QUORA Wants To Ban Me: I Said The $6.2 T Bipartisan Bill Is Mercantilism

Mercantilist economic policies aimed to build up the state, commerce and industry, and Mercantilist theorists charged the state with looking for ways to strengthen the economy… [1]

The Internet is manipulated by the censors which its extremely wealthy owners pay. Many of these geeks have low levels of education, and see offense where there is none. Before getting on Quora today I got a warning that one of my comments violated their policy, and I had to sign an electronic document telling me I was going to be banned, should I do it again. [2]

My comment was entirely technical… and in economy. There were no attack against any member of Quora. There were no insults against people dead or alive. I just sung the praises of “Mercantilism”, an economic theory under which most powers operated for many centuries. I referred to an essay explaining the distinction between “Mercantilism” and “Colbertism”. I cannot imagine why the comment was banned. Actually the 6.2 trillion dollar package just passed is an example of Colbertism… Everybody agrees to save Boeing, that’s Colbertism. I cannot possibly imagine why such a comment would be banned. But it was. We are dealing here with people who micromanage thinking and scholarship. First comic relief:

The Anti-Trumpers are completely insane, but, you know what? It works! As Hitler said, the bigger the lie, the more plausible it sounds. NYT had an article claiming:”Trump to New York: Drop Dead!” The hatred this sort of insanity brings actually makes the anti-Trumpers even more full of righteousness and hatred…

I was answering Peter Malmutt who wrote:

This stimulus was absolutely necessary because as you highlight, no economy no money. While this is structured very differently to the TARP (lessons learned, esp not to trust desperate bankers) and equity positions in some corporates could be an outcome, doesn’t this look like quasi-socialism? Isn’t that something that is taboo for the Republican Party ideology, although they also used to hold strong views on balanced budgets and maximum national debt levels?

In a first comment, I said that, indeed, it was socialism. Then I wrote the following comment, deleted by Quora:
“People who voted Republican in the past wanted to stay wealthy. In a static world, it meant balanced budgets and absolute limits on debt, to insure the value of money. However, the world is not static anymore. Europe is balancing budgets, and getting ever more poor, relatively speaking. The US and UK have been profligate: it works.

If the USA had balanced its budget in World War Two, the completely unbalanced Nazis would have won… The USA sent, for free, absolutely gigantic quantities of planes, tanks, trucks, to the USSR… Enough to turn the tide… Similarly the UK got immensely indebted to the USA to stay in the war. At the end of the war, the USSR had no industrial capacity (it was in the USA) and the UK had to surrender to the USA…

The COVID19 is an occasion for the hard sci fi edge of the US economy to get ahead… Firms like Gilead… Republicans have come to realize that one has to stay ahead, if one wants to thrive… Ahead of the virus, but not just the virus, as governor Cuomo said today… Trump is a billionaire entrepreneur who made his fortune inside the USA, and was long an enemy of the Reagan Revolution (he prefered subsidies… ;-))… And thus a left wing Democrat, relative to say, Biden or Clinton…
Trump literally captured the Republican Party and has been able to harness this new way of creating wealth… Just like the old one, ruling all over Europe and the USA, it’s called MERCANTILISM, but one should call it in its most striking version, COLBERTISM…
Colbert Good, Keynes Not So Smart (https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/colbert-good-keynes-not-so- “

Why was the comment deleted?

Probably because some plutocrat saw it, and perceived that it could be viewed as complementary to Trump (in spite of the crack about subsidies… and it’s true Trump harnessed New York construction subsidies, that’s why the NY gov set up subsidies…). Then the plutocrat, or servant thereof signaled to Quora one better terrorize that author, whose entire “answer” could be interpreted as all too favorable to Trump… Never mind that I approved of a BIPARTISAN BILL…

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Trump Derangement Syndrome extends even to COVID. Here is what I read among the anti-Trump enraged and deranged:

“President Trump has turned to a French virologist with a history of criticizing climate science to offer the world hope amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.” Actually Raoult criticised poor meteorological predictions… which have gone indeed pretty bad recently, because the climate is changing too fast. But the TDS crowd has no limit:

“Last week, Trump tweeted that the combination of two medicines could dramatically alter the often deadly course of COVID-19.

“HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” Trump wrote. He then cited a study published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents that afforded little time for peer review.”

Notice the viciousness: the paper was actually PEER REVIEWED in the most prestigious Journal. And published by said Journal. But now hacks who probably never studied calculus or biology are telling us that the peer review had “little time”. Yeah, guys, thousands of people are dying everyday.

PhD Raoult is the greatest star in his domain… And an MD, so he prescribed his drug, hydroxychloroquine, to more than 4,000 patients: it’s safer than quinine (which I got for years).

The World Wide Web is a treasure. But it’s full of parasites, vermin, viruses… How to distinguish truth from lies is difficult. Over the years I was banned from many Internet outlets, for “fantastic thinking” (the guy who accused me of this was the Harvey Weinstein of philosophy, a serial rapist), or from the European Tribune for having suggested that bankers bankrolled Hitler (they made an Internet search, they said, to prove only me in the entire world had this theory… It’s how the wealth of the Bush family was launched…), or the Daily Kos, for saying Obamacare would make the profit of the healthcare insurance industry greater (it did), or from the Guardian, for being a Jihadist… The fatwa against me from Pakistan Justice (!) Ministry for offending the famous Rophet, a proof, no doubt… Etc.

There should be a law of public utility forbidding censorship… Ah, but as a New York Times subscriber, for decades, I was censored more than 1,000 times… Sanders wanted such a law… But Sanders didn’t want to hurt Biden’s feelings… Thus demonstrating a congenital inability to become US president…

WW Web is Direct Democracy. The political system we have is Democracy through Representatives… Basically, as in China. Direct Democracy has to develop Debate Expertise. This is not a new debate: Socrates was obsessed by the notion of Direct Democracy versus Expertise. What I call “Democratic Institutions” were developed, in the Middle Ages, to answer Socrates. However they turned out to have seen their would-be Expertise been devoured by Will To Power. So now we have anonymous censors without any education telling us “Mercantilism” is an insult.

In any case, Marx, Engels, Proudhon (their inspiration) fustigated the owners of the workers. Now one should fustigate the owners, or more exactly enslavers of thoughts.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Wikipedia entry on Mercantilism I linked to is extremely bad, and denotes an anti-Mercantilist bias. That’s because Mercantilism is nationalistic, whereas the plutocratic globalization was leveraging internationalism to avoid taxation and legislation… Servants of plutocrats probably wrote the article… I will not bother modifying it: total loss of time, I would get in a fight with arrogant poisonous mice…

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[2] Quora is an Internet outfit with intellectual pretense. It covers the full spectrum from unfathomably stupid, to extremely interesting… Depending upon who wrote the article, and what it is about.

Tags: Censorship, Mercantilism, Quora, Raoult, WWW