(Part 3) Top products from r/GoldandBlack

There’s an interesting interview over at Jacobin Magazine of Daniel Zamora, who has written a book about Michel Foucault’s fascination with neoliberalism in the latter stages of his intellectual life. The whole thing is worth a read, but there are a few parts that stand out:

>Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state….
Foucault was one of the first to really take the neoliberal texts seriously and to read them rigorously. Before him, those intellectual products were generally dismissed, perceived as simple propaganda. For Lagasnerie, Foucault exploded the symbolic barrier that had been built up by the intellectual left against the neoliberal tradition.
Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no stimulating reading had existed that took into consideration the arguments of Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, or Milton Friedman. On this point, one can only agree with Lagasnerie: Foucault allowed us to read and understand these authors, to discover in them a complex and stimulating body of thought. On that point I totally agree with him. It’s undeniable that Foucault always took pains to inquire into theoretical corpuses of widely differing horizons and to constantly question his own ideas.
The intellectual left unfortunately has not always managed to do likewise. It has often remained trapped in a “school” attitude, refusing a priori to consider or debate ideas and traditions that start from different premises than its own. It’s a very damaging attitude. One finds oneself dealing with people who’ve practically never read the intellectual founding fathers of the political ideology they’re supposedly attacking! Their knowledge is often limited to a few reductive commonplaces.

The irony is that Zamora may well be correct in his critique of the “intellectual left,” but as Reason’s Brian Doherty points out, intellectuals outside the left have been quite happy to plumb the depths of neoliberal thinking (though one could argue that the intellectual right has its own bugaboos… such as reading Foucault without mocking him).

Indeed, one could argue that we’re in the middle of a golden age of serious intellectual histories of the topic. Angus Burgin’s “The Great Persuasion,” Daniel Stedman Jones’s “Masters of the Universe,” and Jennifer Burns’s “Goddess of the Market” have all recently looked at how free market advocates managed to emerge from World War II to advance a set of ideas that became intellectually dominant a half-century later. The great thing about these intellectual histories is that they take the ideas and the progenitors of the ideas seriously, without being either hagiographic or oppositional.

Zamora’s interview closes with his pretty astute observation about Foucault’s significance in today’s academy:

>[I]t seems to me that relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since the end of the 1970s: after the decline of Marxism, Foucault occupied a central place. In reality, he offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degree of subversion to be introduced without detracting from the codes of the academy. Mobilizing Foucault is relatively valued, it often allows his defenders to get published in prestigious journals, to join wide intellectual networks, to publish books, etc.
Very wide swaths of the intellectual world refer to Foucault in their work and have him saying everything and its opposite.

One of the virtues of teaching at a policy school is that Foucault is not quite as central to scholarly conversations as in traditional humanities departments. That said, Zamora’s observation rings true — which is why conservatives should embrace him and his work. From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault’s writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics.

In some ways, Zamora’s book is an effort by some on the left to try to “discipline” Foucault’s flirtation with the right. It will be interesting to see the academic left’s response to the book. But Zamora also reveals why free-marketeers might want to give Foucault another read and not just dismiss him with the “post-modern” epithet.

She's got a book mark in the book though. Looks like she read the first 20% or so. Maybe the shirt is worn ironically? (I want to believe)

Meh, fuck it. She's still a leftist witch:

>Great research and writing. A wonderful review of the origins and progress of efforts to repeal the New Deal. Very effective in helping illuminate the work of the conservative movement to remove the US Federal social and financial safety net. This is an important work -- very useful to those of us today who work to preserve and even expand it. Thank you.


https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0393337669/ref=cm_cr_dp_syn_footer?k=Invisible%20Hands%3A%20The%20Businessmen%27s%20Crusade%20Against%20the%20New%20Deal&showViewpoints=1

Your post sounds smart, but it poses a false dilemma: it implies that we either use nuclear power or get climate change.

There are literally thousands of other alternatives. We can invest more in renewables, which scale up quicker than nuclear, cost less, don't pose the same catastrophic risks, and don't rely heavily on centralized state action. Baseload power is not a big problem for renewables if you ramp up battery storage (already happening) and improve the grid so that energy can be produced where it's windy or sunny and delivered where needed.

We can also simply get more efficient with our energy use in the first place. Economizing energy use should be our first priority, because all sources of energy have serious environmental drawbacks. (Even nuclear would have comparable emissions to oil and gas if scaled globally, because we'd have to dig into far less efficient uranium ores.) It can be as simple as making it easier for people to insulate their houses or planting more vegetation around their houses. (A few good trees can lower ambient temperature by 9F over other forms of shade, because trees evapotranspirate as part of their metabolism, and the phase change from liquid to gaseous water sucks up a lot of heat energy.) . It can also involve more forward-thinking measures, like ending the absurd 20th-century-style subsidies for automotive transport (like dumb zoning laws, parking requirements, federal outlays on auto infrastructure boondoggles, etc. -- these amount to literally trillions of dollars a year).

These are all great alternatives to nuclear power, which creates deadly waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. We still don't know the full effects of Chernobyl, given that the Soviet government repressed Ukrainian and Belarusian public health research in the aftermath of the disaster. (MIT historian Kate Brown makes an interesting case that the international nuclear community, including U.S. nuclear interests, aided in this coverup.) The National Cancer Institute found that radionuclides from weapons testing in Nevada were responsible for 40,000-200,000 cases of thyroid cancer in the American West around the 1960s. We can expect more of that if nuclear accidents become relatively commonplace.

We can do a lot better than letting powerful incumbents lobby our government to keep propping up nuclear power.

> just like America was 200 years ago.

You mean like during the Whiskey Rebellion? The United States has never been a place of liberty without aggression. Many Founding Fathers were intentionally aggressive. Think about the Quartet, for example.

How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes. https://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why-Crashes/dp/047052670X

It's got pictures, and teaches very easy to understand concepts which will allow you to refute economic nonsense. This is the best choice because non-avid readers aren't going to read Bastiat or Hayek or anything heavy.

>I think your trust of private court systems and mercenary law enforcement is incredibly niave to say the least.

I already explicitly pointed out it's partly speculative. That said, it's not naive at all. Read something like Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook to see what I mean.

I have written some future non fiction. Yes there will be a point where there will be no jobs but that is a good thing. The Future: The Last Job https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PSPV3G1/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_EyH3CbPDP5SYN

Well, it's not as if Feser doesn't have some expertise on Nozick. More to the point, again, as Nozick is a sort of Kantian, what's of utmost importance for him is respecting the separateness of persons and, in particular, respecting their autonomy. Nozick is using the thought experiment to argue the quasi-democracy reached at the end of it no more respects the separateness of persons, their autonomy, and so forth than do the initial conditions of slavery. And the reason for that is because it remains non-consensual.

I just pulled that from memory of various things I read, but there have to be decently sourced books out there about the ratification of the constitution. American historians pore over virtually every letter people sent during that period.

This new 880-page book looks like it probably fits the bill. It popped up when I googled the sanctions against Rhode Island. It looks scholarly, complete, and well-written, but I wouldn't expect libertarian content. For something smaller, here's a writeup of Rhode Island's ratification (pdf).

Oh man, I cannot recommend The Problem of Political Authority, by Michael Huemer enough. Here's a video on the first part of the book for an overview, but you really have to read the book to see how thorough he is. The first part of the book talks about the ethics of why government is not particularly morally justified. The second part really carefully reasons out how and why a stateless society could not just function, but thrive.

Voter irrationality is a big deal. Huemer also has this paper on why it's a good thing the average person is not more influential. Then Bryan Caplan has an excellent book that really delves into the political economy of voter irrationality. I've listened to it on audible, and though the reader is pretty dry, it's a very detailed explanation of just how much astray voters are. You can top off this category with Jason Brennan's Against Democracy.

Economists have used economic methodologies to analyze issues from outside their traditional domain for a long time. And people have been complaining about it for a long time too. The relevant term is economics imperialism.

Gary Becker is a big figure in this regard. For example, his book A Treatise on the Family was a major influence on family economics. (Becker delved into lots of non-traditional areas, like crime and drug addiction, but his work in family econ is the closest to OP's concern.)

In case you like podcasts, EconTalk has done a couple episodes on this. Here's an interview with Becker. Here's a discussion of Becker's work with Edward Lazear.

Foucault makes most of that arguments of the state being made towards violence. Thus having this disstinction between the positive and negative peace in peace studies. Read his lectures before you criticize
https://www.amazon.com/Security-Territory-Population-Lectures-1977-1978/dp/0312203608

Foucault doesn't do any of that because he is a post structuralist (well kind of), so power is always in various methods, it doesn't have to be 1 - 3. He does agree that there is a power-knowledge in which the mechanisms of power produce different knowledge (in this case the political, economic, and cultural means).


I agree with this idea of power that relates to foucault

1. power is not a thing but a relation
   
   
2. power is not simply repressive but it is productive
   
   
3. power is not simply a property of the State.Power is not something that is exclusively localized in government and the State (which is not a universal essence). Rather, power is exercised throughout the social body.
   
   
4. power operates at the most micro levels of social relations. Power is omnipresent at every level of the social body.
   
   5.the exercise of power is strategic and war-like
   
   
   
   

I suggest taking a look at https://www.amazon.ca/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-American/dp/0684824299

Best book on this issue so far

Total lack of evidence except for these links he had in an article he linked to:


http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/iqbeliefej.doc

http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Preferences-Democratic-Politics-Opinion/dp/0521527872/ref=sr_1_1

'Conspiracy Theory' is a weaponized term. It's designed to shut off critical thinking so that people dismiss ideas out of hand without consideration.

https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Theory-America-Discovering/dp/0292757697

The phrase that keeps reoccurring in my mind when dealing with Hillary is: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

Hillary being full of shit on clown-ish levels and people's willingness to still defending her on a knee-jerk level is one of the very few more amusing things about this election cycle.

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

Long story short, foreign aid, mostly in the form of government-to-government transfers of assets, has ravaged the continent in a way that is difficult to overstate.

The solution proposed by the author is investment and trade using the vast natural resources there.

Admittedly the author is not "unbiased" but her analysis is backed by numbers and is difficult to reject.