Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Keynes on Money

The main tenet of liberal socialism is that the state should cut the cord between money and time by taking over as much as three quarters of a country’s capital, bringing the frantic activities of saving and investment that plague capitalist societies under public ownership and control. In tandem with low interest rates and prohibitions on individuals’ and firms’ taking their money out of the country, the state’s management of savings and investment would achieve four goals. First, it would create full employment, which Keynes believed a capitalist economy could not bring about. Second, by funding investments in housing, transportation, and energy, the state would meet social needs that had long been neglected because greater profits were to be had elsewhere. Third, the state would end the scarcity of capital. Keynes thought that the possessor of capital was a social parasite, a “functionless investor” who was able to make money simply because only he had it to lend, much like a feudal landlord in possession of land. The capitalist also had “cumulative oppressive power,” issuing verdicts of life and death to workers and dictating policy to states. Because scarcity was the source of the capitalist’s parasitic power, ending that scarcity would lead to the “euthanasia of the rentier.”

Last, the worthiness of the state’s investments would not be measured by their rate of return but by their contribution to social well-being. Though Keynes imagined a variety of public goods that the state would bring about through its investments, the most important of those goods, for him, was the Smithian virtue of social intercourse:

Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth.

Keynes has long been accused of waging a war of economism against politics, elevating the economist above the statesman and thinking that the moral and political disagreements of a democratic society could be sidestepped or overcome by economic technicians and technocratic solutions.

... Keynes conceded that planning of the sort he was proposing “should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share [the planner’s] own moral position.” Yet he knew that his moral vision of an economy of cultural greatness and aesthetic excellence was not widely shared. ... Perhaps that’s why he found himself ... retreating to a position long familiar to philosopher-kings, calling for planners whose power could be safely exercised because they were “rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue” and because citizens had been reeducated according to the principles of “right moral thinking.”

... Keynes set out a second path for the future, one that he hoped would diminish the importance not just of money but of economic concerns altogether, without making any assumptions about what people believed or wanted from life. It was a vision of abundance and plenty, a world beyond scarcity, which made the hard power and hard choices of liberal socialism, as well as the requirement of democratic agreement about ultimate ends, unnecessary.

Corey Robin, The Trouble with Money (The New York Review, December 22, 2022)

Monday, July 22, 2019

They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil life, are in my opinion very discreet.

Montaigne

Friday, March 22, 2019

I'm a fugitive from injustice
But I'm goin' to be free...

What About Me? Quicksilver Messenger Service

Friday, June 09, 2017

Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together.

Michel de Montaigne

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Mistakes are good.  The more mistakes, the better.  People who make mistakes get promoted.  They can be trusted.  Why?  They're not dangerous.  They can't be too serious.  People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability.  They might land on you.

James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Having noted Chinese immobility, they gained a clearer sense of their own motion.  Their appreciation of individual initiative was enhanced as they noted that individuals in China could undertake only what society expected of them.  They grasped more sharply the strength of the human personality in the West by observing that the only recognized human entity in China was the collective.  They took the measure of the role of competition in their own country when they saw that no one in China could escape his assigned place, for to do so would offend against the established hierarchy.  They saw more clearly how important merchants were in Britain by observing how deeply they were scorned in China.  They became aware of their own devotion to the new by discovering the cult of the immutable.  In short, they gained a clearer insight into the fact that individualism, competition, and innovation were the wellsprings of their own wealth and power.

Alain Peyrefitte's observation, on the "failed" Macartney expedition to China 1792-94, in his masterful The Collision of Two Civilisations

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Marine Corps Rules:

01. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
02. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
03. Have a plan.
04. Have a back-up plan, because the first one probably won't work.
05. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
06. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun whose caliber does not start with a '4.'
07. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
08. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend (Lateral & diagonal preferred.)
09. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
10. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.
11. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
12. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
13. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating your intention to shoot.

There are various versions of these on the web. But a friend sent me these and they can be easily altered to fit the bureaucratic environment.