Likely my biggest disagreement with leftists is that I think money prices tend to reflect costs, not create them. That's why I think suppressing prices mostly hurts the worst off and why helping them requires abolishing monopoly privileges and artificial property rights.
That's why I'm 100% on board with descriptions of socialism as "stateless, classless, moneyless" societies up until that very last one. Unless socialism means severe impoverishment, inequality, and waste, it REQUIRES a means of impersonally conveying tacit, distributed knowledge.
Prices are the truly cosmopolitan, egalitarian, levelling, and horizontal social technology the left has always been in search of. They are the "universal language" that transcends borders, trumps bigotry, and provides exit to the socially marginalized.
And leftists really need to realize the right knows this! The right has ALWAYS known this. That's why they prefer the static traditionalism of hierarchy, coercion, & militarism to the dynamic pluralism of free exchange. In suppressing prices leftists do the right's work for them.
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As far as human problems go, distribution severely pales in comparison to coordination and production.
Aggregating the amount of goods and the amount of people in need of them in a given area doesn't tell us how to get actual goods to actual people. "Give the homeless homes" or "give the hungry food" are empty aims in need of knowledge concerning the goods and people in question.
This emptiness becomes more apparent the more you increase the scale of the area in question and the diversity of the goods and people in question. "Homes" and "food" are not abstract platonic forms but particular objects existing in certain places and ways.
If you mean anarchism and fascism are our fundamental choices because they're the only conceptually stable ideologies (with everything else a confused centrist view), then yes.
But if you mean (as Rand mistakenly did) that anarchism and fascism are more alike than different, no.
This mistake is rooted in the idea that anarchism and fascism are united by opposition to rule of law, thereby endorsing rule of men. But anarchism promises the ultimate rule of law, the total abolition of the distinction between law-makers/enforcers and law-followers.
If fascism is the total embrace of power/total rejection of checks and balances, then liberal democracy is the moderate embrace of power/moderate embrace of checks and balances and anarchism is the total rejection of power/total embrace of checks and balances.
Both Jeff Tucker and Ed Stringham are gone from AIER. I was interviewed by a Buzzfeed reporter looking into Tucker's misconduct and while I've been told that story is being indefinitely put on hold, I have to imagine the whole of house of cards is starting to collapse.
I poured my heart out to this reporter for 30 minutes. About how this man who took me under his wing, published my writings, defended me during the open letter backlash, and generally supported me turned out to have been mistreating women (some of whom I knew) the whole time.
I love the time travel ending to the original Superman. It had to end that way, in a world-altering sci-fi climax forcing Superman to choose between his identities; between obeying his Kryptonian father Jor-El by never interfering in human history or rescuing his favorite human.
Another: that movie in some ways turned its back on a character created by two Jews partly as a response to the rising global fascism and antisemitism of their time by ushering in the Christianized Superman we are still stuck with today.
Another: while "Superman might be an alienated cynic" is far too plastic a conception of the character, "Superman is always forgiving and friendly" is too rigid. Siegel and Shuster's Superman didn't hesitate to dole out karmic justice.
Today is Milton (Bill) Finger's 107th birthday. He's the (until 2015, unaccredited) ghost writer/artist without whom Batman as we know him wouldn't exist. Thread:
Finger is solely responsible for many features of the Batman mythos, such as the hero's alter ego "Bruce Wayne."
Finger turned a mere vigilante into a scientist and detective.