Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“What differentiates system change from reforms? Reforms refer to government interventions that still leave employers in the exclusive position to make the basic enterprise decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with profits. Reforms include minimum wage laws, redistributive tax structures, and enterprises owned and operated by the government. They range…
“Corporations don’t have values; they have an image…Their main objective is to make money.” —Merry Mahaffey It’s not uncommon for corporations to espouse “corporate values.” We’ve all heard this phrase before. But it should be obvious to anyone that these “values” are little more than meaningless slogans or tag-lines; they’re not meant to be taken…
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” —John Dewey I haven’t really written much about the 2016 U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump because it’s been an overall hugely depressing nightmare for me. I have had a lot of in-person chats, Facebook discussions, and have also read a TON of articles, essays,…
“Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.” ― Roger Cohen This presidential election has generated TONS of fun (philosophical) things to think and talk about. Among them is this notion of “rigging” that keeps coming up….
“Libertarianism is perhaps the most toxic mixture of liberalism (ala Hobbes and Locke) and capitalism.” It should not be a huge surprise for anyone who reads this blog to learn that I am not a huge fan of the political philosophy known as libertarianism. One of the things I hate most about libertarianism is it’s…
“It is evident that the more complex organisms have not evolved simply by adapting themselves to the environment. Instead, according to Whitehead, “the upward trend has been accompanied by a growth of the converse relation. Animals have progressively undertaken the task of adapting the environment to themselves.”[9] The primary evolutionary function of Reason is thus…
“One of the problems with capitalism is that it produces mediocrity but also renders that mediocrity unsustainable: capitalism needs average workers, but capitalist ideology insists that only the exceptional deserve the rewards that would allow them to live a decent life. We see this in almost parodic form in Silicon Valley tech boosterism, where every…
“I’d like to talk about an idea that is often abused. The idea is the following: If we want to have workers [be] better off, well then we should do more in the way of educating them. This is a kind of idea that somehow conveys the dangerous notion that the unemployment suffered by many,…
“Lets remember what a market is. A market is not what is taught in the university; it’s not about supply and demand. Markets do not supply what people demand. They supply what people can afford. That’s a very different thing. We could easily right now come up with the demands we think a society like…
“The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the employers “exclusively” receive, the economy has a capitalist structure. So long as it is exclusively…