Tag Archives: market distortions

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Nov. 4-8, 2016

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business: to the Dems, another arm of the state, rather than being driven by the free market. (see “public service,”below)

fact-checking: to the Dems, a vehicle to do partisan politics.

Hillary supporters: Inside-the-Beltway, trust-funded supercilious snots from third-tier Ivy League wannabe schools who, as Victor Davis Hanson put it, “sound quite clever without being especially bright, attuned to social justice without character. Their religion is not so much progressivism as appearing cool and hip and ‘right’ on the issues … . Well-connected and mediocre … . They write and sound off about the buffoon Trump and preen in sanctimonious moral outrage … .”

market distortions: public safety, public health, financial regulation rules and laws, welfare, environmental regulation–all the ways the Dems distort the free market’s natural outcomes.

As Karl Polanyi argued,  the “Market Society” substitutes utility and self-interest for reciprocity and redistribution. Economic policy decisions intended to ameliorate the Darwinian/Hobbesian aspects of the “free” market actually are the free market, not distortions of it. Without them, there is no market.

minimum wage increase: Teenage Job Elimination Act

the press never talks about it: the rising murder rate, global cooling, immigrant murderers and rapists, the Clinton Foundation’s shakedown schemes, Hillary’s lying about her Benghazi coverup or her e-mails, the millions of immigrants pouring over our borders, etc.

The press never talks about these things because they aren’t true.

public schools: Dem dropout factories. By protecting the teachers’ unions, the Dems are sentencing millions of black kids to academic failure.

public service: to the Dems, deferred compensation, as they move to the meeting place of government and business.

redistribution: Dem buzzword/smokescreen for redistributing political power–to the Dems!

rigged system the insider elites who control Washington and “rig” the system so the free market is never set free.

As Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Robert Reich, argues, the opposite is actually true: the elites make sure the playing field is always “predistributed” to tilt in their favor:

there’s a feedback loop between political and market power. Rising wealth at the top buys growing political influence, via campaign contributions, lobbying, and the rewards of the revolving door. Political influence in turn is used to rewrite the rules of the game—antitrust laws, deregulation, changes in contract law, union-busting—in a way that reinforces income concentration. The result is a sort of spiral, a vicious circle of oligarchy.

The Tea Party/GOP’s faux populism is intended to cover over, and perpetuate, this “vicious circle of oligarchy.” Donald Trump, of course, has been at the center of this circle for his entire life. The system has actually been “rigged” for him via tax breaks, write-offs, lawsuits over property and contract rules, cheap foreign labor, free publicity, etc. He’s right-the system is rigged–but he’s done the rigging, and his phony populism–“the blue collar billionaire” meme– shouldn’t fool anyone.

 

 

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, Sept. 18-22, 2016

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community organizer: community agitator.

considered: what the lamestream media calls Hillary’s cautious, boring, stock responses to terrorism, such as “we will continue to work with our allies.” Behind the anodyne platitudes, Hillary is actually “considering” ways to not blame radical Islam for these attacks. “Considered” Dem responses are always politically correct ways to find political safe spaces.

divided country: what has happened to America under Obama, the Great Divider. This ominous label makes pluralism, dissent, and democracy sound like nuisances, nuisances that a Trumpian resurgent nationalism will do away with.

free speech: what radical Muslims take advantage of to organize, proselytize and plan terror campaigns. Disposable in the War on Terrorism.

“hands up, don’t shoot” pandering: blaming the police.

the Islamist reality: the clear and present danger of any Muslim in America, justifying any racial profiling as a national security measure. Any Muslim could be a sleeper cell.

market distortions: subsidies to the poor; allocation of resources by need or equity (aka, redistributionism); any considerations of the role of power in public policy decision making and social choice; any talk of “winners and losers”; any talk of culture or values.  Market-only purists assume that the free play of private interests best promotes maximum social well-being. God proposes, the market disposes, and everyone wins, in the aggregate at least. Every market change leaves society better off , by definition.  Maximization of wealth, however, does not mean maximization of happiness, human welfare, or equity. (see “the public interest, below). 

news: to the lamestream media, whatever information is necessary to arrive at politically correct facts or conclusions. As Victor Davis Hanson explains in the National Review, the lamestream media is made up of

progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies

positive hope and change: things that bring us together, not pull us apart. In other words, symbolic policies without any real hope for any real change. So-called “positive hope and change” assure that white privilege is never undermined or even called into question. It’s a totally fictional leap into an imaginary “post-racial” world.

post -racial: post-American.

the public interest: a liberal phantom that gets in the way of the maximization of private utility.

racists: people who call others racist. Since we live in a post-racist world, calling someone a racist is by definition a slur. This brilliant undercutting of even the possibility of any truth claims for the word itself means that even overtly racist acts of violence can now be called “unbridled patriotism” or “standing up for America”.

to the victor go the spoils: Donald Trump’s foreign policy, in a nutshell, thus justifying re-invading Iraq to take their oil, for example. Wars of conquest will see a resurgence under Trump as the US becomes the kind of rogue state that used to be our enemy.

urban riots: under a black President, the new normal whenever police have to use their guns.

We The People: the authenticity of the people, as opposed to the illegitimacy of the government. Tea Partiers assume that government was imposed or immaculately conceived,  never established or sanctioned by the Founders.