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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
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NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Saturday, June 10, 2017

SOMETHING TO DO

If you live in West Virginia, Louisiana, Maine, Arizona, Colorado, Alaska, Ohio, or Nevada, call your senator’s office and ask for the staff person listed here, urging the senator to vote against the health care bill now moving to the floor in the Senate.  This is important, and worth a few moments of your time.

4 comments:

F Lengyel said...

I probably shouldn't spend the limited time I have commenting. I will never rise very far in the dominance hierarchy of the Internet commentariat. The rewards are meager for the most preeminent commenters, and less so for anyone vaguely conscientious about doing their own work (assuming this is something other than commenting on the Internet).

However, if I were to set such misgivings aside for a moment, I would advance the argument that the Republican assault on healthcare and the insurance markets is anticapitalist. Why would this be so? It would take a book to elaborate the points in sufficient detail, but here is a rough outline.

1. Virtually every transaction in modern capitalist economies is underwritten on some level by insurance.
2. Modern capitalism developed hand-in-hand with the development of insurance and insurance markets.
3. If you want to undermine of capitalism--even cause the collapse of capitalism in its present form, cancel every insurance policy.
4. One could advance the argument that government is the insurer of last resort following Ewald (this isn't logically necessary, but it would strengthen the case for 1 and 2.)
5. Undermining capitalism by canceling all (or sufficiently many) insurance policies is anti-capitalist. [This is supposed to be definitional--I'm not taking a position.]
"Therefore"
6. Undermining the health insurance markets by cancelling millions of health-insurance policies is anti-capitalist.

David E said...

This is a response to I.M. Flaud (get it? get it?), who follows the Trump model of making bold statements on a topic he knows nothing about. Your analysis is as flawed as your cheesy pseudonym.

Even in the Communist world there is, and was, insurance. Nowhere in Marxist theory, to my knowledge, is the State required to be the insurer of last resort, stepping in to pay for any risk or foolishness a citizen may have gotten himself in.

F Lengyel said...

David E religiously follows the Trump-Bannon model of profound ignorance. The statements concerning insurance are originally due to Joseph Heath; those on the state as insurer of last resort can be found in Heath and in François Ewald L'état providence [The Welfare State], Paris: B. Grasset, 1986]. The remarks of his final two sentences are glib non sequiturs having nothing to do with my own post.

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