We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It is the re-education camps for our lot! The Cato Institute has the report.
Now that leftists at Harvard want to portray laissez-faire philosophy as being somewhat akin to a mental disorder, maybe the next step will be re-education camps for Cato staff? Maybe the next “stimulus” bill could include a few earmarks for such facilities? I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get sent some place warm.
South Park could not even come up with these characters.
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I think there is an upside here.
Three meals a day, somewhere to sleep, and all the drugs needed to keep me calm.
And all I have to do to get it is act like a mature and self reliant adult.
The REALLY SCARY thing is that what these Harvard types are proposing is not a parody–they are deadly serious. They say it all with a straight face. Bill Buckley was more right than he knew when he said he would rather be ruled by the first 200 randomly selected names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Cambridge.
Guess that “tolerance training camp” episode in South Park was prophetic after all.
I’m already paying for a bunch of others to do the same thing, why not actually get something back, right?
This looks like an attempt to counter Michael Savage’s refrain that liberalism (apparently meaning the modern extreme, intolerant leftism) is a mental disorder. If so, the irony would be that he is not a free-market advocate, in any meaningful sense.
It’s difficult to say where leftism would transition from brainwashed blindness to anything approaching a disorder. Start throwing in tribalistic hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, and pseudoscience (non-free-market economics being analogous to phlogiston physics), and you probably cross the threshold somewhere.
With regard to the re-education camps, we may simply decide that we’re not going.
At the start of their publicity material for the Harvard conference the academics quote someone they clearly consider a supporter of the free market – to the effect that freedom has a defect he had not thought of.
And this paladin of antistatism?
Alan Greenspan of course.
The man who got a plate shoved in his face by Ayn Rand – when the lady worked out, many years ago, that his talk of freedom was a cover for his support for endless Corporate Welfare via the Federal Reserve system.
That they cite Alan save-the-world-by-endless-money-supply-increasing-rescue-missions Greenspan as supporter of freedom, tells me all I need to know about the academic elite (not that I did not know it already).
Hat tip to Thomas Woods over at the Mises blog for alterting me to the latest antics of these people.
What’s wrong with a little re-education? We hear, all the time, about how bad American schooling is. Maybe the kids are just too damn independent for their own good! Independence should be stamped out of them! They should be forced to read all of Das Kapital, in German! That’d teach them!
The collectivists already control most American “public” (government) schools, and many of the private ones as well.
Teaching training colleges – and stuff like the text books on “social justice teaching” by Bill Ayers.
It is so obvious it is almost amusing.