Engineers of New Versions of Socialism Never Die


By Con George-Kotzabasis

Some have noticed, that whenever Clemons posts a ‘provocative’ post such as the present one “Grotesque Nationalism” presumably for the purpose of bringing into port the spiritually and cognitively leaking armada of anti-America Americans and anti-free marketeers, who are too scared and cowardly, and spiritually and intellectually too enfeebled, to be motivated to sail into the Schumpeterian heavy seas of “creative destruction,” and makes a bungle of an apparently serious post he stands to be corrected. And as ever with such posts it’s the resourceful, doughty, and politically and historically savvy American Jewess, Nadine, who corrects him, and so many others, like Dan Kervick, who in another post being intellectually disabled to give a serious answer to Nadine’s unassailable facts that Israel is engaged in defensive wars and not in expansive wars as Kervick claims, and whom Nadine accuses of being a “disgrace” to Western civilization. And to this accusation Kervick deploys a queasy defence by saying that for eighteen years he taught the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Leibniz, Hume, and Russel, as if such philosophic pedigree absolves him from his incompetence to answer cogently Nadine’s argument.


Why Clemons is in need to fall back from the total failure of “high octane socialism” to even the weakest low octane version of socialism in the face of a brilliant constellation of economists, such as Amartya Sen of Britain, who cogently argue that it was capitalism, with all its shortcomings that Adam Smith himself noted, in the last hundred years that has substantially decreased relative poverty and has incrementally increased the standard of living of the masses. In any version socialism has proven to be an irreversibly bankrupt policy.

McChrystal Could not Fight War with Obama's Contradictory Strategy

By Con George-Kotzabasis


Drew, you seem to place formality above entelechy, the vital element of war. Throughout history an ethic, no matter how laudable and worthy, in critical circumstances is degraded to a lower status if it is not made totally inutile. Winning the war is the primal goal and that can only be achieved by professionals, not by ‘drone’ like Bidens. You also seem to forget, that it was precisely this unconditional devotion to “conditional civilian control” that lost the war in Vietnam. My position is, so you won’t misunderstand me, certainly a general has to abide the commands of the executive branch, but no general worth his salt who has the ultimate responsibility of deploying his troops to win a war, a responsibility that has been given to him by his Commander-in-Chief, is obliged to execute commands that are contradictory in winning the war without expressing his deep concerns critically about the incongruence of the war plan that was designed by the Executive. One cannot increase the Surge by thirty thousand more troops and at the same time announce a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in two years time. This is the fundamental contradiction of Obama’s doltish strategy in Afghanistan. No one but a modern Tiresias could predict that the war against the Taliban would be won in two years or that the Karzai forces would be able to handle the insurgency by their own steam. Obama set the scene for a strategy that for the next two years American blood and valuable resources would be spend not for the goal of victory, but for the purpose of a withdrawal. This is the quintessence of McChrystal’s criticism of the Obama administration although he did not explicitly express it in these words.


Moreover, McChrystal could no more “undermine the executive branch” that was already undermined by itself. Also your accusation of McChrystal of being incompetent and of losing the respect of his troops by commanding them to patrol without cartridges in their guns, except maybe in some rare circumstances, is incredulous and is closer to phantasy than reality. McChrystal and Petraeus were the sagacious heroic victors of the war in Iraq. That one of the architects of this unprecedented victory, that even the wise Kissinger considered it to be unattainable, would lose the respect of his soldiers is pure phantasy. Further, that a most competent commander of the elite Special Forces, a “killing machine,” would put his soldiers at risk is beyond belief. I am curious to know the evidence from which you deduced this transformation of a deadly ‘seal’, who all his life has been trained for the tasks of the infernal world, into an unarmed Gandhian votary.

No More Free Suntans in Sunny Greece


By Con George-Kotzabasis

As Drew correctly states none of the classical liberal economists, Smith, Mises, Hayek, and I would add in this brilliant constellation Mill, Bawerk, and Schumpeter, ever argued that the free market was perfect and “market failure” was inconceivable. On the contrary they argued that the three cardinal principles of the free market were imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and risk. How could any rational and economically literate person accuse the classical liberal economists of contending that the free market were free from market failure, when their whole argument was premised on the above three principles? Moreover, they did argue, that market failure could be cured mainly by the ‘elixir’ of the free market, and not by unqualified and ubiquitous government intervention.


It is the critics of the free market that engendered the ‘straw man’ of the perfect market so they could knock it down easily without any effort of critical thinking, which of course they lacked, and replace it with the socialist planning nostrums or, a la Kervick, with the hybrid panacea of the “mixed economy,” whose avatar was and is modern Europe, and which presently is at the threshold of economic bankruptcy. The sun is still shining in sunny Greece, but there are no more free suntans for its denizens.