Saturday, October 1, 2022

Intellectuals and Politics


Pittsburgh police are investigating a reported carjacking in the city’s Shadyside neighborhood after they say employees of a pizza shop were robbed at gunpoint.
Officers responded to the 200 block of South Highland Avenue shortly before 2:50 a.m. Thursday where witnesses reported three men approached two employees of a nearby pizza shop who had finished their shift. The men reportedly took cash, personal items and jewelry from the employees, said Pittsburgh Public Safety spokeswoman Amanda Mueller.
All three men were carrying guns, police said.

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China has opened dozens of “overseas police service stations” around the globe to monitor its citizens living abroad, including one location in New York City and three in Toronto.

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Socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro is freeing some of Venezuela's most violent criminals from prison and sending them to the U.S. southern border, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report.

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Some job candidates are hiring proxies to sit in job interviews for them — and even paying up to $150 an hour for one.

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M2 — one broad measure of the money supply — went up about 40% between February 2020 and February 2022. In the quantity theory approach, that would be a reason to expect additional inflation, and of course, that is exactly what happened.



                    Intellectuals and Politics

The philosopher Robert Nozick once described the academic frame of mind in a 1998 essay called “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” He wrote:

"Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. … Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution `to each according to his merit or value.’ Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus."

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