations, that’s what’s important.

george mason *is* a school full of goofball randite hacks.

that’s not a bug, to their minds; that’s their niche and their pitch.

So Atlas could shrug and the US “begins a long decline” economically? I don’t think this guy has been paying attention for the past 2 years. There was this thing called the worst recession since the Great Depression. And another thing called 10% unemployment. And a final thing called not out of the woods yet. So any right-wing morons who want harp on that Obama may cause the US to decline: the decline was already happening before Obama. Obama’s the one people elected to fix the decline.

voters will rush to elect leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

Ew, gross.

Substance: Yes; what makes it weird is that it’s an actual wish and not a grammatical error.

Hmm. I think “tail” might be a euphemism, in the same way “Schwanz” is in German.

Rowley is the geriatric version of Alex Tabarrok. Or he is David Henderson.

Fr. would the fake one sound sensible?

Neil, sure, but are you going to take up those arguments with this guy? It would be like debating wildlife conservation with Yosemite Sam. I don’t think this is the thread for serious discussion.

@ #17/#118

I cannot imagine a #FakeCharlesRowley Twitter account that would sound more beserk than the real one.

Re: #7 – fantastic, but I ‘d want to see documentary evidence that such a directive actually existed and neither Claud nor Alex were making that one up. (Ditto the “brothers and sisters, join the Communist Party” story.)

will pocket-picking accelerate to the point at which Atlas Shrugs

Or is there still time for the Robin Hood of Coercive Tax-Accounting to ask instead “what has it got in its offshore accountses?” and pull the carpet of capital flight from beneath the bookless Sybils of idle threat? And having transfer-paymented the Cash of the Titans from the Flightless Pickets of Dubai-less tantrum to the Swollen Coffers of Demand-Pump-Priming, will the Unsuperhumans of Capital, Labour and Land still cry out to the Heavens of Milton (F.) and, keening, rend the garments of supply-side withdrawal-syndrome? Or could they instead use the Form Book of Non-Price Signalling to pick dead certs in a loserless race of welfare-based allocation, leaving the price-setting prestidigidators of greenfingered speculative random walking to respond in masterly ubermensch style to the Incentive of Sudden Destitution by redoubling their entrepreneurial efforts, luxuriating in the Ritzian freedom to shrug into existence new and wonderful civilisations – perhaps on the Douglo-Adamsian planet of fuck-off-and-don’t-come-back?

L. Sprague de Camp, thou should’st be living at this hour…

24 is good. very good.

i read something like that in a dutch book one time, but i could never really see the payoff.

Will both meet the dreaded drop in 2012, if not before?

It’s amazing how many of our friends on the right seem to think that the first black president ought to be hanged. I am certain this in an unfortunate coincidence, and that no racism is intended–oh, of course not.

This is truly a sublime and funky new blog.

the massive fist of free market ideas once again will smash through the false consciousness of Keynesian dreams

I have seen absolutely no evidence that Lawrence Summers is a Keynesian.

Seriously, the “stimulus” plan has almost exclusively focused on increasing the money supply, which is pure Chicago-school monetarist policy, rather than stimulating demand through government hiring/purchasing, which would be the Keynesian response.

No matter. The failed monetarist response will be called “keynesian”, and thus will poison the well for real demand stimulus for the foreseeable future.

You guys are wrong. THIS is the best article on his blog

Henry, how the f*ck does George Mason hire such a dweeb? Was he once actually competant, and deteriorated, or do they really not care?

like rock through paper in that game that children play

Rock covers paper. Or is that part of the joke?

Neil B (#15)–One fairly strong and persistent strand of attack on the Federal Reserve is that we should simply go to a system of privately-issued currency. In fact, googling “privately-issued currency” returns more than 3 million hits. Some of these are, in fact, publications in peer-refereed journals (and, to be fair, a lot of that is in economic history), but there’s also a lot of comtemporary proposals to eliminate the Fed and allow private issue of bank notes. (There’s a strand of this that also calls for 100% reserve banking, but, since that involves some form of regulation, it’s sort of a left-wing aspect of a right-wing fringe.)

And (as Anderson@#37) notes, this doesn’t even take occount of the gold bugs, like Ron Paul. Or, somewhat more interestingly (because he’s at least somewhat more knowledgeable about the history of banking and things monetary), Jim Grant (who just last week wrote a long article for the WSJ advocating a return to gold.)

the massive fist of free market ideas…

Let not your right hand know what your left hand is doing.

…once again will smash through the false consciousness of Keynesian dreams…

We won’t been able to witness this, because the fist is invisible.

“like rock through paper in that game that children play.”

Applause.

“If you had not lost your own tail, my friend,” that fox said, “you would not be giving us this advice.”

Yes, McCain is such a fox.

“it’s super-duper awesome!”

I don’t know… he takes himself much too seriously for that. And there are insufficiently many exclamation points in the text, which lack is not quite compensated for by the funniest part: the klunky third-person self-citations, e.g. This bad outcome was entirely predicted in the book co-authored by Charles K. Rowley and Nathanael Smith and published in September 2009 by The Locke Institute in association with the Institute of Economic Affairs.

But I did like the passage

Let us hope that the Founding Fathers structured the Constitution sufficiently well as to block the political manipulations of this dangerously narcissistic Manchurian candidate who actually succeeded in misleading the electorate of this once-great nation as to his true intentions.

A little flat, but almost hilarious. I think my favorite word in that sentence is “actually.” Had it said, for example,

Let us hope that the Founding Fathers, those wise titanic Atlases on whose uplifted Constitution our government and greatness have been built, structured that Firmament of their toil sufficiently well as to block, as a riot shield does block both the bullet in flight and the splatter of vomit, those political machinations, those abominable manipulations, those schematic calculations, of that dangerous Narcisuss of Manchuria who now threatens to wrest each golden apple from the mighty soil of American prosperity and thieve away that very seed of wealth that has been misplaced into the ground before his feet by an open-eared electorate misled into the whirlpool cesspit of socialism by the Hopeful song of mermaid voices’ lying lyrics, a song sufficiently smooth and couth to mislead this once-great nation down the drain of its demise!

…that would qualify for awesome.

See also how the near-collapse of the global “free market,” thanks to right-wing deregulatory policies has empowered right-wing free market parties in Europe and the US.

The Democrats are a lot of things, but a “right-wing free market party” is not among them.

Fagin and Sikes. It’s ‘Bill Sikes’, not Sykes. Or perhaps he’s thinking of Eric.

Another example of the genre: Stanley Fish has also written a glowing review (here ) of Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten autobiography It’s hard to choose a favorite line, but my favorite is in his intro – where he goes to a used book store (the Strand) and takes the lack of Palin books there as evidence of elitist liberal bias. His assertions that it doesn’t matter whether things in the book are true, and whether Palin actually wrote them, are close runners-up.

[BTW, Fish’s nailing it here is worthy of note, of course, because it is so rare these days. He isn’t who he was when he was Morris Zapp.]

Thanks SM.

Fish:

“When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.”

Yup, he’s not tweaking the pointy-heads at all there. The Strand is mostly a vendor of used books and specializes in rare books, and it’s in Manhattan. The tenor is right up there with his summary:

“It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety.”

The bit where he claims that autobiographers can’t lie about themselves (even when they don’t actually write the book) nails something for sure; I think the target is Fish. The review to me is like reading a deadly serious textual analysis of a Hardy Boys book. I found it hilarous, by accident. Your mileage may vary, but reading this as anything but an enthusiastic endorsement of Palin is tough to justify.

It hasn’t nailed what you say it’s nailed, at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the pointy heads think, but if it did, Fish would be doing a great service to the Palin cause.

He may pay about a bulldog’s worth of lip service to the fact that the book is a (lucrative) positioning exercise, but the obvious fallacy in autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves (viz., redefining the subject matter doesn’t remove the possibility of lying – in this case by misportraying oneself) causes or enables him nonetheless to endorse the book’s message uncritically:

Do I believe any of this? It doesn’t matter. OK so far so disingenuous. But then: What matters is that she does.. Oh she does, does she? And if : …and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice sounds archly knowing, it’s again followed by I find the voice undeniably authentic, and even the really insulting (yes, I know the book was written “with the help” of Lynn Vincent, but many books, including my most recent one, are put together by an editor).

As he continues, the blurry remnants of ambiguity resolve into unequivocal endorsement: there is still a hint of dispassionate reporting in it is the voice [as] of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric, but when he slips in (itself a rhetorical trope), it already sounds jarring amidst such enthusiasm for the message.

And that’s the last real sign of scepticism. By the time he gets to it is the voice of a politician, of the little girl who thought she could fly, tried it, scraped her knees, dusted herself off and “kept walking.” we’re being told it really is the voice of an actual (if metaphorically so-called) little girl, just as it is of an actual politician.

The rest has lost any sense (if the idiotic argument suprissima left any room for such sense) that the intended message and the good old actualité might diverge at all. From the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word, all the way through to as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: “We’ve been through amazing days… [enthuse enthuse, madly]…nothing is hopeless.”, not only is the message clear, but it’s God’s honest truth:

America can’t be stopped. I can’t be stopped. I’ve stumbled and fallen, but I always get up and run again. Her political opponents…should take note. And not just through an interest in expressionistic autobiography, but because ‘America’ Palin really is so sympathetic and so wonderful, and just so…unstoppable.

I don’t know anything about his previous persona, but from what I’ve come across, he sure talks a load of crap these days.

Smaug wrote: “Are we sure this isn’t a Poe?”

I find ‘Poe’ to be vastly overused. I rather rue the day it was introduced. You can’t have a decent comment thread about a net.kook without a dozen people calling ‘Poe’, no matter how clearly genuine the kook is. I find it tiresome.

Just Say No To Kneejerk Poe-calling.

Regarding Fish’s review, I got as far as “I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore…” and gagged and winced and gave up. But kudos to those of you who soldiered on and read it through.

You can’t have a decent comment thread about a net.kook without a dozen people calling ‘Poe’, no matter how clearly genuine the kook is.

Besides, I already conclusively verified the indubitable veracity with rigorous investigative research.

“I am the real Charles Rowley.”

You are excellent, Salient.

Denial Depot for the soft sciences, but at least we now have our candidates for best blogs of the year in two categories