I believe in white privilege in a very significant regard. The privilege that I speak of is so significant that it’s had the power to allow millions of my fellow whites to lift themselves out of a countless number of circumstances and to reach the highest levels of social, political, and economic class. For those who don’t have this privilege, it’s kept them mired in internal and external conflict, convinced that without this privilege they can never achieve the same levels of whatever class as those who have it. And the thing is, they aren’t wrong.
Tag: privilege
What the American Flag Means to Me
The American flag, the “star-spangled banner” is one of those things whose meaning to me has changed significantly over the course of my life. Once upon a time it meant being a winning nation, the best the world had ever seen in terms of righteousness, justice, freedom, and opportunity. When I saw the flag, those are the ideas that were brought to mind, ideas that I value, and produced the warm and fuzzies deep inside. I admired and waved the stars and stripes with a sense of pride. What the American flag means to me today is very different than what it meant to me as recently as 10 years ago.
Jamie Dimon is Right to Fear Cryptocurrency
When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud,” what ensued looked a lot like a “poop and scoop” con: The practice of driving down a thing’s price by saying bad things about it, then buying up a bunch of it before the price bounces back.
How Mass Schooling Perpetuates Inequality
For kids like Matt, schooling can bring out the worst behaviors. Like a trapped tiger–angry and afraid–they rebel. Unable to conform properly to mass schooling’s mores, they get a label: troubled, slow learner, poor, at-risk. They will carry these scarlet letters with them throughout their 15,000 hours of mandatory mass schooling, emerging not with real skills and limitless opportunity, but further entrenched in their born disadvantage.
What the Left Should Like about Public Choice
Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan, et al.
Public Choice Analysis a Scheme for Imposing Racist Oligarchy on the USA? Preposterous!
The claim that public choice analysis is intended to, or actually does, assist the rich in dominating the poor, or the capitalists in dominating the workers, or the whites in dominating the blacks cannot be made in good faith by anyone who has the slightest familiarity with public choice analysis.
How I Changed My Mind on Intellectual Property
I’d been solidly libertarian for many years the first time I gave thought to “intellectual property” (copyrights and patents) at all. Someone mentioned the protection of property, including intellectual property, as the root of prosperity and freedom. I agreed without hesitation. It just seemed to make sense.
How to Spite Putin
I have an idea. It’s so clever and foolproof that I’m surprised no one in the ruling elite and its mass media has thought of it. We can yank the rug out from under that dastardly Putin, and he’ll never bother us again.
Political Means and Economic Means
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man…is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose… to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means”… while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
Supporting Government “Services”
If I am attacking the theft and coercion behind some things, don’t take it as an attack on you for using those things–unless you start being nasty in defense of the status quo and making it about some tangent that buzzes your bonnet.