Tommy

“According to the liberal theory entrepreneurs earn profit because they combine productive factors in the most economic manner. By seeking profit for themselves they also increase the efficiency of the productive system. According to Veblen, however, entrepreneurs may also earn profit by thwarting production. They can do this in virtue of certain institutional devices. In a sense, Veblen’s theory is, of course diametrically opposed to liberal theory. Yet, his premises are the same: he, too, thinks of an ideal economy which would maximize production if there were no interventions, although ‘interventions’ in his model may be caused by entrepreneurs. Veblen’s criticism is of the kind which can easily be understood by a liberal economist. It is merely a question of deciding what is an ‘intervention’ and what is ‘free’ or ‘natural’. His criticism does not reject the general presuppositions of liberal theory. A liberal can remain inside the boundaries of his theory when he tries to refute Veblen.”
― Gunnar Myrdal, Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory

“But anarchism has become fashionable, especially among refugees from the left who don’t understand that anarchism isn’t a sexier version of leftism, it is what it is, it is something else entirely, it is just anarchism and it is post-leftist.”
― Bob Black, Defacing the Currency: Selected Writings 1992-2012

“Lutheran ideology unleashed libido to achieve its political and ecclesial ends, and Luther, like Hugh Hefner, discovered that the only way to make use of libido effectively was to create for his contemporaries an escape from the guilt that accompanied its satisfaction. The sixteenth-century equivalent of the Playboy Philosophy was justification by faith alone, culminating in the doctrine of the enslaved will. De Servo Arbitrio, it should be remembered, was published in the same year that Luther married. Luther, in creating his doctrine of the enslaved will, became the first modern man, and Lutheranism became the first modern ideology. Its primary attraction to the hordes of apostate priests and nuns who flocked to Wittenberg to follow him lay in its ability to rationalize sexual license and broken vows.”
― E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior

“In theory everyone agreed that applied science was made for man and not man for applied science. In practice great masses of human beings have again and again been sacrificed to applied science. The conflict between science, as it has been applied up to the present, and human interests was clearly stated by Thorstein Veblen in his Science in the Modern World. In this essay Veblen distinguishes between what he calls the pragmatic and the scientific point of view. Pragmatically human beings know pretty well what is good for them, and have developed myths and fairy tales, proverbs and popular philosophies, behaviour-patterns and moralities, in order to illustrate and embody their findings about life. The findings of science—especially of science as applied for the benefit of the holders of centralized economic and political power—are frequently in conflict with humanity’s pragmatic values, and this conflict has been and still is the source of much unhappiness, frustration and bitterness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace