"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK
- Rick Ungar with more on Thomas Jefferson's support of public health insurance mandates. This is in reference to the merchant marine insurance scheme I mentioned earlier on here (HT - Brad DeLong). I think a lot of the perceived libertarianism of the founders is due to the simple lack of resources in the late 18th century. No, for the most part there is no public health program to speak of. The thing is - there was no real private health program to speak of either. Health care simply wasn't that advanced and where it was advanced there was no effective demand for it because people didn't have resources to spend on it. To speculate that that means any sort of public involvement was rejected by the founders from that is absurd.
- Gene Callahan calls for more empirical arbitration between the Austrian School and Keynesianism. I'm not quite sure I fully agree with his and Garrison's point on the primary difference between Keynesianism and the Austrians - but I'd have to think about it.
- The Social Democracy for the 21st Century blog provides a discussion on early post-war Keynesianism.
- Frances Fox Piven is now receiving death threats. I first became familiar with Piven several years ago in college. My reaction - "eh, she's a 60s liberal that's written a lot about activism and welfare". She didn't really hold my interest till her name started popping up again in the last two years or so. Must be a total coincidence - totally unconnected to the state of rhetoric in America - that she's now being targeted with death threats, right?
- Scott Sumner suggests that many different problems cause downturns and that a collection of problems causes big downturns. I would whole-heartedly agree.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
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Ah, what a coincidence that I had just heard about Frances Fox Piven only a while ago.
ReplyDeleteYou see, I was looking at a clip from Milton Friedman's PBS show. In the discussion going on at University of Chicago, Piven said that black Americans had been disadvantaged and needed help from the government.
In a moment of anger unusual of a rather calm person, Thomas Sowell told her, "Polls have shown that black people never support affirmative action or such government policies. We never said we wanted this! You said it! You wanted it!"
YouTube comments were full of, "Sowell just laid a pimp hand on that biyotch." Piven is presumably not well liked, it would seem, even by "centrists" and moderates, who think her to be a dangerous radical.
By the way, I believe you Americans have a particular word for a woman like Piven. What is it - she is a foreigner who comes to your country to discuss what is or should be in your country. Is it...carpetbagger? I have heard that used for Canadian David Frum and for British Christopher Hitchens.
I always think it's ironic how
ReplyDelete1. Thomas Sowell gets enraged when he thinks people are trying to speak for the black community, and
2. He always tries to speak for the black community.
I mentioned in a recent post on Martin Luther King that I had revisited the report from the Conference "To Fulfill These Rights" in 1966. Contrary to Sowell's self-righteousness, many people were interested in pro-active government solutions, including affirmative action.
Carpetbagger may indeed be appropriate, although that is not exclusively applied to foreigners. There's also usually an element of opportunism and personal gain implicit in "carpetbagger". Usually it's people moving to a different place within the United States and imposing themselves for opportunistic reasons. Hillary Clinton was called a carpetbagger when she moved to New York just to run for the Senate, for example.
I put a link on your FB page related to Lovecraft:
ReplyDelete