No, it is the correct name, because there is nothing libertarian about them, usually; they're living bags of glibness about the nature of oppression in the alleged free market.

And I read the Tyler Cowan link. Oh. My. God. My brain is no longer just dribbling.

I feel my brain dribbling out of my ears. I love the way libertarians and neoliberals are in perfect agreement that nothing can be better than they are.

Manta1976's insight is the correct, most fundamental insight in this issue. Wealth is relative. No one *really* wants the rising tide to lift all boats, especially not by the same margin.

Now THAT is a damning endorsement.

er, "only somewhat", just to put the focus correctly.

dr2chase: You mean you had a really great experience and are trying to avoid being overwhelmed by awesome? (I'm balking at Android because it feels like it ties me in too deeply to the Googleverse, which I consider somewhat less bad than the App Store.)

Why thank you Don. Being one of the Valar, I can condemn a dead elf to a millenium in the Halls of Awaiting AND chew gum at the same time. Anyway, I actually wrote my summary/opinion piece explaining my new layman's understanding of MMT as a critique of mainstream economics. Ended up being a lot longer than I intended.

Thx for the link to my little blog! I've posted all the notes now, and linked them from that post via a category. I am still in the process of writing up my summary/opinion on it, though, should appear in an hour if I'm really inspired.

While in DC, I have decided to spend a day attending this fiscal sustainability counter-meeting at GWU thing with econ bloggers like Auerback and Mosler, and I'm in the middle of liveblogging the second half once I figured out how to get online here. My bloggery starts here: http://politblogo.typepad.com/politblogo/2010/04/fiscal-sustainability-counter-summit.html and moves on to further posts once I get wifi. Disclaimers about accuracy during high-speed liveblogging, etc, etc.

It's, um, not the only evidence for Israeli corruption. Take Ehud Olmert. No, I'm serious, take him...

jonathan, dude, there have been Israel/Palestine flamewars for as long as there has been a USENET and before, and many of us have encountered all your points many times. Tendentious, melodramatic claims that "our ears are stopped" aren't exactly original nor do they mean anything; so, by that token, are yours. Rubber, glue, etc. Miller is also saying nothing new, but repeating as a Great Epiphany the desire that acquiescence to Israel's behaviour be taken as prudence rather than the huge destabilizing force that it is. That's what every single pro-Israel activist has been saying since forever... If you want to go and tell the refugees they should become Lebanese or whatever, and come up with a plan for keeping Lebanon stable thereafter, be my guest, good luck, etc, etc. Heh. Very few people really believe that there will be a mass physical return to the lands within the pre-1967 borders. The hottest points of conflagration are---unsurprisingly---the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and Israel by overwhelming force holds the key to the solution to these more immediate issues. It chooses not to do so, but not content even to permit any kind of status quo to take root, it actively chooses to further entrench itself in siege and in settlement (look at Sheikh Jarrah for example). A simple examination of the Israeli press (JPost, Ha'aretz) reveals that even if peace were offered to Israel on a platter, it would be incapable of accepting it if it had to yield anything on Jerusalem. Both you and Miller obfuscate these points when you reduce the discussion to supposed defects in Arab and Muslim character. Obama does really even have to find a way to resettle the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; he merely needs to find a way to make Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders. The best way to do that is to cease the one-sided support for Israel. So part of Miller's article is right in a sense he does not intend; the best way for the US to react to the region is with passivity. True passivity. True neutrality. But from the point of view of Hamas, Miller's idea is peachy-keen. Hamas is very happy to let Israel become the apartheid state of which it is accused of being; the kind for when even the most tepid criticism (e.g. Goldstone) is viewed as an anti-Semitic act. Time is not on Israel's side, as the US influence wanes. Can it save itself by withdrawing to sustainable borders?

Contrary to popular Western belief, Arabs are not fungible. A Lebanese Arab is not the same as a Palestinian Arab is definitely not the same as a Syrian. But even leaving aside that issue, jonathan comes up with the crux of the matter indeed: "Here in the US we only talk about how we deal with Israel. There was almost no mention by Miller of how we deal with the Arab states and only that one mention of the problems the PA faces. He doesn't mention the big concession, the big thing the Arabs would have to give up. One thing he left out is that we, meaning the West, always hoped that at some point the Arabs would decide that enough is enough, that there has been enough suffering, that Israel is not going to wither and die, and that therefore peace is the best alternative. That has not happened. Perhaps it is the Islamist revival. Perhaps it is the ancient idea that "Muslim lands" must be ruled by Muslims. Perhaps it is that the Arab states have a ton of problems of their own and they use the Palestinians to deflect attention. Perhaps the religion is so focused on the afterworld that current suffering is a price one pays to do Allah's will." It was the belief of Western policymakers and Zionist forerunners that they could make permanent the results of an aggressive incursion into the Muslim world ("At last my dream come true") through a decades-long policy of utter intransigence on the matter of the rights of displaced people and even the sovereignty of Muslim people. So in this, jonathan reveals his double-standard: what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. He cannot logically complain and pathologize Muslim persistence in the face of Western intransigence. Anyone who knows anything about most Muslim countries is that rejection of Israel is an authentic popular desire that transcends political regimes---starting from its *very direct and obvious* representation of the Western domination of Muslim lands, that same dynamic explicitly being the source of political-Islamic revival. This is not helped by the hopelessly patronizing behaviour and attitudes of Israel and its supporters, who behave like a stereotyped boorish American tourist writ large and continuously fan the flames. A (genuine, non-Gaza-siege) withdrawal to Israel's *legal* borders (the pre-1967 ones) will at least allow the conflict to simmer down, rather than the continuous symbolic reminder that the Muslim world is at the mercy of the West through puppetry, invasions, etc. In any case, Miller may be right in a narrow sense; the conflict may resolve itself through Israel's own actions. Insofar as American influence is waning, the imposition of Israeli populations on Palestinian ones may itself result in an untenable situation for Israel's national ideology.

The Aaron David Miller/Foreign Policy article is an absurd piece of obfuscation. Just for starters, how do you work on "improving the lives of Palestinians" without stopping the expansion of settlements? He talks as though "natural growth" and "settlement expansion" are benign processes without huge consequences in Palestinian lives, starting with endless checkpoints and ending with uprooted olive trees and worse. And the attempt at denying the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to US-Islamic relations is even more absurd. Most of the public in the Muslim world can name no more central act of the West's hostility than its support for Israel. But the biggest sophistry is the entire convoluted premise of the article, which is that solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is hard. It is not: the whole problem is fueled by American politics. Simply end the lopsided support of Israel, demand Israel returns to its legal border and withdraws its citizens---the only real stumbling block---and the case will mostly be closed.

So, because someone MAY have been dissuaded from reading a book based on something he MIGHT have read in a book by Noan Chomsky, he MAY not have been SUFFICIENTLY discouraged from having something to do with Cambodia...say what? I'm already lost. That's a long road to "odious".

"If only the Democrats had stuck together..." HAHAHAHAHAHA.

The FT is going to regret their paywall. One article in thirty days? Are you kidding me? One thing it doesn't do is induce me to subscribe.

Heh, congratulations. Actually, it sounds like it says things I might actually agree with :)

"earnings are based on political power" Bingo. What should economists study? I suggest the following: how to forestall a descent into right-wing populism and general nukery of the planet in the context of a working class that has been denied any other power to remedy its situation in the face of cheap Asian labour. As economic orthodoxies have successfully forestalled protectionism without even making a pretense of trying to provide a way for the 50-year-old tire manufacturing worker from the rust belt to sustain his/her income without massive debt, a solution to the consequences is in order, thank you.

Oh, lots of things, starting with massively greater transparency (audit the Fed!).

Oh, boy, not one of those. The freedom to use your own name is a privilege most bestowed upon white males with secure jobs, and it's almost always them who demand it.

Brad DeLong: *obligatory kick at fringe commies*

This "blocking any protectionist moves" negates in the long run any good the rest may or may not have done (I'm thinking largely not). When the comparative advantage of America's trading partners is in some or whole part based on cheaper labour and/or lower environmental standards, and almost any skill can be transferred over the internet, and you have people like James laid off at middle age or later when it's hard to learn a completely new skill and hard to get hired even if you do... ...unregulated free trade is completely irresponsible.

FWIW for once I kind of agree with Brad. The political constipation of the American system on this particular issue has become a problem in itself. Passing this bill, as long as it doesn't directly require things like the deliberate maiming of every 14th three-year-old or absurdly evil things like that, is a step to breaking the deadlock.