Download Free Peculiar Politics Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Peculiar Politics and write the review.

"In this deliciously amusing, multi-barbed novel, condom-carrying New York City yuppies assess one another...with hilarious intensity. Hank Lowe, a rising star in his law firm, swings between love for and disgust with Christine Lustgarden, who has browbeaten him into marriage because she's pregnant. Hank's client Mike Blitsky (aka Mike Mauvais), a transvestite pimp who runs a 'call boy' services, is writing an autobiography that Hank's ex-fiancee Dawn (whom he still loves) is editing. Dawn enlists her friend Katherine--an English lit scholar whose entangled love life makes the N.Y.C. subway map look simple--to dig up information on Mike's dark, sordid childhood. The finale, a wedding ceremony, is laugh-aloud funny." --Publishers Weekly
Economists typically treat government as something outside the business realm, a sort of “Lord of the Manor”. Richard Wagner argues that this is the wrong approach and can ultimately be destructive to capitalism and to society. Modern governments are a peculiar form of business enterprise. They face the same problems as regular businesses, such as ascertaining demand and organizing production, and act within the system in a way that can lead to a parasitical relationship with the market. Largely rooted in political economy, this book develops new theoretical ideas and formulations to explain why democracy is a difficult form of government to maintain. The author explores how and why limited governments can morph into a system of destructive politics, and looks at ways to escape this process. This dynamic book will be useful for public choice scholars, economists, political scientists, and lawyers who are interested in political economy in its various guises.
Government and politics might seem twisted today, but they’ve always been strange. There’s something about public office that, throughout time, has transcended normalcy. Politics Weird-o-Pedia presents some of the oddest and most interesting political absurdities and tidbits from around the world, from Peter the Great’s tax on beards to a lawmaker’s mistress whom he kept on the congressional payroll despite her admission that “I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone.” Eminences include: Some of America’s Founding Fathers wanted to jail newspaper reporters. A Mongolian conqueror liked to build cement walls out of the bodies of his vanquished opponents (while they were still alive). An all-female resistance to nuclear missiles in Britain resulted in a protest that lasted for nineteen years—long after the missiles were gone. Politics Weird-o-Pedia doesn’t stand still for a minute. It is intriguing, funny, and occasionally startling. It is more than a collection of trivia, adding bits of context and historical vignettes that make it clear that no matter how dysfunctional politics and government might seem today—we’ve been through it all many times before.
Too often, Wallace Hettle points out, studies of politics in the nineteenth-century South reinforce a view of the Democratic Party that is frozen in time on the eve of Fort Sumter--a deceptively high point of white racial solidarity. Avoiding such a "Civil War synthesis," The Peculiar Democracy illuminates the link between the Jacksonian political culture that dominated antebellum debate and the notorious infighting of the Confederacy. Hettle shows that war was the greatest test of populist Democratic Party rhetoric that emphasized the shared interests of white men, slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike. The Peculiar Democracy analyzes antebellum politics in terms of the connections between slavery, manhood, and the legacies of Jefferson and Jackson. It then looks at the secession crisis through the anxieties felt by Democratic politicians who claimed concern for the interests of both slaveholders and nonslaveholders. At the heart of the book is a collective biography of five individuals whose stories highlight the limitations of democratic political culture in a society dominated by the "peculiar institution." Through narratives informed by recent scholarship on gender, honor, class, and the law, Hettle profiles South Carolina's Francis W. Pickens, Georgia's Joseph Brown, Alabama's Jeremiah Clemens, Virginia's John Rutherfoord, and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. The Civil War stories presented in The Peculiar Democracy illuminate the political and sometimes personal tragedy of men torn between a political culture based on egalitarian rhetoric and the wartime imperatives to defend slavery.
This is a preliminary draft of the third of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter contrasts two approaches to working with the compound noun “political economy.” The standard, additive framework treats polity and economy as distinct objects, and with polity intervening into economy to change its attributes. The alternative, entangled framework treats polity and economy as comprising a single system that is only partially decomposable into separate subsystems. This alternative framework sets forth an alternative treatment of property rights and of the capital accounts of political enterprises.
The acerbic columnist for The Washington Post offers a trenchant look at the enigmatic culture of American politics, examining the often bizarre behavior, language, culture, social institutions, and taboos of Washington politicians. Reprint.
A Strange Liberty calls for the relentless pursuit of decentralization in whatever manner this course is still open to decent, freedom-loving citizens. Quoting from, among others, the late Angelo Codevilla, a bold scholar of government and an unabashed critic of our democratic decadence, Deist proposes that states that oppose federal overreach and woke indoctrination react against these evils through noncompliance. He shows again and again that the federal government’s behavior has been blatantly unconstitutional for a very long time. As the book chronicles, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and other federal agencies have all been repeatedly unleashed on those whom the one-party state wishes to target. In light of this situation, state governments should not be obliged to serve slavishly a federal administration that is making war on some of its citizens. Up until Joe Biden’s election, it was in fact the Left, with media incitement, which was calling for resistance to the federal government, on behalf of marijuana use, sanctuary for illegals, and gay marriage before that. Why shouldn’t the Right or the non-Left have the same right to disobey federal directives which are coming from a regime that is openly hostile? Jeff here has given outraged citizens a voice and extolls them to pursue this practice of resistance through state or local governments where they can. Although he knows it’s not clear this strategy will be sufficient to work against federal overreach, he encourages us to get out of our chairs and be proactive in finding ways to push back. In A Strange Liberty, there is more of the mood and wit of H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury than the spirit of National Review. This anthology does not just duplicate the positions of a previous generation. It is a creative return to truths that were never lost and should be given an active voice again.
Scholarship on American labor politics has been dominated by the view that the American Federation of Labor, the dominant labor organization, rejected political action in favor of economic strategies. Based upon extensive research into labor and political party records, this study demonstrates that, despite the common belief, the AFL devoted great attention to political activity. The organization's main strategy, however, which Julie Greene terms 'pure and simple politics', dictated that trade unionists alone should shape American labor politics. Exploring the period from 1881 to 1917, Pure and Simple Politics focuses on the quandaries this approach generated for American trade unionists. Politics for AFL members became a highly contested terrain, as leaders attempted to implement a strategy which many rank-and-file workers rejected. Furthermore, its drive to achieve political efficacy increasingly exposed the AFL to forces beyond its control, as party politicians and other individuals began seeking to influence labor's political strategy and tactics.
Economists typically treat government as something outside the business realm, a sort of 'Lord of the Manor'. Richard Wagner argues that this is the wrong approach and can ultimately be destructive to capitalism and to society. Modern governments are a peculiar form of business enterprise. They face the same problems as regular businesses, such as ascertaining demand and organizing production, and act within the system in a way that can lead to a parasitical relationship with the market. Largely rooted in political economy, this book develops new theoretical ideas and formulations to explain why democracy is a difficult form of government to maintain. The author explores how and why limited governments can morph into a system of destructive politics, and looks at ways to escape this process. This dynamic book will be useful for public choice scholars, economists, political scientists, and lawyers who are interested in political economy in its various guises.
Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in different ways since the early twentieth century. Here in twenty-two essays scholars address a variety of these intersections from a historical perspective. The chapters include such diverse topics as the cultural history of psychoanalysis, the complicated relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult, and the struggles for dominance between the various schools of psychology. They show the ambivalent positions of the "psy" sciences in the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes of Nazi Germany, East European communism, Latin-American military dictatorships, and South African apartheid, revealing the crucial role of psychology in legitimating and "normalizing" these regimes. The authors also discuss the ideological and political aspects of mental health and illness in Hungary, Germany, post-WW1 Transylvania, and Russia. Other chapters describe the attempt by critical psychology to understand the production of academic, therapeutic, and everyday psychological knowledge in the context of the power relations of modern capitalist societies.