A sentence worth diagramming

Other than deleting a couple of comments he made here a while back, I have not interacted with Rod Kailey in months. So it was odd to read this:

Soren Kierkegaard pointed out in the book “Either/Or” that ofttimes we are identified by our enemies more so than by our friends. So, Mark decided that Dave Budge and I were his arch-nemeses, and I haven’t had much peace online since.

There is talent in that sentence – real talent. There is fake victimhood, poseur-like intellectual musings, and brothers-in-arms coupling of himself with Dave Budge. As I used to say of my former boss, a woman with a net worth of $35 million at that time, between the two of us we averaged $17.5 million each.

Here’s my take on Dave Budge: He comes off, oddly, as a wounded refugee. He came, apparently, from high finance, and is a recovering drug addict. I cast no dispersion aspersions on that matter. It’s a lifelong battle, and he is winning at this point. He’s an educated intellectual, well-read, and is a gifted writer with a well-developed sense of humor. He suffers from arrogance but also has the ability to self-reflect and has at times attempted to squash that trait. But it is always there. (Trust me, I know these things.) He finds me intolerable – I bring out his anger, and since no one can live with such feelings for very long, has banned me from his website. He reads this site, probably only occasionally, but never comments other than to sneer in a passive-aggressive manner elsewhere.*

My problem with Budge has always been the other end of the grinder. No matter what quality material goes in, it always comes out breakfast sausage. He advocates economics of the Austrian school, a little more developed than standard neoclassical fare, but still a deaf-mute when it comes to describing the world as it really exists. The whole of the profession of economics is, in my view, cloaked ideology. Unfortunately, the one lurking behind the Friedman and Hayek and Mises and so many others is fascism. They didn’t knowingly advocate such a thing, of course, nor does Budge. However, there is big money behind the universities, endowed chairs and think tanks that promote it. Even as it fails on every level, it is standardized thought for anyone entering the profession. It is the voice of the 1%. Nothing else is taught in significant degree. (It must be said, in fairness, that Budge has thought deeper than most about income distribution and health care, and has non-standard views on those and a few other matters.)

Imagine that all the companies that process carbohydrate-based food also funded food science … wait. They do. That’s why food science advocates high-carb low-fat diets. In economics, the high-carb equivalent that prevails in the face of all evidence is called neoclassical, with the Austrian School the equivalent of a Jenny Craig diet. So virtually all dietitians advocate low-fat diets, and all economists are neoclassical.

Anyway, that’s Budge – complex, flawed, human, arrogant, wrong, right, interesting, funny.

Kailey, on the other hand, is just a dick.
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*Only Max Bucks is banned here, and not for content. Just volume.
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The drawing above is called poseur, by adrienne price

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