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A Science Lesson for DSA Kiddies
Christopher Watts has read through the DSA manifesto — “Workers Deserve More!” — so you and I don’t have to. Workers? When did the left care about the workers after class politics was replaced by race and feminist and LGBTQ politics?
The manifesto calls for “popular control of resources and production”, also known as government control. And “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation ‘aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.’” Yes, honey, but getting all those things on the table are incredibly complex tasks, the sort of tasks that, in the last two hundred years, we have learned the hard way, cannot be run by politicians, activists, and bureaucrats.
In fact the record is clear. If you hand over “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation” to government, and they dream up Five Year Plans and Great Leap Forwards, people will starve. By the millions.
But first, let us talk about “capital accumulation.” Lots of people talk as if capital is something that “accumulates,” like gold bars in a secure cellar. That is rubbish. The capital of a business is the present value of the future income. The capital value of Tesla — that closed today at $374 per share — is the present value of its future income from building and selling cars and leasing FSDs.
So where does “accumulation” come from? It comes from Marx. Lefty John D. Judis:
For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to the accumulation of labor time…
The notion is based on the “labor theory of value” created by classical economists like Adam Smith:
According to the labor theory of value… the exchange value of consumer goods and of capital goods (plant, equipment, raw materials) is measured in the labor time it takes to produce them.
Except the labor theory of value and the exchange theory of value were exploded in the marginal revolution of 1870. The market is the market. Prices are what people actually pay or collect when they buy or sell. That is all. When people buy or sell Tesla stock they are combining all their knowledge about the company, from Elon Musk to the sales of Tesla EVs, down to the availability of charging stations. It’s all a guess. And tomorrow the price will be different.
It’s a curious thing. Just after Marx published Das Kapital in 1866 came the marginal revolution in 1870 that blew his economics to smithereens. Only lefties still haven’t got the message.
Next up was the first genuine experiment in national socialism in Bolshevik Russia after the revolution of 1917. Three years later in 1920 came “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” by Ludwig von Mises. He argued that socialism was impossible because it could not compute prices. In 1921 Lenin eased up on the socialism with his New Economic Policy. But Stalin doubled down and gave us Five Year Plans and the Ukraine Famine in the 1930s. When the windows were opened up in 1991 it was clear that Soviet Russia was a basket case.
Never mind. All the good people in the 1940s knew that “planning” was the wave of the future. But in 1944 came F.A. Hayek. He published “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and the book The Road to Serfdom and argued that a planned economy was impossible because the planners and bureaucrats and administrators could not have enough knowledge to plan everything down to the last detail. Hayek’s advice was followed in Germany by Ludwig Erhard and Germany experienced 7 percent annual growth through the 1950s; they called it a Wirtschaftwunder. Britain went in for planning and experienced 0 to 3 percent growth in the 1950s.
Still, all the good people knew that those capitalists and corporations needed to be properly restrained by economic regulation. But in 1971 George Stigler and “The Theory of Economic Regulation” and the notion of “regulatory capture”. That means that
As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its own benefit rather than for the general public.
In the 1980s, far-right governments like Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain loosed the chains of regulation and their economies boomed.
Has anyone ever taught the DSA kiddies about this basic knowledge? High schools? Universities? It’s the fundamental knowledge that anyone needs to live and act in the market economy. If you don’t get taught this in school, or don’t read about it in your young adulthood, you are clueless about how to live in the modern world.
| Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:04:36 GMT |
How to Philosophize about DSA / Woke 2
I’m all flummoxed. I can’t decide if Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is a cunning CIA agent planning a color revolution in the US. Then I can’t decide if Karen Bass is a Cuban intelligence agent or a Chinese intelligence agent, or Commie IC-adjacent, or merely a lefty fool.
And then there is the question, raised by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic and dissected by Liel Leibowitz in The Free Press, of whether Zohran Mamdani is a crazed lefty lunatic or a cunning “partisan of overthrow” planning the destruction of New York City to prepare for the revolution. No, Jonathan. Stop the misdirection. Mamdani is not a moderate.
But really, the only sensible way to understand the DSA and the culture cult of Woke 2 is to understand it all as a Christian heresy. The whole point of Christianity was that Christ gave His life so we could be saved, and go to Heaven in the next life. Socialism says we can have Heaven in this life, if only the rich pay their fair share and the police are replaced by mental health services and buses are free and childcare is unlimited.
There is, of course, another Christian heresy that might dovetail better, Manichaeism:
A radical dualist faith teaching an eternal war between the kingdom of Light (spirit) and the kingdom of Darkness (matter).
In our modern era, this Christian heresy has secularized into:
A radical dualist faith teaching an eternal war between the Oppressed (innocent) and the racist patriarchal Oppressors (guilty).
Now, of course, all the world knows that the Iranians invented dualism first, in Zoroastrianism:
Features a classic cosmic struggle between Spenta Mainyu (the Bholistic/Truth spirit) and Angra Mainyu (the Destructive/Falsehood spirit)[.]
I wonder if the mullahs in Iran have any dualist residues left. Google says NO!
The most famous dualistic heresy under Christianity is Catharism. There were lots of Cathars in France back in the day. That, experts agree, has nothing to do with the current mostly peaceful manifestations in France, which is merely about devoted students dreaming of a better education.
Of course it could be that the way to understand our lefty friends and their Angst about life, the universe, everything, is to replay the story of the Garden of Eden. There they were, Adam and Eve, lolling around in perfect bliss, when the Serpent tempted Eve into eating an apple off the Tree of Knowledge. So she did, taking a modest little bite so she could share the apple later with Adam.
I wonder if Eve had eaten the whole apple, and then applied to God for a full lesson in philosophy and the Big Bang and the question of women in the public square, if everything would have turned out different.
But anyway, here we are, turned out of Paradise, and our lefty friends cain’t stand it. They want back in, and they want the billionaires to pay for it.
But obviously, trillionaire Elon Musk has other ideas, and I suspect that in his youth he watched more than a few episodes of The Honeymooners. I dare say he decided that “to the Moon, Alice” didn’t quite do the trick in the internet age, and so a more comprehensive and mandatory program to “Occupy Mars” with lefty lunatics would be required.
Do you think I have, as the Brits say, “lost the plot?” Maybe, but I am just trying to do a Sun Tzu and endeavoring to know the enemy. And that, I believe, requires a discursive journey through all human history and beyond, particularly as today is Wednesday.
But the philosophers at The New Yorker have a bigger worry. What if les manifestations en France create
an extreme, right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-NATO, anti-the-alliance-of-democracy government. We already have something like that in the U.S.
Yep. The only thing to do is create more states, abolish the Senate, add more seats to the Supreme Court, and frighten conservative youth away from politics.
Also known as a color revolution to those on the inside.
| Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:37:02 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The first rule of politics is: never tell people the truth.
Politician: follow me or you will all be killed. Priest: follow me or you will go to Hell.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Plato
