If, for instance, a reformer proposed to resist the concentration of capital in combines and corners, the dear old gentleman would declare that nothing could stop the growth of monopolies and money-rings, because we could not alter human nature. This only serves to prove that he was himself singularly ignorant of human nature, if only because he was singularly ignorant of human history .... His moral theory was entirely modern, and was in flat contradiction to the moral theory that is really ancient. Most of his ancestors regarded making a corner simply as a crime, like that of cutting a throat or picking a pocket. Forestallers, as our fathers called them, were often put in a pillory, or even hanged on a gallows, to stop them from doing what he declares they cannot be stopped from doing.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
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3 comments:
It's a little like saying you can't stop theft or murder. And of course you can't eliminate them, but you can get together as a society and make them much more difficult and therefore rarer.
Then it becomes a question of trade-offs. Will you system work better with all the things you've got to do in order to discourage the behavior you want to minimize? When it comes to economic behavior like cornering a market, the answer is not always as obvious as it is with violent crime. -- It's also interesting to me that people are not more inclined to be suspicious when the government corners a market, as if that behavior were more benign than when the Hunt brothers do it.
Quite true. I am not suggesting hanging cornerers, just noting that there have been different attitudes that were taken for granted.
On the same theme teenagers will on the average tend to do what society expects of them. Expect them to act like adult with adult responsibilities, and more of them will.
We need to survive the end of the world before we're capable of getting together as a society: and even then, maybe... unless of course, you believe in miracles... Do you? I do too!
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