Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.--C.S. Lewis
Mom had a girls night out at the movies.
Mike Lange on the Pirate broadcast didn't look like he would survive the night.
In the US, an annual income of only $5,300 makes you richer than 75% of the world’s population by income, $16,5000 per year makes you richer than 90% of the world’s population, $53,000 makes you richer than 99% of the world’s population and $100,000 puts you in the top richest 0.1% of the world’s population.
Asia's 20 wealthiest families are now worth more than $450 billion combined, a testament to how the world’s economic growth engine is minting fortunes at an unprecedented level. Topping the list with a $50 billion fortune is India's Ambani family.
A poll conducted with professional philosophers a few years ago asked them to name the philosopher, no longer living, with whom they most identify. Hume won, by a clear margin. In Julian Baggini’s estimation, contemporary ‘scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume’.
Amazon intentionally posts low profits because it takes the vast majority of the money it earns and invests it right back into the company so that it will profit all the more in the future. Its business model, once reviled on Wall Street, has spurred numerous other companies like Uber and WeWork to emulate Amazon and forgo profits for the sake of growth — though many of these companies haven’t really proved that they could ever be profitable.
Both "Lynch" and "Dewitt" mean "To kill by mob violence." While the word lynch is coined after a perpetrator of such killing (Captain William Lynch), the word dewitt is coined after people who were the object of such violence, after the brothers Johan and Cornelius De Witt, Dutch statesmen, who were killed by a mob on Aug 20, 1672. This was a horrific event, the end of the Dutch Republican merchant class leadership as William ascended first to Dutch leadership and eventually to the throne of England. Early experiments against monarchies did not go well. It was the opening of Dumas' Black Tulip.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, stunning the world, given their diametrically opposed ideologies. Apparently some people believed that public ideologies rather than the drive for power motivated people.
Slavery and Capitalism
The anti-capitalists are busy bees. If they weren't so malicious they would be funny. One of the new themes is this: Capitalism came from slavery and therefor capitalism is bad. There is some sort of transgenerational immoral contagion at work. Remember, the sins of the father are visited upon the sons. The Left is sometimes very biblical.
A new multipart feature series in the New York Times advances this thesis, depicting modern free market capitalism as an inherently “racist” institution and a direct lineal descendant of plantation slavery, still exhibiting the brutality of that system. This characterization draws heavily from the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) — a genre of historical writing that swept through the academy in the last decade and that aggressively promotes the thesis that free market capitalism and slavery are inextricably linked.
NHC contains historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy). Indeed, it was NHC historian Ed Baptist who produced an unambiguously false statistic purporting to show that cotton production accounted for a full half of the antebellum American economy (it actually comprised about 5 percent of GDP).
Magness has an interesting article on this deceptive frenzy where he resurrects
George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, first published in 1854. He quotes the opening lines:
"Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxim Laissez-faire and "Pas trop gouverner," are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least."
This is not a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom tract. This guy is a slaver and a proponent of controlled economy and society. Fitzhugh was a leading slavery apologist who tried to make an elaborate ideological case for slave labor and indeed all aspects of social ordering. Such a system, he announced, would resolve the posited state of perpetual conflict between labor and the owners of capital by supplanting it with the paternalistic hierarchy of slavery. Fitzhugh was also an avowed anti-capitalist. Slavery’s greatest threat came from the free market economic doctrines of Europe, which were “tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions.” To survive, he declared, the South must “throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.”
By 1861, he had added his voice to the cause of southern secession and began mapping out an elaborate slave-based industrialization policy for the Confederacy’s wartime economy.
Fitzhugh had effectively worked out the Marxian theory of “surplus value” over a decade before the publication of Marx’s own Capital (1867), and derived it from the same sweeping indictment of the free-labor capitalism.
These similarities between Fitzhugh and socialism, and indeed the aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric of proslavery ideology, are seldom examined in the NHC literature. But never mind.
Buzz, buzz. These controlling statists never sleep.
(a lot from Magness)
Mom had a girls night out at the movies.
Mike Lange on the Pirate broadcast didn't look like he would survive the night.
In the US, an annual income of only $5,300 makes you richer than 75% of the world’s population by income, $16,5000 per year makes you richer than 90% of the world’s population, $53,000 makes you richer than 99% of the world’s population and $100,000 puts you in the top richest 0.1% of the world’s population.
Asia's 20 wealthiest families are now worth more than $450 billion combined, a testament to how the world’s economic growth engine is minting fortunes at an unprecedented level. Topping the list with a $50 billion fortune is India's Ambani family.
A poll conducted with professional philosophers a few years ago asked them to name the philosopher, no longer living, with whom they most identify. Hume won, by a clear margin. In Julian Baggini’s estimation, contemporary ‘scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume’.
Amazon intentionally posts low profits because it takes the vast majority of the money it earns and invests it right back into the company so that it will profit all the more in the future. Its business model, once reviled on Wall Street, has spurred numerous other companies like Uber and WeWork to emulate Amazon and forgo profits for the sake of growth — though many of these companies haven’t really proved that they could ever be profitable.
Both "Lynch" and "Dewitt" mean "To kill by mob violence." While the word lynch is coined after a perpetrator of such killing (Captain William Lynch), the word dewitt is coined after people who were the object of such violence, after the brothers Johan and Cornelius De Witt, Dutch statesmen, who were killed by a mob on Aug 20, 1672. This was a horrific event, the end of the Dutch Republican merchant class leadership as William ascended first to Dutch leadership and eventually to the throne of England. Early experiments against monarchies did not go well. It was the opening of Dumas' Black Tulip.
On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, stunning the world, given their diametrically opposed ideologies. Apparently some people believed that public ideologies rather than the drive for power motivated people.
Slavery and Capitalism
The anti-capitalists are busy bees. If they weren't so malicious they would be funny. One of the new themes is this: Capitalism came from slavery and therefor capitalism is bad. There is some sort of transgenerational immoral contagion at work. Remember, the sins of the father are visited upon the sons. The Left is sometimes very biblical.
A new multipart feature series in the New York Times advances this thesis, depicting modern free market capitalism as an inherently “racist” institution and a direct lineal descendant of plantation slavery, still exhibiting the brutality of that system. This characterization draws heavily from the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) — a genre of historical writing that swept through the academy in the last decade and that aggressively promotes the thesis that free market capitalism and slavery are inextricably linked.
NHC contains historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy). Indeed, it was NHC historian Ed Baptist who produced an unambiguously false statistic purporting to show that cotton production accounted for a full half of the antebellum American economy (it actually comprised about 5 percent of GDP).
Magness has an interesting article on this deceptive frenzy where he resurrects
George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, first published in 1854. He quotes the opening lines:
"Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxim Laissez-faire and "Pas trop gouverner," are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least."
This is not a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom tract. This guy is a slaver and a proponent of controlled economy and society. Fitzhugh was a leading slavery apologist who tried to make an elaborate ideological case for slave labor and indeed all aspects of social ordering. Such a system, he announced, would resolve the posited state of perpetual conflict between labor and the owners of capital by supplanting it with the paternalistic hierarchy of slavery. Fitzhugh was also an avowed anti-capitalist. Slavery’s greatest threat came from the free market economic doctrines of Europe, which were “tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions.” To survive, he declared, the South must “throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.”
By 1861, he had added his voice to the cause of southern secession and began mapping out an elaborate slave-based industrialization policy for the Confederacy’s wartime economy.
Fitzhugh had effectively worked out the Marxian theory of “surplus value” over a decade before the publication of Marx’s own Capital (1867), and derived it from the same sweeping indictment of the free-labor capitalism.
These similarities between Fitzhugh and socialism, and indeed the aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric of proslavery ideology, are seldom examined in the NHC literature. But never mind.
Buzz, buzz. These controlling statists never sleep.
(a lot from Magness)
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