I don't see myself here: Mises and "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality"

Mises is interesting to me in part because he helped kick off the Socialist Calculation debate in the 20s by trying to show how socialism wouldn’t work in his estimation. I thought Mises’s argument was tortured, but Hayek did put a nice bow on it by looking at the problem of incomplete information.

I wanted to read more Mises without having to slog through Human Action, so I pulled this text. This text is especially salient to me because I am highly critical of capitalism as it really exists. The problem is that in reading the book, I really didn’t see myself. I think this is because the Capitalism Mises describes is a very rosy idealized version that doesn’t exist – there are no embedded power structures that prevent the rise of the talented or anything that distributes rent to people who don’t earn it. For Mises, in fact, even crisis and depression are not part of the capitalistic system, but are instead “the result of interventionist attempts to regulate capitalism” (pp. 60). For Mises, the person who is against capitalism is so because of a sort of envy of those who have been successful – he internalizes the idea that the fruits of labor and capital are evenly distributed and any questioning of this is sour grapes. To me, this is laughable in that same vein of argument that communism will work only just we haven’t tried real communism yet – with that being defined differently by the speaker. Ultimately, I wasn’t convinced. Perhaps I’ll have to slog through Human Action to get at his arguments in more depth, but I’m in no rush.

Economics from the Ground Up: Mazzucato and "The Value of Everything"

Mazzucato is one of the most interesting economists working today. I say this because her project in the last two books focus on a ground-up redetermination of what is important in the economy. To someone like me, who is interested in the social generation and distribution of resources but who think that policy makers went the wrong way in recent years (especially before 2008, see Bernanke to Friedman: “Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again. “) this book is just catnip. So much catnip that I stayed up too late a couple of nights in a row reading it.

Mazzucato, in this book, looks at where value was theoretically derived historically from the physiocrats to Smith through Marx and into the marginal revolution. She focuses the critique on the marginalists and the composition of current GDP about how it focus to much on the market – how what has a price has value and nothing else. For Mazzucato, this sidelines non-market institutions like the government which are long-term value creators but left out of market considerations because what they do doesn’t have a price. It is a compelling argument to look at how we analyze “the economy” in a different light.

Being Told to Embrace Centrist Democrats

You and I just won't agree on this. Obama came into office with momentum and a good majority. They had to govern in a way that earned votes in the midterm. I was on the front lines of this because...

I was unemployed from December 2008 to July 2011. I watched as policy favored the banks who helped blow up the whole thing - remember how they argued in 2009 about how they still had to pay out bonuses, and there was no clawback? How with that majority there were the bailouts, but HAMP, for homeowners had a lot of red tape and no cramdown options? How fraud from Goldman and ABACUS to Joe Cassano and AIG FP didn't get prosecuted but invited into the administration? The SEC did fine a lot of banks, but where was justice and why was no one held accountable? Bunch of chickenshits. How after passing ARRA in January of 2009, there was a in incredibly premature turn to austerity as unemployment was still over 8% and there were 6 job seekers for each opening. How unemployment was first extended but then extensions stopped even though millions were still looking for anything, something. I interviewed for a data entry job; another a PI job, and I didn't get it. And then what do you do with all that political capital? You pass the Heritage Foundation's 1994 health plan and call it progressive even though it still enshrines biases against women's health because you're bending over backwards to get just one GOP vote so you can call it bipartisan (an you keep doin it, Obama, to the point where you're ready to give away on social security to burnish your legacy when the GOP stopped bargaining in good faith early in 2009). Remember the "fiscal cliff"? And that doesn't even get at never coming to terms with the previous administration's illegal wars and the folks we tortured and keeping people locked up in Cuba without any due process rights....

And that's what we get to vote for, to be let down time and again, like how right to work spread.....

It's tiring in a different way than Trump is tiring.
And that's what we get to vote for, to be let down time and again, like how right to work spread.....
It's tiring in a different way than Trump is tiring.

Criticism is easier than creation: a better world is possible

I was reading a thread on twitter a while back about the importance of world building in fantasy and science fiction. The author pointed to how important it was to have a fully fleshed out world to make it believable. In a fantasy novel, we need not just kings and queens but also celebrities in culture and other amusements.

This is entirely true. How many times have you been reading a book where it just doesn’t ring true to itself so the entire plot that the writer puts into motion on the stage of the setting so the whole thing tumbles. This is harder when you’re creating a new world than when you’re relying on the past or the present to do all the heavy lifting. If I’m thinking of writing a historical novel based on WWII, then there is a lifetime of history that people have absorbed.

World building isn’t just important in fantasy. It’s important in real life. One of the appeals to me for the Manifesto over Capital is that it looks more forward (and is shorter, let’s not kid ourselves). Capital is about looking at the totalizing capitalistic system on its own terms. But what we need to worry about as socialists is the transformation problem. Not esoterics in volume three turning from value to quantified dollar amounts, but the real transformation problem in turning this world into the better world that is possible. We can criticize, but we need to be world builders first.