Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

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 [...]

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  [...]

Variants of interventionism

At Secular Right Heather Mac Donald makes the following observation:

We are not moving from pure capitalism to pure socialism, we are moving from an already highly regulated, corporate- and individual-welfare-saturated economy to an even more regulated and redistributed economy.  (And we didn’t get to our welfare-saturated state without popular support for trying to minimize risk, [...]

Parasite-In-Chief

Unfalsifiable achievements

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion [...]

Look, I am against torture!

Do people who believe that torture is wrong under all circumstances arrive at this conclusion after a painstaking analysis of all the scenarios in which torture might be the only choice to avoid individual or collective catastrophe? Or is it just another way of signaling to the rest of the world that you  are on [...]

Politicians in panic

Dick Morris on using fear and panic to expand government power:

Why does Obama preach gloom and doom? Because he is so anxious to cram through every last spending bill, tax increase on the so-called rich, new government regulation, and expansion of healthcare entitlement that he must preserve the atmosphere of crisis as a political necessity. [...]

A technocratic dictatorship

Arnold Kling writes:

Starting last September, our country has gone through six months that shook the world. We have abandoned free markets. We have abandoned democracy, in the sense of having policies that reflect the popular will. The United States has become a technocratic dictatorship.

The current administration is a government by “experts.” But as Nassim Nicholas [...]

Capitalist Counter-Revolution

Barack Obama versus Michael Bakunin

There are great expectations about the ability of academics to shape society by “smart” policies. The anarchist Michael Bakunin had not much useful to say about economics but he was a realistic observer of intellectuals and power:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for [...]