Save the University: Wendy Brown
A teach in by UC Berkeley faculty on the UC budget crisis
No surprise it comes from Berkeley.
Applicability of its endeavours
I’m seriously LOLing here. How dare these people be accountable to the market for what scarce resources they squander! How dare they be forced to endeavour to be applicable to the people who fund them!
This is all too much. So funny that the notions she utters balefully sound just great to me (aside from the inaccurate statements).
I was just watching this, and it feels like a good response.
The statist left will never shake their love of public education. Some of them might be antiwar generally, but they still think kidnapping children to ‘learn’ is acceptable. I also note she throws the ‘neoliberal’ buzzword around alot.
My response to her is as follows: public ‘goods’ is an oxymoron.
I was going to apply to Berkeley for my graduate work…now no thank you.
That is a great video.
She sounds like someone desperately trying to save her job, career and ‘industry’. She knows her socialist drivel will not be valued without the state.
She makes a pretty compelling case for privatization.
Or are we supposed to regard entrepreneurship as a bad thing?
Most of it is not bad, however he proves during his last 3 minutes to be just another collectivist!
Thank you very, very, much. The first minute alone killed the argument for science being a public good. I’ve only got 92 minutes left to watch. 
Everyone needs to watch that video.
That video is amazing. He does turn out to be a collectivist, but that has no bearing on the excellent points he makes.
I don’t know. People arguing for free markets on the basis that it is the best way to attain the goals for “the common good” of the collective makes me sick.
Why is that? The man who this site is named after was a utilitarian, after all.
It seems that you completely misunderstand the writings of Ludwig von Mises and the other similar individualistic thinkers. They do not argue that the ‘individual good’ matters and the ‘common good’ does not matter. Instead, they argue that the ‘individual good’ is the ‘common good’ and the ‘common good’ is the ‘individual good’ as far as the market is free because if it that were to not be true, society would not exist.
I have no problem with the above statement. But when the “common good” is used to justify violence against the individual, then the above equality (individual good=common good) is not what is in the mind of the thinker. The thinker is then engaged in the mystical realm of the collective good vs. individual good. The justification for the Queen to be the true owner of the property does not seem compatible with the individualistic thinking that you have presented.
It’s just not true that statists hate privatization. Plenty of them are only too keen to privatize sectors of the government since it gives them a chance to sell a monopoly title to a rent seeker. Granted, I’m sort of equivocating here, but the point is that more often than not privatization doesn’t lead to a more economic use of resources or to a freer market, it’s not really something free market advocates should be endorsing uncritically. Look at Russia, it’s not much more market oriented now than it was under the Soviets.
Does it really? Without appearing as a “troll” or whatever words you crazy kids use these days, I’m seriously interest whether or not it actually makes you sick that people might support the market on the grounds that, say, the poor will be better off.
I see a lot of people making comments about their hatred for the state and how sick they feel at the bailouts. Of course, no action ever comes from this, at most there are a few blog posts and then people go back to their lives. Granted, I’m not a libertarian, but at least I’m up front about my views, I’ve never pretended to “hate the state” or whatever. The thing is, people here complain about how they’re slaves etc. Yet, they mainly go around their lives just fine. To use a simple example, in spite of any laws against it they can still find weed with relative ease, kids under 16/18/21 just have to ask somebody old enough to go get them booze and they can drink and smoke all they want. To be honest I think it does an injustice to the people who live under some of the most totalitarian and coercive governments in the world and who are impoverished because of to say that they’re “slaves”.
Nevertheless, his anti-IP points are the strongest I have ever encountered, and they don’t rely on his collectivist view at all. I hope everyone interested in IP watches it - just ignore the last 3 minutes.