Tuesday, March 23, 2004
In the world we live in there is no perfect economy. There is sad to say there is no economy in which we can achieve perfection in understanding human needs and wants and being able to keep up with them given the circumstances of the world. The economy we live in is a post-institutional one. It is one marked by the dissappearance of work and the skewering and distorting of goods, commodities and market forces. The socialist economy of yesterday are by far gone and it does not mean that the so called capitalist one we live in provide any much more relief. It is just that the principles of socialism has reached an epoch of history that is by far crude and naive for any policy maker or activist must cling to.
It is here to examine in some shape and form why socialism is a failure and why we cannot ipso facto claim to any if not most of the values that socialism that was the heart of 1960s and 1970s radical and reformist movement and is not a wise one today. It is not an attempt to concede to the right or anything antipathy towards the left for as I will discuss the energy/time element later on in this essay that it is possible to refashion our values in relation to human understanding, human politics, human equality, and even human welfare without the complication the fact that it is very difficult to engineer principle that might be good for the individual and for the collective whole simultaneously. That is and has always been a difficult task to do.
John Gray, a Professor at the London School of Economics, in his book Beyond the New Right:Markets,government and the common environment(Routledge,1993 New York and London) discusses in the 3rd Chapter titled 'The moral foundations of market institutions' that the main element of a socialist economy is the fact that it is orchestrated by central planning. From what anyone would know about economics, central planning doesn't work without adverse cost. On smaller scales, in terms of local or state government it will have a negative effect on the economy. Yet such intervention is sought for the interest of public welfare and the common good. Yet central planning whatever legitimacy libertarians and the right(here I am argueing from an existentialist view) on human culture and intergenerational skills and so forth is that it is disastrous and non competitive. It is here that Gray states:
"The deeper explanation of the future of socialist central planning is, however, not one that appeals to artificial distortion of incentives, but one that involves instead insuperable limitation of human knowledge"(p.68)
Note how Gray breaks from the traditional concept of incentives and deals with what we call epistemology, the studying of knowing and not knowing. Epistemology practically speaking is also the backbone for the early known forms of government regulating big business, social programs, and even New Deal programs. On the on hand empirical evidence is needed to find inequalities and address ways to correct everything and that other elements like 'intent' and 'prudence' can stand in substitute for what the government does not know.
Gray criticism of socialism and why it could not work comes from the works of Ludwig Von Mises, F. A Hayek, Micheal Polanyi, and Paul Craig Roberts and more importantly the works and arguements of G.L.S. Shackle. Socialism as the early scholars Mises and Hayek notes is that it is an 'epistemological impossibility' and that is always impossible government knows how much of one thing there of in terms of supply and demand without the construct of price or in consideration of human knowledge. Gray talks about the two types of knowledge known as 'articulated' and 'tacit'-knowledge that can be expressed and not expressed but implied or just merely performed. The other authors builds up on the works with the use of scientific experiments and internal competition but it is that of Shackle that interest me the more with as Gray states 'unknowability of the future' and 'subjectivity of expectations'(p.70). That is to say as we see in the recent situation of Spain, the ages that has been accepted by most, comes and go quicker than we expect.
In subsequent pages he talks about the 'mirage of egalitarianism'(p.84-92). If socialism as something that is no longer acceptable with the government owning and planning every corridor of economic life then whatever legitimacy it has on simple paradigms that can be approached in ordinary life in the 'freeer world' is no longer useful much less feasible or for that matter plausible. Gray criticizes the more accepted egalitarian arguements set out by Raymond Plant. In which case Plant's 'normative' arguement 'that people's well being of their lives and liberty could be equalized' Gray here contends that Plant's view is too relational and that Plant's 'empirical' arguements that ' if the good is the empowerment of the needy...if power is positional good...guaranteeing basic need will be zero sum..." using a "rule of equality." Gray's arguement is that such assertion has no empirical bases and that in the business world that there are postivive sum relationships in which it does not always has to be what one loses the other gains(of course I would be guilty of making a false dichotomy if I include externalities or third parties). In Gray's contention that autonomy is satiable because as I understand it most egalitarians or socialists who claims to this belief views things backwards asserting that the 'intrinsic nature' of human being scarced and the natural world around us as not being or that it is farfectched to think so.
Either way the economy that we live in is one that is quickly squeezing anything conceptually of the physical world. To be computer illiterate these days is almost the equivalent to being just illiterate itself. To cling to social arguements or prejudices that was accepted 10 or 20 years ago is a grave mistake and just being misguided today. If anything the way human knowlegde is being shaped and designed with the advent of the internet and the fact that there must exist a certain level of 'openness' in approaching various social and institutional mechanism in order to keep us from lagging too far behind. It is often said that advancement in civil rights might be much better than it was ten years ago, much less twenty five or forty or fifty years ago but it might have not kept up pace with the time as Gray borrowing from Shakle the uncertainty of future and future events such as the September 11th has undone such. It cannot also rule out the ongoing age of Supertechnology, that is putting increasing pressure for us to recognize these happnings
So what propel the economy we live in has been the so-called information age. Why it has done so rests on the one hand, to protect society from massive war a society has to be restructured to maintain social harmony, material distribution and national flourishing and on the other hand the image of what a free society whatever that means must be endured. The sad fact about the information age we live in or perhaps coming out of and going into a more advance age of information society is the way the information is being formatted and its effect on peripheral institutions. This effect can as I see it can be looked at many ways but I prefer to see it as a constant build up of massive energy that must be released and that this energy shapes the concept of what is the very definitive structure of nature.
History itself no matter how people looks at it is a part of nature, for the history of societies is reflected on whether knowingly or not how mankind percieved themselves to be in conjunction with nature. Yet nature itself is just a small part of the universe but being part of a living world where the inhabitants were able at one time send a person to the moon, the role of understanding the universe and cosmos through science and theory complicates the historical trajectory how nature again knowingly or not is perceived through human eyes. This course of history is often described as revisionist or in some cases pragmatic(such as the universality of creeds, ways of lives, political philosophy and free markets from an economic point of view). As our views about the shape of the earth and the boundaries becomes clearer or at least so we think compared to about 500 years ago where the onset of Western imperialism with conquering New Worlds and the idea of slavery began.
This does not mean that there is an end to these Western evils or evils in general as the 'New Economy' being shaped by an exodus of energy and another important factor the element of time. Time itself doesn't standstill. It is dynamic, rather than static, unchanging. Time itself shaped by labor and an anti-rationalist approached set out by Friedriche Neitsche dismantles the 'moral' fibers which makes the criticism of evils a part of our everyday political social membrance and often times resurrect them under other guises. To state that slavery has ended in the United States much less in much of the other parts of the world is an illusion that is reflected in a post-Soviet world of cultures re-asserting their identity in a world that has no room to install traditional concept of 'supply and demand' with factories and the political economy per se that arose over hundred years ago worldwide. The change that wrought by the technology of the internet and pretty soon with its demise or transformation to nannotechnology has pretty much 'crowded out' a corrigible market for worldwide luxuries for stuff like perfumes, exotic foods, silk and so on.
On the other hand the time/energy effect also allows humankind to dissolve older institutions and put up in their place newer radical structures that are able to deal with things that are relevant to our day and age. If there are two things that we must look at in shaping the outcoming of global events today, they are the geopolitical shift when it comes to oil away from the United States to the area of Middle East. Jeremy Rifkin in his other book Hydrogen Economy argues that oil prices are set to peak within the next decade or so. This is reflected as we already have seen in recent years fluctuation of gas prices at high levels as a result of American military intervention in Iraq. It is also reflected in the present administration looking into studies of supporting hydrogen fuel cars. The other factor is more or less a hierarchal approach and that has to do with the shift of from a 'libertarian' point of view of the 'night watchman' state which means that it will shift more towards the left as political events around the world continues to unravel.
This so-called shift of the 'night watchman' state is seen in the so-called Patriot Act in which the US government has almost unlimited access never seen before since the McCarthy hearings or the Red Scare of the 1920s. Yet this shift is unimaginable and might put into some historical and political question that if there were something that gives government near state of emergency powers such as martial law how it would be done with the internet.
The Patriot Act itself could not be accomplished without the internet. The attackers of the September 11th and perhaps the ones in Spain had to have tremendous access to online networking to carry out the attack. Not only they were able to fake passports and other essential documents, they were able to wire illegally or legally money for nefarious purposes. Yet the thing about the September 11th attack was that the conspiracy to carry out the attack itself was advance but the attack itself was simple and crazy. It was only so because of the technologies and the mobility to control it was very sophisticated and have not existed on that level when the WTC was attacked back in 1993.
The recent attack in Spain was on morning commuter lines, that is trains. The attack was simple on how it was carried out as the perpetrators left bags of explosive that left over 200 people dead and close to 2,000 people injured. Unlike the political effects of the US, it upsetted a recent election and shifted the country further left and forced the new government to pull their troops out of Iraq. It has but anything hijacked the political process as we have ever seen before which can be detrimental to the presidential election this fall. Security to shift the government of Spain further left was not something that could be found in the Patriot Act but an economy make up that allows their citizen to be laid open to the remnants of terrorism.
If anything, democracy itself is perhaps one of the more notable creeds and institutions that is suffering from the time/energy changed syndrome. We have yet to see what the effect of the recent terrorist effect that goes hand in hand the September 11th attack which was an attack launched on the ability to be mobile across borders and through electronic means and the sniper shootings that was esoteric and yet a precise attack against society for what it stands for and to the recent attack in Spain that warped democracy as we know it and perhaps accelerated the post-institutional effect to scales unheard of.
It is here to examine in some shape and form why socialism is a failure and why we cannot ipso facto claim to any if not most of the values that socialism that was the heart of 1960s and 1970s radical and reformist movement and is not a wise one today. It is not an attempt to concede to the right or anything antipathy towards the left for as I will discuss the energy/time element later on in this essay that it is possible to refashion our values in relation to human understanding, human politics, human equality, and even human welfare without the complication the fact that it is very difficult to engineer principle that might be good for the individual and for the collective whole simultaneously. That is and has always been a difficult task to do.
John Gray, a Professor at the London School of Economics, in his book Beyond the New Right:Markets,government and the common environment(Routledge,1993 New York and London) discusses in the 3rd Chapter titled 'The moral foundations of market institutions' that the main element of a socialist economy is the fact that it is orchestrated by central planning. From what anyone would know about economics, central planning doesn't work without adverse cost. On smaller scales, in terms of local or state government it will have a negative effect on the economy. Yet such intervention is sought for the interest of public welfare and the common good. Yet central planning whatever legitimacy libertarians and the right(here I am argueing from an existentialist view) on human culture and intergenerational skills and so forth is that it is disastrous and non competitive. It is here that Gray states:
"The deeper explanation of the future of socialist central planning is, however, not one that appeals to artificial distortion of incentives, but one that involves instead insuperable limitation of human knowledge"(p.68)
Note how Gray breaks from the traditional concept of incentives and deals with what we call epistemology, the studying of knowing and not knowing. Epistemology practically speaking is also the backbone for the early known forms of government regulating big business, social programs, and even New Deal programs. On the on hand empirical evidence is needed to find inequalities and address ways to correct everything and that other elements like 'intent' and 'prudence' can stand in substitute for what the government does not know.
Gray criticism of socialism and why it could not work comes from the works of Ludwig Von Mises, F. A Hayek, Micheal Polanyi, and Paul Craig Roberts and more importantly the works and arguements of G.L.S. Shackle. Socialism as the early scholars Mises and Hayek notes is that it is an 'epistemological impossibility' and that is always impossible government knows how much of one thing there of in terms of supply and demand without the construct of price or in consideration of human knowledge. Gray talks about the two types of knowledge known as 'articulated' and 'tacit'-knowledge that can be expressed and not expressed but implied or just merely performed. The other authors builds up on the works with the use of scientific experiments and internal competition but it is that of Shackle that interest me the more with as Gray states 'unknowability of the future' and 'subjectivity of expectations'(p.70). That is to say as we see in the recent situation of Spain, the ages that has been accepted by most, comes and go quicker than we expect.
In subsequent pages he talks about the 'mirage of egalitarianism'(p.84-92). If socialism as something that is no longer acceptable with the government owning and planning every corridor of economic life then whatever legitimacy it has on simple paradigms that can be approached in ordinary life in the 'freeer world' is no longer useful much less feasible or for that matter plausible. Gray criticizes the more accepted egalitarian arguements set out by Raymond Plant. In which case Plant's 'normative' arguement 'that people's well being of their lives and liberty could be equalized' Gray here contends that Plant's view is too relational and that Plant's 'empirical' arguements that ' if the good is the empowerment of the needy...if power is positional good...guaranteeing basic need will be zero sum..." using a "rule of equality." Gray's arguement is that such assertion has no empirical bases and that in the business world that there are postivive sum relationships in which it does not always has to be what one loses the other gains(of course I would be guilty of making a false dichotomy if I include externalities or third parties). In Gray's contention that autonomy is satiable because as I understand it most egalitarians or socialists who claims to this belief views things backwards asserting that the 'intrinsic nature' of human being scarced and the natural world around us as not being or that it is farfectched to think so.
Either way the economy that we live in is one that is quickly squeezing anything conceptually of the physical world. To be computer illiterate these days is almost the equivalent to being just illiterate itself. To cling to social arguements or prejudices that was accepted 10 or 20 years ago is a grave mistake and just being misguided today. If anything the way human knowlegde is being shaped and designed with the advent of the internet and the fact that there must exist a certain level of 'openness' in approaching various social and institutional mechanism in order to keep us from lagging too far behind. It is often said that advancement in civil rights might be much better than it was ten years ago, much less twenty five or forty or fifty years ago but it might have not kept up pace with the time as Gray borrowing from Shakle the uncertainty of future and future events such as the September 11th has undone such. It cannot also rule out the ongoing age of Supertechnology, that is putting increasing pressure for us to recognize these happnings
So what propel the economy we live in has been the so-called information age. Why it has done so rests on the one hand, to protect society from massive war a society has to be restructured to maintain social harmony, material distribution and national flourishing and on the other hand the image of what a free society whatever that means must be endured. The sad fact about the information age we live in or perhaps coming out of and going into a more advance age of information society is the way the information is being formatted and its effect on peripheral institutions. This effect can as I see it can be looked at many ways but I prefer to see it as a constant build up of massive energy that must be released and that this energy shapes the concept of what is the very definitive structure of nature.
History itself no matter how people looks at it is a part of nature, for the history of societies is reflected on whether knowingly or not how mankind percieved themselves to be in conjunction with nature. Yet nature itself is just a small part of the universe but being part of a living world where the inhabitants were able at one time send a person to the moon, the role of understanding the universe and cosmos through science and theory complicates the historical trajectory how nature again knowingly or not is perceived through human eyes. This course of history is often described as revisionist or in some cases pragmatic(such as the universality of creeds, ways of lives, political philosophy and free markets from an economic point of view). As our views about the shape of the earth and the boundaries becomes clearer or at least so we think compared to about 500 years ago where the onset of Western imperialism with conquering New Worlds and the idea of slavery began.
This does not mean that there is an end to these Western evils or evils in general as the 'New Economy' being shaped by an exodus of energy and another important factor the element of time. Time itself doesn't standstill. It is dynamic, rather than static, unchanging. Time itself shaped by labor and an anti-rationalist approached set out by Friedriche Neitsche dismantles the 'moral' fibers which makes the criticism of evils a part of our everyday political social membrance and often times resurrect them under other guises. To state that slavery has ended in the United States much less in much of the other parts of the world is an illusion that is reflected in a post-Soviet world of cultures re-asserting their identity in a world that has no room to install traditional concept of 'supply and demand' with factories and the political economy per se that arose over hundred years ago worldwide. The change that wrought by the technology of the internet and pretty soon with its demise or transformation to nannotechnology has pretty much 'crowded out' a corrigible market for worldwide luxuries for stuff like perfumes, exotic foods, silk and so on.
On the other hand the time/energy effect also allows humankind to dissolve older institutions and put up in their place newer radical structures that are able to deal with things that are relevant to our day and age. If there are two things that we must look at in shaping the outcoming of global events today, they are the geopolitical shift when it comes to oil away from the United States to the area of Middle East. Jeremy Rifkin in his other book Hydrogen Economy argues that oil prices are set to peak within the next decade or so. This is reflected as we already have seen in recent years fluctuation of gas prices at high levels as a result of American military intervention in Iraq. It is also reflected in the present administration looking into studies of supporting hydrogen fuel cars. The other factor is more or less a hierarchal approach and that has to do with the shift of from a 'libertarian' point of view of the 'night watchman' state which means that it will shift more towards the left as political events around the world continues to unravel.
This so-called shift of the 'night watchman' state is seen in the so-called Patriot Act in which the US government has almost unlimited access never seen before since the McCarthy hearings or the Red Scare of the 1920s. Yet this shift is unimaginable and might put into some historical and political question that if there were something that gives government near state of emergency powers such as martial law how it would be done with the internet.
The Patriot Act itself could not be accomplished without the internet. The attackers of the September 11th and perhaps the ones in Spain had to have tremendous access to online networking to carry out the attack. Not only they were able to fake passports and other essential documents, they were able to wire illegally or legally money for nefarious purposes. Yet the thing about the September 11th attack was that the conspiracy to carry out the attack itself was advance but the attack itself was simple and crazy. It was only so because of the technologies and the mobility to control it was very sophisticated and have not existed on that level when the WTC was attacked back in 1993.
The recent attack in Spain was on morning commuter lines, that is trains. The attack was simple on how it was carried out as the perpetrators left bags of explosive that left over 200 people dead and close to 2,000 people injured. Unlike the political effects of the US, it upsetted a recent election and shifted the country further left and forced the new government to pull their troops out of Iraq. It has but anything hijacked the political process as we have ever seen before which can be detrimental to the presidential election this fall. Security to shift the government of Spain further left was not something that could be found in the Patriot Act but an economy make up that allows their citizen to be laid open to the remnants of terrorism.
If anything, democracy itself is perhaps one of the more notable creeds and institutions that is suffering from the time/energy changed syndrome. We have yet to see what the effect of the recent terrorist effect that goes hand in hand the September 11th attack which was an attack launched on the ability to be mobile across borders and through electronic means and the sniper shootings that was esoteric and yet a precise attack against society for what it stands for and to the recent attack in Spain that warped democracy as we know it and perhaps accelerated the post-institutional effect to scales unheard of.
# posted by Jamie @ 5:48 PM 
