For understanding our modern monetary troubles, Nik Bhatia’s pamphlet-sized book from last year hits exactly the right intersection between money and banking, between the past and the future. Clocking in at around 150 pages of easy prose, it’s accessible but not dumbed down, revealing but not inaccurate. It has a simple framework that Bhatia explains and explores with great expertise.
Max Weber, citing Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk, bluntly stated that “every state is founded on violence.” The imaginative theories that have been at times employed to justify the state violence do not fall under the scope of this article.
A non sequitur is a rudimentary yet common logical fallacy that occurs when a supposed conclusion does not necessarily follow from the previous argumentation.
While Russian military forces are encircling several of Ukraine’s key urban centers, American hawks on both sides of the political aisle are squawking in typical fashion.
During the Cold War, people were shocked to see the Soviet Union lock up dissidents in state mental institutions because being against socialism was “proof of mental illness.” Soviet psychiatrists were condemned for violating the Hippocratic oath, with one of the most important promises of that oath being “First, do no harm.”
As you would expect from brain-dead Biden and the people controlling him, American policy has been moving in the wrong direction. Whatever you think about the situation in the Ukraine, one thing is obvious. It’s a crisis. Shouldn’t we try to stay out of danger? Instead, the US has led the way in imposing drastic economic sanctions on Russia, backing Putin into the wall. What if he gets desperate and uses atomic weapons? This could result in the end of civilized life on our planet. Is this what Americans want?
Florida Senator Rick Scott recently kicked over a beehive when he included an income tax increase for most Americans in his 11-point plan to ‘Rescue America.’ The fifth point of that plan, titled ‘Economy/Growth,’ included ‘All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.’
Mendacity is worse than dishonesty. According to one essay on mendacity, “Mendacity connotes a mixture of dishonesty, hypocrisy and audacity.” Mendacity is an important theme of the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams. “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity?
Having been lied into war in Iraq in 2003, the American public swore it had wised up. Sure, it went on to drop the ball by supporting the Libya intervention, itself prefaced by lies, and supported the government’s intervention in the civil war in Syria (or at least didn’t mind it), even though the US sided with the very Sunni extremists it had been fighting a few years before in Iraq.
Sometimes people wonder whether philosophy is of any use in understanding daily life. Aren’t philosophers “in wandering mazes lost”? Away with such nonsense, say some. Elaine Sternberg illustrates by her example that this view is wrong. In her excellent Economic Affairs article “Defining Capitalism,” she shows in convincing fashion that providing an exact definition of pure laissez-faire capitalism is of great help in responding to many common objections to the free market.
