Just call me Paul the Professor
Colbert, via Crooks and Liars:
I for one appreciate the McCain campaign treating us like children. McCain will bring us back to a simpler time. A time when you could identify your neighbors’ jobs by the hats they wore. Like Sam the Fireman, Bill the Cowboy and Jose the stereotype. These are the people in your neighborhood. The people that you meet when you’re walking down the street. They’re the people that you meet each day. And what the people in your neighborhood, the Joe the Plumber, the Wendy the Waitress need are tax cuts for the wealthy and off shore drilling. They don’t need universal health care or last names.
Just call me Paul the Professor – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog.
This seems to be the Republican meme. “Just let the “decider” make the all the tough decisions”. All of us self-thinking geeks who place too much credence in intelligence and education, be it formal or the school of hard knocks, aren’t “real Americans”. In the last couple of weeks we are being called “un-American”, Socialist, even Communists by the Republican Party…Way to go folks.
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Gary, you may be missing the point here. Socialism is what it is, rather than a dirty name. It also has been shown to not be a viable socio-economic system for improving our lives.
The Nobel economist Friedrick Hayek wrote in his book, “The Road to Serfdom”, that “socialism required central economic planning and that such planning in turn had a risk of leading towards totalitarianism, because the central authority would have to be endowed with powers that would have an impact on social life as well, and because the scope of knowledge required for central planning is inherently decentralized.
Hayek went on that “in centrally-planned economies, an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. The efficient exchange and use of resources can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets”.
Now Hayek was not an advocate of relying completely on pure laissez-faire capitalism, but he was well aware that policies swinging widely toward socialism would not improve our lives. I can’t think of a better reason to NOT vote for the Democratic candidate than this.
Yes Jim, you just reinforced my point while trying to disagree…The Republicans this year are using the name as a dirty word, you know it, I know it, hell, the whole world knows it.
And for you to then comment that the swing toward socialism is the best reason you can think of not to vote Democratic. Who is it that is “socializing” the financial sector? Am I not hearing talk of bailing out the auto industry? We have had socialization of a number of well conected industries for years, if you are powerful enough to hire the right lobbyists you get your welfare checks in the mail each month and nobody complains…Gotta love this capitalist country America has become…
The only real problem with what you say is we already have a centrally planned economy. We just made the mistake of letting people run it who do not believe in a competent government. And since belief is prerequisite to outcome we all pay for their disbelief…It’s time to put those in charge who actually think government CAN work again, Then we can all stop worrying about the next disaster that might strike and get back to making this country great again.
Gary, I’m saying that we don’t need to swing the pendelum further left than it already is, especially when have evidence that it doesn’t work. If it has dirty connotations, then it’s because people don’t want to live their lives under further government control. And they every right throw off attempts to do otherwise by whatever means necessary. It’s just politics as usual.
Jim, you want to keep everything to the right, I look forward to the day that the pendulum swings back to the left. The dirty connotation is all in the eyes of the speaker, not the one being spoken to. After trying it your way, I look forward to trying it Obama’s for a while…