Prefaced with the usual double standard notice: imagine if the pornstress had picked a ‘filthy immoral’ democrat instead of a ‘fastidious Christian’ conservative:
WTSP— Porn star Jenna Jameson chose a familiar stage to make her endorsement for the 2012 presidential election Thursday night. At a San Francisco strip club, the former adult actress and stage performer said she was ready for a Romney presidency.
“I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office,” Jameson said while sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. “When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.”
You know, I can’t say her reasoning is unsound. In fact that’s the most honest endorsement for Romney I’ve hear about all year.
Yes indeed.
Well, that’s just one person who fucked people for money endorsing another. Makes perfect sense.
But one did it with consent.
Question is: why do millions of very poor, destitute Americans systematically vote Republican?
Election results are usually very close. Or is it that half the voters are “the 1 %”?
Does not compute.
Answer: over a period of decades a small group of super wealthy conservatives have invested heavily in their political infrastructure. They now have massive, effective interlocking sets of support networks, from churches to pseudo news to think tanks, they hav their own scholarships and grants, their own libraries and universities, all dedicated to keeping enough of the rank and file misinformed and angry enough to vote against their own middle class interests and allow conservatives to win enough elections to obstruct progress and occasionally enact conservative ledge, the same network is also focused on rewarding success/loyalty and punishing detractors.
That’s a short, quick and crappy answer to a great question. I suggest the book What’s the Matter with Kansas for a far better explanation, quite well written and very informative.
^I actually have a question about that. In my experience, the vast majority of economists I’ve run across have leaned heavily towards the laissez faire/Austrian side of things. When I ask actual economists for book recommendations, I almost always get something along the lines of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232
http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Serfdom-Documents-The-Definitive/dp/0226320553/ref=pd_sim_b_2
I’m having trouble reconciling the comments I constantly hear on places like FTB about how libertarians are all living in a fantasy world with the observation that very few economists seem to be on the Keynesian side of things (and those that are, like Krugman, get everything they say ripped to pieces by people who seem to understand economics a lot better than I do).
You guys always make it sound like this is just a Koch-funded conspiracy to get the poor folk who don’t know no better to vote against their own interests, but that’s not what I see so far from surveying the opinions of economists who are supposed to be somewhat outside the American political machine.
Any help here?
One should also acknowledge that once you have become rich no one cares that much how you earned you money. Of course Jenna harmed far fewer people,if any,making her money. She never gutted anyone’s pension fund or sent someone’s kids to war.
redpanda,
There are a couple of economists who post regularly on FtB. I am one and I’m a Keynesian-type economist.* Actually most Western economists, including most North American economists, are neo-classical economists. The Austrian School and Chicago School economists** are actually a minority. However, they’re noisy economists. When Fox News wants an economist to sneer at liberals, they get one of the Chicago Boys from the Cato Institute to jump through their hoops.
Just like you can find libertarians all over the internet, even though they are a tiny minority of Americans, you can find Austrian and Chicago economists all over the internet. Few of them come here because they’ve learned they’re expected to justify their theories. Most libertarians claim to follow Austrian School economics but they’re generally economic illiterates.
*I’m a New Keynesian, but I won’t go into the differences between Keynesians, Neo-Keynesians, Post Keynesians and New Keynesians.
**Austrian economists and the Chicago Boys are two similar schools of economics. Wikipedia will give you a decent description of each school.
Ah, thanks for the reply. Is there anything you would recommend I read on Keynesian-type/neo-classical economics? General Theory is probably a little too dense for me, and as a medical student with a family my free time is somewhat limited.
On the other hand, a lot of popular press books are too dumbed down (I recently read Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, and wished it were a little more meaty).
Incidentally, a few years ago there was a survey of economists in Austria. None of them were Austrian School economists. The school was founded by an Austrian, Ludwig von Mises, in the 1920s and the theories were further articulated by another Austrian*, Friedrich Hayek.
I won’t say anything about Austrian economics because I’m not sympathetic to it.
*Hayek became a British subject in 1938.
There’s three economics books I recommend for the non-economist:
First and foremost, there’s Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science. Wheelan is a journalist who writes for “Economist” magazine. He’s used to explaining economics to the layman, he’s a clear writer, and he doesn’t write down to people.
Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist is also quite good. It has similarities to Freakonomics but without the latter’s political biases.
If you want a conservative book Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy is well written and covers basic economics well. I have some problems with this book. Sowell is in love with the Free Market™ and is anti-government. He also takes the attitude the only reasons anyone would disagree with him are either pigheadedness or sheer ignorance.
I recommend you start with Wheelan, then read Harford, and finally read Sowell for a contrasting view.
Thanks! I’ll check them out. It’s been frustrating so far because most of the people I’ve run into so far have tended to be Chicago/Austrian based, and I’m getting really tired of seeing everything painted in black and white. Sowell at least seems to be careful about his use of absolutes.
I mean, at this point I have absolutely no problem acknowledging that many government interventions have been short-sighted and ultimately harmful, but don’t pull out a few examples like that and then try to sell me on the idea that therefore government intervention is always bad and the free market really will solve all of our problems. I need a lot more than that before I go put a Ron Paul bumper sticker on my car.
Her announcement and her statement of her reason, interestingly, is either an incredibly politically naive and stupid thing for a Republican supporter to say, or an incredibly clever thing for a stealth Democrat to say…..
I think the best layman’s book on economics is Krugman’s Pop Internationalism. It’s a collection of essays he wrote to address his worries about the early days of the Clinton administration, but it’s still relevant. Best book for explaining comparative advantage and currency balances out there.
If you really understand this book’s message you will cringe every time someone mentions being “competative”. Krugman argues that how well other nations are doing is pretty much irrelevant to how a nation is doing. Only average productivity growth and income distribution matter. Trade policy and industrial policy are irrelevant too.
@Amphiox
Alternately, it’s a completely politically neutral thing to say because no one who would actually vote Republican is ever going to hear of it. Even if porn stars were usually heard in the conservative echo chambers, this particular statement would never make it there.
Jameson and Romney have a lot in common: they profited from pornography shown in Marriott Hotels.
The only difference it, Jameson did it on her back and Romney did it from the back room.
And both want to appeal to large consumers of porn, the uptight and overly conservative far right.
Well, at least she’s up-front about it.
Thats what I love about this place, where else on the internet would the story “porn star endorses politician” lead to a discussion of economics?
Now he has a supporter who changes positions as much as he does.