Mark Ames on V.S. Naipaul

Discussion in Naked Capitalism Mark Ames: Why the American Right Never Liked V.S. Naipaul:
"I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere.....

Now that Naipaul could compare the two Eldridge Cleavers–the Black Panther vs. the Republican lackey–the message was clear. If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American Right-Wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front-lines of the ideological battle of the 1970′s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.

Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American Right by doing what he was always best at: Describing exactly what he saw at the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering."

As thet say, read the whole thing. In the comments section Yves Smith has some comments on Australia "I’ve lived in Australian and done business in Canada. They are so far from libertarian it isn’t funny.

Both are WAY to the left of the US. They have universal health care, much more progressive taxation (and far more cumbersome tax reporting in Oz than here), much higher minimum wages, have laws more favorable to unions, far more aggressive regulation (Australia’s version of the FDA makes the FDA look like pussies; they shut down a major drug maker while I was there and have much tougher policies on food than we do. Similarly Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have more extensive and intrusive bank regulation by a country mile).

Voting is MANDATORY in Australia, for Chrissakes. Paid political advertising on TV is forbidden. People there do not believe CEO of companies they did not build deserve to be paid a lot. Hedge fund manager John Hempton has said flat out no CEO is worth more than $2 million a year, and I’m sure if I asked him he would not object to confiscatory taxation to support that. And he has plenty of company in the top tier in Oz (I know because I met about half the people at that level in Sydney, they are very accessible if you make the effort).

And Australia is also rated as having one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world, in the same category as the US, the UK, and China. So how libertarian is that?"