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Why Special Interests Try to Take Control of Governments
Why Special Interests Try to Take Control of Governments
George Monbiot, popular Guardian columnist, beacon light of global environmentalism, is also the kind of progressive who insists on seeing the world as he wishes it were and not as it really is. Wearing these kind of blinders will not help us get a better environment or better world.
In his latest column, Monbiot states that: “The forces that threaten to destroy our wellbeing are… the same everywhere: primarily the lobbying power of big business and big money, which perceive the administrative state as an impediment to their immediate interests.”
This is nonsense. Big business and big money, along with other special interests, such as Big labor and Big law and Big education, and all the other “ Bigs” absolutely love the “administrative state” because they have learned how to control it and use it for their own self-interest.
This is the “ progressive paradox” that Monbiot resolutely ignores: the more the state increases its powers over the economy, the more motivated special interests become to take control of the state in order to thwart genuine market competition. The resulting corruption just gets worse and worse.
Has Monbiot ever considered what persuaded enough voters to hold their noses and choose Trump? It was not that the administrative state provided honest government under the prior administration. Nor was the prior administration making any effort to hold back the power of special interests in Washington.
Two examples will suffice. In the “fiscal cliff” bill, President Obama achieved his long sought objective of increasing taxes on the rich. But in the same bill, passed at midnight, he snuck in subsidies for his own corporate supporters.
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Keynes: A Master of Confused and Confusing Prose
Keynes: A Master of Confused and Confusing Prose
Paul Samuelson, professor of economics at MIT after World War II and author of a best-selling economics textbook, was one of Keynes’s most ardent American disciples. Here is what he has to say about the latter’s General Theory:
It is a badly written book, poorly organized. . . . It is arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgements. It abounds in mare’s nests and confusion….
In reading this, one recalls Keynes’s infatuation with paradox. Samuelson, the ardent disciple, is telling us that the master’s book is good because it is bad.
We do not, however, have to take Samuelson’s word about the bad writing, poor organization, and general confusion of The General Theory. Following publication in 1936, many leading economists pointed to the same problems, although some of them hesitated to criticize or quarrel with Keynes and thus chose their words carefully. Frank H. Knight, a leading American economist, complained that it was “inordinately difficult to tell what the author means. . . . The direct contention of the work [also] seems to me quite unsubstantiated.”
Joseph Schumpeter noted Keynes’s “technique of skirting problems by artificial definitions which, tied up with highly specialized assumptions, produce paradoxical-looking tautologies. . . .” British economist Hubert Henderson privately stated that: “I have allowed myself to be inhibited for many years . . . by a desire not to quarrel in public with Maynard . . . . But. . . I regard Maynard’s books as a farrago of confused sophistication.”
French economist Etienne Mantoux added that the whole thing simply appeared to be “rationalization of a policy … long known to be . . . dear to him.
In The General Theory itself, Keynes has a good word to say about clarity, consistency, and logic.He is quick to pounce on what he considers the errors of others. But he then leads us down a rabbit hole of convolution, needless and misleading jargon, mis-statement, confusion, contradiction, unfactuality, and general illogic.
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