Reading List 12-04-15

Our Ayn Randian dystopia: Here’s the secret five-step plan to privatize everything

Post-Ayn-Rand, in the growing era of neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan blurting “government is the problem” and Margaret Thatcher proclaiming “There is no such thing as society,” once-respected institutions like public education and public transportation were demonized as “socialist” and “Soviet-style.” The message has been repeated so often by the business-backed media that the general public began to believe it.  - Paul Buchheit

The GOP Ignores the Bigger Terror Threat—From the Right

The threat posed by ISIS is real and must be forcefully addressed. But if these Republicans truly want to keep us safe, why don’t they ever raise the issue of right-wing terrorists? After all, as The New York Times reported just a few months ago, “Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.”
The reality, of course, is that talking about scary Muslims plays great with the GOP base. - Dean Obeidallah

A reassessment of socialism: many questions

 I was just at a conference that looked at the importance of Piketty’s most recent book for the future of capitalism.  In talking about it, several participants mentioned the VoC literature. The acronym refers to the literature dealing with the “varieties of capitalism”. That made me think of the fact that for the first time in history the entire globe is capitalist. In effect, for the first time in history, capitalism, defined as a system of  the private ownership of the means of production, free wage labor, and rational pursuit of profit, does not have to share the globe with the “varieties of feudalism” or “varieties of socialism”. It has won.  -Branko Milanovic  

The Lesson Of Trump Is You Should Argue With Your Own Team

When know-nothing movements put know-nothing politicians into power, this power gets squandered on garbage like debt ceiling standoffs, auditing the fed, and phony attempts to repeal Obamacare that lack an actual idea of what they’d replace it with. Republicans with less power but a more coherent and intelligent idea of what to do with it would probably be better off. - Adam Ozimek

How Republican ‘Thought Police’ Enforce Climate-Science Denial

Brooks presents the situation as a “vast majority” of GOP politicians that understand climate science cowed into submission by an angry minority. Perhaps the vast majority of Republican politicians who confide their private beliefs to Brooks feel this way, but this is probably not a representative cross section. It is clear that a large proportion of party elites proclaim themselves to be climate-science skeptics for reasons purely of their own volition. Nor is this sentiment confined to talk-radio shouters. Esteemed chin-strokers and collectors of awards, like George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer, broadcast their disdain for the findings of the climate-science field.
The rise of Trump, and his increasingly cartoonish lies, has framed the Republican Party as split between the Establishment and the kooks. But on the climate issue, at least, the kooks are the Establishment. The “sophisticated” arguments about climate change that appear in prestigious conservative organs contain childish ignorance. - Jonathan Chait