It still works Mike. Chicago was the home of Leo Strauss the Godfather of modern American conservatism. In reality it is classical German economic culture grafted onto what conservatives believed was the theories of the Founding Fathers. Poor translations and second language English speakers. In reality, there was no German culture in the original American secular covenant that had a mix of Native, mostly Iroquois, and English ideas that had been cooking since Locke and others first discovered the Columbian exchange of their "new world." All of this primarily through Ben Franklin but with Thomas Jefferson's help. The same happened in English with William Blake in literature and Rousseau (to some degree) in Switzerland. All of that "Pride of the Peacock is the glory of God" stuff.
You do know don't you that Europe's prosperity and blossoming Arts and Enlightenment were funded by rape and pillage here? Although very little serious work has been done on the effect of the Columbian Exchange of political ideas with the Brits except for the Iroquois scholars at Cornell here. It still gets silly when market worshipping conservatives write about a gifting economy and native peoples which they are ignorant of. It's because their grandfathers weren't there and weren't even here until just before the middle of the 20th century. It constitutes a pathological form of psychological projection. They lived in Europe until just before WWII. So we get Leo Strauss and his world of, as he himself says: "Jerusalem and Athens" as the basis for his New World. Very, very historically ignorant and racist at its root. The opposite of the German culture in Einstein, Bohr, Gell-Mann etc. and the scientists. Many came at the same time but both were antagonists to one another. You can imagine what Einstein would think of Strauss's grandchildren today. He made himself clear about that before he died. He knew about the coming information age and how the distributions problems of governments would be solved by computers and the quick management of knowledge. But the rest just sat and watched until the Straussians won and now claim Burke and Ayn Rand as their "God"fathers, which is recent. Thirty years ago they were crediting Leo Strauss and Allen Bloom. It all seems like a family food fight that spreads out into the neighborhood. Nudvwiv Ani-noquisi aka REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 10:21 AM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: So which one is coming outof thetelephone booth... My observation is that SH is less an ideological economist than an ideological rightist i.e. less a follower of Friedman than a follower of that other dark intellectual lord Leo Strauss (that's why using the term is an bit of irony... SH is less concerned with maintaining the purity of the market -- it seems that he sees that as something expedient to use as part of his broad political strategy rather than v.v. (but I could be wrong... A lot of people in Canada at the moment are waiting with stopped breath to see how SH will in fact operate now that he has more or less total political control. The mood in Canada at the moment among the (upper) chattering classes (the Editorial Board of the Globe and Mail for example) is "please be gentle with us... We had to give you absolute power to keep the red hordes away from the treasury but Genghis, perhaps your bloodthirstiness was just a ruse to frighten us into submission and now that we have given you the keys to the kingdom perhaps your true colours as an elightened and democratic despot will come shining through... We wait... M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 12:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: So which one is coming outof thetelephone booth... > No, Harper is a "trained economist" (a private joke for Canadians > :(... Despite being in Canada, I had to go look that up. I didn't know SH claimed to be a "trained economist". (I guess I don't watch enough television.) For other troglodytes such as I, a bit of a backgrounder here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/it-could-be-worse-stephen-harpe r-could-really-be-an-economist/article1778607/ >From the article: Here's the problem: Besides the various branches [of economics], there are different schools within the study of economics, some less extreme in their embrace of the magic of the market than others. As it happens, Stephen Harper emerged from the Calgary School, inspired by the Chicago School and its saint, Milton Friedman. In this sect, ideology trumps evidence every time and delusional fantasies about capitalism are treated as axioms. One of Prof. Friedman's laws, for example, goes as follows: "Few trends so thoroughly undermine free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of any responsibly other than to make as much money for their stakeholders a possible." This natural law has been enthusiastically embraced by the world's corporations, including, for example, the many Canadian mining companies operating in poor countries. I might add that, increasingly, corporations (collectively), the corporate mind set and individuals bound closely to corporate doctrine are becoming our role models. Control of the media landscape by national security strategists [1] is only part of it. To the extent that we learn to emulate such models, we emulate psychopaths. The best result we can expect from that is cognitive dissonance. Less appealing than cognitive dissonance is gradual change that I might call gradual religious conversion to acceptance of "delusional fantasies." [1] http://cryptome.org/0003/obl-kill-mmo.doc -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
