In short, a human-scale (vastly smaller) government would tend to encourage human-scale organizations.

“Enmassment”……of society. We likes this one, it rhymes with “debasement” and creeps up near “emasculate” or “engorgement”. This is the perfect term…..a bit of genius. No matter how one cares to flip this rock, a culture that suffers from “enmassment” aint got much to offer besides “mass”.

When there is no political agency urging chaste restraint in fiscal matters, one can be sure that penury will be developed as a national past time for all but those who participate in the High and Mighty Bunko Program as Bagmen For the State. It’s not that spending money is all bad, nor is making it….its just that there is a minor problem with indiscriminate spending, something usually only practiced by those who don’t give a rats patootie about much of anything besides empty gizmos and a quick exit plan out the back door.

Democracy at gunpoint……..one of the more ridiculous things ever concocted by a group of thinkers who are so professionally ridiculous that they possess the most effulgently patriotic and smarmy names of all the grand name tags of the various dens of institutional brigandage hovering about the rotting corpse of Washington D.C. . What are these “thinkers” called you might ask? Well, hold your sides now, in august tones we shall utter the terrible name of the “Neo-Conservative”. A fine double negative, self- canceling…kind of like a “Shy Whore”. ….except, in their case, one can subtract the “shy” part and add a Marketing Department and a few paid junkets to the Levant.

Oh, I did it now, dinst I.

In contrast to this view, it is often thought or assumed that values are apprehended a priori, that they are written in the structure of the universe and are apprehended by pure reason rather than learned through the bitter lessons of history. Western nations, under the continuing influence of Kant, are one and all in the sway of this view. This results in the continuing inability of Westerners to understand cultures whose history has taught them very different lessons (or even the inability for one western nation to understand another). After all, if morality is a priori, and thus universal, all of humanity must concede to identical values. Much of our continuing conflict with Middle Eastern countries comes from this misunderstanding—we simply can not understand how they could fail to adapt western values when they are so obvious. But of course, these values are anything but obvious and what we now think of as “Western values” had an extremely painful birth in the previous centuries where they were often conceived in conflict, born in bloodshed, and nursed through many devastating wars before emerging today where we assume they should be obvious to all.

If, “The current economic crisis is not so much a problem of public policy as it is a problem of imagination.”, it would seem public policy had no role in causing or enabling the crisis and cannot in any way be amended for the better. It would be something akin to a natural disaster, an act of God.

If this indeed is the opinion held it needs an argument more substantial than this meditation.

The reduction of the notion of culture to some sort of mental content and external trappings goes along with the reduction of our image of the human person to a calculating and choosing being. It abstracts from the concrete institutions, practices, habits and immediate social relationships that form us.

None of this is to deny Goodfellow’s point that “democracy-building” in Iraq was vitiated by the venality of the corporate interests involved and by lack of vision and genuine good sense.

Err, what? What sort of a “culture” possesses the “prerequisites for constitutional government.” Is this something intrinsic to a “culture”? A white european “culture”? I’m sure the reason Iraq was mired down has nothing to with neo-colonial imperial crusades of humanitarian interventionism that belies numerous corporate interests. Or, y’know, other historical features of Iraq’s oppressed state in the last 20-30 years. But, no, I think a benighted “culture” sounds about right.

“If forced to choose, I side with Berry, Röpke, and Schumacher and place my emphasis on returning to a humane scale in both government and the economy.”

And how exactly does one plan to do this — absent the vast framework of capitalist interests, we just magically conjure this like a rabbit out of a hat? Sounds like metastatic gnostic faith to me.

According to both standard neoclassical and Austrian theories, this should disrupt and destroy an economy. Yet for 60 years, the opposite has been the case. In the period from 1853 to 1953, the economy was in recession an astounding 40% of the time; since then (that is, since the dominance of Keynesianism) it has been in recession 15% of the time. The question that rarely gets asked is, “Why is such a high level of gov’t expenditures required to stabilize an economy?”

Economists often speak of an “equity-efficiency” trade-off. That is, we can have a just economy or an efficient economy, but not both. Let me suggest that the truth is exactly the opposite: without justice, the economy can not be efficient, and without this efficiency, inefficient state intervention is required. For the last 30 years, the median wage has remained stagnant, yet productivity has exploded. That is to say, each worker now produces a great deal more than he used to, but has no increase in purchasing power with which to absorb the excess goods. Hence, the economy has resorted to three expedients to dispose of the excess, each of them worse than the last.

The first is to put more family members to work or to work longer hours. This keeps family income up (but only by about 18%) but destroys the family life that the economy is there to support. The second is to have the gov’t absorb the excess goods through high spending. This works, sort of, but increases statism in gov’t and gigantism in industry. In the end, it converts the citizen into a mere client of the state, with each of his needs attended to by a gov’t department. Further, since the 80’s, we have demanded high expenditures, but refused to pay for them in the form of taxes. Hence, ballooning deficits which further fuel consumption but not production. In any case, this Keynesian solution started to be insufficient some 20 or 30 years ago. So another method was needed to absorb the excess.

The third expedient is usury, or consumer credit. Those with excess funds simply lend it to those without. This also works, but it is a ponzi-scheme; you can increase consumption by a dollar today only by decreasing it by that same dollar tomorrow, plus interest; the money has to be paid back. This requires even more lending in the next period, until sooner or later the whole thing collapses of its own weight.

The Just Wage is regarded by most economists as a romantic notion, at best, with no real measure. But the opposite is true: it is a necessary notion and has a fairly precise measure, at least in the aggregate. Namely, can we distribute the bulk of goods through wages, or do we need the three expedients: more work, more gov’t, more usury? If we must rely on these to balance the accounts, then there is a failure of equity. And equity here is a practical problem; without it there will not be a working economy, and we must rely on the other, non-economic means.

The Obama administration wants to do what has been done in the past, and they want to do this because it used to work. But this will no longer work, because it has ceased to work for some time now. As you say, if it was going to work, it would have worked under Bush. It didn’t work for him and won’t work for Obama.

We have a big gov’t because it seemed to be–at a practical level–the only way of dealing with big business. The one feeds the other in an endless spiral until the point of collapse, which may be the point we are at. The key to getting rid of big gov’t is to get rid of big business, which is the problem of scale you mentioned. And it will turn out that reducing one will reduce the other, but both must be reduced, must be re-scaled.