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#like this guy who is an ex minister ex cop now social worker with a beard that could host rats-
chapst1ckmcdyke · 2 years
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Ex is officially moved out and it went well but i could still puke
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collapsedsquid · 7 years
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2001 article by Corey Robin about some right-winger free market types who became pro-welfare, one of which I’ve talked about before.
And what of Edward Luttwak? He was one of Ronald Reagan's premier court intellectuals, a brilliant military hawk who mercilessly criticized liberal defense policies and provided the philosophical rationale for the American military buildup of the 1980s. Liberal critics called him Crazy Eddie, but cutting a figure that was part Dr. Strangelove and part Dr. Zhivago, Luttwak effortlessly parried their arguments, pressing the Cold War toward its conclusion. Today, he is disillusioned by victory. He finds the United States a capitalist nightmare, "a grim warning" to leaders seeking to unleash free-market forces in their own countries. Deploying the same acerbic wit he once lofted against liberal peaceniks, he mocks the "Napoleonic pretensions" of American business leaders, challenges the conventional wisdom that capitalism and democracy are inevitable bedfellows ("free markets and less free societies go hand in hand"), and decries the savage inequalities produced by "turbo-capitalism." He excoriates European center-leftists like British prime minister Tony Blair for abandoning their socialist roots and for their unwillingness "to risk any innovative action" on behalf of "ordinary workers." With their "disdain for the poor and other losers" and "contempt for the broad masses of working people," Luttwak writes, Clintonesque New Democrats and European Third Wayers "can yield only right-wing policies." 
[...]
All love affairs come to an end, but Gray's breakup with the market has been particularly venomous. He now denounces it as the scourge of modern civilization. In the United States, he writes, the free market has "generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited." Americans suffer from "levels of inequality" that "resemble those of Latin American countries." The middle class enjoys the dubious charms of "assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the nineteenth-century proletariat." The United States stands perilously close to massive social disruption, which has been held at bay only "by a policy of mass incarceration" of African Americans and other people of color. "The prophet of today's America," Gray claims, "is not Jefferson or Madison.... It is Jeremy Bentham"—the man who dreamed of a society "reconstructed on the model of an ideal prison." 
[...]
But there is a deeper reason for Gray's turn: By itself, the market could not sustain his affections. Without the Soviet Union and the welfare state as diverting symbols of Enlightenment rationalism, Gray could no longer believe in the market as he once had. The market, he now had to admit, sponsors a "cult of reason and efficiency." It "snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge." He used to think that the free market arose spontaneously and that state control of the economy was unnatural. But watching Jeffrey Sachs and the International Monetary Fund in Russia, he could not help but see the free market as "a product of artifice, design and political coercion." It had to be created, often with the aid of ruthless state power. Today, he argues that Thatcher built the free market by crushing trade unions, hollowing out the Conservative Party, and disabling Parliament. She "set British society on a forced march into late modernity." Gray believes that "Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common." Both, he writes, "exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress." There is only one difference: Communism is dead.
[...]
Military struggle may no longer hold any ideological allure for Luttwak, but his disaffection affords him the time and intellectual space to confront the enemy he has been shadowboxing his entire life: capitalism itself. "The market," he says, "invades every sphere of life," producing a "hellish society." In the same way that market values once threatened national security, they now threaten the economic and spiritual well-being of society. "An optimal production system is a completely inhuman production system," he explains, "because...you are constantly changing the number of people you employ, you're moving them around, you're doing different things, and that is not compatible with somebody being able to organize an existence for himself."
Although Luttwak writes in his 1999 book Turbo-Capitalism, "I deeply believe...in the virtues of capitalism," his opposition to the spread of market values is so acute that it puts him on the far end of today's political spectrum—a position that Luttwak congenitally enjoys. "Edward is a very perverse guy, intellectually and in many other ways," says former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, one of Luttwak's early champions during the 1970s. "He's a contrarian. He enjoys confounding expectations. But I frankly don't even know how serious he is in this latest incarnation." Luttwak insists that he is quite serious. He calls for socialized medicine. He advocates a strong welfare state, claiming, "If I had my druthers, I would prohibit any form of domestic charity." Charity is a "cop-out," he says: It takes dignity away from the poor.
The only thing that arouses Luttwak's ire more than untrammeled capitalism is its elite enthusiasts—the intellectuals, politicians, policy makers, and businessmen who claim that "just because the market is always more efficient, the market should always rule." Alan Greenspan earns Luttwak's special contempt: "Alan Greenspan is a Spencerian. That makes him an economic fascist." Spencerians like Greenspan believe that "the harshest economic pressures" will "stimulate some people to...economically heroic deeds. They will become great entrepreneurs or whatever else, and as for the ones who fail, let them fail." Luttwak's other b'te noire is "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the peripatetic CEO who reaps unimaginable returns for corporate shareholders by firing substantial numbers of employees from companies. "Chainsaw does it," says Luttwak, referring to Dunlap's downsizing measures, "because he's simpleminded, harsh, and cruel." It's just "economic sadism." Against Greenspan and Dunlap, Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."
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