Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Professor berates colleagues who voted for Trump" video.

  1. Carlson may be the most nuanced interviewer in commercial-t.v. format, which isn't saying much, but it takes some skill to pull it off, day in and day out, in such an obsolete forum.
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  2. sergio perez: You realize that if they leave Social Security as is, that it will go bankrupt? What's YOUR proposal? MY proposal is that we do away with it, entirely. It was openly a pyramid scheme from the very beginning, propped up by a never-ending growth of new participants at the bottom of the pyramid, and plagued by adding more recipients to the list, while the population explosion that made it all seem like utopia is over, and the Baby Boomers expect MORE benefits, and they will ruthlessly extract them from a shrinking number of young people. If Bernie Madoff does it, it's a felony. If the federal government does it, it's government doing a good deed out of love, compassion, and better-than-yours virtue. To every concern, the answer is "No, this program will never be used for that. And we keep the money in a 'lock box,' that nobody will ever or can ever (ever ever ever ever) use for other purposes." And then they keep adding new ways for people to receive benefits without paying in. I will grant 'em this, though. When they then do the inevitable 'lock-box raid,' they're careful to put a sincere and heartfelt IOU in the box. So we got that goin' for us. Also, they're very good about keeping it quiet, and it's good not to rile people up.
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  3. At the least, it should be treated as your private capital investment. People like you, who work hard and pay in rarely get even 100% return, let alone any actual earnings. They're too busy dividing up your money between 50 other people to waste any time worrying about their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors. That's the beauty (and the horror) of government. They're the only entity who can use force to impose their will, even when their will contravenes reality and principles of real fairness.
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  4. In the mathematician's case, I suspect it's a mechanistic view of society that fails to take human nature properly into account. And I bet he's not really all that well-read in history or the current research in psychology, biology and sociology. Sociology, especially, is kind of a surprise ally of the classical liberal side. I used to see sociology and psychology as a bunch of wishy-washy liberals drawing rock-hard conclusions from putty-soft data. But the researchers in both disciplines have maintained an ideology-free pursuit of truth that's put them at odds with the postmodernists who dominate on the political side.
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  5. I stand as living proof, aurora123borealis. Coming up, my math mentors were not uniformly left or right, but the lefties were more outspoken. Mathematicians have very strong reasoning skills, but our proofs and conclusions are no better than our initial assumptions. Einstein, himself stressed the fact that mathematics is always internally consistent, but the extent to which that internal consistency applies to external reality is never a sure thing. We don't go from using the Bell Curve as a tool in analyzing empirical data to concluding there is a human being, somewhere, who stands 10,000 feet tall, even though the normal distribution says that there are.
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