Commenters on my little Nazism and capitalism post are claiming that the graph tells us nothing about the Nazis and capitalism; it only tells us that the economy improved under the Nazis. As it did in the United States under FDR. So maybe the graph plotting capital’s return under Nazism just shows general improvement in the economy in the 1930s, an improvement widely shared throughout the industrial world? Luckily, Suresh Naidu, the kick-ass economist at Columbia, supplied me with the following graphs. This first graph, which comes from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, compares the share of national income that went to capital in the US and in Germany between 1929 and 1938. Suresh tells me that the share […]

Jonathan Chait is no dummy. He’s one of the smartest political journalists around. So this bit of obtuseness in his critique yesterday of Ta-Nehisi Coates caught me by surprise. Coates has been writing a series of pieces interrogating the idea of the culture of poverty, the notion that African American poverty is rooted in a deep tradition of bad values, bad behavior, bad choices, especially among black men. This idea used to be the exclusive preserve of the right; a milder version of it has since migrated to the liberal left. In his latest dispatch, Coates wrote this: Certainly there are cultural differences as you scale the income ladder. Living in abundance, not fearing for your children’s safety, and having […]

Last year, I said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that socialism is about converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. This is what I meant. Socialism won’t eliminate the sorrows of the human condition. Loss, death, betrayal, disappointment, hurt: none of these would disappear or even be mitigated in a socialist society. As the Pirkei Avot puts it, against your will you enter this world, against your will you leave it (or something like that). That’s not going to change under socialism. But what socialism can do is to arrange things so that you can actually deal with and confront these unhappinesses of the human condition. I was reminded of that reading this wonderful piece by Anya Shiffrin about the death of […]

Pete Seeger’s death has prompted several reminiscences about his 1955 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). And for good reason. Two good reasons, in fact. First, Seeger refused to answer questions about his beliefs and associations—up until the 1940s, he had been a member of the Communist Party—not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment, which protects men and women from self-incrimination, but on the basis of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. While invoking the Fifth was not without its perils—most important, it could put someone on the blacklist; individuals who invoked it frequently found themselves without work—it had the advantage of keeping one out of jail. But the cost of the 5th was […]

In yesterday’s New York Times, Robert Pear reports on a little known fact about Obamacare: the insurance packages available on the federal exchange have very high deductibles. Enticed by the low premiums, people find out that they’re screwed on the deductibles, and the co-pays, the out-of-network charges, and all the different words and ways the insurance companies have come up with to hide the fact that you’re paying through the nose. For policies offered in the federal exchange, as in many states, the annual deductible often tops $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple. Insurers devised the new policies on the assumption that consumers would pick a plan based mainly on price, as reflected in the premium. But […]

The Wealth of Nations: The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity. … The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives….Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low.”

In 1969, while he was working on Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an income of $1600 plus $800 in food stamps to every family of four, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was deputized by Nixon to investigate the historical accuracy of one of Karl Polanyi’s claims in The Great Transformation. Polanyi had argued that Britain’s Speenhamland system—like Nixon’s plan, it would have guaranteed an annual income to poor families, regardless of whether they worked or not—had the perverse effect of making the poor poorer. Reiterating claims made by Marx and Engels, Polanyi wrote that Speenhamland allowed, even encouraged, employers to hire workers at below-subsistence wages (the poor were guaranteed an income regardless of whether they worked). Because workers […]

The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Inc.’s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is so full of cushy perks that some employees may never want to go home. Soon, they’ll have that option. The social network said this week it is working with a local developer to build a $120 million, 394-unit housing community within walking distance of its offices. Called Anton Menlo, the 630,000 square-foot rental property will include everything from a sports bar to a doggy day care. … One of Facebook’s corporate goals is to take care of as many aspects of its employees lives as possible. They don’t have to worry about transportation—there’s a bus for that. Laundry and dry cleaning? Check. Hairstylists, woodworking classes, bike maintenance. […]

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 10, Part II: Corporation laws, however, give less obstruction to the free circulation of stock from one place to another than to that of labour. It is everywhere much easier for a wealthy merchant to obtain the privilege of trading in a town corporate, than for a poor artificer to obtain that of working in it. Same as it ever was.

Every single one of the explanations that Adam Smith offers—in Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 1, of The Wealth of Nations—for the difference in wage rates between various kinds of labor is discomfirmed by the example of adjuncts in the academy.* Turns out: work that is harder, more disagreeable, more precarious, riskier as a long-term career opportunity, of lower social standing, and that requires more time and training to enter into and more trust from society to perform, does not in fact pay better. *These explanations have to do with what Smith calls “inequalities arising from the nature of the employments themselves.” These explanations are to be distinguished from those having to do with government policies or the forces of […]

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters. Thus the law which obliges the masters in several different trades to pay their workmen in money and not in goods, is quite just and equitable. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence: The rich and opulent merchant who does nothing but give a few directions, lives in far greater state and luxury and ease and plenty of all the conveniencies and delicacies of life than his clerks, who do […]

How can “the man of inferior rank…hope to distinguish himself,” muses Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Unlike the man of high rank, the non-noble cannot affect the bearing of nobility; his comportment will go unnoticed. “Why should the man, whom nobody thinks it worth while to look at, be very anxious about the manner in which he holds up his head, or disposes of his arms while he walks through a room?” The man of middling or inferior rank is expected to act modestly and plainly, so he must. He must thus pursue a different path, says Smith. If ever he hopes to distinguish himself, it must be by more important virtues. He must acquire dependants to […]

Here’s a photo of a letter Margaret Thatcher sent to Friedrich von Hayek on February 17, 1982, in which she draws a comparison between Britain and Pinochet’s Chile.  I wrote about the letter in chapter 2 of The Reactionary Mind. It now turns out, according to Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell, that there is no No one has yet to discover—not in the Hayek or the Thatcher archives—a preceding letter from Hayek to Thatcher, even though, as many of us have wondered about this letter before.assumed. So we don’t know what exactly it was that Hayek said that elicited this response from Thatcher. Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell speculates, in an email to John Quiggin that I was copied on, that Thatcher […]

On Bloggingheads, Mike Konczal and I talk about Nietzsche, the Austrians, and neoliberalism. I explain the weird ways in which Hayek’s view of judging mirrors America’s belated feudalism, how my thinking about the Austrians has changed, why academic theorists and leftists wrongly elevate Strauss and Schmitt above Hayek and Mises, and how we might think about neoliberalism differently. Unfortunately I can’t seem to embed the video here, so you’ll have to click on the link and watch it over at the BH site.

While I have your attention, I want to highlight two dimensions of that 1981 Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) meeting in Pinochet’s Chile that Hayek helped organize. You can read about the whole affair here: I encourage you to do so; the devil, ahem, really is in the details. But two points stand out for me. The first is how hard the meeting’s organizers worked to transmit the notion that the ideas of Hayek and Milton Friedman had found a home in Pinochet’s Chile. One of the ways they did so was by seamlessly interweaving the distinctive vocabulary of Hayek and Friedman into their accounts of Pinochet. Pedro Ibáñez, one of the original organizers, told the attendees that with the election […]

My article “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” has provoked much criticism, some of it quite hostile. (Here’s a complete list of the responses I’ve received.) The criticism focuses on four issues: the connection between Nietzsche and Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek; the question of Hayek’s elitism; the relationship between economic and non-economic value; and the relationship between Hayek and Pinochet. I address three of these criticisms here—a separate post on Hayek and Pinochet follows—but first let me restate the argument of the piece and explain why I wrote it. “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” juxtaposes Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of objective value with the turn to subjective theories of value in economics, first among the early marginalists […]

I’m not the biggest fan of Bob Fitch’s work, but this passage from an essay he wrote in New Politics—which Bhaskar Sunkara just forwarded me—is just splendid. The aim of the Right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict — to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically. Frank Capra’s picture in A Wonderful Life of Bedford Falls under the domination of Mr. Potter illustrates the way small town politics usually works. The aim of conservative urban politics is to create small towns in the big city: the local patronage machines run by the Floyd Flakes and the Pedro […]

Barack Obama at Morehouse College: Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever […]

I’ve been traveling for several days, but in the last 24 hours, a bunch of people have responded, all critically, to my “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.”  I just got back and have a bunch of teaching to do, so I haven’t had time to read them all and may not be able to get to them for a while. But I thought I’d post them here.  I’ll try to get to them as soon as I can. Kevin Vallier, one of the sharpest libertarian theorists out there with whom I’ve argued in the past, has what seems on a very quick glance to be a thorough critique (not trying to suggest it’s not thorough; I just only had time to skim […]

“Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche.” So said Clarence Darrow at the trial of Leopold and Loeb, the two University of Chicago law students who had murdered young Bobby Franks for no other reason than to prove that they were Nietzschean Supermen who could. When I’m feeling mischievous, I think of using that line as an epigraph for an essay on Nietzsche and libertarianism. How many teenage boys, after all, have found their way into the free market via Nietzsche? None, one insider tells me; a lot, says another. My impression is that the latter is right, but good data is hard to come by. Every ten years, Liberty Magazine polls its readers about their […]