The people surrounding Trump

[Admin]

Pretty scary, at times. Thiel is a bona-fide entrepreneur, but if he's appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump (there are rumors this might actually happen), he's not qualified and he has some rather weird ideas:

Thiel’s belief that the gold standard was a good idea is not shared by, well, pretty much anyone who knows anything at all. As Matthew O’Brien explained in the Atlantic,

Economics is often a contentious subject, but economists agree about the gold standard — it is a barbarous relic that belongs in the dustbin of history. As University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler points out, exactly zero economists endorsed the idea in a recent poll. What makes it such an idea non grata? It prevents the central bank from fighting recessions by outsourcing monetary policy decisions to how much gold we have — which, in turn, depends on our trade balance and on how much of the shiny rock we can dig up. When we peg the dollar to gold we have to raise interest rates when gold is scarce, regardless of the state of the economy. This policy inflexibility was the major cause of the Great Depression, as governments were forced to tighten policy at the worst possible moment.

Indeed, as economist Brad DeLong notes, nations began to emerge from the Great Depression at about the same time that they abandoned the gold standard..

Trump’s potential SCOTUS appointee thinks America took a wrong turn when women got the vote

And then there is this:

In an essay published by the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, Thiel questioned the very idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the governed. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel claimed. He added that he thinks America made a serious wrong turn when it began extending basic human rights to women and poor people.

Moreover, Thiel’s views, while out of place among mainstream thinkers, are increasingly common among right intellectuals. Consider his Cato essay, for example. The main thrust of that piece is not that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but that democratic values are the enemy of the libertarian society Thiel would prefer to live in.

Trump’s potential SCOTUS appointee thinks America took a wrong turn when women got the vote

On the latter, they might very well have a point. If democracy leads to the likes of Putin, Trump, Erdogan, Chavez, perhaps democracy isn't compatible with freedom (or a decent society) anyway..