Thus Madison would have understood that libertarian minarchism without taxation is incoherent.While it is unclear what Washington may have thought or said, he did lead the army to put down the Whiskey Rebellion to put down an insurrection over refusal to accept a tax.
I greatly admired his previous book, Banking Across Boundaries, and this new one has the same compelling combination of analysis and historical detail. The theme this time is capitalism as a constant balance between competitive markets and market power, these two forces applied by laws and their enforcement. Anti-trust laws are enacted or enforced with greater rigour when monopoly power gets out of hand. Intellectual property laws are strengthened after periods of cut-throat competition. In contrast to those – often Marxist – writers who have seen a single direction of travel toward ever-greater monopoly power, Christophers argues here that there is a cycle. He cites Kalecki, but also Marx’s dialectics: “Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly,” Christophers quotes Marx as writing in a letter of 1846.…
Christophers ends with Lenin’s prediction that the future is capitalist monopoly on the international stage, monopoly imperialism. I have more confidence in self-correcting mechanisms. We will see.
The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Thursday that some of America’s largest financial institutions appear to lack respect for the law, a potentially explosive charge against an industry already roiling from numerous government investigations into alleged wrongdoing.
William Dudley, one of the nation’s top banking regulators whose organization helps oversee Wall Street banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, made the comment during a speech focused on the problems posed by banks perceived to be “too big to fail,” and possible solutions to correct them.
But in an abrupt turn, Dudley suggested that regulators may be stymied by "cultural" issues that have negatively affected the nation's biggest banks.
“Collectively, these enhancements to our current regime may not solve another important problem evident within some large financial institutions -- the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust," he said.
“There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” he continued. “Whether this is due to size and complexity, bad incentives, or some other issues is difficult to judge, but it is another critical problem that needs to be addressed.”Is Bill Dudley finally reading Bill Black?
This is a simple point, but important. All capitalist systems or systems based on markets – or indeed human society of any sort – require law and order and ultimately force and coercion to back up the law and the enforcement of the law.Social Democracy For The 21St Century
