Predictions of the imminent collapse of the U.S.A. usually aren’t a good sign of intellectual health, either.

So that’s my advice–as to the whole debate about how much to base our understanding of society/politics on political economy, that is a more serious can of worms, but suffice it to say I have a lot of reservations about how Mr. Medaille wants to proceed. We certainly should not think that “we have the kind of government we have because we have the kind of economic system we have.”

Clare, I liked your talk of the anthropology we need–I think you really would love Chantal Delsol’s books, who talks about this quite a bit, especially in Unlearned Lessons of the 20th Century.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/42845.html

Our economy is out of our control so long as the currency is out of our control!

Before I can begin to pick this apart, please give us your definition of ‘property’ and ‘sharing’ (in positive law aka lex humana) being an avowed pragmatist I don’t want to bog you down with the minutae of metaphysics and athropocentricisms of natural law.

and Bruce The direction of this money is by an oligarchy, or Socialism of the Rich, who loudly shout that only if the making of money is separated from government interference all will be well whence do you arrive at “direction” of money and “making” of same? Coins and other fiduciary media of legal tender ought be subject to simple laws of physics, no? That’s why we have weights-n-measures buraucrats, right? What use scolding a Publican in a tavern for tampering with his liquor glasses when the coin used to pay for their contents is not subject to the same scrutiny?

seconding Ryan: Is it might makes right or right makes might? Does Maximos espouse a top-down artitrary empiricism or a subjective subsidiarity from below? Voluntas is a prerequisite for libertas/caritas. A third term has since crept in: capitalism, also much in need of definition — for the Austrians define it logically, whereas the shared-owning types get a little confused, with fractional reserve banking and FIAT legal tender dictates messing with the conceptual frameworks (ie houses of made of straw and sticks, not bricks) and breach of contract a privilege of the public authorities tasked with defending the law of contracts! The crash was not “precipitated by the capital rich Rich” but by the financial sector usurping YOUR capital, YOUR savings in the public and private pension funds they manage! They don’t “own” the money in all those accounts. They don’t “own” the dollar in your pocket or cash register that has lost 90% of its purchasing power since the Fed was charged as lender of last resort. Its your capital that crashed, buyer beware! The notion that money can simple retain value by being baby-sat by fat cats is hilarious. Cash is nothing more than another good to be exchanged in the market, it facilitates the trade of things your have for things you want. Its value is derived from the immutability or incorruptability as a mobile and divisible store of worth. The green sheets of paper we currently use have no such value, they are underwritten merely by the government’s creditors good will (the Chinese and other foreign potentates, in other words).

Does man have free will (Smith didn’t think so nor did Marx, but I’m with Mica’s affirming inherent dignity, most dictionaries include the female productive definition of parturition as labour rather than the male reductionist agrarian cost factor)?
Or is man/woman merely obligated to submit to an arbitrary reductionism of the hive a la Islamic Sharia or literally, as is the case of Chinese one-child policy? Without adequate laws protecting property rights, what prevents the encroachment of the Front Porch by “sharers” of a different stripe?

Postscript. Marginal utility does not require “vast numbers of firms” or “examples on the ground” for its not an abstraction, its a law of human action. Denying prudential judgement is like someone denying the validity of the perfectly common sense notion that “parents raise their kids” because the interlocutor has no evidence of social structures dedicated to teaching “parenting.” Nonsense – we don’t need such academies because that skill occurs spontaneously in the normal course of social exchange.

Note: “normal” is what is at stake here – an ontology or anthropology of what sustains a good individual. We cannot exercise a just society without a model for the perfect man (we Christians know we have it in the Logos of the Eternal Word, others may only wish to concede the tenets of natural law contained in the Decalog: lying, stealing, adulterating, coveting, killing, and denying we’re not self-created or owe respect to those who came before us, are all incompatible with human flourishing, ie iniquitous conduct unbecoming a Front Porcher)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/the-invisible-hand-is-dea_b_128030.html

In short, the phrase “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, could be re-phrased as “The price of a free-market is eternal vigilance.” Clearly, America has been taken over by a Mutant Disorder in the last thirty years, introduced mainly but not entirely by the Republican Party, and which we can best describe as Libertarianism, or unregulated opportunism. These thirty years have witnessed epic battles between the Opportunists and the Co-operators which is only now starting to be seen for what it is after the Opportunists came close to destroying America’s economy. It remains to be seen whether sufficient American people wake up to the fact they have been taken over by a mutant ideology and decide to act to eradicate it.

Truly sustainable agriculture refers to methods is opposed to industrial agriculture, which is heavily dependent upon cheap oil, and this dependency is not sustainable. It must be small scale as a result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

This story of revision up to his death is a quote from Robert L. Heilbroner’s book “The Essential Adam Smith.” Of course, Adam Smith may have accidentally missed revising the section I quoted but given the opening sentence of his book I do not understand why:-

” How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

This is the Strong Reciprocity of Bowles and Gintis and the Reverse Dominance of Boehm. I guess Adam Smith will remain an enigma for me.

Just because the new techniques are more sustainable doesn’t mean that they’re any less industrialized. It’s just smarter industry.

He knew more about property than he let on. His few statement in WON are bitter and sardonic. Such as(quoting from memory, and therefore not precisely) “Government is establish to protect those who have some property against those who have none; that is, to protect the rich against the poor.” And “But when all the land of a nation becomes owned, then landlords, seeking to reap where they never sowed, demand a rent even for the natural produce of the land.”

“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”

The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Part IV.I.10. Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation.

It almost seems as though Adam Smith was wrapped up in some sort of cocoon and perhaps he was as an academic. You wonder whether he was aware of all the historical struggles ordinary people were involved in before and during his lifetime, not least perhaps the resistance to enclosure that was taking place throughout the eighteenth century and obtained the first notoriety in Scotland a year after Smith’s birth with the Galloway Levellers. Anyway here is a list of those struggles based around land which was the primary focus of production up until the Industrial Revolution:-

http://www.jubilee-centre.org/uploaded/files/Attitudes%20to%20land%20ownership.pdf

These struggles continue to this day but to land has been added capital as an issue of focus. We could say that the issue of political suffrage has been largely settled but has not proved to be the panacea the workers believed it to be in relieving economic injustice. It is now obvious, in the light of the Financial Crash (precipitated by the capital rich Rich) and the experience of universal male followed by female suffrage over the last two centuries, that political suffrage without economic suffrage will not create fairness. The arguments in FPR and the interest in distributism reflect that growing awareness if not to the point of seeing concisely that economic suffrage has to be the next big push.

Consumer society and its paradise of service jobs has created a white collar serfdom ably controlled by both our public education system of leveling and tidy conceits…the cult of easy answers and a half hour time horizon..as well as Fiat Money and Debt in thrall to the gluttonous “growth economy “. It is not so much the innate abuses of capitalism that have brought us to this day as it is the seemingly innate ability of the people to disenfranchise themselves from their responsibilities under a Republic , insuring that the language of free exchange is perverted in the manner it has been.

Boiling further, one need perhaps look simply at the changes in the top tax rate since Eisenhower and how we think we can now run a government that gleans an Eisenhower tax rate at the current tax rate. Though a formidable protagonist, the Chinese are hardly our masters, their economy is still a fraction of ours and even though they could plunge us into a deep hole by abandoning the dollar, this would simply plunge them backwards as well…it is a Faustian Bargain for Oriental and Occidental Strivers. We also think it is our job to solve the ills of the rest of the world , largely because they inhabit the resources and potential markets of the Corporate Masters of the vaunted Consumer society. The real absence of cause and effect that has habituated the American to a life of service serfdom and idle pursuits may have been aided and abetted by a form of capitalism but it is not to capitalism alone we can ascribe it to. Rather, it is a kind of pidgen capitalism, a perversion of the language of transaction that we can ascribe it to. Property ownership, stewardship, the simple clarity of a quid pro quo transaction along with certain other wealth building and spreading aspects of capitalism remain as firm as they have always been . We have simply become rubes and ham-handed in it and surrendered both personal productivity and local awareness. We let economics become profoundly uneconomic and the fiat money, reserve currency status has been roundly abused for short term purposes and the interests of the War Party….a bi-partisan, international cabal.

Perhaps monolithiphobia is as good a description as anything of the Porcher mentality. Like the Checks and Balances of the lapsed-Republic, we may need a variety of forces to counter-balance one another and function within a system of subsidiarity that matches mode with landscape. But we will need citizens to do this, not factotums. The goal is civilization and so a tad more civitas is required.

Above all, it is the compulsion to define one’s opponent through demonization , the neo-conservatives favorite pastime…. that occupies way too much of our time, mine included. At times, I read Smith with wonder and agreement and at times I read Jefferson or Tocqueville with similar respect. At other times, I read the Marquis de Sade or even Marx and react with alarm that I have been muttering what they say . This does not make me a Marxist nor a Smither nor a Jeffersonian, it makes me an American, in the modern age and aware that it is the present we are missing in our constant gaze at two poles we yearn for: the past and the future. One we can do something about but only if we observe the other closely. However, we will never discern that ineffable thing called the present….and do it well…until we stop the various demonizations that are, more and more, simply in service to the Moloch Irony ruling our aggressive lives. Ive met truth and false in a substantially mis-spent life that is treasured still but the older I get, the more it becomes apparent that about the time someone says they have the exclusive license on truth and do it with the greatest vigor, I know false is about to come in and lay down the law.

Heres to a messy porch…….but a bit more clarity of mind, a mind tempered by humility and humor…that thing which beyond all, seems most lost to this frustrated triumphalist known as the Red White and Blue American. We talk City on a Hill but pave the approach roads with a macadam of nihilism.

fails to treat the prospect of a billion deaths with gravity is one which I contend cannot be taken seriously.

This is my great concern re: a nation of small farmers. Now let me say right off – I hate the way agriculture is managed in this country today. I grieve everytime another small farm in my area hits the dust and gets covered with those wretched faux chateaus. I hate the way our food is produced and what it is doing to us.

But there is a reality we ignore – that the population we sustain – 300 million – has been made possible by modern agriculture which in turn has been made possible by the availability of cheap oil. I believe that now our farmers feed 5 families per acre, 3 families here in the US and 2 families outside the US. A return to small farms will reduce our yields. So not only will people in the US starve, but given how dependent people all over the world are on food we produce, people in other countries will starve. A solution which ignores this dooms as you say billions to starvation. It is no solution.

It is great to see suggestions on how we might change – but those suggestions must take into account the complexity of the systems which assure our survival. A solution must include a bridge which gets us from here to there without killing off millions of our fellow citizens (even if we don’t like what they name their kids).

I advocate a “third way” I can see. I can see in in Mondragon, in Emilia Romagna, in Taiwan, and in thousands of employee owned enterprises. I can see it producing great wealth over long periods of time and varied economic conditions. Without this test no theory of human actions can have any validity.

“Do not believe me,” I tell my students, “and do not believe the pope. Believe what you can see, in mundane matters at least. But keep your eyes open so you can really see things. No theory without practice, no practice without practical examples. Test everything, hold fast to what is good.”

Ryan, Smith still gave priority to agriculture in the Wealth of Nations, he just credits more to manufacturing than Quesnay did, and frankly the Big Q was not altogether coherent on that point. As for self-interest, it really doesn’t mean in Smith what it means in Mandeville or in the writers who followed Smith. For Smith, it was just the Butcher looking after his own business, the basis of a sensible commercial life. This Smith clearly distinguished “private interests” of the merchants, who could not meet (Smith tells us) even for social reasons without it resulting in “a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices.”

Bruce, Smith did have a moral view of the market, and it cries out throughout the WON. He had no “invisible hand” mysticism; the phrase appears but once in the book, and that to refer to foreign trade. He was merely stating that no public bureaucracy was needed to insure a favorable balance of trade, as the Mercantilists claimed; it would manage itself. He was a bit naive on that score, but the statement has been generalized to all trade in a way Smith really didn’t do himself.

Smith’s moral problem lay elsewhere. He had a good grasp of distributive and commutative justice, but he separated them into two incompatible theories. The former was handled by the Labor Theory of Value, while the later by utility. The whole of 19th century economics is nothing but a battle between these two theories. Marginal utility is supposed to solve both problems by using utility itself to drive prices to the costs of production, which all reduce to labor (if you ignore economic rent.) But the theory only functions in a frictionless free market where any commodity is supplied by a vast number of firms, a situation that describes no important sector of any advanced economy.

Smith did understand the problem of property, and comments on it in bitter tones. But he was dependent on the propertied class, and was himself no revolutionary. At the beginning of his career, he thought it didn’t matter (In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example) but he definitely changed his mind on that.