Monthly Archives: August 2017

The new new left is even stupider than the old new left

Posted on by
Reply

An article you might wish to read THE OLD NEW LEFT AND THE NEW NEW LEFT in a journal you might like to subscribe to: The Claremont Review of Books. Starts wtth the right question:

Will the ’60s ever end? Ever since the ’60s we’ve been debating the ’60s. With the recent bursts of rioting and student activism at Berkeley, Yale, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, and across the country, even today’s millennials and post-millennials (Generation Z, as they’re called, perched on the very alphabetic cliff) find themselves drafted into nostalgic comparisons with their grandparents’ generation.

My generation, that is. An unusually stupid but arrogant crew that thought itself superior because it rightly fought for equal rights in the American south but wrongly because it fought on the side of the Vietnamese communists and helped deliver the country to a tyranny that is only now being lifted. A very interesting historical summary that can only truly be understood by someone who was there but has completely changed sides.

Preventing dissent at its source.

Posted on by
Reply

You should read this article that will help explain the problem we face: Google is coming after critics in academia and journalism. It’s time to stop them. These are comments on this article which help explain the points made.

Google isn’t just wanting map and search monopolies. They’re trying to monopolize information itself. The dissemination of information. How people look things up, what results they get, why they look things up, and the actions they take after they do (e.g. buying a product). They collect massive amount of information on all of us whether we want them to or not. There’s no option for opting in or out. No checkboxes to authorize. No agreements to sign on what they can do with that information. If it was government doing this, we’d rebel against a tyrannical collection of information and psychological manipulation. Which leads to a second point: civil libertarians need to begin speaking out as forcefully against monopolists as they do against government. Sure, Rand Paul can filibuster about drones and NSA data collection, but you don’t hear a peep from him about private companies. Cato and other conservative and libertarian think tanks give corporations free reign because they’re not government entities. They’re wrong. We all need to see that freedom isn’t just about the ability to live without government coercion. It’s about the ability to live without any coercion, including from private entities. Increasingly, we’re being spied on, manipulated and have our very freedoms limited because private entities are intruding in on our lives, including our own employers. There has to be a point at which this is unacceptable, not as consumers or liberals or conservative, but as humans with inalienable rights that should not be taken by government or corporations.

Orwell wrote in 1984 that “NewSpeak” would actually make improper thinking impossible. This prevents dissent at its source. This is exactly what Google is doing. By controlling all search results, it becomes impossible to even see an idea Google disapproves of. Once Governments begin paying for this capability, it will become nigh impossible to even understand how people are being manipulated. You can have all the freedom you want, just as long as you are not free. I think that is Google’s real motto. Go nuts with cat searches, but whoa there son, what do you mean you want to research Congressman so and so’s business holdings?

To paraphrase Tim Cook, At Apple, our customers buy the product; to others (e.g. google) you are the product (e.g., the data they glean from your use of what they provide). As has been written about by others, we are at an early stage of beginning to understand what powers the internet has and how slow we are to really understand how they affect us. But this is clear enough: Google behaving this way needs to be called out into the open, and more of their activities need to be called out, too. And, consider boycotts. I have. I use no google products.

There are other, seemingly more “far-fetched” reasons for concern about these tech monopolies, too. I’ve been thinking about that since we began seeing news (not nearly enough of it, IMO) about US companies following in the footsteps of Sweden and microchipping their employees. Her dilemma: do I let my employer microchip me? So while many millennials are extremely gung-ho about getting their hands chipped by their employers as if they were pets, and are excited about the prospect of being able to wave their hand in front of a scanner to travel and buy things and access their medical information, I’m concerned about how the problem of tech monopolies will inevitably fit into all of this. Brick-and-mortar stores continue to be put out of business by Amazon, and Amazon continues moving into traditional markets by offering services like produce delivery and buying up grocery stores. Everyone has an iPhone now and eventually password entry will be phased out altogether as the fingerprint becomes mandatory, which will then be replaced by retina scanning which will supposedly debut in this year’s model. You have to wonder.. how long before the microchip becomes necessary to unlock your iPhone, use an ATM, board a plane, purchase anything, make a payment, access your email, obtain medical care, etc? How long before it’s a requirement for employment…everywhere? How long before newborns get them at the hospital? If just Google and Amazon alone implemented the technology and required it for their services, we’re talking about many millions of young people who would go along without hesitation.

I switched to Duck Duck Go after Google brazenly announced they were the sole arbiters of what is “hateful” and which ideas deserve or don’t deserve to be accessible on the internet. Yeah, no thank you.

The Mark Steyn Club – join it

Posted on by
Reply

Before I go further, if you are interested in doing your own bit to save as much of our past and history, as well as maintaining as much of our way of life as possible, you must join The Mark Steyn Club. This blog is a tiny tiny part of the global conversation trying to save us. Mark Steyn is a larger part and is read worldwide. You can help him by joining The Mark Steyn Club by going here. I would have thought it’s too late but Donald Trump did get elected so who can know? This is from his latest post, which really did astonish me. He actually went to Rotherham and spoke to the girls who had been sexually abused and worse by Muslim men, and discovered this:

The sexual exploitation of children is still going on in Rotherham. In broad daylight.

Cannot be, you say. Well, apparently it can. Sign up and do your bit.

Sebastian Gorka about Trump and the deep state

Posted on by
Reply

To be read if foreign policy in the Trump White House is your interest, which it surely ought to be: Sebastian Gorka on the Trump Agenda and China. Reassuring, which is nice for a change. It’s an interview and this is an excerpt:

Buskirk: Barack Obama was criticized relentlessly and I think rightly, for never uttering those two words, radical Islam, or Islamic terrorism, or any permutation of that phrase, and now we have seen that either it was never in the Afghanistan speech, or it was struck at some point. That tells me that it wasn’t just Obama. There’s a deep reticence to think about the challenges we face from radical Islam at all levels within the national security apparatus.

Gorka: Let’s not just make this about Islam or jihadis. It’s a larger phenomenon. It’s political correctness run amok. I remember two years ago I was asked to run an exercise for 06s, the colonels working in the Pentagon as strategists. I asked them as a group to break up into teams and then decide for themselves, I asked them, “What is the primary national security threat to America?” and then to work out a strategy and then present it to their peers.

When they stood up three days later to present their plan, half of the teams, and these are professionals, teams of professional military individuals. Half of the teams said, under the Obama administration, “The primary national security threat to America is climate change.” That is a product of censorship, of group think, of political correctness.

It’s not just about understanding the threat from jihadist Islamic terrorism, it’s about understanding reality, understanding truth. One of the things we postmodern individuals deny is objective truth. The American voters spoke very loudly on November the 8th and they said, “Something’s wrong. I may not know the difference between Sunni and Shia, but something’s wrong in the swamp,” and that’s why we have Donald Trump as President.

This should be absolutely illegal

Posted on by
Reply

This previous post of mine was not a bit of whimsy but ought to be taken up as a serious proposition before it is too late: It must be made illegal on “social media” to deny service to people who say things that are not illegal to say. This is from Gateway Pundit and via srr: Joy Villa Given 48 Hours to Delete Her Incredible MAGA Song From YouTube. Someone needs to legislate to make this illegal. It is merely a fetish to say that a private firm can do anything it likes, when no private firm can do anything it likes. If someone puts up a platform for general use, only illegal activity can permit that platform from being withdrawn. Here is the story.

Singer Joy Villa shocked Hollywood after she burst onto the red carpet in February wearing a MAGA dress and a big beautiful smile to the Grammys. She became a star overnight with skyrocketing album sales as Trump supporters raced to purchase her music.

‘Tolerant’ and ‘loving’ liberals on the other hand, called for Joy Villa’s death–over her support for President Trump.

Villa claimed she had written consent from everyone in the video, however; YouTube claimed “we cannot accept or review agreements granting consent before the video was uploaded.”

YouTube is cracking down on conservatives, Christians and Trump supporters by demonetizing videos, deleting videos and suspending accounts altogether.

As TGP previously reported, pro-Trump personalities Diamond and Silk accused Google-owned YouTube of demonetizing 95 percent of their videos. The pair believes YouTube’s decision was driven by their support for President Trump.

YouTube isn’t the only platform targeting conservatives. Twitter and Facebook routinely censor and suspend pro-Trump accounts without any real explanation. Many conservatives receive vague emails claiming ‘terms of service’ was violated for benign posts while liberals and terrorists run wild on the platforms posting gruesome beheading videos, using profanity and calling for the assassination of president Trump without consequences.

The definition of “Antifa” is psychotic nutter

Posted on by
Reply

This is a story that I am reprinting as it was published but with a bit of editorial adjustment so that what actually took place is clarified: Masked anarchists nutters violently rout right-wing peaceful and law abiding demonstrators in Berkeley

An army of anarchists violent criminal psychopaths in black clothing and masks routed a small group of right-wing extremely brave demonstrators who had gathered in a Berkeley park Sunday to rail against the city’s famed progressive politics, driving them out — sometimes violently — while overwhelming a huge contingent of police officers.

Hundreds of officers tried to maintain calm in and around Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park before the 1 p.m. “No to Marxism in Berkeley” rally, putting up barricades, searching bags and confiscating sticks, masks, pepper spray and even water bottles. The goal was to head off the type of clashes that sprang from similar rallies in the city earlier this year.

But once again, counterdemonstrators a bunch of genuine fascists pretending they are actually against fascism frustrated efforts by police, who numbered about 400. As the crowd swelled to several times that size, officers stepped aside stopped doing their jobs and allowed hundreds of people violent thugs angered by the presence of the right-wing peaceful rally to climb over the barriers into the park, said Officer Jennifer Coats, a spokeswoman for Berkeley police.

The masked counterprotesters violent criminal gangs of hoodlums, often referred to as antifa or antifascists, significantly outnumbered the people who had come for the rally, many of whom wore red clothing indicating support for President Trump. The anarchists criminally insane thugs chased away the right-wingers law-abiding members of the public, and in one case four or five [cowardly actually fascist nutcases] pummeled a man with fists and sticks before a radio host for Reveal, Al Letson, [that is, not the police!] jumped in to shield the victim. Anarchists Violent psychopaths also attacked reporters who documented their actions.

By the time the confrontations violent criminal attacks wound down in midafternoon, police had arrested 13 people, including one for assault with a deadly weapon, Coats said. Most were accused of bringing banned items into the park. Six people reported non-life-threatening injuries, Coats said, including two taken to hospitals.

Every society has its psychotics who are usually kept chained up and sedated but sometimes it is seen as useful by political groups to allow them to run free. Using the right words to describe what is happening is essential if the underlying dynamic is to be more clearly understood.

No idea who their enemies are

Posted on by
Reply

These are comments found on a thread at Catallaxy following this post titled, Strange days indeed which is itself linked to an article titled, My great uncle was alienated in postwar France. Now Americans know how he felt. The writer is Hadley Freeman implying there is some great irony in Jews having fled European fascism in the 1930s only to find their descendants – her, for example – caught up today in the rebirth of fascism in America. A complete fool, consorting with her deepest enemies and giving them cover, her shameful ignorance identified in the Catallaxy comments thread.

Surprisingly, many Jews have a poor grasp of history and an even poorer grasp of reality. They consistently line up behind those who threaten Israels existence and who would be dispose of them in a heartbeat. Antifa should be all to familiar to them and completely alarming.

The problem with a lot of leftist Jews (and I have some in my family) is that they are leftists first and Jews second – well, quite often Jews in name only. They embrace every liberal cause that comes along, they work against the interests of Israel and their people, they work in favour of violent and antisemitic Palestinian causes, they deny the reality of Islamic violence and Jew hatred and they hate people like Trump simply because he is not one of them (that is, they don’t hate him because he is not a Jew – rather they hate him because he is not a liberal). In fact to them, anyone not to the left of Marx is a Nazi so I would not necessarily place too much faith in their judgment of who is and who is not a Nazi (leftists in general are seldom interested in evidence or facts where these conflict with their narrative). Of course some of the people at Charlottesville were neo-Nazis who do in fact hate Jews, but many were just conservatives. And Trump was right – much of the rise of the extreme right wing is a backlash brought about by the violence and intolerance of the extreme Left which is being supported and protected by many who should know better – including many so called Jews (who incidentally by their own actions are working against the Jewish people – Israel in particular). In this respect, Trump is more of a Jew than many of the lefty, so called “Jews”are). Denis Prager (himself a practicing conservative Jew) hits the nail on the head when he points out the danger this creates not just for Jews but for western civilization as a whole. And in point of fact I see as much if not more anti Jewish behaviour on the Left than the anti Jewish behaviour on the right which is being perpetrated by a vanishingly small number of neo Nazis. The fact that this Leftist anti Jewish behaviour is often disguised as criticism of Israel does not change the fact that it is actually Jew hatred. Though they like to think of it as some kind of superior morality. I also find it passing strange to see this writer doing what the Left so often does – projecting onto the other side their own bad behaviour such as accusing Trump of being anti Israel or of being appeasers (apparently appeasing extremist Islam, which is a far greater threat than a tiny number of neo Nazis is OK however). Sickening.

Objectively, having an ancestor who survived the Holocaust is irrelevant, it doesn’t give her opinions any special authority; that’s the genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue — Wiki). Conversely descendants of nazis, or descendants of our pioneers for that matter, carry no special guilt. She, they all, use faulty reasoning as in: Trump is supported by neo-nazis (allegedly) therefore he must support neo-nazis or guilt by association in this case ‘reductio ad Hitlerum’.

What part of Islamo-Fascist does she not understand? What part of “some good people” does she not understand? What part of “Antifa” brutal street fascism does she not understand? This blinkered woman does not understand very much.

Liberal???… She’s not a liberal, she’s a Socialist and Fascistic one at that….. But like most fascists she excuses her violence of thought and deed by blaming the victims of her political passions. She exaggerates and lies….. and she does it deliberately for political effect.

Trump supports Israel and went to the wailing wall in a very respectful manner. Obama undermined Israel and sympathises with its enemies. He would never have gone there in the same fashion Trump did. These leftist commentators like her are always off the mark, but this statement is deranged.

The typical modern guardianista liberal with an empty head and an empty life. If Trump is Hitler, then she can pretend to be Ann Frank – it gives her life a tiny bit of meaning.

Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen… just a few of the places where J__s are no longer being born. Don’t think it has anything to do with Nazis though.

It is the left that is anti-semitic and pro-muslin. Trump’s own family is part Jewish. The Gramsci-ites know, a la Goebbels, that the propaganda lie, once out there gets disseminated by a fellow-traveller medja, and absorbed by those who fail to reason why and by youth made compliant via leftist k-12 transformational “education”.

Desecrates her uncle’s grave with cheap anti Trump addendum to a story about a man of greatness. But that is so typical of the “cultural left”.

I wish I had any idea of what she means. Can someone explain it. I’ll give it a shot, friend of Israel = nazi, Muslims who want to wipe Israel and every Jew off the face of the Earth = not nazi. And just like in 1930s the beautiful people side with the nazis. It’s instinctive to them as they find ugly art beautiful, ugly literature worthy and ugly movies as entertainment.

You better put some ice on that

Posted on by
Reply

Went to the ballet last night and at half time went out for a coffee to make sure I could keep awake for the second half. And there I chanced upon the daughter of an old old friend who I had known since she was an infant, an extremely bright young woman who had even been dux of her school. And we chatted as we always do as I searched around for the milk, and in the midst of it all she asked me how I thought Donald Trump was going as president. And since we had quite frequently met on the train during the election last year and had chatted amicably about the election, I said what I thought, which was that I found he was going even better than I had expected he would, especially given the opposition he was facing. So I will now relate how the last conversation we will ever have from that moment continued.

Well, she said, he gives me the creeps. This may be a mis-remembrance since this is what Hillary has been quoted as saying in recent days as excerpts from her new book are being released. But if those weren’t her exact words, they were certainly her sentiments. Why, I said? Because he is not respectful of women.

So I said, but we elect presidents to deal with policy. Don’t you care about North Korea, Islamic terrorism, open borders, our economic future and the preservation of Western Civilisation? Don’t you think these are also important and should be put into the balance as well. No, she didn’t think that at all. Walking home at night safely without worrying about molestation is what’s important.

But, I said, if that was the major issue, what about Bill Clinton, and his enabling wife Hillary? With Monica it was consensual. But she was an intern and he was her boss, didn’t that matter [and I forgot to mention Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey if consensual was so important]? No, not in the least. You know, I said, as we stood in the lobby of the Arts Centre at half time at the ballet, you are living in a bubble surrounded by a normality that might come crashing down if we do not get our political environment properly set. You – she said to me – think like that because you are a male. You cannot understand things from the perspective of a woman.

Well, I said, lots of women voted for Trump. Yes, but they were white women. That is not a worthy argument I replied since it basically forecloses on all possibility that we can discuss anything. Once you say that, there is no possibility of coming to any kind of mutual understanding since nothing I can ever possibly say has any possible ability to get past that defence. (And funny enough, a black cab driver in Washington had made the same point when we had had a similar conversation in July, that I could not understand what he was saying because I was not black myself.)

And then we went back to our seats, where I was able to stay awake for the second half without the least bit of trouble. But what annoys me almost as much as anything is her breach of friendship. She knew my attitude to Trump pre-election but assumed, like every other political fool, that I must have seen the light once he became president. So far past her widest intellectual compass was the possibility that having backed him for the eighteen months that led up to his election that I might still find myself very content to see what he has done since he is doing what he said he would, or at least trying. Dragging policy into the conversation was merely trying to sidetrack the only thing that mattered so far as she was concerned, his wrongthought on how to treat women.

But as it happens, every Democrat president, aside from Jimmy Carter, since I became conscious of politics at all – Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton – has been a serial adulterer. Clinton was even worse, an accused rapist, and we have it on good authority that Hillary ‘put up with’ Bill Clinton’s sexual ‘grabbing, groping women’. Trump did not lie about it or deny this incident, but said what I say, that it was highly unacceptable, but that there are bigger issues that matter much more. If you can ignore the Clintons’ far far worse behaviour, and make this one story about Trump your single reason for not supporting Trump as president, then so be it. But if you also think you have any political judgement whatsoever, then you are an even bigger fool than I might ever have thought. Rotherham and Cologne have become one-word reminders of how bad things have become even if we restrict ourselves to sexual assault. If this one story about Trump is all she can think of as the reason not to vote for him, she really is stupid in spite of her undoubtedly high IQ.

AND FOR THE RECORD: And I do think of policy as what matters. Aside from not being Hillary or a Democrat, there is this as well on Trump’s side of the ledger. From Cohenite who has taken the list from somewhere else:

WHAT HAS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP DONE SINCE HE HAS BEEN IN OFFICE ……

1. Supreme Court Judge Gorsuch
2. 59 missiles dropped in Syria
3. He took us out of TPP
4. Illegal immigration is now down 70%( the lowest in 17 years)
5. Consumer confidence highest since 2000 at index 125.6
6. Mortgage applications for new homes rise to a seven year high
7. Arranged from 7% to 24% Tariff on lumber from Canada
8. Bids for border wall are well underway
9. Pulled out of the lopsided Paris accord
10. Keystone pipeline approved
11. NATO allies boost spending by 4.3%
12. Allowing VA to terminate bad employees
13. Allowing private healthcare choices for veterans
14. More than 600,000. Jobs created
15. Median household income at a 7 year high
16. The Stock Market is at the highest ever in its history
17. China agreed to American import of beef
18. $89 Billion saved in regulation rollbacks
19. Rollback of A Regulation to boost coal mining
20. MOAB for ISIS
21. Travel ban reinstated
22. Executive order for religious freedom
23. Jump started NASA
24. $600 million cut from UN peacekeeping budget
25. Targeting of MS13 gangs
26. Deporting violent illegal immigrants
27. Signed 41 bills to date
28. Created a commission on child trafficking
29. Created a commission on voter fraud
30. Created a commission for opioids addiction
31. Giving power to states to drug test unemployment recipients
32. Unemployment lowest since May 2007
33. Historic Black College University initiative
34. Women In Entrepreneurship Act
35. Created an office for illegal immigrant crime victims
36. Reversed Dodd-Frank
37. Repealed DOT ruling which would have taken power away from local governments for infrastructure planning
38. Order to stop crime against law enforcement
39. End of DAPA program
40. Stopped companies from moving out of America
41. Promoted businesses to create American Jobs
42. Encouraged country to once again – ‘Buy American and hire American’
43. Cutting regulations – 2 for every one created
45. Review of all trade agreements to make sure they areAmerica first
46. Apprentice program
47. Highest manufacturing surge in 3 years
48. $78 Billion promised reinvestment from major businesses like Exxon, Bayer, Apple, SoftBank, Toyota
49. Denied FBI a new building
50. $700 million saved with F-35 renegotiation
51. Saves $22 million by reducing white house payroll
52. Dept of Treasury reports a $182 billion surplus for April 2017 (2nd largest in history)
53. Negotiated the release of 6 US humanitarian workers held captive in Egypt
54. Gas prices lowest in more than 12 years
55. Signed An Executive Order To Promote Energy Independence and Economic Growth
56. Has already accomplished more to stop government interference into people’s lives than any President in the history of America
57. President Trump has worked with Congress to pass more legislation in his first 100 days than any President since Truman
58. Has given head executive of each branches 6 month time frame, dated March 15, 2017, to trim the fat, restructure and improve efficiency of their branch. (Observe the push-back the leaks the lies as entrenched POWER refuses to go silently into that good night!)
59. Last, refused his Presidential pay check. Donated it to Veterans issues

I hope each and every one of you copy and paste this every where, every time you hear some dimwit say Trump hadn’t done a thing! Bob Sr.

Ray Schneider, PhD
Associate Professor Emeritus
Bridgewater College

********

It took 32 years for the 3 prior administrations to totally destroy this nation and her people, and Trump’s first 6 months to begin a major unwind of all the prior traitorous issues.

“The left knows no bounds for its hatred of others”

Posted on by
Reply

A comment at Instapundit in response to this article: The obscene effort to shame ‘Trump’s Jews’.

The left knows no bounds for its hatred of others. None.

What we are seeing is the historical and slow-motion collapse of an American political party – the Democrat Party.

In the past decade they have lost 1,000 elective seats in federal and state governments. They have lost much of the working middle class, and the labor union members. They have called a vast swath of voters “deplorable and irredeemable”. They have happily told formerly reliable Democrat voters that thy are going to end their jobs and raise prices.

They have lied about health insurance, and those lies have cost millions of voters a LOT of money, and the Democrats are utterly dismissive about helping fix the problem they created. They support anarchists who riot in the streets. The support and enforce social justice warriors. They demand that grown perverts use the same bathrooms as voters’ children. They protect criminals and despise the police. The cities they govern have become horrible and expensive places to live. The schools they run are failing.

The newly-elected party leaders hate American history, love Islam, hate democracy.

And now they are attacking their own, and for no good reason, but simply to further the hatred of a properly elected President.

They have no economic policy, no foreign policy, no great dream for America. All they have is hatred, hatred, and more hatred.

They pretend to be nice people but there is no evidence other than what they say about themselves.

Economic theory has been hollow for a long long time

Posted on by
Reply

The secret is getting out. Modern economic theory is a pseudo-science. So let me give you some recent discussions of what ought to be obvious to anyone living in an economy in which economists are advising governments. First this: The new astrology: By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience. From which:

The economist Paul Romer at New York University has recently begun calling attention to an issue he dubs ‘mathiness’ – first in the paper ‘Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth’ (2015) and then in a series of blog posts. Romer believes that macroeconomics, plagued by mathiness, is failing to progress as a true science should, and compares debates among economists to those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism. Mathematics, he acknowledges, can help economists to clarify their thinking and reasoning. But the ubiquity of mathematical theory in economics also has serious downsides: it creates a high barrier to entry for those who want to participate in the professional dialogue, and makes checking someone’s work excessively laborious. Worst of all, it imbues economic theory with unearned empirical authority. . . .

Romer is not the first to elaborate the mathiness critique. In 1886, an article in Science accused economics of misusing the language of the physical sciences to conceal ‘emptiness behind a breastwork of mathematical formulas’. More recently, Deirdre N McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics (1998) and Robert H Nelson’s Economics as Religion (2001) both argued that mathematics in economic theory serves, in McCloskey’s words, primarily to deliver the message ‘Look at how very scientific I am.’ . . .

Romer believes that fellow economists know the truth about their discipline, but don’t want to admit it. ‘If you get people to lower their shield, they’ll tell you it’s a big game they’re playing,’ he told me. ‘They’ll say: “Paul, you may be right, but this makes us look really bad, and it’s going to make it hard for us to recruit young people.”’

There was then this in The Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago: The Great Economics Debate. Here is the bit before the paywall.

Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes worked at a time when the study of economics was concerned with society and its values. Richard Vedder reviews ‘Hayek vs Keynes’ by Thomas Hoerber. By Richard Vedder

Today economics is a fundamentally quantitative pursuit, dominated by abstract mathematics and complex modeling, largely removed from the realities of human interaction. But it was not always thus. Economic theory . . .

You can undoubtedly guess the rest. Meanwhile, here at RMIT, Imad Moosa, one of my professorial colleagues, has just had a book published with the quite direct title: Econometrics as a Con Art. Here is a summary of the book:

Imad Moosa challenges convention with this comprehensive and compelling critique of econometrics, condemning the common practices of misapplied statistical methods in both economics and finance.

After reviewing the Keynesian, Austrian and mainstream criticisms of econometrics, it is demonstrated that econometric models can be manipulated to produce any desired result. These hazardous analyses may then be relied upon to support flawed policy recommendations, ideological beliefs and private interests. Moosa proposes that the way forward should instead be to rely on clear thinking, intuition and common sense rather than to continue with the reliance upon econometrics. The mathematization of economics has limited the accessibility of and participation in economic discussion by converting the area into a complex ‘science’ when it should not be.

Economic theory has been hollow for a long long time, but good economics exists. Unfortunately you would have to go back near a hundred years to find a time when economic theory was consistently sound. Nor is it just the maths that has ruined theory but the diagrams as well. That, however, is for another day.

In the meantime, I have just sent out a final draft of an article I have written to a number of colleagues and friends with this note attached.

I have written that it is almost impossible for an economist raised on Keynesian models and presuppositions to understand how classical economists approached economic issues. I also say, which is a bit more provocative, that they understood the processes of an economy better than we do, which of course implies that I think I understand how an economy works better than most economists today. Which, to tell the truth, I do. This is the article in which I try to explain why I think that in less than 2000 words. It is therefore not long, and I also think not very hard to understand, but then I think that about everything I write on classical theory which turns out to be immensely difficult.

I will just bring this joke out of the paper since I think it’s clear what I’m saying, but perhaps it is a bit too enigmatic. In any case, I think this is also true if you see my meaning:

Grieve mentions that I must think of myself as the only one in step. The joke I actually see myself in the midst of is about the impossibility that there could be a twenty dollar bill on the ground because if there were someone would already have picked it up. But there are others [who understand Say’s Law and classical theory], with Bylund (2017) a particularly fine example.

And if you would like to look at Bylund’s article, you will find it here: Rick Perry — and His Critics — Still Don’t Understand Say’s Law.”