01.15.11

Walking through Borders Bookstore

Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 2:22 pm by nemo

Review of ‘The New Road to Serfdom

I was walking through a Borders store today and passed the polit/sci section. Looking at the strange and impoverished selection of rightwing texts (with not a few liberal texts sprinkled throughout) it instantly became obvious what is going on with the Tea Party stupidoes: they are easy to fool and manipulate with a few trashy texts. This glimpse of their bibliography was very helpful: they are transparent Fox News droolers with a few patron saints, like Hayek.
Hayek? In a rural Borders store! It is my fault for not realizing sooner what’s afoot with this bunch of pathetic retards.
Thus the works of Hayek were prominently in evidence, sticking out absurdly next to the trash of the Glen Beck variety.
Hayek’s snob appeal no doubt is enough for these mostly unread books I am sure.
Hayek himself, despite the appearance of smarts, was a third rate Kantian, and his ‘Constitution of Liberty’ won’t last lont taken in that light. His critique of the socialist calculation debate is a cogent challenge, which we have discussed here before: 1. the coming of new technology will sooner or later create the possibility of replacing markets, more or less, with computational systems.
2. Markets left immoral slave systems that tantalize with wealth creationk but change nothing in the end, leaving the victims impoverished. So a partial restriction on markets is the only rational procedure. Hayek’s inability to balance his views, thus as seen now serving to confuse low class idiots from the Tea Party, was an intellectual crime. Surely he must have known better.

A little categorical impishness on the subject of the “Kingdom of Ends’ should be enough to finish off the capitalism mania of Hayek and his ilk. But try telling that to the Palin riffraff. Or, for that matter, the Greenspans, and Sumners’, who certainly should know better, but no doubt were fed sugar at each stage of their educational cooptation, graduating to that brand of higher idiocy so useful for enforcing the gangster logic of Wall Street with the sweet perfume of market models and math. We see the same thing in Darwin indoctrination, very smart people abducted very young, fed sugar at each stage of their ‘Aren’t you smart’ meriotocratic brainwashing, the best material for propagandists…. Cripples even worse than the yokel Tea Partiers who are dumb enough to be confused about their own self-interest.

Permalink