Robert Viennaeu's Thoughts on Economics

I've been a big fan of Robert's since stumbling upon him a couple of years ago.  He has taken up economics as a hobby and with gusto.  He has reached many of the same conclusions about economics as I have, but he still believes in it as a science that has something meaningful to say.

Today's post is a good one, and it has its own link to a piece by Gavin Kennedy, somebody who has studied Adam Smith extensively and reached a very different conclusion about what Smith actually meant by his Invisible Hand.  This quote from a paper by Getty Lustila comes from Kennedy's latest post:

For Smith, all human beings are naturally ‘in-tune’ with one another through the faculty of sympathy; which, acting as a mirror for others, allows us to take part in their suffering and joy. The ability to sympathize with our fellows is not a virtue (in the traditional sense). Instead, the faculty of sympathy is a constitutive part of human agency: devoid of sympathy, we are not human.

And that's neoliberalism's aim: dehumanization.

Karl Denninger Sees the Real Enemy, Inadvertently Previews A Paradigm Shift In The Political Spectrum

In a post entitled "Nail, Meet Hammer," Karl posts up this interesting video:



I do not agree with everything that Christopher Greene says in this video, and I doubt that Karl does, either.  But  there is a great deal that I do agree with, and I'm sure that Karl wouldn't post it if he didn't agree with a lot of it, as well.  While I doubt that Karl and I would agree about what where we agree with Mr. Greene's video, I am sure that we would agree more than we disagree.

The point here is that a new political center is being created before our eyes.  Denninger proclaims himself as an original member of the Tea Party.  But he has pretty much washed his hands of it and now supports the Occupy movement.  He even makes a pretty good observation about it here.

NOTE: Where Karl and I probably disagree with Greene is the conspiracy theory that drives Greene's narrative.  Karl probably doesn't believe in it, as he prefers to think of people as stupid instead of evil.  I don't agree with the details of the conspiracy implied by Greene's narrative, but the documented history of neoliberalism demonstrates a concerted, multi-generational effort to shape and control public perception in order to rip off the public.  If you're willing to have a looser conception of a conspiracy theory, one that does not require secretive back room meetings between villains, then it is hard to not view neoliberalism as one giant conspiracy.