New World Order, Inc.
Just yesterday, I read that the belief "that we could have utopian prosperity if we got rid of private businesses and had the government run everything" should be marked down to "stubborn stupidity." Fair enough. As hyperbolic and Straw Manned-up as that statement is, thwarting all independent economic activity would be a bit delusional, given
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Of course it was, since that was the point of the statement, as it was a parody of the hyperbolic and straw manned-up statement it was in response to.
Don't these folks know that given enough size, a corporation today has-via the power granted by over-reaching trade agreements-greater legal right than most countries?
Uh, via the power granted to them by governments, actually. So, where is the source of the problem there? That's right, governments. The concentration of power in government is what allows for the concentration of power in a megacorp. Without the first, you wouldn't have the second.
they act to protect and improve the lives of their citizens. Egypt, for example, fairly recently raised minimum wages for some category of employees. An example of them ( ... )
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STRAWMEN, TO YOUR MARKS! FIGHT!
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An excellent point, one I will address by pointing out that the megacorp's power would not exist without mega profits. Without that enormous operating profit, there would be no money power to affect government decision making through bribery er, massive (read, "expensive") lobbying and the preferable treatment that comes from strategic campaign contributions.
We are looking at a chicken-egg "which came first" problem. The entirety of the blame or credit does not fall on any one actor.
One may counter that the massive war chests enabled by the profit may have its source in the government allowing such profits to be kept; but here, I think, is where we diverge. The societal allowance of massive individual wealth goes beyond mere government tolerance.
And then you give two examples that show exactly how the problem is government power being used. . . .Ah, here you are mistaken. The two examples reflect how one or two ( ... )
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To assign the blame, we must once again delve into what forces caused any of the signatory governments into their signing, and again we reach non-governmental influences.
I disagree. The influences are very much governmental.
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*sigh*
Work with me here in considering just one example. When a body of bureaucrats needs advice on economic matters, to whom do they turn? Economists. Economics as a body of research has skewed remarkably to the right, toward the side of private fortunes and away from the view that an economy should benefit all the members of society.
Private fortunes agree to fund schools of economic thought as long as that thought is the kind that will support the continued aggregation of vast fortunes. A bank endows a prize for "excellence" in economic thought, and awards most of the prizes to those economists who toe the vast fortune enabling dogma.
By the time the private money has fought this ongoing battle against social good and for private fortune, the committee of functionaries at the government is reduced to a rubber stamp for the established mythos of Private Riches.
That's what I meant by forces that affect governmental decision making.
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That's not skewing to the right. You're using a political spectrum to describe a non-political setting. And I disagree with your assessment that economics is tilted that way.
Private fortunes agree to fund schools of economic thought
Citation needed. Prizes are not funding.
That's what I meant by forces that affect governmental decision making.
You're looking at a minor reflective influence and calling it the driving force.
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No. Economics has always been political. Most schools that taught the subject before the turn of the last century, in fact, called themselves schools of political economics. The slow change to calling economics a "science" rather than a series of political observations, in fact, has led to the confusion you so ably demonstrate. That, in turn, has allowed the right-ward shift to occur unnoticed by many. Including, it seems, yourself.
Citation needed.
Fair enough.
A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university ( ... )
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Well I'd say you have the collapse of the soviet union and current state of countries like Venezuela and North Korea to blame for that one. Face it, Marx was straight-up wrong and Hitler has poisoned the old "3rd way" for at least another generation or two. That just leaves the various flavors of capitalism to duke it out.
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Huh?
Face it, Marx was straight-up wrong. . . .
Ah, but here you prove my point. It turns out ol' Karl wasn't that far off the mark at all. Several of his observations in Das Kapital were right on the mark. Steven Keen calls him the last great classical economist (the first was Adam Smith).
Sadly, since he called for a revolution of classes he helped define, and since Russia wound up following that advice, there followed his writing and life a time of instability in the field of economics where folks bent over backward inventing theories-many of them based on absolute bullshit-that attempted to debunk Marx's contributions. It got so ugly that other economists (like Keynes) in return bent over backward to disguise any reference to Marx lest they get branded as "Marxist" even though that theory was absolutely proven correct.
The result?
The advantage Marxists have over economists is that ( ... )
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Communism and other forms of collectivism fail because Marx's labor-based theory of value is demonstrably false and has lead to nothing but murder mayhem and oppression everywhere it has taken root.
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Saying that Economics skews right, is a lot like saying that Chicano Lit skews towards the study of latino writers or that Womens Studies majors skew towards feminism.
No, wrong. Economics can be either right or left without not being economics. What's at stake here is which school of econ will be supported by society/monied interests. Those monied interests have the most to lose if the econ shifts left.
Communism and other forms of collectivism fail because Marx's labor-based theory of value is demonstrably false and has lead to nothing but murder mayhem and oppression everywhere it has taken root.
Marx wrote both economics observations and dialectic dualism in the Hegelian style. Only the latter "class tensions will inevitably lead to revolution" bullshit has anything to do with the murder and mayhem you mention. (I gave examples earlier, but again, screw LJ.)
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Sadly, there are plenty of historical right-wing, left-wing and middle-of-the-road jerks engaging in "nothing but murder mayhem and oppression."
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