Centrist Gary Cohn, chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump, Director of the National Economic Council, and a DINO, will lead the Trumpist way to privatizing more of the US public infrastructure …
Private ownership can create a process of placement, layering, and integration that conditions the public into paying for things that used to be financed by instruments like bond issues.
Privatization becomes ideologically mystifying as it demonizes the public trust, disrupting the social contract with labor.
Capital extraction/exploitation, transfer/transformation, currency manipulation can all become part of privatization. Making infrastucture and other public entities private, ensures a kind of secrecy now hinted at in the Kushner revelations.
Property in whose name? Privatization (as standing questions in law) creates illusions of ownership or the rights of such ownership. Information has become such a battle ground in the ownership of our online data. How even more problematic when one’s information can be held hostage.
The current White House crisis demonstrates that money laundering is another sign of a social structure of accumulation and whose rapidity is an illusion (drug dealers who sample their own product, buy the hype they’ve produced, or be big Orange idiots)
Trumpism or its Bannonist rationalizations manifests itself as a force to overcome an administrative state, a mainstream media enemy, and all those “others”.
...The first, from 1980, is by David Gordon, under the title "Stages of Accumulation and Long Economic Cycles." It is more or less the founding text, although it already builds on work by Weisskopf and by Edwards. It contains a tremendous amount of ideas, including some excellent speculations about the nature of the initial capital and social investments that lend unity and duration to a long wave. Thirteen distinct social structures that directly support accumulation are enumerated, and some of their contradictions are analyzed.
...The second text, "Long Swings and the Stages of Capitalism," is an excerpt from the book *Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States* (1982). Here the focus on the capital/labor conflict is sharper, and the segmentation of workers into distinct groups within the hierarchy of a large corporation is shown to be a crucial mechanism of social control. Undoubtedly this whole book would be worth reading, as well as another one by Richard Edwards, *Contested Terrain : The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century* (1979) from which the notion of hierarchical control is taken.
...What's really galvanizing, though, is to read just those two texts and then go on to the one by Michael Wallace and David Brady, which is called "Globalization or Spatialization? The Worldwide Spatial Restructuring of the Labor Process." It's from a recent book called *Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century* (2010).
It hardly qualifies as a coherent non-Schumpeterian “creative” destruction (not deconstruction but distraction, diversion,) devaluation, and deregulation.
There are claims that money laundering is simply about capital but when one sees the relation to institutions, resources, and infrastructure, human agency in cultural and natural capital become affected.
Privatization is not without its nuances relative to ownership, command, and control.
First, the public sector here includes agencies administered as part of the state and organizations owned by it, such as state enterprises and independent public authorities like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In the private sector I include not only commercial firms but also informal and domestic activities, voluntary associations, cooperatives, and private nonprofit corporations.
Second, in the definition I am using, privatization refers to shifts from the public to the private sector, not shifts within sectors. Thus the conversion of a state agency into an autonomous public authority or state-owned enterprise is not privatization, though it may well put the enterprise on a commercial footing. This was the objective, for example, of the conversion of the United States Post Office into a public corporation, the United States Postal Service, in 1971. Similarly, the conversion of a private nonprofit organization into a profit-making firm also is not privatization, though it, too, may orient the firm toward the market.
Both of these intrasectoral changes might be described as commercialization; in the case of public agencies, commercialization is sometimes a preliminary stage to privatization.
Third, shifts from publicly to privately produced services may result not only from a deliberate government action, such as a sale of assets, but also from the choices of individuals or firms that a government is unwilling or unable to satisfy or control. In many countries, private demand for education, health care, or retirement income has outstripped public provision. As a result, private schooling, medical care, and pensions have grown to relatively larger proportions. This is demand-driven privatization.
When privatization is a demand-driven process, it does not require an absolute reduction in publicly produced services. Stagnation or slow growth in the public sector may be the cause. In some socialist societies the growth of an "underground" economy represents a form of privatization that is not a planned development (though it may well result from development planning).
In other words, as a process, privatization encompasses more institutional changes than those brought about by self-conscious privatization policies. It seems useful, then, to distinguish instances of privatization according to whether they are predominantly policy- or demand-driven.
Fourth, if one shifts attention from the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption, one may alternatively define privatization as the substitution of private goods for public goods. A public good, in the economist's sense, has two distinguishing properties: One person's consumption does not preclude another's; and excluding anyone from consumption is costly, if not impossible. The prototypical example is fresh air. A public good need not be produced by government. A broadcast television program is a public good even if it is provided by a commercially owned station; but videotape is not…
Even within the economic theory of privatization, there are some subtle but important differences between two approaches: the radical view of privatization as a reassignment of property rights and the more moderate, conventional view of privatization as an instrument for fine-tuning a three-sector economy…
It is worth taking note of the premises and implications of the property rights approach. First, the theory holds that the form of ownership is the predominant explanation for the varying performance of different organizations. The theory gives no importance whatsoever to organizational characteristics such as size, centralization, hierarchy, or leadership. Nor does it recognize any variation in performance that might stem from task characteristics, such as poor information or ambiguity about goals. The theory does not even recognize the effects of economic incentives unrelated to property rights, such as those originating in various types of contracts. The theory does not point to any contingencies in generalizing about public-private differences; it does not identify any particular conditions or characteristics that might cause public institutions to perform well. The disease the theory diagnoses in the public sector is, so to speak, genetic and incurable.
Second, the theory takes the market as the standard for judging value and finds public institutions deficient because they fail to measure up to that standard, e.g., their "shareholders" cannot sell stock. Survival in the market, of course, depends on the capacity of organizations to produce a residual reward for the owners--a profit. This is not the standard that public institutions generally need to meet. The property rights approach says that society would be better off if, instead of meeting approval in the political process, public organizations or their assets were privately owned and had to meet the test of profitability.
Third, the property rights theory assumes that the market for corporate control is highly efficient and that the chief reason corporations are acquired is their management's poor performance. In the United States today, however, some corporations are acquired because they have built up large pools of cash, while other corporations avoid being acquired because their managers take preventive but inefficient measures, such as piling up debt.
Frequently, behemoths with large cash flow but low returns on equity and other indicators of poor performance have taken over firms with much better records. Virtue is not always rewarded in the market for corporate control; nonetheless, according to the property rights view, market discipline forces managers of private firms to be more efficient than public managers. The theory gives no weight at all to the monitoring capacities of the state, the public at large, and the various institutions of a liberal democracy, such as the press, that routinely scrutinize the performance of public institutions. The reasons for this dim view of public monitoring are spelled out in the theory of public choice…
In short, starting with an individualistic model of human behavior, the public choice school makes a series of empirical claims:
( I) that democratic polities have inherent tendencies toward government growth and excessive budgets;
(2) that expenditure growth is due to self-interested coalitions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats; and
(3) that public enterprises necessarily perform less efficiently than private enterprises.
But rather than being an advance of science over intuition, the appeal of the public choice school is precisely to those who are intuitively certain that whatever government does, the private sector can do better. Together, the property rights and public choice schools show only that, if you start by assuming a purely individualistic model of human behavior and treat politics as if it were a pale imitation of the market, democracy will, indeed, make no sense…
Privatization, as some advocates themselves point out, represents an effort to alter the conditions of political competition by breaking up the coalitions supporting public provision and by promoting more market-oriented political values. In other words, it is an attempt to fix in place the conservative orientation that has emerged forcefully in the 1980s. No one need doubt that public institutions like private ones, are bases of wealth and power. They are environments that encourage those who work within them to develop different political orientations. To alter the public-private balance is to change the distribution of material and symbolic resources influencing the shape of political life. Privatization ought to be frankly recognized as part of an effort of conservatives to reinforce their own power position.
Since I do not share the values for which that power is deployed, I distrust privatization. Ultimately I fear that one form of privatization does entail another--that as we move public provision into the private sector, we move from the realm of the open and visible into a domain that is more closed to scrutiny and access. And in the process, whether or not intending to change, we are likely to narrow our involvements, interests, and vision of a good society and a good life.
The problem of course is that neoclassical economists would only look at employment/wage effects as efficiency measures rather than the more complex disposition of capital flows and their effect on accumulation / value. There are also data measurement matters that include national histories, the sectoral differences, and social divisions, among many different divisions of labor, even before getting to social structure of accumulation issues, etc. Foreign investment for some is also money laundering for others.
More interesting is how capital is being reconceptualized in terms of capital formation in commercial/non-commercial construction, although in the case of Rognile, financial capital as fictional capital in construction and development provides the detail not covered by Piketty in his historical coverage of wealth. What remains missing are a variety of contingencies usually omitted in orthodox approaches to economic analysis.
On March 20th Matthew Rognlie, a 26-year-old graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presented a new paper at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
Mr Rognlie has critics of his own. He appears to underestimate the role changing technology plays in widening inequality (by increasing the substitutability of capital for labour, for instance, or by raising the demand to live in expensive cities). But his observation that it is homeowners in particular—rather than rentiers generally—who are grabbing a larger share of the pie is important for policy. Mr Piketty used the historical evidence in his book to argue that a global tax of up to 2% a year on individual wealth should be introduced in order to prevent capital concentrating in the hands of the few. But if housing wealth is the biggest source of rising wealth then a more focused approach is called for. Policy-makers should deal with the planning regulations and NIMBYism that inhibit housebuilding and which allow homeowners to capture super-normal returns on their investments.
Just how inconvenient Mr Rognlie's argument is for Mr Piketty's overarching narrative is a matter of perspective. The latter certainly did not make housing wealth the central theme of his bestselling book. But a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty's argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers. But their NIMBYism is a very Piketty-like phenomenon.
The multisector model offers better support for the scarcity view. If, as most evidence suggests, consumers’ demand for housing is sufficiently inelastic, the rising price of residential investment and growing scarcity of land can account for most of the growth in housing’s portion of capital income. Although this does not resolve all aspects of the time series—especially the fall and rise in the corporate sector—it does explain a sizable portion of the long-term contribution of housing...
Outside of housing, there appears to be little correlation between the capital-income ratio and the net capital share.By contrast, the rise in housing’s contribution to the capital share can be explained in part as the result of scarcity. The rising real cost of residential investment and the limited quantity of residential land have conspired to make housing more expensive, and given low elasticities of substitution this has meant a rise in housing’s share of income.With these trends in mind, policymakers concerned about the distribution of income should keep an eye on housing costs. Many urban economists,including Glaeser, Gyourko, and Saks (2005) and Quigley and Raphael(2005), have documented explicitly how restrictions on land use and residential construction inflate the cost of housing. Outside of housing, however,this paper raises more questions than it answers about the evolution of the net capital share: once the accumulation view has been discarded, there is no master narrative at hand that can explain the postwar fall and rise.If anything, these results suggest that concern about inequality should be shifted away from the overall split between capital and labor and toward other aspects of distribution, such as the within-labor distribution of income. Although the net capital share has at times seen dramatic shifts both up and down, away from housing its long-term movement has been quite small, and there is no compelling reason to suggest that this pattern will change going forward...
Without bursting Rognile’s bubble, as we’ve seen with master(sic) builder / “developers” like Trump and Kushner, their concerns are purely consumptive and even prejudicial in terms of fomenting inequality, given their alleged roles as slumlords as well as money launderers. US social history is the privatized American Dream of home ownership as the ultimate privatization, even if the bank really owns your home. And then there’s the whole FHA role of the state as well as the historical problems of public housing.
Chapter 2 of Gordon et. al. (1982) presents the SSA theory. In that chapter, the authors begin their analysis by implicitly defining capital accumulation in the following way:
The process of capital accumulation contains three major steps.
Capitalists, in business to make profits, begin by investing their funds (money capital) in the raw materials, labor power, machinery, buildings, and other commodities needed for production.
Next, they organize the labor process...
Finally, by selling the products of labor, capitalists reconvert their property back to money capital (p. 23).
The SSA theory asserts that smooth and rapid capital accumulation requires a well functioning set of institutions that support it, called the SSA. Once constructed, an SSA sets off along period of relatively rapid capital accumulation. Over time the combined system of SSA and capital accumulation process develops contradictions that undermine both the SSA and rapid accumulation. As the SSA collapses (or loses its ability to promote rapid accumulation) and stagnation sets in, a search begins for a new SSA. This is held to explain a historical pattern of long swings in capital accumulation…
Just at the time the SSA theory was itself being constructed, a new, neoliberal institutional structure (IS) was being built in much of the capitalist world, particularly in the UK and USA. The neoliberal IS, which has now persisted for more than 25 years, is clearly a structure that has conditioned the process of capital accumulation…
This account combines two different Marxist concepts, that of the circuit of capital and that of capital accumulation. In this combining of two different concepts lies one of the roots of the problematic aspect of the SSA theory.
The circuit of capital is traditionally defined as the process symbolized by M-C-C-M'. In the first step of the circuit of capital, M-C, the capitalist uses money to purchase means of production and labor power. The second step, C-C', is not an exchange but the production (or labor) process, in which new commodities are produced and surplus value is created. The third step, C'-M', represents the sale of the produced commodities for money. However, the money received by the capitalist in exchange for the final commodities is initially not money capital, as Gordon et. al. (1982) state, but money revenue, which "replaces" the value of the means of production and labor power purchased by the capitalist and also contains surplus value. The money revenue is transformed into money capital only if the capitalist throws it back into another circuit of capital by using it to again purchase means of production and labor power. As will be pointed out below, the key question for the SSA theory has to do with the conditions necessary for money revenue to be converted into capital.
After Gordon et. al. (1982) make a persuasive case that each step in the circuit of capital requires supportive institutions, which are collectively named the SSA, they state the following: "We further propose that a social structure of accumulation alternately stimulates and constrains the pace of capital accumulation (pp. 25-6, italics added)."…
While a reasonable case is made in that work that the institutional framework of a capitalist system can have a large impact on the rate of accumulation, no strong case is made that the aim of increasing the rate of accumulation is the central goal that guides the construction of a new institutional structure…
Institutions normally cannot be created by the individual capitalist. Institutions, which are social in nature, require some kind of common action for their creation and maintenance. The competitive, individualistic aspect of capitalism make cooperation among capitalists for any purpose difficult and somewhat unstable. However, history shows that capitalists are able, at least at certain times, to cooperate in creating institutions that will protect their core interests. Often they do this in alliance with other groups and classes, since larger numbers may be required to create institutions than the capitalists can muster from among themselves. Particularly if a condition arises in which institutions are failing to effectively support the circuit of capital, in which appropriation of surplus value has become difficult, in which the average rate of profit has fallen, and in which such a condition has persisted for some time, one would expect the capitalist class, or at least a large part of it, to be able to overcome the centrifugal forces generated by capitalism to work together to create institutions that will protect their core interests, which have not been served by existing institutions…
Consider the individual capitalist. As Gordon et. al. (1982, ch. 2) note, before the individual capitalist will plough profits back into new productive investments, there must be an ability to make a reasonably determinate calculation of what the rate of profit on such investments will be, as well as the prospect that such a determinate rate of return will be acceptably high. The alternative is to hold the surplus value in another form, typically through some type of financial investment rather than real investment, while awaiting more favorable conditions for deciding to make a real investment. At times capitalists can make high rates of return through financial and speculative investments when the expected return to productive investment is either very uncertain or low. Such a situation would not impel them to transform institutions to produce a shift from speculative/financial investments to productive investments.
Transformations of the supportive institutions are key to the conditions for money revenue to be converted into capital and then there are the foibles of “individual capitalists”, especially of the Orange kind.
x
"We'll launder your mob money if you lend us a secret stash of cash. Need back channel for that, of course." What Kush said to Kislyak?
“As capitalism emerged, there were social forces of competition and wealth, resulting in an unequal distribution of resources, avarice and individualism. Once self-interest and more egoistic impulses assert themselves, crime emerges. The poor would commit crime out of need or out of a sense of injustice.
Hence, those with power exercise control and impose punishment, equating the definition of crime with harm or threat of harm to the property and business interests of the powerful.
This is not an amateur operation in the style of smugglers carrying suitcases full of money into Switzerland. Among those who have acted as middlemen for the elite we find some of the largest banks in the world, such as HSBC, UBS, Societe Generale and Credit Suisse.
On the one hand, the leak of all this information calls into question the system as a whole, and not just a few bad apples within in. At least 29 of the Fortune 500 companies (the largest corporations in the world) are included in the investigation papers.
On the other hand, these latest revelations will come as little surprise to many ordinary people, who already have rock-bottom expectations regarding the behaviour of the rich and the elite after years of Establishment scandals and big business tax-dodging in all countries.
Despite the scale of this leak, it still does not give the full picture. Mossack Fonseca is just one company that is part of a massive industry helping the 1% to build their fortunes by lying and cheating. The internal servers of dozens of other firms like Mossack Fonseca would make interesting reading and would likely implicate many more members of the global elite who are fortunate enough to have escaped embarrassment this time around because it wasn’t their lawyers who suffered a leak.
In reviewing the most common phases and techniques of money laundering appearing in the cases, the results are similar to previous years.
The most observed stages of money laundering were placement and layering and the most common techniques for money laundering were structuring and smurfing.
Structuring normally involves multiple cash deposits or withdrawals at amounts below the reporting threshold and smurfing is defined as multiple deposits of cash, and/or low-value monetary instruments purchased from various banks or money services businesses by various individuals...
There are three widely recognized stages in the money laundering process:
Placement involves placing the proceeds of crime in the financial system.
Layering involves converting the proceeds of crime into another form and creating complex layers of financial transactions to disguise the audit trail and the source and ownership of funds. This stage may involve transactions such as the buying and selling of stocks, commodities or property.
Integration involves placing the laundered proceeds back in the economy to create the perception of legitimacy...
The following types of businesses were found to be associated to all types of cases, that is, suspected to be complicit in (or created for the purpose of) laundering illicit proceeds gained from various criminal activities (possibly related to drugs, fraud and organized crime), and suspected of acting as vehicles for terrorist financing:
investment/trust companies;
import/export businesses (e.g. food, clothing, medical supplies);
money services businesses (MSB), including foreign currency exchange dealers;
telecommunications businesses; and
car sales/rentals.
How Canadian version of money laundering works
One of the challenges for Marxists is to separate what is distinct about this moment in time from what remains consistent with earlier eras of capitalism. David Harvey is probably the most widely read Marxist scholar to contribute to that goal, analyzing a dizzying array of topics from the structure of Marx’s Capital,3 to the theorization and history of neoliberalism,4 to the changing nature of imperialism,5to a theory of Marxist urbanism,6 all while continuing to defend the relevance and necessity of Marx’s revolutionary method to both understand and, ultimately, transform the world we live in.
One of his most influential recent contributions has been the theory of “accumulation by dispossession,” in which he describes the ways capitalism uses force and theft to rob the world of value—both human beings and nature—in its insatiable quest for profit.
As Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the theory is a critical extension of Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation:
By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as “primitive” or “original” during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.7
He goes on to explore the ways in which these practices have been integrated into the ongoing evolution of capitalism and argues that alongside the exploitation of workers and the extraction of surplus value, there is simple plunder: the naked transfer of wealth from the world’s working class and poor to the ruling class. Additionally, this alternate mechanism of accumulation has become increasingly central to the functioning of capitalism under neoliberalism…
A discussion of the ongoing fraud and theft that goes on persistently under capitalism is largely missing from Capital because, as Harvey has written himself, Capital is not a complete portrait of the capitalist system; it is a critique of political economy—an attempt to show that even if we accept a number of conditions demanded by liberal economists—namely free markets, a pure system of only workers and capitalists, and most importantly for our purposes, the assumption that all commodities are purchased at their full value—the result is not trickle-down economics or the invisible hand gently leading us to a more equal future, but greater inequality, poverty, and misery for the majority, while a tiny minority reap billions.23
Marx is trying to show that even if you could get rid of theft and corruption (which he believes capitalism is incapable of doing), you would still be left with a system based on exploitation and class struggle.
Capitalism may produce the Bernie Madoffs of our world, but it can’t be reduced to them.
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 145-147:
To grasp these new forms of privatization, we need to critically transform Marx's conceptual apparatus.
Because he neglected the social dimension of the "general intellect," Marx failed to envisage the possibility of the privatization of the "general intellect" itself--and this is what lies at the core of the struggle over "intellectual property."
Negri is right on this point: within this framework, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible, which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures, that is, by non-economic means.
This is why, today, exploitation increasingly takes the form of rent: as Carlos Vercellone puts it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by the "becoming rent of profit." (SeeCapitalismo cognitivo, edited by Carlo Vercellone, Rome: Manifestolibri) And this is why direct authority is needed: in order to impose the (arbitrary) legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer "spontaneously" generated by the market.
Perhaps therein resides the fundamental "contradiction" of today's "postmodern" capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, "anti-statal," nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the "becoming-rent-of-profit" signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent.
Dynamic deterritorialization co-exists with, and relies on, increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses.
What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is today gathering strength.
To put it another way: when, due to the critical role of the "general intellect" (knowledge and social cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are increasingly "out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production," the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but rather the gradual relative transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor-power into rent appropriated by the privatization of this very "general intellect." Take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the cost of producing the commodities Microsoft sells (one can even argue that Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). It is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of higher levels of "exploitation" of his hired workers. If this were the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: masses of people would have chosen programs like Linux, which are both free and, according to the specialists, better than Microsoft's. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft has succeeded in imposing itself as an almost universal standard, (virtually) monopolizing the field, in a kind of direct embodiment of the "general intellect." Gates became the richest man on Earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the "general intellect" he successfully privatized and still controls. Is it true, then, that today's intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labor (they own their PC, etc.), which is Marx's description of capitalist "alienation"? Superficially, one might be tempted to answer "yes," but, more fundamentally, they remain cut off from the social field of their work, from the "general intellect," because the latter is mediated by private capital.
And the same goes for natural resources: their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, marked by a permanent struggle over who is to receive this rent, the peoples of the Third World or Western corporations.
The supreme irony is that, in order to explain the difference between labor-power (which, when put to work, produces surplus-value over and above its own value) and other commodities (the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involve no exploitation) Marx mentions as an example of an "ordinary" commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary "profits."
Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labor--the production costs are negligible; the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners and controllers of this natural resource because of its scarcity and limited supply.
In Proudhon’s period, the animating assumption of essentially all works on property was that God created the earth and gave it to mankind in common to use. This was the long-standing Christian view, which was notably reflected in Thomist thought and even received a ringing endorsement from John Locke. The Christianist idea of the common ownership of all of the earth is Proudhon’s starting point.
From there, a question arises: if God initially gave the entire earth to mankind to own in common, then how can you ever have individual property? Or, to borrow a line from Locke, since the earth is given to mankind in common, “it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.” The correct answer to this question, reached by Proudhon but not Locke, is that the only way to move from universal common ownership to individual private ownership is through theft. When an individual appropriates pieces of the earth (e.g. land) out of the commons and into private ownership, that individual steals from everyone else. Everyone else’s ownership share in that piece of the earth is taken from them, violently and without their consent….
Even under the hypothetical stories libertarians tell (“fact-defective potential explanations” in Nozick’s parlance) about how property can originate, the fact is that at the initial point in time, everyone can access and use every single piece of the earth at their will. There are no restrictions. You can move about the world freely. Nobody can stop you. You truly have negative liberty in the sense that it would be wrong to interfere with your bodily movements.
But then something curious happens. Somehow (regardless of how it’s justified), individuals are permitted to appropriate pieces of the world privately. The upshot of such appropriation is that everyone else’s previously-existing ability to access and use the appropriated piece of the world is stolen from them without their consent. Those who do not go along with having their access and use stolen from them are met with violence. This is theft. Access and use, both valuable things, are taken from people at the barrel of a gun…
The reason I bring up the fact that property is theft is because most actually-existing libertarian arguments are premised upon the idea that so-called laissez-faire capitalism is somehow voluntary and liberty-respecting. It is, of course, neither. The institutions that make up laissez-faire capitalism, the institution of private property especially, are imposed involuntarily on populations whether they want them or not. And to the extent that such involuntary impositions are enforced by violently attacking other human beings when they don’t comply, they are liberty-infringing.
This is not a novel point of course. Robert Nozick, an exception in the libertarian sphere, was very explicit about recognizing that the appropriation of property is liberty-destroying. He justifies such brutal attacks on human liberty with his paternalistic non-worsening proviso (that incidentally entails Rawlsian egalitarianism), but we can leave the particulars of that aside here…
What the Nordics have shown over the past three decades in particular is that you can transfer (and provide universal welfare benefits, which are transfers in net) at a far higher level than the US currently does without growing slower than the US.
One of the interesting things about the last few decades is that cross-country data among rich, developed countries has not shown any consistent relationship between tax levels and growth levels within the range of tax levels out there at present.
Not unlike other orthodox fantasies, the claims of privatization as more efficient only depend on a variety of factors unattended to by a number of analyses, including labor migration, labor trafficking, and that ever-present exploitation of labor power.
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
There is a lot of great material here. Lots. Too much, in fact. I think you ought to take it easy, and repost this over the next week or two (or even three) as a series of posts.
up
0 users have voted.
—
- Tony Wikrent
Nation Builder Books(nbbooks)
Mebane, NC 27302 2nbbooks@gmail.com
the content you provide. I want to understand it more fully, but can only manage it piecemeal. There's always so much of significance in your essays to process.
There is a lot of great material here. Lots. Too much, in fact. I think you ought to take it easy, and repost this over the next week or two (or even three) as a series of posts.
F this shit! If people are foolish enough to allow any further erosion of government responsibility and the public trusts, the public lands and parks, the infrastructure and resources that the public already owns, and generations have paid for, they might as well jump to the ending and put on shackles.
up
0 users have voted.
—
Fighting for democratic principles,... well, since forever
"... people are foolish enough to allow any further erosion of government responsibility and the public trusts,"
it's that they know little else. Wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast propaganda spews from the Think Tanks and Non-profit Foundations financed with billions of dollars by the oligarchy of corporations, banks, and obscenely rich Capitalists. These billions of dollars are mostly hidden, but even if they were not hidden one would know little of them since the nation's Press is controlled by a tiny handful of the same oligarchs whose billions fund the propaganda mills.
I'm not going to blame John and Jane Q. Public. They switch on the TV and expect to see the evening news. Instead, they are fed propaganda. They open the local newspaper and read the same propaganda they just saw the evening before on the television. On the way to work, the radio continues the onslaught.
As an example, when I speak to people about universal health care, I usually hear some comment such as, "I don't want the damn government in charge of my health; they can't do anything right and the cost will quadruple!" When I explain that, for instance, Medicare's overhead is far lower than that of commercial insurance, they are dumbfounded. It's not so much that they don't believe it, it's more that they have never even heard the argument. There are many hundreds of other examples that could be given -- some explained in annieli's (rather long, but excellent) essay.
Or do we serve the machine?
F this shit! If people are foolish enough to allow any further erosion of government responsibility and the public trusts, the public lands and parks, the infrastructure and resources that the public already owns, and generations have paid for, they might as well jump to the ending and put on shackles.
the military used to do everything that was outsourced to Halliburton and other private corporations. The cost of doing everything went up and in came tons of fraud. Even after companies were found guilty of fraud, they paid a small fine that didn't affect their profits and they continued to keep getting more contracts.
Chicago sold their toll roads to Saudi Arabia for a very small price and the costs of tolls went up.
They also sold their parking meters to Citibank and it was the same story.
The revenue for those services used to go back into the city's coffers and the money was used for the budgets, but now their budgets don't have enough money.
Good essay. I agree with others that breaking this up into smaller essays would be easier to read and understand.
up
0 users have voted.
—
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
@snoopydawg
The fees are really a tax on each individual.
the military used to do everything that was outsourced to Halliburton and other private corporations. The cost of doing everything went up and in came tons of fraud. Even after companies were found guilty of fraud, they paid a small fine that didn't affect their profits and they continued to keep getting more contracts.
Chicago sold their toll roads to Saudi Arabia for a very small price and the costs of tolls went up.
They also sold their parking meters to Citibank and it was the same story.
The revenue for those services used to go back into the city's coffers and the money was used for the budgets, but now their budgets don't have enough money.
Good essay. I agree with others that breaking this up into smaller essays would be easier to read and understand.
Privatizing the profit and socializing the cost is eroding our democracy and building an oligarchy. On this memorial day let's try to remember exactly what our warriors died for.
up
0 users have voted.
—
The real SparkyGump has passed. It was an honor being your human.
![660422_1_1_[1]](https://genehowington.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/660422_1_1_1.jpg)
Comments
I didn't get a harrumpf.
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
Le Pétomane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A9tomane
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Wow
There is a lot of great material here. Lots. Too much, in fact. I think you ought to take it easy, and repost this over the next week or two (or even three) as a series of posts.
- Tony Wikrent
Nation Builder Books(nbbooks)
Mebane, NC 27302
2nbbooks@gmail.com
annieli, I totally agree with Tony Wikrent about dissecting
the content you provide. I want to understand it more fully, but can only manage it piecemeal. There's always so much of significance in your essays to process.
Does the machine serve us?
Or do we serve the machine?
F this shit! If people are foolish enough to allow any further erosion of government responsibility and the public trusts, the public lands and parks, the infrastructure and resources that the public already owns, and generations have paid for, they might as well jump to the ending and put on shackles.
Fighting for democratic principles,... well, since forever
The voice of The Machine
In my opinion, it's not so much that
it's that they know little else. Wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast propaganda spews from the Think Tanks and Non-profit Foundations financed with billions of dollars by the oligarchy of corporations, banks, and obscenely rich Capitalists. These billions of dollars are mostly hidden, but even if they were not hidden one would know little of them since the nation's Press is controlled by a tiny handful of the same oligarchs whose billions fund the propaganda mills.
I'm not going to blame John and Jane Q. Public. They switch on the TV and expect to see the evening news. Instead, they are fed propaganda. They open the local newspaper and read the same propaganda they just saw the evening before on the television. On the way to work, the radio continues the onslaught.
As an example, when I speak to people about universal health care, I usually hear some comment such as, "I don't want the damn government in charge of my health; they can't do anything right and the cost will quadruple!" When I explain that, for instance, Medicare's overhead is far lower than that of commercial insurance, they are dumbfounded. It's not so much that they don't believe it, it's more that they have never even heard the argument. There are many hundreds of other examples that could be given -- some explained in annieli's (rather long, but excellent) essay.
We saw what happened when they privatized the military
the military used to do everything that was outsourced to Halliburton and other private corporations. The cost of doing everything went up and in came tons of fraud. Even after companies were found guilty of fraud, they paid a small fine that didn't affect their profits and they continued to keep getting more contracts.
Chicago sold their toll roads to Saudi Arabia for a very small price and the costs of tolls went up.
They also sold their parking meters to Citibank and it was the same story.
The revenue for those services used to go back into the city's coffers and the money was used for the budgets, but now their budgets don't have enough money.
Good essay. I agree with others that breaking this up into smaller essays would be easier to read and understand.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Privatization is privatizing of the power to tax.
The fees are really a tax on each individual.
Google, Facebook, Ancestry.com: privatizing our every move + DNA
https://consumerist.com/2017/05/23/google-following-your-offline-credit-...
https://thinkprogress.org/ancestry-com-takes-dna-ownership-rights-from-c...
The 99% worry—the 0.01% in training seek “alpha” & “optionality”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencement-ed/
Serfs Up!
Privatizing the profit and socializing the cost is eroding our democracy and building an oligarchy. On this memorial day let's try to remember exactly what our warriors died for.
The real SparkyGump has passed. It was an honor being your human.
Kudos and Thank You
(Logged in just to say that.)