Brad Delong posts a great old interview with Milton Friedman. Somewhere after the 25th minute he says:
Government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to have power over their fellow man get in a position of controlling them.Think on that, homeys.
13 comments:
Yeah, that's an eye-opener all right. Replace "government" in that sentence with "capitalism." Or "war." Or "organized religion." Or "organized crime." Or "sexual reproduction." Thanks Uncle Miltie!
It’s a more important distinction than that. [Things like sex are a false comparison, that's a 1:1, usually, "contract" without compulsion, by definition or else it’s rape.] If the institution of government can only attract the kind of people who are least fit to govern, well, that would be a good thing for everyone to "think on." If there was wide agreement that it's a truism, that would make it possible to arrive at a government where utility outweighed maintenance costs.
Sexual reproduction, not sex. Gene pool, ladies.
Friedman had no pretense that a desire for "power" over one's fellow human being was disqualifying in any other human institution, least of all those run by the suits who paid his bills. So you'll forgive me if my frontal cortex isn't all a-quiver. And since the desire for power over fellow human beings is characteristic of all government (along with most primate social behavior) it's pretty obvious his objective is not to improve the cost benefit ratio.
Then again, all this crap is really about industrial regulation, not government at all.
That's a rather forced effort at tendention, I'd say. Governments retain, at present, certain coercive powers unavaiable--in this country, at least--to other actors. A person has choices when it comes to or "organized religion" or "sexual reproduction," you know. Most people, meanwhile, have no choice of citizenship.
Which is all to say that "capitalism" and "industry" are all fine and well, but if you can name me an institution with more power or a broader scope of power than government, I might concede something to your point. Capitalism is not an institution, an idea, or a "system" in any meaningful sense, so . . . ?
What planet do you hail from? On mine, outside of a few heavily industrialized/centralized countries, the state bureaucracy is powerless to enforce any priorities at all unless they coincide with the ambitions of people who achieved power via other kinds of networks. Your attempt to generalize stinks of the Monongahela. Do you really think, for example, that 90 percent of the human population has a choice of their organized religion?
Moreover, "Government" is as much an abstraction as "Capital." Both are concepts used to encompass a wide variety of heterogeneous institutions. But OK, United Fruit Company in Batista's Cuba. The World Bank's Peru country office circa 1990. The AIOC in Hashemite Iraq. Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta. I mean, come on.
The point is not that governments are not powerful, the point is that there are many organizing frameworks that serve humans' desire to dominate each other. All of them also facilitate humans' desire to create things. Friedman's choice of "government" as the great bugaboo strikes me as quite arbitrary, if not suspiciously consistent with the desire of his sponsors to maximize their return on investment. More importantly, it misses the reality that power is simply potentia. Inveighing against Government because it allows people to seek power over their fellow human beings is like advocating amputation as a prophylactic against leg cramps. We'd get them in our arms if we walked on our hands; and anyway, that's what happens when you train for a marathon.
In closing-- do I have to spoonfeed you people everything? Reproduction gives an individual power over the fate of the human race itself. All sorts of frameworks exist to enhance that power. And here, too, the Jews have extended their tentacles everywhere.
Friedman was nothing. Proudhon, Spooner, Warren and Tucker had it figured right, with indisputable eloquence, long before that gilded lily was a twinkle, as they say.
Moloch, you work too hard.
Quite right. In that light, the reproductive correlation is even less accurate. The more power one has the less one tends to reproduce. DNA is not a shotgun. Mammals have ridiculously convoluted brains precisely because our branch moved in the direction of investment in care over laying 10,000 eggs and swimming away.
"Most primate social behavior" seems rather unqualified too. Lemurs? Benobos? Orangutans?
Those who seek power via the agency of capital, brains, martial ability, better stories (religion), whatever have, by definition, strength. Again, not talking right or wrong, just cause and effect. Even crime requires skill and effort for continuing success; parasitism and such is well, even over, represented in nature.
The government question is interesting because it *seems* to function on the opposite premise. The weakest, regarding the task at hand, are the most likely to succeed. Are the ones drawn to it.
"Why? By what agency? If they *are* the weakest, who are those dealing from strength and why do they allow it?" They're interesting questions and, once I see them pared down, I realize they were also answered in the last century.
This—“Reproduction gives an individual power over the fate of the human race itself”—is just goofy; and implicitly racist. A conversation ender too.
Wrong on all counts, but especially about reproduction. The more power one has the less one tends to reproduce only because there is less need to protect one's spawn. Protected by powerful parents, even a single child is likely to enter the gene pool. Those 10,000 eggs are only laid in the hopes that a few of their occupants may survive to sexual maturity. And anyway, rich people with few kids is a phenomenon unique to our narrow perch in the time-space continuum. I consent of course to the end of our conversation, though why that should be because I think sexual reproduction is an exercise in power over (future) fellow human beings rather than because I find your your ideology stupid, is a bit obscure.
It's been dull.
Wouldn't a failure to sexually reproduce be more of an "exercise in power over (future) fellow human beings" than the, you know, positive steps toward their creation? I'm just sayin' . . .
Well, it would depend either on your definition of power or on the correlation between genetics and behavior. I do note that the attempt to exercise power by abstention appears to describe your political strategy as well as your reproductive one. How's it working so far?
Well now that's a creatively deployed fag joke if I ever heard one. I'm gonna have to steal that.
I confess that my abstention from matters of power and politics is less complete that the accusation suggests, as you're obviously aware.
That said, I haven't got a "political strategy," although I do have some beliefs, of which I'm hardly protective. I lately find your comments oddly reminiscent of a boyfriend I once had, who almost always did what I told him to do, but who invariably picked a fight when I suggested what he should do.
In the meantime, I'm certainly accepting suggestions for achieving the libertarian paradise sometime before I'm too old to get it up.
I just though whoisioz.com needed a more competent heckler. But maybe that was your ex-boyfriend's motivation as well.
That I'll certainly take.
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