Trump Federal Reserve nominee: Capitalism is more important than democracy - Polidicks

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/12/politics/stephen-moore-kfile/ (CNN) Stephen Moore, who President Donald Trump announced last month as his nominee for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, has a history of advocating self- described "radical" views on the economy and government.In speeches and radio interviews reviewed by CNN's KFile, Moore advocated for eliminating the corporate and federal income taxes entirely, calling the 16th Amendment that created the income tax the "most evil" law passed in the 20th century. Moore's economic worldview envisions a slimmed down government and a rolled back social safety net. He has called for eliminating the Departments of Labor, Energy and Commerce, along with the IRS and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. In an interview for Michael Moore's 2009 film "Capitalism: A Love Story," Moore said he wasn't a big believer in democracy. "Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy," Moore said. "I'm not even a big believer in democracy. I always say that democracy can be two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner. Look, I'm in favor of people having the right to vote and things like that. But there are a lot of countries that have the right to vote that are still poor. Democracy doesn't always lead to a good economy or even a good political system." Speaking on the Thom Hartmann Show in 2010, Moore reiterated this belief, saying Hitler was democratically elected and Saudi Arabia wouldn't be better off as a democracy. Federal Reserve governors serve for 14 years.

Well shit, I agree with the "I'm not even a big believer in democracy" idea but fuckin capitalism? Lmao

One step closer to an An-Cap paradise nightmare

This is right-wing thinking in a nutshell, the dude's just admitting it for once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

>But there are a lot of countries that have the right to vote that are still poor. There are also a lot of countries that are capitalist that are still poor, so??? Also even if a country has a lot of wealth, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's citizens do (and in fact, capitalism naturally tends to result in the average citizen having an ever-declining slice of the pie)

haha wow cool fact Moore, do you also know who eroded democratic institutions while expanding capitalist institutions?

Well I'm glad they're just up and saying it out loud now, at least

Boy he sure is a fucking guy, huh? A real piece of human.

https://i.imgur.com/TbI0nNa.jpg

markets are an amazing tool for promoting profitable behavior you know what behavior is really profitable if you aren't punished for it? swindling

We're already the United Corporations of America, so I'm not even surprised

fuck it mask off

I always say that democracy can be two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner. He considers this foolish because, in his view, the strong should just exploit and eventually kill the weak because that's the natural order of things. What a walking crock of rotten shit.

That's exactly it lol. Any situation with sheep where you enter a wolf into the "voting" equation ends with one less sheep and a well-fed wolf. So it's not like a democracy of 2 sheep and 1 wolf is gonna end any better for the sheep. Shit in this context just tell all the wolves to sod off, but then people go "lol you wanna be a sheeple, libcuck"

This video is so terrible that I'm not exaggerating when I say he's falsifying history. A key problem is he lumps together anyone across history who has some sort of issue with democracy and equality as 'reactionary' regardless of their actual relationship to contemporary or past iterations of liberalism, let alone conservatism, in their time. This is him retroactively applying his own ideological standards (judging by his reading list) to history and revising it. It leads to these absurdities: He gives no explanation how Burke, de Maistre, and Hobbes differ. They're all the same because they 'defend the monarchy', which is the kind of reductionism that defines the whole video. One of these three is an Enlightenment philosopher whose ideas informed liberal thought on civil society, one is a liberal-conservative that defended the American revolution, one rejected exactly all of that. The conservative continuity he implies between Burkeanism and marginalism does not really exist, classical economics was not a left-right issue and Burke was not particularly at odds with Adam Smith. He was not in any sense reacting to some democratic implications of the labor theory of value (which Marx did not represent) and marginalism was not a repudiation of liberalism. This is an example of the falsification, here it's meant to support a narrative of 'royalist' continuity (defined not by actual royalism, but by some relationship to some kind of anti-egalitarianism) that supposedly extends from the classical aristocracy to the liberal bourgeoisie all the way to the populist alt-right. He just completely omits many important conservative figures. He does not distinguish between different regional traditions of conservatism (compare the European continent with the Anglosphere) or gives you any idea how to tell the difference between the conservatism of Hayek (who was not a conservative, he was a right-wing liberal) from that of Metternich (a reactionary who extolled conservative socialism), Benjamin Disraeli (one-nation conservative), Russell Kirk (traditionalist conservative), and William F. Buckley (a fusionist). To make 3 even worse, he does not distinguish between different liberal revolutions and liberal traditions spawning from them. This video's distortions are the left-wing equivalent of revising history and saying the nazis were socialist.

He's not entirely wrong though? The entire reason Hobbes wrote Leviathan is because his Royalist buddies persuaded him to and so he put pro-monarchy views in the book. Burke staunchly argued ""We fear God, we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected" in believing the monarchy and aristocracy is natural. De Maiste practically fetishized monarchies. He never explicitly, says their the same for that though, he just generalizes because otherwise going through every difference between them would take hours. Additionally, you missed the context entirely. All three of those men very much had influence on the creation of classical liberalism and conservatism, both of which operated and viewed society in hierarchies, and later combined into the neo-conservative thought we see today. That's once again, missing the point he's trying to get across with the two competing theories of labor. Burke wasn't an economist so he didn't try to compete with Smith, he more or less just teased the idea out along with a bunch of other economic thinkers at the time who then took it and expanded upon it to establish the typical schools of thought we view as today, which makes sense as marginalism is supposed to have been created as a response to Marxian thinking. The whole Royalist thing is something else entirely as those early thinkers who have helped form modern conservative thought definitely did have royalist tendencies, even as liberals, ala Burke. He literally stated "these boys are not the alpha and omega of conservative thought, but their ideas helped form the basis of early conservatism, and have never gone away." And he's not wrong. The point with the Royalists isn't that modern conservative thought wants us to go back to the monarchy, it's the idea that there are those who are inherently better than others and thus deserve to be at the top. With the royalists, it was obviously the monarchy and aristocracy who they believed should be up there, but with classical liberalism (moreso the economic liberalism side of things) that was instead replaced with the rich and wealthy who deserved to be up their, using marginalism and subjective economic theory to justify their existence up there. Also it's hilarious you're implying that neo-conservative policy isn't anything other than a vain attempt to take classical imperialism and make it more digestible. Do you seriously believe that we invaded Iraq because we believe they had weapons of mass destruction? You're entire post is predicated on a misunderstanding and misconstruing of his points. Modern conservatism IS classical liberalism with conservative ideas thrown in, and thus there is a direct lineage back to both Burke and De Maistre, which is important as both advocated for the ideas of Social Hierarchies. The whole point of including the economic side of things was to show the transition from the originally royalist thinking of aristocratic dominance to the modern conservative thought of wealth dominance. That's literally what this entire video is about. It's attempting to prove how conservatives today still think in hierarchical thought, and they objectively do, and it goes all the way back to Burke's and De Maistre's ideas of those on to being might and superior and thus should have the control over those on the bottom. Also: Please do provide your sources on this?