Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death?
No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can’t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that’s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy—the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors—because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not.
or this
tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people happily call for more "public" control of our economies and lives without the faintest clue of what it really means behind the scenes; as though Lord Acton's Law is somehow abolished when you have elections. You'd think that the counterexamples like Chicago would be adequate refutation of that belief. And it never ceases to amaze me how many other people, reacting against the terrifying insanity of the first group, are persuaded that holy greed will always work for the public good.
I'll have to keep an eye out for the book.
Must . . . not . . . order . . . on . . . Kindle . . . until I finish reading the book I downloaded yesterday. This looks great, though.
ReplyDeleteIs "greed" really the word you're looking for, though? The free market allocates resources by letting a large number of individuals make trade-offs concerning their own resources according to their own needs and preferences. Individuals whose overwhelming concern is to amass material goods, and who are skillful and/or lucky, will get rich. Unless they stole all the stuff, whom does this hurt?
The world is always going to have a mixture of people who are more or less concerned about giving their stuff away without asking anything material in return. I'm not sure you can alter the mixture by having either dispersed control (free market) or central control (socialism). If acquisitiveness and retentiveness really hurt society, do they really do more harm in a free-market system than in a centrally planned one?
The goal of a free-market system is not to enshrine greed but to let a lot of dispersed people make judgments about the relative worth of scarce resources with alternative uses.
I'm thinking mostly of the Ayn Rand crowd. But I've run across others as well who defend the wealthy and powerful as though they were too pure-hearted to ever take shortcuts or "frame mischief by statute." "Greed" is the word they choose and so it's the word I use.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have a completely free market; for example we break up monopolies. Monopolies don't seem intrinsically bad, but in practice they almost always turn predatory. (ATT didn't, AFAIK, but they also stagnated. One unfortunate cost of the breakup was the loss of Bell Labs, though.) The mortgage disaster seems to have been a combination of insane requirements in some areas (banks must make risky loans) and no oversight at all in others (the infamous bundling and re-labeling of mortgages). Being sane about the regulation would have made our semi-free market less likely to go off the rails, and without being very invasive.
I'm no socialist--I call myself a Godelian: any system you create will be broken somewhere. (Dunno if he'd appreciate the interpretation :-) ) Some system are a lot worse than others, and it seems to me as though we're in the process of trading in something that more or less worked for a cronyism.
The safest approach seems to be to keep a jaundiced eye trained on any great economic or political power groups. Maybe for now they're run by noble characters, but that never lasts.
You could say that an economy based mostly on production and service and trade among peers is a humbler one than one based on rent-seeking or conquest. I'll have to puzzle on the meaning of that a little while.