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Paul Matzko Profile picture
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8 May, 5 tweets, 1 min read
The signs of an impending, inflationary economic collapse are all around us: manufactured unemployment + massive fiscal stimulus + unlimited corporate lending + overheated stock market + increasingly exotic hedges + historic levels of corporate & governmental debt.
I mean, any *one* of these trends would be disconcerting, but it's all of them at once! Image
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And note that the trends were *already* bad before the covid pandemic hit; now just get your red pen out and draw a 45 degree line up at the end of each of those charts!

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More from @PMatzko

Paul Matzko Profile picture
10 May
A good example of how a classic libertarian critique -- in this case anti-competitive rent-seeking -- only gets traction on the Left when plugged into a culture war framework w/ a victim from a sympathetic group.

msn.com/en-us/money/co…
A new ice cream store was delayed by months because an existing ice cream store filed a complaint w/ the Planning Commission.

San Fran has created a regulatory regime that discourages new entrants at the expense of consumers who pay out the nose for goods, services, and housing. Image
And certainly, the hypocrisy of the incumbent ice cream shop owner rankles! The attempt to frame their store as a small business and the competitor's store--which has one other shop in NYC--as some kind of corporate chain is risible. Image
Read 6 tweets
Paul Matzko Profile picture
27 Apr
If we did resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, it would have vast, negative, unintended effects. You couldn't just target Tucker Carlson or whatever pundit/outlet you dislike.

How do I know that? Because I wrote a book about those effects last time we tried the Fairness Doctrine.
First, let me note that the Fairness Doctrine didn't prevent "deadly lies." That was never in its remit. It was meant to balance points of view. So if your goal in resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine is to stop folks from lying, you'll be sorely disappointed.
Second, for half of its functional history (1949-1963), the Fairness Doctrine was essentially unenforceable. I could go into more detail, but for sake of time, think about how many people you'd need to employ to monitor every broadcast outlet to make sure they were being "fair."
Read 19 tweets
Paul Matzko Profile picture
23 Feb
It's worth noting that Senate Democrats on the Commerce Committee did something very similar in 1967, sending a letter to every radio station in the country asking which of them aired "Radical Right" broadcasters and notifying them of upcoming hearings on the Fairness Doctrine.
Indeed, the letter was so successful at intimidating stations into dropping right-wing programs, that the point man on the effort, Bob Lowe, told an ally that "The Senate simply was losing interest in the issue" since the broadcasters "were not gaining ground."
This cleared the way for the next item on the agenda, which was to create a nationalized, public radio network to counter-balance conservative broadcasters.
Read 8 tweets
Paul Matzko Profile picture
20 Feb
Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.
Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.
Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this week.

beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/…
Read 11 tweets
Paul Matzko Profile picture
13 Feb
The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be deceptive.

nytimes.com/2021/02/13/tec…
Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.
But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.
Read 12 tweets
Paul Matzko Profile picture
9 Feb
If you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is an unprecedentedly conspiratorial, bigoted nut job, well, then let me introduce you to Republican Congressman James B. Utt, who represented Southern California back when the state was a reliably Republican state in the 50s & 60s.
Utt was a John Birch Society ally. The JBS was somewhat analogous to QAnon, heightening every political disagreement into a sinister conspiracy.

He was also a Republican racist at a time when that was still somewhat novel, blending racism & conspiracism in a now familiar combo.
Take how Utt responded to civil rights protests in Savannah, Georgia in the summer of '63. Civil rights activists were winning concessions in the city that year, w/ MLK even calling it "the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line."

crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm…
Read 23 tweets

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