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
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. […]
A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right. I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painfully, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget. But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that […]