TRAGER'S SPARE TIRE | 2006-10-12
Trager needs the old coach to put him through some spring training while we are exchanging ideas. He has gotten intellectually flabby.
Older seminar members don't need me to remind them of this and Trager may not, but I don't know where Trager is right now. I don't put IN MY OPINION here, but it is understood here. Those three words are the key to the kingdom. When I say something here, it comes with IMO.
So, IMO Trager is the classic example of a world class player who has become intellectually flabby for lack of people in his on rarified range to talk to. That was what I criticized in his first entry.
Those of us who are in THIS intellectual league spend our lives talking to people who aren't. The result is that everything you say is out of their league. You get lazy. You get unorganized and soft. It takes no effort at all to beat the hell out of third rate minds and intellectual fossils.
So you get lazy. You get used toe verybody being impressed by the most superficial observations.
So you get superficial.
Aka, SILLY.
I need the old Trager, the one I used to talk with toe-to-toe.
From the outside, it would seem as if Trager has been in the intellectual fast lane the whole time. He has hobnobbed with Nobel Prize Laureates and the leaders of our movement, including William Pierce.
But outside of people like Pierce and me, Trager has been dealing with 1) Lesser minds and 2) Intellectual fossils. A Nobel Prize Laureate, for example, spends the rest of his life on some extension of his basic idea. The mental flexibility that made his insight goes away.
One Laureate Trager and I know has not had a new idea since Trager and I met forty years ago. He has spent the rest of his life mathematizing his ideas and using Publicchoicespeak. The days when Public Choice was stated in plain English and when it was developing are long gone. Now Public Choice has 'a literature."
In academia, when something gets "a literature" it is time to call the undertaker. No one who is not keeping up with "the literature," who doesn't talk about the latest pointless jargon and agonized mathematical stuff can talk to those who have turned a living field of thought into an embalming session. You get no more intellectual exercise in dealing with these intellectual fossils than you do from third-rate minds.
We deal here in BASICS, the way Public Choice used to. Trager has been away too long.