Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "Marianne Williamson: America needs a Philosopher King" video.

  1. I'm listening to an American moan about the US health care system. In the UK, our heath care system is a disaster. The NHS waiting list is now 7 million. UK doctors risk their career should they give health care advice contradicting government diktat. The US does NOT want our centralized authoritarian system. It didn't begin like that. yet, once the state gets it's mits on something the tendency is towards silencing all critics. So I do NOT understand why leftists promote central control of the economy but expect critical thinking to flourish in such circumstances! The interviewee, Marianne Williamson, misuses the term "neo-liberal". She basically uses it as an insult for free-market supporters. In reality neo-liberalism is state interference in the economy (and in everything else). Neo-Liberalism began in the 1960s when economist Milton Friedman proposed legal action against polluters as a market-like system to stop pollution. Since then, the vast majority of neolib market-like "correcting" mechanisms are statist - they rely on laws to enable such neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is therefore ANTI- free market. Yet lefties don't want to understand this. To a leftie, neolib is just an insult to throw at supporters and enablers of capitalism. Labelling anything neolib signals one's anti-capitalism, without saying "capitalism". Yet the term has a very distinct meaning in economics and policy. A shame we lost that level of diagnosis.
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  2. Philosopher King <- No such thing. It's a concept dreamt up 2400 years ago by a philosopher called Plato. Unfortunately for humanity when all those other Greek philosophy books were destroyed (over time, war, and history) Plato's books survived. So accidents of history are responsible for the titles of Egg Head YouTube videos today.
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