Monday, October 26, 2015

Oh Boy: Bernie Sanders

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is planning a major speech on his political philosophy of democratic socialism.

3 comments:

  1. This should be an excellent opportunity for all of us to watch how exactly he shoves his foot into his mouth and how far it can go.

    I have no doubt that his speech will be filled with contradictions, & something tells me he'll never address who he thinks should own the means of production.

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    1. And of course nobody in the media will call him on it or question. They will probably call it 'brilliant' or something stupid like that.

      But in reality, he has no 'philosophy.' Just taking more and giving it to others is not much of a philosophy. There will be no real discussion and justification of his worldview with regard to political theory.

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  2. I was unaware that Walter Block hung around with Alvin Rabushka. I became a libertarian (after being a leftist Democrat) in 1973 because I was assigned in class “Power and Market” by Rothbard and “Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability” by Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth A. Shepsle.

    http://tinyurl.com/ot2hyam

    The original version from 1972 (all you need) is available online as a PDF:

    http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.363.6093&rep=rep1&type=pdf

    The Rabushka book contains everything one needs in order to eviscerate democratic socialism in multi-ethnic societies. EVERY SINGLE TIME, elections break down into ethnic and religious blocks. (Austrians and libertarians understand that whoever wins the election owns the entirety of a democratic socialist society). The only counter-example is Switzerland which does not really count because it has little centralized control over the ethnic regions and fewer “public goods”. See page 208.

    This also explains why small Scandinavian countries with a single ethnic group can survive with a large amount of “public goods” (the term the book uses) when multi-ethnic countries cannot.

    On that same note, my neighbor (a customs border cop here on the border) was a U.S. Marine M.P. during Viet Nam in NYC. He insists that you could never, but never allow Swedish/American and Norwegian/American troops to be together in the same bar because they would go to brawling. At one time, Sweden conquered and “owned” Norway. Those people all look alike to me and I’m allegedly part Norwegian.

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