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Cato Goes Woke
A speaker at an event at the “libertarian” Cato Institute says that efforts to maintain or rebuild American manufacturing is nothing more than a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.” And I really don’t whether this comes from a place of embracing woke racialism (seeing everything in terms of race and class) or just the typical contempt of the think-tank class toward the working class.
But perhaps the real lesson is that no one should ever take the Cato Institute seriously. Video is here. Some of the hot takes are here.
The speaker is the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics – an economic think-tank that champions globalism and is funded by a bunch of transnational corporations.
Published in General
Can confirm.
James Weeks, candidate for party chair, at the 2016 Libertarian Party convention. (
GoogleSearch engines are our friends. <grin>)“I didn’t leave Libertarianism, it left me.” Just about every political philosophy has something to say about the human condition, but using the heavy hand of government to enforce orthodoxy is what unites fascists everywhere. Politics is not a left-right spectrum, it is a circle in which one pole is maximizing individual liberty and the other pole is authoritarianism. Class hatred or arrogance is simply a movement toward the authoritarian pole from whichever direction you take.
Dim bulb Republicans talk like this. Don’t be a dim bulb Republican.
The economy is not even close to being set up right for this stupidity, even though in the long run he’s right.
He might be right in the long run, but that’s only after businesses can’t circumvent the labor market and are confronted with the failed education structure and deflated wages that can’t cover the cost of that failed education yet is required anyway AND the inflationary welfare machine that props up the rising “value” of our consumption economy is drastically cut back.
Which is, effectively, never.
Most people don’t get it, but that is either totally accurate or almost totally accurate.
It’s hard to get your mind around the concept of free markets. It means the government doesn’t get to control the basic process which means no company gets to set the rules. We always interpreted this as allowing international competition even though most countries don’t practice free market economics, even back when we mostly did. Now none of us do, so what does the phrase mean? And what about the new phenomena of companies whose costs always fall? (Presumably all digital companies.) How do we control them without creating government decision makers they can control? We’ve got to get the basics right and know what reforms we want, and failing any reform, what rules to establish in a new country formed of free states, the only alternative should we fail to reform this place.
I think we have to abandon the idea of global free markets. There are companies that simply enjoy falling costs and these companies will control us whether we try to control them or not. Our economy is so giant that we can reap necessary and available economies of scale no matter the cost structure of the technology. Indeed, maybe we’re just too big and should break up into several pieces anyway but with an ability to form a joint military which is going to be necessary until China collapses and rots again. China will rot because that is what happens when political power gets to control all economic power.
Everybody think real hard about this.
Which is what the Constitution establishes anyway, Amendments 9 and 10.
Cato often includes a Constitution pamphlet in its mailings, so you may want to get that out before you throw away the rest of it.
Many years ago, when Cato was starting a new publication, they mailed me the same subscription offer thirteen (13) times. It wasn’t that they were after me, or even had my name and address on file. It’s just their deep pockets had let them rent a lot of mailing lists, and I appeared on thirteen of them.
I thought the same, “why is this a white man issue?” And BTW, it’s pretty obvious to anyone not insufferably elitist, society would fall apart without our highly capable and hard-working tradesfolks, no matter their color or gender.
We had miles of debates here during the 2016 election and while Jamie Locket was around performing as the champion of free trade, which is part of “free-marketism”. I could never understand how being totally manipulated by currency manipulation, slave labor, and the theft of intellectual and copyright laws by one party of a transaction could ever provide any semblance of free trade that the USA was supposedly involved in with China, Mexico, and Europe. It turned out, neither could our newly elected President Trump. Too bad he didn’t have four more years to complete hi mission.
There are old jokes to the effect that if you give the Cato Institute five dollars, they will send you so many massive white papers that your mail carrier will suffer a back injury.
And be on disability for decades.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Don’t ask us about pit bulls with big teeth, drive-by shooters, mask Karens, or Cato Institute document dumps.”
How on earth does Immigration improve Productivity? It can improve Output, and perhaps the ability to pay for existing infrastructure and debt, but it doesn’t improve Productivity unless the new people are more productive that the existing people. Same point for GDP per capita.
Do you ever see a guy like that asked hard questions like that? Then so many people go along with it. It’s stupid.
I actually think you can do that in theory, but nobody has the guts to make the changes. It would have to be after a huge depression.
By driving down wages?
If the central bank ran with enough deflation it would actually work and be good, but we are too stupid to do this. Nobody in the Democrat party or the GOP is going to do what needs to be done. Therefore, don’t do it.
In reality, it forces the need for a UBI.
It is only one data point, so take it for what it is worth. I saw young programmers and engineers predominantly from India and Taiwan who were much more productive than their entitled American counterparts. Reason? Well, it could be related to a boxing match I saw decades ago. The challenger said that he had the advantage. He was a poor kid from Jamaica. His answer to why he had the advantage was as best I can remember: “The champion is a rich man. He has succeeded and his belly is full. I am a hungry man, and a hungry man is a dangerous man.”
He’s talking about low skilled people. We aren’t set up for it.
The fact that low skilled people need to move here also reflects on how crappy the country is that they are from. They don’t have any marginal value where they come from.
We have an OK system that people want to move to, and we aren’t that great at keeping it OK.
I work in manufacturing. I agree with the first sentence. We way over romanticize and way too heavily support our tax laws with manufacturing. It is a Fetish. Then he just makes a Racist and Insulting statement as why we have this Fetish. Implying blue-collar men should not have any power.
Think tanks talking about how to run a business is just word barf. They are just academics who have no business running a small mfg plant let alone setting nationwide policy for them.
Most MFG in the US is not low skilled. Sure we have it but we mostly due more high tech manufactoring. That fact he does not even know that meean no one should listen to him.
Simple, immigrants get paid less. Productivity measured by output per dollar this increases. American born workers displaced by cheap migrant labor get killed off by fentanyl and Kevin Williamson mocks them.
Right. You can also set up the economy so they don’t get displaced from cheap labor, but we are too stupid to do that. Libertarian everything and the stupid central bank stops creating inflation and asset bubbles. People have no idea.
We aren’t even close to being set up properly to let in a whole bunch of low value added labor, but we could.
That’s not how productivity is measured. Labor productivity equal inflation-adjusted output divided by hours worked.
Right, but the net output would still be positive, not negative. Basically, it’s bad for the country, but it’s probably OK for the business owner and the guy he hired.
I think that’s right. Maybe not..