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Left and Right: Trying to Censor Speech

Really, it all comes down to what you are not allowed to say. On the right these days you are not allowed to question Israel or World War II. And recently Ben Shapiro came down hard at Turning Point USA “to launch a blistering attack on the grifters and charalatans on the right.”

You think, Ben? I’d say that anyone that goes outside the Overton Window anywhere in the world is considered a grifter and a charlatan: left, right, and center. Until the grifters and charlatans gain political power and can start to brand The Other Guys as grifters and charlatans.

Meanwhile Mike Miller writes about censorship on the Left:

The Left’s decades-long attempt to suppress, distort, or outright censor speech that discredits their various narratives, deceptions, and bald-faced lies is obvious to most Americans…

In addition to censorship, the Left is all about compelled speech; demanding its adherents stick to the narrative, including the strict use of words and terms, with deviation considered a hypocrisy.

I’d say that the censorship problem is worse on the Left than the Right, because the institutional power of the left is so much stronger. How about this professor at the University of Washington getting into trouble over compelled speech:

In 2022, Professor Stuart Reges triggered a firestorm when he refused to attach a prewritten “Indigenous land acknowledgement” statement to his course syllabi.

Look I get it. Religion — including modern religion like Marxism and postmodernism — is all about the One True Narrative. And that makes sense. Most people don’t have the time or the ability or the desire to construct a True Narrative for themselves. They are just social animals. So they just want to pick up an Approved Narrative at the convenience store and live their lives by it: because it’s true.

And let me be clear: experts agree that it’s not enough to believe in the Narrative; you have to renew it by recitation. That’s why Christians recite the Creed every week in church.

And when the religion starts encountering competing Narratives the priests in the church and the monks in the monasteries and the professors at the universities and the functionaries at the Ministry of Truth start to double down. Don’t think of it as scandalous; it’s just human.

Right now in the United States, I’d say, both the “conservatism” and the “liberalism” of the post-WWII era are crumbling. Let’s say that modern liberalism as instituted in the Democratic Party goes back to FDR and his heroic achievement in rescuing the US from the Great Depression in the nick of time from the eevil Herbert Hoover and the spectre of Literally Hitler. Modern conservatism — and its political manifestation in what we now call RINO Republicanism — goes back to Bill Buckley and his effort to create a safe and acceptable alternative to the dominant liberal ideology in the post-WWII era.

Guess what: both ideologies are breaking up. Of course they are. It’s now a couple of generations since the heroic days of yore, and we need new ideas, new idols, new beliefs to sustain us in a belief that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

And guess what. Before you can start to build a new cathedral, you have to clear the building site of the crumbling remains of the old cathedral, dig new foundations, and start anew.

OK, you don’t always have to dig new foundations. But sometimes you do.

I’d say that the Republican establishment has only limited power to control the Narrative and keep the old beliefs sacred and inviolable. The Democratic establishment has much more power to control the Narrative.

But in the end it does not matter. A new world requires new Truths, and the old Truths will crumble into dust.

The populist nationalist movement all over the world is about a rising ordinary middle class that wants a world founded on the identity of the nation state and middle-class morality that works for them. The old conservative establishment really doesn’t have the power to enforce “compelled speech,” especially now that Independent Media allows independent voices — including grifters and charlatans — a significant bandwidth. That’s why the old conservatism is giving way to populist nationalism.

The postmodern wokism in the Western world is about the educated ruling class trying to keep the Age of the Educated Class going for one more ideological cycle. Look, the ideas of the Enlightenment and the replacement of absolute monarchs by the rule of the educated class were just what the doctor ordered if you were a middle-class intellectual back in the day that had access to the new-fangled Gutenberg printed books. And what was good for intellectuals back then is good for the whole world now. So it makes complete sense that the educated class is doubling down on its ideology and enforcing “compelled speech.” The educated elite still has the power to do this, for now. But, with the replacement of Mass Media by Independent Media, the power to compel is slipping away. Clearly with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and the election of politicians like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle, the space for a new beginning is not yet available for the educated class.

Like I say, censorship is a “tell.” It is a sign that the ideas of the movement aren’t working as in the olden time. And the reason is simple: they aren’t providing a convincing answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, everything. Not any more. Not for intellectuals and not for normies. And nobody cares about the lower class, not really, darling.

Guess what: we humans don’t have an answer to the meaning of life, the universe, everything. We never did, and we never will. What we have are cobbled together Narratives that convince us for a season. And the Season of the Intellectuals is over.

And frankly, I would say that the more we learn about life, the universe, everything, the more we learn that we really don’t have a clue. About anything.

Misunderstanding the Point of Free Market Competition

Here’s a Doctor Kareem Carr who completely misses the point on X about economics and the free market economy.

The single most revolutionary idea in my economic education came from reading Harvard Professor Michael Porter and realizing that pure free-market competition is for absolute chumps.

If you are a business, free market competition is your sworn enemy. It is your imperative to subvert it at every turn.

Unconstrained competition is a corrosive acid, that left unchecked, relentlessly erodes profit.

So every business should strive to become the dominant buyer, dominant seller, make products with few substitutes, etc.

And then construct barriers to new entrants to the business.

No doubt. But that misses the point. The point of free market capitalism is not that it is conducted in a “pure free-market” where every transaction is negotiated anew.

The point is that the participants CAN change the price or the product or the product design or the quantity or whatever — if they want.

The fact of human life is that it is mostly same-old same-old every day. If you are a business you serve the same customers every day and you don’t change things. And you provide customers with little benefits, like airline mileage programs that gently lock their customers to their brand. Customers are the same. We go to the same grocery store and buy the same products, week after week, year after year.

But, from time to time, we change. And that is the point of the market economy. We CAN change, if we want to. And that influences the behavior of both producers and consumers. Yes, airlines can keep the price a bit higher, because their loyalty plan members will usually fly with them, because more mileage points. But at some point, the customer decides to go with a lower price at another airline, just this once.

But in a regulated industry, the producers don’t have to pay so much attention to the preferences of the consumer.

And in a socialist economy the producers don’t have to pay any attention to the preferences of the consumer. The government decides what the consumer needs and that’s it.

I’ve been reading Paul Feyerabend and The Tyranny of Science. He makes the point that all science and rational knowledge is pretty small beer that is mixed into the immense complexity of experience and unconscious knowledge.

That’s the point about economics. It is a thin gruel of theory that explains to us why the market works. And it explains to us why socialism does not work.

But to understand how loyalty programs work, or how supermarket specials work, or how and why businesses manipulate things to make it hard for customers to switch to another supplier, that’s more the area of anthropology — if indeed rational knowledge has any part to play.

People of tender feelings may be shocked, shocked, that businesses don’t just operate according to the mechanical rules of Adam Smith’s economics. They are really complaining, of course, that we don’t live in a perfect world, the best of all possible worlds.

And they are missing the point. As does Doctor Kareem Carr. He finishes that:

Capitalists often sell [capitalism] as if the businessman, and chief among them, the billionaire is the natural ally of the consumer. They are not.

It is their job to evade constraint, and it is our job to constrain them.

“Ally” you say? That means you are interpreting capitalism as a war, with allies and enemies. But capitalism is not politics; capitalism is not war.

Capitalism is more like sports.

So, the point of economics and the free-enterprise ideology is not to explain the world. Maybe it is more about explaining why, all of a sudden in the last couple of centuries, we humans have exploded in prosperity. I like to start on this comment by a chap in Britland back in 1685. Wrote Carew Reynell:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

And that was about 90 years before Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations. It’s interesting to wonder what was going on that people would be thinking that radically increased prosperity was possible.

I’d say that the point of economics is to try to understand what was going on when lots of people started to live in cities and live not by growing their own food and exchanging a few luxuries, but mostly living by working with organizations buying and selling in the market.

And by the way, the critical thing to know is the Marginal Revolution of 1870 when three economists updated the “classical economics” of Adam Smith and its two value systems — exchange value and use value — to a new, and even more abstract notion of “marginal value.” Let’s go with Grok:

Marginal value in economics refers to the additional value (or benefit) gained from consuming, producing, or using one more unit of a good, service, or resource. It is a core concept in marginalism, which analyzes decisions based on incremental changes rather than totals.

Now I would say that if you analyze the X-post of Doctor Kareem Carr you would suspect that he/she didn’t really understand the concept of “marginalism.”

Because, you see, in marginal economics people don’t change their same-old same-old until they see an “additional value (or benefit) gained from consuming, producing, or using one more unit of a good, service, or resource.”

And that explains a lot of what people don’t get about the market system. Folks like Doctor Kareem Carr.

Only the “market system” isn’t a “system.” It’s…

I suggest that we don’t have a clue about the “market system” any more than we have a clue about “life” or “the universe” or “everything.”

OK. Maybe we have half a clue.

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