Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power. Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution. This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Law, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Adam Smith, Donald Trump, East India Company, Elon Musk, Michał Kalecki, William Douglas
Many people of my generation have heard of Bill Safire, who worked as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew. When I was growing up, Safire had long departed the Nixon White House. He was now a columnist for the New York Times—perhaps the first in what is a by-now familiar sequence of the Times’ hiring voices who could speak for the “reasonable right” on its oped page. Like William F. Buckley, Safire liked to style himself a man of words, and his columns were often peppered with painful pedantry and middlebrow mewling (I can do alliteration, too!) over the rules of proper usage, the etymology of words, and such. So let’s do some here. Despite […]
Far from being something entirely new or novel, Elon Musk embodies something Adam Smith identified in The Wealth of Nations as one of the most pernicious political forms of the modern age: the East India Company. Most people don’t realize this, but Smith’s text, particularly the fourth book, is a sustained critique of the East India Company, which he identified as a monstrous hybrid of merchant and sovereign, “the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” Smith was most concerned about the role of the East India Company in India, but its reach was global and the repercussions revolutionary. The irony here is considerable. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year as the American Revolution. […]
David Brooks: Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change….I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant transformation. Edmund Burke on the East India Company: It is fixed beyond all power of reformation…this body, being totally perverted from the purposes of its institution, is utterly incorrigible; and because they are incorrigible, both in conduct and constitution, power ought to be taken out of their hands; just on the same principles on which have been made all the just changes and revolutions of government that have taken place since the […]