krebscycle

Robin Hanson, is a professor at a Koch funded George Mason University who recently confessed that the basic principles of democracy and the enlightenment are incomprehensible to him:

I’ve long puzzled over the fact that most of the concern I hear expressed on inequality is about the smallest of (at least) seven kinds: income inequality between the families of a nation at a time

So puzzling! Those radical leftists who are concerned about wealth inequality, like, say, Aristotle:

Happy is the state which is ruled neither by the very rich who are reared in luxury, nor by the very poor who are too degraded, but by the middle class who are equal and similar. The rich know not how to obey, nor the poor how to rule; and thus arises a city of masters and slaves; the slave envying his master and the master despising his slave. But the middle class are to be trusted. They do not covet other men’s goods and nobody covets theirs; they neither plot nor are plotted against; and therefore they are the very best material of the state. And where they outnumber one or both the other classes, the state will be safe from extremes, and will be free from faction.

Or, even worse, Thomas Jefferson:

 I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation.

just must confound  poor Professor Hanson.  Some of what follows in Hanson is predictable: the ad-hominem attribution of concern about wealth inequality to “envy” and some dumb stuff about “redistribution” and:   ” an implicit threat of violence should redistribution be insufficient.” Blah blah. All blog standard excuses from the servants of the rich since the Prophet Isaiah complained about it back in the day. But what’s novel in Hanson, and more generally about the current US right wing is the sheer talk-show host crassness and sexual violence that comes out. Hanson is writing days after a terrorist action in Canada by a member of a faction of violently misogynistic perverts who call themselves  “incel” (for involuntarily celibate). While the victims are still freshly in the morgue, Professor Hanson wants to come up with what must seem to him like a clever witticism:

“One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. “

You can almost hear the clownish “har har har” in Professor Hanson’s voice. Hey, those libtards gals should redistribute sex to  people who fantasize about rape and murder, whose ranks include a mass murderer. So funny, eh?

Modern “conservativism” is an extremist anti-American ideology that is violently authoritarian.  I guess Hanson would be able to approve of Jefferson’s slave holding, but otherwise, this 21st century “scholar” at  university named after one of Jefferson’s compatriots is firmly in the most hidebound  Tory camp. Here we are more than 200 years after the American Revolution, and lavishly funded academics right there in the Capitol are mocking the basic principles of democracy, human rights, and the enlightenment.  And the editorial management of the liberal press are swooning with admiration. Maybe they should change the names to Charles Cornwallis University and the New York Royalist Times.