Under the name of reason

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Stiglitiz on the crisis

Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion.

web find

every once in a while you find something online that makes you marvel at how great the web is.

Go learn something.

I'm glad i'm not the only one that is dismayed by Obama's recent silence on the crisis in gaza. In fact I find it very worrisome for those of us who want to see the Democrats go from a center right party to something a little more to the left if not center.

But I'm perplexed by Jason's comment

I'm not taking any side here because I believe would should stay out of the conflict entirely,

Seeing as how we are helping subsidize this little slaughter, we're knee deep in the conflict whether we like it or not.

Also because Israel is helping to empower Osama Bin Ladin with this atrocity, and weaken its own security, it might be wise, from our own national security standpoint, to not "stay out" of this conflict.

I read his "taking sides," statement as claiming one is either for Isreal or for Hamas. That would be terribly simplistic to one of the truly complex issues of our era.

Jason is one of the few commentators that I have come across on the right that has some substance and depth to his arguments and positions. Hopefully he'll go a little more indepth on such an important issue.

Rocker on Liberalism and Democracy...

"Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve" --Rudolf Rocker "The Ideology of Daily Life"