>so, why did clinton want to put pressure on the world to privatize?
That wasn't about oil - that was about phone companies, steel companies, etc., serving mainly domestic markets where there was lots of money to be made.
>I haven't been talking about the personal gain of capitalists
>through world oil prices. I'm talking about trying to understanding
>why _the neocons_ are acting rationally on their own worldview.
They may be.
>you may think it's is idiotic, but you probably also think it's
>idiotic for Walmart to treat employees as they do or Nike to spend
>ridiculous amounts of money on marketing.
No, I think it's rational profit-maximizing behavior. Rational in the narrow sense of capitalistic rationality, of course, but from their POV, it makes sense.
> But they, in fact, do these things that appear irrational. And,
>just because they seem irrational from a rational choice calculus,
>it does not follow that they ARE irrational.
I'm not saying it is irrational. I'm looking for better explanations than I've heard so far.
On the other hand, as Corey Robin put it in his Boston Review piece and his interview with me, there's an element of the Romantic about the neocons - questing boldly, and scornful of what Keynes called the Benthamite contraption.
Doug