Boshembechle's suggested reading list for Economics

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Road to Serfdom isn't 'challenging'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Georges Batailles' The Accursed Share is 'heterodox' in the same way child sacrifice is. It's also incredialy literary, operating in the same intellectual space as Tzara and Breton.

I never knew Bataille wrote on economics.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, "economics". The worthless members of the priesthood of orthodoxy wouldn't recognize The Accursed Share as anything resembling mainstream economics, and that includes the various right-libertarian diseases. It is economics' answer to Lovecraft's non-Euclidean architecture.

This sounds like something I might actually want to read. A cursory search indicates that it deals primary with Bataille's characteristically eclectic theories about the concept of surplus?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yes, and particularly his view that deliberately destructive rituals are necessary in all societies to dispose of that surplus, whether it be sacrifice, war, etc. It's the perfect antidote to neoliberal 'rationalism'.

That sounds really interesting--and passes the first-impression smell test, at least for me. (I'd question the idea that such rituals have to be 'destructive', but I'm long past the point where I expect to fully agree or fully disagree with Georges Bataille on much of anything.) I'll definitely have to give this a look.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

Have you ever read an argument from Ayn Rand?

Yes.

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Yes, and I was president of a large university's philosophy club for a year.

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Rand's staggering ineptitude as a philosopher.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

Have you ever read an argument from Ayn Rand?

Yes.

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Yes, and I was president of a large university's philosophy club for a year.

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Rand's staggering ineptitude as a philosopher.

How has Rand not critiques government?

Rand certainly argues against government. My point is that I don't consider her arguments either valid or sound enough to merit being referred to in terms of critique. They're essentially projections of a stripped-down, seemingly almost purposefully banal version of a Grecian heroic ideal, which at times appears to be more a sexual fantasy than anything else, into the modern political sphere by somebody with no background in economics, history, sociology, or any related subject. It's not so much critiquing as inveighing. At least boshembechle's recommendations, awful as many of them are, are actually by economists.

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Well, to list the first few examples that spring to mind, her proposed resolution of Hume's Fork is pat question-begging that answers literally nothing, her concept of the individual doesn't follow from its own proposed aetiology (although this problem is not unique to her by any means), and in the process of proposing said aetiology she somehow manages to conflate the Law of Identity with an argument against the existence of God. And since she was insistent that Objectivism was a seamless and self-contained worldview, incoherence on questions of metaphysics by her own terms calls the politics into question as well.