Even in this age of supposed “enlightenment”, I still find it hard to believe that there are this many mouth-drooling, morons who believe this ultra-left, socialist blarney!

http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/10/washington-virginia-utah-biz-cz_kb_0711bizstates-table.html

http://www.wvupress.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=45&products_id=40

I had a class to one of Sobel’s close friends in another social science. The man spent most of his time attacking all the “Marxists” on campus. I discovered that none of these people had a clue what Marx said about anything, but they were all knee-jerk against him. It’s almost as if someone said Hitler.

If anything, this knee-jerk dismissal of Marx led me to actually read what Marx actually said about things, and I’ve read several good books on Marxist theory and Marxist history. I’ve found there is a reason why they hate him so much. It’s not because he was wrong (He was wrong about some things, like his historicism and how long it would take capitalism to disappear and where it would disappear first), but because the things he was saying back in the mid 1800’s were very clearly against the dominant paradigm– the one in which they operate so coolly. The basic contours of Marx’s analysis I would say aren’t exactly incorrect; in fact, I would say that they are more accurate now than when he came up them. To tell you the honest truth, I don’t think any of these people have ever read Marx.

I’ve learned that if someone says “that’s Marxist,” I just look up what Marx actually said. I’ve found that Marx and I tend to come up with the same things a great deal of the time. It’s actually kind of bizarre.

The right is trying to repackage itself as not imperialist or religious. It’s now trying to connect to my generation in libertarian way–South Park, Penn and Teller, Reason, Drew Carey, and Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the same exploitive right wing that it always was.

The problem is, as I noted in my blog post on the subject, that he didn’t prep himself for a hardball sort of interview from a real journalist (Bray Cary is a brilliant marketing exec with a paleoconservative political agenda, not a journalist, IMHO). He will probably be ready next time.

I’m probably slightly more (but not much more) open to his argument than y’all, but “hard scientific facts,” my ass.

He’s definitely being played and used as a pawn in a bigger political game. His naive views of what is objective “science” and what is political are kind of sad and very limited.

There are some things he says I agree with: ending corporate welfare (or at least having clear job quality standards and clawback provisions for public aid to corporations) and the general idea that market economies, with some safeguards and public investments, work much, much better than command economies. The thing is that I don’t know too many people who advocate command economies these days.

I’m with him (and you) on making Promise more need based, too. I’m also not opposed to all targeted tax cuts for business, as long as these don’t come at the cost of cutting education, infrastructure, and vital services.

The good things he advocates are negated and/or vastly outweighed by the ideological biases and the ideological extremism of the agenda. Maybe that’s the price of being a true believer.

The political reality is that the people who previously accepted Blankenship as their personal/political savior are now placing their hopes in this book to do what B’s millions couldn’t.

I listened to the whole interview over the weekend, and my conclusion about Sobel is that he’s not a partisan hack, he’s just hopelessly politically naive. He repeated the thing about abortion/gay marriage/the Iraq war four or five times in the 55 minute interview. He said that his personal political views are not in line with the Republican party (e.g., he supports gay marriage). Then he said that he doesn’t even pay attention to political candidates and couldn’t tell you what their positions are and that, in fact, he usually doesn’t even vote. He doesn’t vote! Here’s a guy who says that he wants to do something to help West Virginia’s economy, and he’s completely unengaged in politics and apparently has no idea what his representatives in government are doing. If he truly does care about WV’s economy, he might want to start paying attention.

He did say one thing that I completely agree with — that the Promise scholarship should take financial need into account. Also, when Scott Finn listed all of the policy proposals that are in lockstep with the Republican party’s platform, one of the things he listed was eliminating business subsidies, which, last I checked, wasn’t part of the GOP’s agenda.

Part of me thinks this guy is being played by others who do have a political agenda (i.e., the Public Policy Foundation). I didn’t get the feeling that he wasn’t being honest, I think he’s just completely unsavvy about politics. Toward the end of the interview, he said that it would be a shame if the issues in this book became really political, because then reform won’t happen in WV. Sorry Dr. Sobel — too late.

Social science is an imperfect and messy conversation that seeks little nuggets of truth and can never find anything “definitive.”