Right now, populist conservatives are enjoying a well-earned resurgence. The massive state overreach by totalitarian leftists has given them an opportunity to make some changes.
Full show notes here.
Tag: politics
My latest article published by the Mises Institute is another look at MMT, only this time we’re taking a completely different route.
My article:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/mmts-barely-hidden-totalitarian-bias
Have you ever heard of the infamous German Foreword to Keynes’s General Theory? In it, he basically admits his system is best-suited to one with centralized, totalitarian control of the economy. Without such control, the government can only partially implement Keynes’s recommendations, and utopia remains just out of reach–so long as liberty is permitted.
My very rough notes here.
This video available at Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
I was honestly a little worried from some of the talk I had heard about the most recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, with Jordan Peterson.
I sat down and watched the whole thing, and ended up being pleasantly surprised.
The Conquest of The Conquest of Bread, Ch. 13
Chapter 13 is titled “The Collectivist Wages System” and it is a tissue of faulty comparisons, bad conclusions stapled to obsolete theories, and nonsensical figures attached to shifting goalposts.
The Conquest of
The Conquest of Bread:
Chapter 12
Chapter 12 is supposed to be Kropotkin’s answers to objections, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) he only goes after a few cursory criticisms and even his answers to those are seriously flawed.
Full show notes here.
Practically every argument Kropotkin makes is even better satisfied by private property, free markets, and voluntary exchange.
There are even some terrifying positions he takes that basically confirm that his “voluntary associations” are simply the coercive state with a prettier name. They have the potential to be even more tyrannical than the most callous private employer.
This video available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Intro quote is from “Kropotkin’s Ethics and the Public Good,” by Williamson M. Evers:
https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/kropotkins-ethics-and-publc-good
Article reference:
“Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty,” an interview with Benjamin Powell
https://mises.org/mises-daily/sweatshops-way-out-poverty
Intro music edited from a piece by Music for Video, courtesy Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/users/music_for_video-22579021/
The Conquest of The Conquest of Bread: Chapters 10 and 11
More bizarre economic ignorance from Kropotkin in these two chapters, which demonstrate his inability to comprehend the concept of trade-offs–specifically in labor comfort and safety and in the quality and/or durability of capital goods.
Full show notes here.
Categories
Unsafe for Every Need
The Conquest of
The Conquest of Bread,
Chapters 5-9
We’re speedrunning these chapters of Kropotkin’s book because they’re basically repetitions of the same mistakes and fallacies again and again, only applied to different types of goods.
Full show notes here.
Take Everything, Let “Society” Sort It Out!
Chapter 4 is titled “Expropriation,” and (perhaps unsurprisingly) it is another chapter of assertions not backed up by significant arguments.
Full show notes available here.
Chapter 3 of the book is titled “Anarcho-Communism,” so I was expecting to finally get Kropotkin’s great argument for how to establish communes without a state apparatus forming.
What I got was a series of weird historical cherry-picking and declarations pretending to be arguments.
Detailed notes available here.
Kropotkin’s second chapter is a doozy. He makes a variety of really bad extrapolations, a bunch of incredibly ignorant anti-economic points, and then goes on to demand total expropriation of all goods, both capital and consumption, “private” and personal.
He bases this mostly on floppy definitions of “need” and “live,” as well as the usual incorrigible envy that motivates most actual socialists and communists.
Even worse, the next chapter is supposedly his argument for “anarchic” communism, but considering how he simply papered over the confiscation of all goods with some utopian nonsense, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a good argument, because it doesn’t look like one is coming.
Full show notes here.