The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today) — Eric Schliesser

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review.

Digressions&Impressions
The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Bill Mitchell — Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs

Thomas Fazi and I have been discussing the shape of our next book and I think it will be an interesting and worthwhile followup to Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017). We hope it will be published some time late in 2019. One of the angles that will be delved into is the way in which neoliberal narratives and constructs have permeated individual consciousness. Yes, sounds a bit psychological doesn’t it. But there is a strong literature going back to well before the recent period of neoliberalism that allows us to draw some fairly strong conclusions on how the process has worked. It also allows us to make some coherent statements about the dis-junctures that are going on across the world between the people and their polities, which have spawned the support for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the popularity of far-right movements, the electoral demolition of the traditional social democratic political parties, the election of the new Italian government, and the on-going trouble that the Gilets Jaunes are causing the mainstream political processes in France (and Brussels). The literature also provides a guide as to how the Left might break out of their current malaise based on their tepid yearning for cosmopolitanism, identity and their fear of financial markets to reestablish themselves as the progressive voice of the people. That is what I am writing about at present and here is a snippet....

Bill goes "there," where "there" is philosophy in the best sense as "the study of the wholes in terms of wholes," that is, in terms of systems and subsystems. Economics cannot be approached on than on a simplistic basis without considering its relationship to society. Society is a network of networks, and these networks are dynamic rather than static. That implies that history counts, which includes culture, traditions, and institutional arrangements that are fluid.

Without taking into consideration the considerable knowledge that has been developed in the various disciplines, the social sciences in particular, economics doesn't have much to say about society that is of any worth practically. And the world is looking for practical solutions to pressing challenges.

In other words the mechanistic models based on physics that assumes that human being are like atoms obeying laws of nature and that assume ergodicity are barren with respect to practical application. Reality is not like that idealized world, which is mathematically tractable but non-representational. The social world is non-ergodic; uncertainty and asymmetries are facts of life.

As managers of our lives and environment, we humans need appropriate models to approach human problems efficiently and effectively, and devise workable solutions to pressing issues of the day. The paraphrase management guru Peter F. Drucker, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." Business people figured out long ago that conventional economic theory is of little usefulness in management. Go figure.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Noah Smith — Libertarianism's Time Has Come and Gone

Noah brings in the issue of power, and bullying as an example of it.

Libertarianism is based on individualism. Methodological individualism based on ontological individual is also the foundation of the neoclassical approach. 

If Noah is correct, individualism as a foundational principle is on the way out.

Bloomberg View
Libertarianism's Time Has Come and Gone

Noah Smith, contributor

Ines Stelk, Steven Bosworth, Dennis J Snower — Technological progress: The other side of the coin

How the trend towards individualism in societies affects economic welfare is debatable, but it is generally agreed that the role of technological progress in spurring individualism is substantial. Exploring the impact of technological progress in a model of individual utility, this column finds that the direct positive effects of technological progress, in the form of innovation and economic growth, may be offset by the indirect negative effects resulting from greater positional competition at the expense of caring activities.

vox.eu
Technological progress: The other side of the coin

Ines Stelk, Steven Bosworth, Dennis J Snower

George Monbiot — We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof.

In complex adaptive systems, optimization involves adaptation through feedback and learning, as well as taking into account return on coordination. This happens naturally and spontaneously not only cognitively but also affectively since it a positive evolutionary trait. Evolutionary success involves a combination of competition and cooperation through coordination, as in teamwork. Homo socialis is the reality rather than homo economicus.

Evonomics
We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof.

George Monbiot

Francois Badenhorst — Martin Luther King Jr. Asked This Economist a Profound Question

The interesting career of Sam Bowles. His latest book, The Moral Economy, will be available in March.

Evonomics
Martin Luther King Jr. Asked This Economist a Profound Question
Francois Badenhorst

According to parasite stress theory, we should see higher levels of collectivism in situations of higher pathogen stress, but not in response to other kinds of material insecurity. 

According to the material insecurity or institutional hypotheses, we should expect people to exhibit less collectivism and in-group loyalty when state-level institutions successfully meet people’s basic needs and guard against material threats.

Finally, the asocial life history hypothesis suggests that in situations where people have fewer opportunities to control risk, for example, in situations of greater mortality and economic uncertainty, they will avoid investments in anything but their own immediate reproduction (and thus eschew commitments to relationships and other social investments).

Another important distinction between these different theories is the feedbacks they posit.

Parasite stress and asocial life history theories both assume a relatively fixed environment to which individuals adapt.

The material insecurity or institutional hypothesis, on the other hand, assumes positive co-evolutionary feedbacks, whereby the existence of beneficial institutions can lead people to make further investments in those institutions to render them even better investments in the future. Thus, the material insecurity or institutional hypothesis can lead to novel social trajectories which are not purely driven by initial conditions—such as parasite levels—in a setting.…

Suggestive rather than conclusive, but interesting nevertheless.

Evonomics
A New Theory That Explains Economic Individualism and Collectivism
Daniel Hruschka | Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University

Brian Beutler — The Rehabilitationists

How a small band of determined legal academics set out to persuade the Supreme Court to undo the New Deal—and have almost won.

In case anyone was wondering why philosophy — or call it foundational studies if you think the term "philosophy" is outdated — is important.

As the article observes, Libertarianism is a form of conservatism. However, it is based on an assumption of self-sovereignty that is actually an extreme form of liberalism in that it prioitizes prioritizes individual freedom.

But how can a conservative position be liberal?

The answer lies in the paradoxes of liberalism. Economic liberalism leads to disparity of wealth and income and the de facto institution of social class and political power through economic means. This is anti-democratic, which Libertarian dismisses as the tyranny of the majority over the individual.

So Libertarianism leads to neo-feudalism of "capital" under economics liberalism unrestrained by social and political liberalism through democratic governance based on government of the people, by the people and for the people under popular sovereignty, a pillar of political liberalism.

Conservatism is about rule by most qualified, that is, the privileged few who rise to the top, on the assumption that this is chiefly due to merit when violence is taken off the table under the rule of law in which the basic law is self-autonomy and an absolute right to private property. Sociologists beg to differ.

Libertarians are correct however in arguing that America was founded as conservative country rather than a liberal one as the founding documents and the controversy around their composition and adoption reveal. Slavery was enshrined in the constitution, which is illiberal as it gets.

The American government is that of a republic rather than a popular democracy, which early debate reveals was designed to favor those who able to amass political power, which is typically a matter of wealth in societies in which violence is ruled out as a political tool. The design is to preclude "the rule of the rabble."

The New Republic
The Rehabilitationists
Brian Beutler

Kerry R. Bolton — Spiritual Roots of Russo-American Conflict

Weekend reading.

Western-liberalism, rationalism, even the most strenuous efforts of Bolshevik dialectal materialism, have so far not been able to permanently destroy, but at most repress, these conceptions—conscious or unconscious—of what it is to be ‘Russian’. Spengler, as will be seen, even during the early period of Russian Bolshevism, already predicted that even this would take on a different, even antithetical form, to the Petrine import of Marxism. It was soon that the USSR was again paying homage to Holy Mother Russia rather than the international proletariat, much to Trotsky’s lament.

‘Russian Socialism’, Not Marxism

Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Western culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, ‘in the brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’.[7]

The Russian concept of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and of impersonal service to the expanse of one’s land, implies another form socialism to that of Marxism. It is perhaps in this sense that Stalinism proceeded along lines often antithetical to the Bolshevism envisaged by Trotsky, et al.[8] A recent comment by an American visitor to Russia, Barbara J. Brothers, as part of a scientific delegation, states something akin to Spengler’s observation:

The Russians have a sense of connectedness to themselves and to other human beings that is just not a part of American reality. It isn’t that competitiveness does not exist; it is just that there always seems to be more consideration and respect for others in any given situation.[9]

Of the Russian traditional ethos, intrinsically antithetical to Western individualism, including that of property relations, Berdyaev wrote:

Of all peoples in the world the Russians have the community spirit; in the highest degree the Russian way of life and Russian manners, are of that kind. Russian hospitality is an indication of this sense of community.[10]…

Whatever Russia is called outwardly, whether, monarchical, Bolshevik, or democratic, there is an inner—eternal—Russia that is unfolding, and whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.

Ironically, the Native American soul as described by Ohiyesa aka Dr. Charles Eastman in The Soul of the Indian is very similar to "the Russian soul" as Bolton describes it with reference to Oswald Spengler, that is, communitarian culture and deep spiritual feeling shaped by the immense space of plains and ever-receding horizons. Interestingly also, it was African-Americans that popularized this meaning of "soul" in American English.

Failure to understand this makes American liberalism illiberal in attempting to impose "the American soul" a universal. It is not going to work, and it has already resulted in huge devastation.

Foreign Policy Journal
Spiritual Roots of Russo-American Conflict

Kerry R. Bolton | Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, Athens; assistant editor of the Academy's journal Ab Aeterno; "contributing writer" for Foreign Policy Journal, and proprietor of Renaissance Press

Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland — The role of culture on democratisation

Heresy! Economics professors bringing in sociology. The horror of it. Who knows where this could lead. And look where it led Kenneth Boulding, who left economics to participate in the development of general systems theory.

Social science studies usually explain democratisation of countries with the increase in incomes. In contrast, this column argues that culture is a neglected but important determinant of democracy. The findings show that countries with individualist culture democratise earlier than collectivist cultures that may remain stuck for a long time with relatively efficient autocracies.....

We compare decisions of collective action under an individualistic culture, giving social status reward to standing out and innovativeness, and a collectivist culture emphasising conformity and embeddedness in large groups (tribes, clans).

• Individualistic culture tends to create a demand for democracy, as individual freedom is fundamental for self-achievement. Equality before the law and limited government provided under democracy help protect individual freedom.
• Collectivist culture instead focuses more on the necessity of a benevolent ruler to create stability between different clans and groups. The emphasis is more on hierarchy and order, and freedom can be seen as endangering stability.

As I have mentioned previously, the categories of the vertical axis of the Political Compass would be more accurately labeled "law & order" at the pole now labeled "authoritarian" and "freedom" for the pole now labeled "libertarian."

Because of these cultural differences, when there is a window of opportunity for collective action in an individualistic society, however infrequent, revolt against autocracy will always occur, independent of the quality of autocracy, and will lead to democracy. In contrast, in a collectivist society revolts against good autocrats will be rarer. Windows of collective action will thus lead either to democracy or to the establishment of a higher quality autocracy. Collectivist societies may thus remain ‘stuck’ with a relatively high quality autocracy. In the long run, individualist societies will thus end up with a democratic regime, whereas collectivist societies will end up either with democracy or with a high quality autocracy. The implication is that individualist societies will end up more often having democratic regimes than collectivist societies, even if collective action occurs less often than in collectivist societies that might be better in coordinating collective action.

The problem with this analysis is cognitive bias toward individualism and therefore "democracy." The authors focus too much on the poles and thereby creating an excluded middle range that include most political systems today. There is no government on earth today that is a true democracy as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. However, there are still some absolute (despotic and nepotistic) autocracies like Saudi Arabia. The so-called democracies are republics that are actually oligarchic plutocracies. What the authors call "democracy" is actually plutonomy, or as US founding father John Jay, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court, is reputed to have said, "Those who own the country should govern the country." This was largely the view of the other founding fathers and the US Constitution as well as the discussion around it reflect this bias.

Another matter that the authors overlook is the fact that freedom assume security, whereas security can exist independently of freedom. Therefore, individualism alone is not a sufficient condition for democracy.

Again, societies rarely have become successfully democratic in other than a minimal way of holding period elections without the development of institutions that support law and order in a democratic society. The United States was an anomaly in that it was a new nation, on one hand, and secondly, most of the people involved at the beginning were British. Britain has a long history of power gradually being devolved from the crown to powerful feudal lords, beginning with the Magna Carta, and then from the landed aristocracy to include an upper class of landed gentry under the manor system and then the owners of capital. As result institutions were already either in place or patterns available for adoption by the new government. Imposing democracy on countries without such an institutional heritage and developmental process has generally not worked as well as hoped for.

My conclusion is that since the authors are economists, they have a strong cognitive bias toward methodological individualism that has shaped their thinking on this matter. They need to think it through more deeply. Culture has many more factors that individualism and collectivism, and even though terms are biased in that they carry a connotative charge instead of being purely denotative. Conversely, some sociologists who do not operate under the cognitive-affective bias of individualism might see what the authors call "collectivism" as "tribalism," which implies a strong emphasis on social fabric and social capital, whereas "individualism" implies a weak emphasis on social fabric and social capital. Psychologists might see he individualism of homo economicus as implying alienation and detachment, and the holism of homo socialis as implying adjustment and connectedness.

Interestingly, the only real democracy was evidenced by so-called primitive people. Even Athens, the so-called cradle of democracy, was based on a slave economy that gave the Athenian (male) citizens the leisure to debate the issues. Some time ago, I saw a documentary of a tribe of about two hundred people in Panama that made decisions collectively by consensus sitting in a circle with all members of the tribe, even very young children. Everyone had their turn and the youngest children, who obviously didn't know what was going on yet, were encouraged to say something, which everyone listened to intently, too. As far as I know, the closest we got in the US  was the New England town meeting.

But I am glad to see economists venturing off the reservation.

vox.eu

The role of culture on democratisation

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, University of California – Berkeley, and Gérard Roland, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley; and CEPR Research Fellow

Kevin M. Kruse — How Corporate America Invented Christian America

The unholy alliance of  capitalism, modern American Libertarianism and Protestant religion. The link is individualism, as British historian R. H. Tawney explored in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

It's a struggle for the "soul of the nation" between individual freedom and social justice based on different readings of the Bible from opposing ideological perspectives. The battle still rages.

Politico
How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history at Princeton and the author, most recently, of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, from which this article has been adapted

h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Heather Cox Richardson — It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth

Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth. For two generations, Movement Conservatives have subverted American politics, with increasing success, by explicitly rejecting the principle of open debate based in reasoned argument. They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate....

In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr. articulated a strategy for opposing the consensus that supported New Deal policies. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” was a sophomoric diatribe by the Catholic son of a wealthy oil magnate, published by the small right-wing Henry Regnery Press. In it, Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.
Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology..

In 1960, a new voice added anti-intellectual populism to Buckley’s rhetoric. Political operative Phyllis Schlafly wrote “A Choice Not an Echo” to support Barry Goldwater’s quest for the presidential nomination. In her world, correct political decisions were simple: The nation was engaged in a great struggle between good and evil, and educated Eastern Elites who insisted on weighing the realities of a complicated world had enlisted on the wrong side. Elites complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. Communism was bad, so anyone advocating government activism was evil. Elites arguing for government action were parasites. All they really wanted was money from government contracts, paid for by hardworking regular Americans..

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the “Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush administration [Karl Rove] famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by studying reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior advisor to the president told Suskind. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”.

When Governor Walker replaced “the search for truth” with “meet the state’s workforce needs” in the charge to the University of Wisconsin, he did not make an error. He was articulating the principle that has driven Movement Conservatives since their earliest days: Facts and arguments can only lead Americans toward a government that regulates business and supports working Americans, and they must be squelched. The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.

AlterNet
It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth
Heather Cox Richardson, Salon

Bill Mitchell — Neo-liberalism has compromised the concept of a citizen

This is the key failing of neoliberal capitalism, as well as any social, political and economic system based on individualism. The assumption of homo economicus as rational utility maximizer by nature is wrong. This assumption underlies the so-called "laws of economics" that are supposedly similar to the laws of (19th century) physics based on atomism. Human being are not like atoms and don't behave like atoms.

The more correct conception is homo socialis, in the Greek of Aristotle, zoon politikon, that was developed millennia ago. For Aristotle the end or goal (telos) of humans is living a good life in a good society. Then question becomes what is a good life and what is a good society, and how do they relate to each other to result in a full human life.

The rule of law and rights are fundamental to this, along with the recognition of universality along with individuality, that is, all people share the same nature as human persons even through each is unique as an individual.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Neo-liberalism has compromised the concept of a citizen
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Bryan Caplan — The Evidence of Altruism

The logic of collective action versus the free rider problem. Take that, economic liberalism.

Each of these stories appeals to self-interest, but economists almost uniformly reject them as absurd. Why? Because they ignore another beloved economic insight: the logic of collective action. When actors have a small effect on big social outcomes, and their only incentive to act is the big outcome itself, selfishness urges them to stand down, twiddle their thumbs, free ride, and yawn "Let someone else do it."

Econolog
The Evidence of Altruism
Bryan Caplan | Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

Bryan Caplan is a Libertarian (anarcho-capitalist). But see his Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist.

Apparently, some Libertarians (right libertarians) get it about the logic of collective action and the free rider problem that arises from economic liberalism based on self-interest (rational pursuit of maximum utility).

On the other hand, all left libertarians get this, as well as social democrats and heterodox economics of the left — which is why they are on the left. Caplan links to the Wikipedia article on the logic of collective action, which is chiefly about the book of that title by Mancur Olson. What it fails to mention is Nobel laureate in economics Elinor Ostrom's collective action and social development. See her paper, Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms.

Oh, and contrary to Libertarian assumptions to the contrary, some people are actually motivated by altruism. Moreover, this is the normal path of human development toward self-actualization and unfolding human potential.

Altruism one manifestation of spiritual maturity. Caplan seems to think that his explanation is comprehensive, whereas it is only partial. Just as humans develop physically, emotionally and intellectually, they are also capable of developing spiritually, that is, the the direction of greater universality as the boundary of individuality recedes toward the horizon of wholeness.

Spiritually immature people imagine that altruism means giving up individual desire, choice and action, which kill one's individuality, one's sense of personal self, that to which one relates everything, which is what one is. However, the opposite is the case. As one grows spiritually through actualizing one's potential as a human being, one becomes more fulfilled, more complete, and happier. As Aristotle observed in Book One of Nichomachean Ethics, happiness or well-being (eudaimonia) is the by-product of excellence (arete). This is consistent with the perennial teaching of those to whom humanity looks to as sages about the spiritual path and the progressive realization of inherent potential. To miss this is to miss what is truly important in life.

The Economist — John D. Rockefeller Defended [Review of Titan: The Life Of John D. Rockefeller Sr. By Ron Chernow]

Nowadays, says Ron Chernow, most people imagine that American businessmen believe in competition. In fact, as he shows, in his thorough and thought-provoking biography of the greatest businessman in American history, combination has been as constant and perhaps as creative a force in the history of capitalism as competition. 

“It was forced upon us,” John D. Rockefeller said. “We had to do it in self-defence. The oil business was in chaos and daily growing worse.” And he spelled out his economic credo in words that were as shocking in the 1870s, when he built his great combination, or in the 1890s, when he had to defend it against the attacks of the muckrakers, as they may be to free-market theorists today. “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.”...

Mr Chernow has written a worthy biography of a truly titanic figure. He conceals none of the seamier side of Standard Oil's practices, but his overall view is sympathetic. In his opinion the vast accumulation of Rockefeller's fortune and the almost equally fabulous disbursements of his philanthropy were not in contradiction, but were two sides of his Protestant capitalist ethos. “Many of Rockefeller's critics alleged that he divided his life into compartments and kept two separate sets of moral ledger books: one governing his exemplary private life, another sanctioning his reprehensible business behaviour,” Mr Chernow writes. “But he saw his entire life guided by the same lofty ideals.”

 Like Ayn Rand, he must have liked Nietzsche, too.

"Combination" = oligarchy, cartel, trust

The Economist
John D. Rockefeller Defended

Ira Chernu — If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from

It all began when I was re-reading Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (trying to escape from obsessively tracking the DC rollercoaster.) As Wood observes, the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians divided over basically the same issue that plagues us now: How much of a role should government play in people's lives? (Though the clash back then was so fierce, and split American society so sharply, that it makes today's politics look rather mild by comparison.

But Wood takes us deeper into the substance of the issue. Jeffersonians were willing to limit government only because they assumed that there was "a principle of benevolence ... a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being." They were founding an American nation upon the European Enlightenment's belief that "there was 'a natural principle of attraction in man towards man' [as Hume put it], and that these natural affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together."

This was exactly the point that frightened Alexander Hamilton most. He summed up his opponents' view quite accurately: "As human nature shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan," based on common moral sense and the spread of affection and benevolence, government eventually "will become useless, and Society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles." Then Hamilton, the greatest conservative of his day, dismissed this vision of shrinking government as "a wild and fatal scheme."

The Republicans who now control the House obviously have a very different view of what it means to be a true conservative. But that doesn't mean they have become Jeffersonians. Not by any means. In many ways they would be closer to Hamilton, who scorned Jefferson's trust in human nature.

AlterNet
If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from
Ira Chernu

Steve Randy Waldman — Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong

Here’s a statement that I don’t think will be too contentious, across the ideological spectrum:
"The American way is to draw sharp distinctions between winners and losers, in order to encourage people to hustle." ...

But, in the lingo of economics, consider the “social welfare function” embedded in this story. The claim is emphatically not that this system maximizes some measure of aggregate utility that could be decomposed to a sum of individual welfares. On the contrary, it celebrates as necessary large costs in individual welfare for the sake of impersonal characteristics of the aggregate: “prosperity”, or “strength”. It is an entirely collectivist justification for policies that are deeplyharmful at an individual level, if you take seriously at all the idea of diminishing marginal utility. The individualist approach to maximizing welfare would be to redistribute. If we (contentiously but commonly) assume people share comparable utility functions, aggregate utility is maximized by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At least in a methodological sense, it is socialists who are the individualists, attending to the sum of individual welfares, while unsympathetic capitalists rely upon collectivism to justify their good fortune and the policy apparatus that magnifies and sustains it.

As SRW observes, there is a divergence on the right between Libertarians and conservatives on this matter. Libertarians deny any collective influence, whereas the most important factor for conservatives is the strength of the nation, especially relative to other nations. Conservatism pretends to be liberal, being based on individualism, but it is inherently Tory, holding that political and economic strength arises from rule by the best for the good of the nation, and not necessarily the people. What's good for America is not necessarily good for all or even most Americans.

This post is sure to spark an interesting philosophical and historical discussion over there. I suggest reading de Tocqueville's chapter on enlightened self-interest along with it: How The Americans Combat Individualism By The Principle Of Self-Interest Rightly Understood, Democracy in America, Chapter VIII.

Interfluidity
Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong
Steve Randy Waldman

Al Jazeera — Pope sends message of hope to Brazil's poor

Pope Francis has issued the first social manifesto of his young pontificate, telling slum dwellers in Brazil that the world's rich must do much more to wipe out vast inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.

History's first Latin American pope, in a speech on Thursday to residents of Manguinhos, blasted the "culture of selfishness and individualism" that persists in the world and encouraged efforts in Brazil to end hunger and poverty.

"No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world," he said.

Al Jazeera
Pope sends message of hope to Brazil's poor

Peter Radford — Democracy versus capitalism: take two

That economics textbooks muddle this all up and confuse or conflate the political system with the economic system is a major ideological faux pas.

Neoliberalism conflates the freedom of economic choice in the free market economic system of capitalism based on property ownership and exchange with political freedom in a democracy based on political rights, rule of law, and representative government. They are not the same, nor even necessarily complementary. Historically, they have often been antithetical — the story of the class struggle between propertied and unpropertied, and between privileged and commoner.

The post also explore many issues that we deal with here at MNE on a regular basis between institutionalists and individualists.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Democracy versus capitalism: take two
Peter Radford

Frances Coppola — The extent of evil

Weekend philosophy club.

Coppola Comment
The extent of evil
Frances Coppola