Against Politics

Zinnlandia

Aschwin de Wolf — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:03:54 PDT

A recent blog post by Chip Smith at the Hoover Hog drew my attention to the writer Takuan Seiyo. In the archives of the author at the Brussels Journal I found a 2008 piece on the pathological political culture of the Pacific Northwest, or as the author calls it, Zinnlandia: Behavioral psychology has names for various [...]

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Rudolf Carnap politicized

Aschwin de Wolf — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:11:33 PDT

It is a welcome development that there is an increasing interest in the history and substance of logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Most of this literature, however, is produced by professional philosophers and social scientists, and, therefore, should be approached with caution. Despite the refinements that have been made to the basic...

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Animal spirits in public policy

Aschwin de Wolf — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:24:45 PDT

In the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review, Arnold Kling reviews George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller’s new book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Reading his review, one wonders how it is still possible for a serious scholar to make a case for [...]

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Unfalsifiable achievements

Aschwin de Wolf — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:39:45 PDT

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that...

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Macroeconomics in politics

Aschwin de Wolf — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:04:11 PDT

Steve Chapman writes: If the economy improves and unemployment drops, Obama can take credit. If it fails to improve and unemployment rises, though, he can say he averted an even worse showing. Republicans will take the opposite tack — attributing any improvement to the natural resilience of the economy and blaming the administration if...

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The destruction of self-help by state intervention

Aschwin de Wolf — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:46:56 PDT

The Independent Institute’s quarterly Independent Review is a worthy publication. The journal produces well researched and innovative scholarly articles in the classical liberal tradition, avoiding excessive emphasis on “public policy libertarianism” on the one hand, and avoiding an exclusive emphasis on a single school of...

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Political classification and economic reductionism

Aschwin de Wolf — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:03:42 PDT

At Taki’s Magazine E. Christian Kopf writes: As conservatives and right-wingers like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Whittaker Chambers and many others have pointed out for over a century, free marketeers (19th century liberals or modern libertarians) differ from Marxists and democratic socialists (20th century liberals) only superficially,...

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Thomas Sowell on the poisonous doctrine of ‘empathy’

Aschwin de Wolf — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:09:36 PDT

Thomas Sowell writes: If you were going to have open-heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is, or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and [...]

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Counter-modernism

Aschwin de Wolf — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:31:46 PDT

In my review of Jonathan Bowden’s book Mad I discussed the possibility of “a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy, as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary...

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Jonathan Bowden’s Mad

Aschwin de Wolf — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:43:08 PDT

From the publisher who brought us a new and expanded edition of L.A. Rollins’ excellent “The Myth of Natural Rights” comes a rare little book by Jonathan Bowden called “Mad.” The book was originally published in 1989 but I have not been able to find much information about it. Before publication Nine-Banded Books...

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