Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

The voodoo science of stimulus

Most social “science”, and macroeconomic modeling in particular, suffers from serious epistemological and methodological problems.  In a recent article for Reason Peter Suderman discusses the questionable models that are used to evaluate the effects of the stimulus:

According to the CBO’s estimates, depending on how the money is spent, one dollar of government spending can produce [...]

Ruthless authoritarianism

As evidenced by the 2010 Health Care Summit, the governing philosophy of the current Administration is one of paternalistic authoritarianism.  After giving the semblance  of listening to different perspectives, progressive policy makers conclude that health care is too important to leave to individual decision making and requires a top-down approach from the central government. As [...]

Scientific consensus

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

Competition vs coordination

If there is one consistent theme in the fallout of the financial meltdown it is the demand for more  policy “coordination.” In the case of the sovereign debt problems in the European Union it seems inconceivable that the  “low debt” countries that are negatively impacted by the “high debt” countries would respond by withdrawing from [...]

Ayn Rand: Russian fanatic

In some respects, Rand is almost Soviet. Her habit of remaking the past in accordance with her wishes or needs of the present is most striking… Allied to this tendency to remodel the past was Rand’s megalomaniac notion that moral philosophy had been nothing but a tissue of sentimental error until she came along….In her [...]

Peter Sloterdijk on the predatory German welfare state

As the United States makes rapid progress to become just another European-style welfare state, one of Germany’s most controversial intellectuals, Peter Sloterdijk, initiates a public debate  with an offensive on the welfare state that takes no prisoners, even by American standards:

To assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it [...]

Barack Obama: Authoritarian

The surprising defeat of the Democrats in the recent Massachusetts elections has unleashed a great number of opinion pieces about the  mistakes of the Obama administration. A common theme in these articles is that the Obama administration fails to recognize that the United States is a right-of-center nation that consistently rejects the far-left / progressive  [...]

The useless Constitution

Lysander Spooner expert and legal scholar Randy Barnett argues that Obamacare is unconstitutional. It does not seem likely that such an argument will prevail. Over the course of American history it has become clear that the Constitution presents little obstacle to a changing political climate. This makes the Constitution basically useless. When the prevailing political [...]

The ruling class

In an engaging piece about the lack of ideological diversity in American theater Harry Stein makes the following perceptive observation:
Like liberals everywhere, its creators imagine they’re speaking truth to power—when, in fact, they are the power, and guard it as jealously as any of the right-wing, American-allied dictators of yore they grew up protesting against.
One [...]

Libertarian centralism

“Centralization is ordinarily a sign of social decadence.” Russell Kirk
From a “skeptical empiricist” perspective (to use  Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s useful phrase) neither “rationalist”  nor public policy approaches to libertarianism are particularly credible.  But what is quite remarkable about current debates about “libertarian centralism” is that libertarians associated with rationalist schools of thought (Austrian economics, natural [...]

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