Professional wrestler showing college professor intelligence?!?!?!

[Prateek_Sanjay]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/jacobs/jacobs-arch.html

Guess who wrote this stuff. How is he allowed to get away with this?! He is showing insights here that even a few among us liberals ever show - of course it’s pointless to talk about tax when there are inflationary powers with the authorities.

We’ve all heard the phrase “equal pay for equal work.” Many of those who habitually repeat this mantra may not realize that it is simply a variation of the discredited labor theory of value (LTV), which is generally associated with Marxian economics. According to the LTV, the value of a product is related to the labor needed to produce it. The LTV prevailed in classical economics until the Marginal Revolution in the late 1800s. The marginalists proved that value is not the result of a product’s inputs, but the result of the subjective judgment of individuals.

Besides, we have bigger fish to fry. While taxes are certainly an important issue, it is not the taxes we see that are our greatest worry at this point. The tax we should be concerned about is the one that we don’t see.

As long as the Federal Reserve System retains the monopoly power to issue currency, it really doesn’t matter what the tax system is. Theoretically, the Fed can print all the money the government needs and we will be taxed through the loss of purchasing power of the dollar. This is going to become more and more evident as the federal government grows to unprecedented proportions. The crisis that we are witnessing now pales when compared to the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. The only way for the government to deal with them is to inflate the debt away.

The government’s second priority, you said, should be to build infrastructure – putting people to work building roads, bridges, a new electrical grid, and a broadband internet system.

While we certainly need those things, how is this going to create jobs and why is it the government’s business to build them anyway?

Labor is not homogeneous. Yes, people can do many different jobs, but many jobs require specialized training and skills. While building a road may be a boon to the road construction industry, how does it benefit an investment banker who just lost his job? How does building a bridge in California benefit an aerospace engineer who was just laid off in St. Louis? Or running fiber optic cable in North Dakota benefit a real estate agent out of work in Florida?

While the government can create jobs in one sector of the economy, it can only do so by destroying jobs in another sector of the economy. Perhaps you are familiar with Frédéric Bastiat’s famous essay What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. In it, Bastiat explains that when the government undertakes a project such as building a bridge we see the benefits it brings – the jobs that it creates. What we do not see are the things that are destroyed because of the project – the jobs that are not created because the government confiscates the resources needed to create them.

[Angurse]

You can just look at the guy and see how he can get away with it.

[JAlanKatz]

I don’t see why you want to insult him by comparing him to college professors…

[kstigs]

Lmao^

I never knew Kane was an intelligent fellow. Thanks for the link and the article.

[Praetyre]

Well, brains and brawn aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

[Jon_Irenicus]

Appearances are deceiving. It reminds me of the interview Marilyn Manson had with O’Reilly. His answers to some questions floored me because I didn’t realise the guy’s mind worked that way.

[BrianAnderson]

It reminds me of the interview Marilyn Manson had with O’Reilly.

Just watched it. That is really interesting how the most un-assuming people can have such normal, coherent thoughts. Serial killers too. Many of them, even though they’ve done such terrible things, can be quite smart when it comes time for an interview. Except Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson. They are just insane.

[Prateek_Sanjay]

@Jon Irenicus

Appearances are deceiving. It reminds me of the interview Marilyn Manson had with O’Reilly. His answers to some questions floored me because I didn’t realise the guy’s mind worked that way.

David Gordon pointed to these articles in LRC, saying that the “elite may look down upon professional wrestling…but he[Jacobs] shows far more intelligence than the entire Beltway put together”.

I like how Gordon points to the “elite”; it seems that many people who are on Mises.Org or LRC are not from that Manhattan, Ivy League, or Beltway culture, but from the more grassroots backgrounds, where people do enjoy NASCAR and wrassling and other hick interests, and have a strong suspicion of those who like to look intelligent on national television for a living.

I have seen this manner in a lot of public intellectuals who are from slightly more modest background. Even though they are themselves public intellectuals, they dislike public intellectuals, especially the kind who come from those dreaded parts of New England. For example, Thomas Sowell of Harlem had once said:

"Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.”

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson “could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.” But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages."