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Wednesday, May 7, 2008 12:00 AM

McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power

The GOP nominee actually complains that it is judicial power that is excessive and is unduly limiting the powers of the president.

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  • Thursday, May 8, 2008 06:56 AM

    Wage 'slavery', debt 'peonage', interest-bearing capital and consent

    I use those terms, with the scare quotes, deliberately, to make a point in the simplest possible way : if we start from a set of assumptions about the organisation of labor that imply a degree of subordination of the wills - and this includes the moral values - of people without capital to people with it, then we will have to allow an ideology that justifies or purports to justify this, by invoking a higher moral interest. A relatively sober way of doing this is to argue that, no matter how amoral the intentions of the capitalists, the market will bring about some sort of adjustment towards industries of general human utility, and away from grossly immoral ones, because the laborers - now wearing their 'consumer' hats - will prefer to buy things that reflect a general utility. Unfortunately, as the mass communications systems become more and more sophisticated and manipulative - and they cannot help doing this, because they also compete with one another for 'market share,' it becomes less and less easy to believe that 'general human utility' is the spontaneously emergent outcome of the 'market forces' involved. Thus, eventually, you get a mutation : Alissa Rosenbaum, the apothecary's daughter from Petersburg, goes to Hollywood and becomes 'Ayn Rand' the mini-nietzchean nemesis of the Reds ...

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