Hasn’t economics reached a dead end? Seriously, has there been a new idea about how we collectively share the spoils of our success since Marx? A grand, sweeping analysis of the human condition…

What do political professors in China teach? Just wondering.

No, we need a new Karl. A singular genius with a radical re-imagining of human civilization. A post-capitalist, post-marxist, post-youtube thinker. Probably she is out there. (pardon my gratuitous feminism).

Sweep out the universities. To hell with them. I’m shocked! my BA in Philosophy is now worthless! How did this come to pass? Calamity.

Of course this new thinker will have to be Chinese. Brush up on your mandarin if you want to get in on the ground floor.

Neo-confucionism anyone?

(I remain firmly committed to advancing at whatever glacial pace possible, the goal of the destruction of a coercive political system in whatever form it may take).

Who is programming the Robo-Romney? They need to get it back into the lab and figure out why it keeps uttering these alarming sound-bites.

Do certain features of the social safety net serve the capitalist class more than the working class?

Isn’t it true that social programs such as unemployment insurance, food stamps and certain types of assistance (such as tax credits like the Earned Income Credit–introduced by the Nixon administration as an alternative to raising the minimum wage) reduce the solidarity of workers and inhibit direct action? Isn’t it less likely that workers will take direct action when the government offers benefits that ameliorate the damage done by the capitalist class?

Employers pay a relatively small tax to provide unemployment insurance to workers, and contribute to the general funds that create other programs. Is unemployment insurance a program for the unemployed, or insurance against strikes?

I say the more extreme the better!

I lived in Texas in 2006 and my protest vote was for Kinky Friedman (who has now endorsed Perry). Oh well. After last night though, I’m kind of with the punditocracy. I think Romney is going to be getting some big fat checks pretty soon. And what would a Romney presidency look like? Pretty much like the last three years.

That’s fine, I can hang on a few more years.

The struggle – and it has to include play and festival, and in healthy portions, or it becomes an ascetic agonism – itself is how a person/community decolonizes while using old memories and making personal and shared ones.

The above from Mr. Crow. Enough for me to riff on…

Jack makes a valid point about the link between memory and culture. Culture is a collective scrapbook. Culture is what is recognizable when you take the individuals out of the picture. It’s the recipes, the fashions, the mores, and the prejudices. It is the acceptable behavior of “the one”, as in “One does such and such in this situation.” It is bowing, handshakes, kisses and personal space.

Culture is also a collection of laws. Not the laws of the court or legislature, but the more stringent, immediately enforceable laws of face-to-face interaction. There are immediate consequences when these laws are broken. No need for courts, judges or juries. We are all judges in the court of culture. These laws are not interpreted by jurisprudence, but rather by tradition. One definition of a conservative might be one who adheres to and enforces ones own cultural identity most exactingly. That’s why all religions are conservative. To be otherwise is to forfeit whatever authority the institution is purported to have in the first place.

Culture is not moral, it is the merest of custom. (Morality is custom, too, but of greater consequence being potentially trans-cultural).

To kill ones culture is a sort of suicide. What’s left when the culture is removed? Free will?

So long as we continue to live together, culture will exist. The propagation of culture is a form of colonization (to use Jack’s terms). Good enough. So we decolonize as we willfully replace that culture with something else.

I don’t see that happening. Culture cannot be changed by individual will. Each individual must overcome the culture on his/her own. And there’s no use trying to create a new culture on your own. You might as well try to create your own language (see Wittgenstein).

Each must be a Superman without a culture.

Damn. This summer would have been much more memorable with a catastrophic collapse of the American economy at the hands of a newly invigorated U.S. Congress. But alas, it was not to be. The short-term economic impact of such disastrous, ruinous incompetence would have interrupted the vacation plans for various members.

The bravery that the more responsible members showed by swallowing the bile in their throats and voting for this deal will surely be rewarded. What matters above all else is that the status quo be maintained. Punch & Judy theatrics are integral to the show, but make sure everything is back in order before the curtain goes down. Stake out your rhetorical positions, make your speeches, fly to your districts and proclaim loudly your distaste, nay disgust, at your own profession.

Congratulations, public servants. You have greased the machinery of the ship of state sufficiently to keep it groaning along for another year.

Arizona is a strange place to live. The desert is glorious, but the populated areas, particularly in July, prove that human beings are adept at exceeding their grasp.

So, there’s a big long border down south that apparently presents an existential threat to the comfortable lifestyle of the citizens of this newest of the continental states. Since the feds just won’t spend enough money on building the damn fence, the state of Arizona, desperate to keep those illegals from coming over and cutting off people’s heads on their way to trimming their oleander and blowing the dust off their sidewalks (not to mention picking their cheap tomatoes) want a real fence built. Since this is a popular idea among the subservient law-and-order set, they have asked for donations. They got $65,000 in the first few days. Which seems strange to me, since the people donating this money are probably the same one’s that were rubbing their hands together in glee when Gov. Brewer refused to use surplus federal money to help save a few transplant recipients last year.

How can people be so ignorant? Have the lives of these people been so adversely affected by the hardships of sharing their desert paradise with immigrants that they are willing to spend their own precious after-tax dollars to help build a 12-foot fence three-hundred miles long? Apparently so.

Maybe by the time the damn fence is built it will be useful after all–at keeping us in, rather than keeping them out.

Michele Bachmann’s apotheosis (and I do think she is nearing it now) among the religious right has me ruminating on the benefits of faith. Bachmann is the one “true believer” among the Republican hopefuls. Santorum is a good catholic boy, but that makes him only slightly more desirable to evangelicals than mormon Romney. Bachmann is the real deal. However weird her positions may be they all make perfect sense to evangelicals. (Palin, by the way, was never entirely trusted by this group).

Anyway, back to faith. It’s a wonderful thing, especially the pure, hardcore form that you find among American evangelicals.

Given the limits of human intelligence–the ineffability of consciousness being the most glaring example–what is a mere mortal to do? We have two stark choices: accept our own inadequacy and nibble around the edges of intelligibility (what most philosophers do) or have faith. A faith that can undergird our conception of ourselves, the world and our place in it. Nothing soothes the soul like the assurance that one is absolutely right about some things. And if one is right about at least some things, one is more likely to be right about a lot of things: like economic policy, for example.

Watch out for Bachmann. She’s gonna kill in Iowa.

I appreciated this articleby Mr. Stiglitz in latest issue of Vanity Fair. Pretty much sums up the obvious modus operandi of the wealthiest one percent.

So first off I start thinking about the basic question, “Is this morally wrong?” Is it immoral for so few to have so much? I’ll give them a pass on this. No, it’s not immoral. How they got the money may be immoral, but having it isn’t.

Next question. Is it good for society for so few to control so much? A lot of people seem to think so. It’s pretty hard not to feel special, gifted and important when you have that kind of power. Maybe they really are better than the rest of us. Maybe they deserve it. Naw, that’s not right. There’s no way any particular individual can be shown to be, as a human being, intrinsically worth 10,000 times more than any other person. Even so, it may be that allowing a favored minority to accumulate excessive wealth is beneficial to everyone. It’s one of those “least evil” arguments. This is the Milton Friedman view of economics. Poor people are less poor because we let the rich get richer, the argument goes. And this makes society better overall since the poor are less likely to starve to death. And if some of those poor people die from other problems like poor housing, health care, natural disasters and so on, the whole society is still better off for having extremely wealthy individuals at the helm.

Well, that’s their argument. It makes a lot of sense if you happen to be one of those people. If you’re not, well you’re better off than you would be otherwise, so stop whining about it.

But what if that argument is wrong? What if, as Stiglitz argues, this whole system is unjust? What if the combination of excessive wealth and influence, combined with an obsessive desire to hold on to that wealth and influence does real harm to the rest of the society? Do the benefits that accrue to the poor as a result of Friedman economics cancel out the damage that is done in the name of protecting the wealth of the privileged elite? Not bloody likely.

Let’s use the old pie metaphor. Having a system that supports extreme wealth makes the pie bigger. The pie may be bigger, but the overall size of the pie doesn’t matter if nearly half the pie is consumed by only 1% of the people. A smaller pie would be fine for the 99% if each individual slice was a little bigger.

So what is the remedy? Defenders of progressive reform point to the gains made in the first half of the 20th century on behalf of the majority of Americans. The progressive income tax successfully redistributed a decent chunk of the excess wealth that had been created. American-style socialism emerged. Government intervention in the form of regulations in all levels of society promised to check the excesses of our free-market system. Social safety-nets were created. Labor unions flourished. The middle class grew. It seems that the progressives were right. An activist government with benevolent intentions could safely redistribute excess wealth and make everybody’s slice of the pie grow.

But progressivism appears to have run its course. Perhaps it was doomed from the start. It has no ideological purity to support it. It is born of compromise and a desire to have our cake and eat it too. The mid-century boom and the spectacular success of the United States in the 20th century may have been a historical fluke.

I expect the progressive agenda to have maybe one more shot. If the current regime continues its agenda to completely dismantle what is left of American socialism, and if they are successful, then there will be an inevitable backlash of dramatic proportions. Under the cover of this backlash a final attempt may be made to re-implement progressive taxation that would redistribute the concentrated wealth that will inevitably become more concentrated without government intervention.

This last attempt to “fix” the system will fail as well. It may buy a generation or two, but will crumble under its own weight eventually. Only from the ashes of this future failure will another American revolution emerge. By then the wealth will have moved elsewhere anyway.