My Theory of the Brontosaurus

malaise

1. narcissism (spiritualism?) and/or submission to authority (conservative religion, messianism, cults)
2. middle class thinning, capital globalizing
3. resistance to feminism and environmentalism, limits to technology, masculinist control of nature, capitalism (see 1 and 2 above)
4. a republic lost to international power (binary world, national security state, unaccountable to democracy, international by deceit)

Note that the split between the republic and the national security state, revealed in Vietnam (note for example Kennedy's thrilling to foreign policy as described in Halberstam, not to mention his vetting by the wise men) really vitiates democracy, which the right, hostile to democracy anyway, can exploit in the name of patriotism. The patriotic American misrecognizes his loss of control as the fault of government, which is his empowerment, when it is the work of the executive as the agency of the national security state.

How much of our financial market mania is also a misrecognition, a false distribution of ownership in lieu of wage growth? The financial markets grow to make capital flexible by complicating and off setting risk. Inequality creates concentrated wealth, which needs the services of the financial services industry. But this has nothing to do with the health of the economy as the availability of jobs and wage growth. As in the former opposition between property fearful of inflation and labor seeking economic growth the interests of wealth and labor diverge. There is an article in the Times today about an argument among our central bankers over the threat of wage pressure despite the lack of leverage for the American worker (with unemployment high and no union structure, and stagnant wage growth for about 30 years). Thus interests must be raised to counter inflationary pressures, or lowered because the economy, ie investment, is fragile and needs the encouragement of easy money. If we are dependent on the economy, ie and not on our crops or hunting, we are dependent on economic growth.

biosphere

Capitalism offers the simulacrum: there is no intersection of persons and hence no law, just desire. Perfect voluntarity, over the forgottenness of property. And without thought to the exhaustion of resources, the extinction of species, etc. We still die alone, but we don't know about it. I wanna be sedated.

Let's simplify, or try to. The libertarian ignores equality, and associates liberty with  property. This goes back to the establishment of parliament and taxation in Medieval England. Property is a grant of power, a title. The king is lawfulness itself, which is to say inheritance. Vs. this is the liberal demand for equality. The political freedoms, ie freedom of conscience, are not necessary in the state of property. A man's home is his castle. Equality is nonsense on stilts; it cannot be derived; it is unthought, writing: ie voting--not agreement but voting. It is the demand that everyone be called by name; that every-one be called, to consent. Freedom of thought is freedom from law; antinomian, meaningless, the individual.

One could argue for individuality based on Christianity, on the higher law, the call of conscience. Or a natural law theory would depend on the meaning of the human. Recall that Native American tribes refer to themselves as the people. The human is defined as what is proper to the human, his proper ends. Or was so until the universal. The opposite of the individual is the community. There is no thought of universality in the community. The demand to include everyone stretches the community to the breaking point, to an impossible thinness. There is no one left to define it, ie outside of it. We flip into the diremption. As we approach universality we lose content.

A "classic" liberal, ie Mill, has no demand for universal suffrage. Liberty is devolved, per Burke; it can't be intended, made a project or end. It's hard to grant universal suffrage and insist on the elitist indifference of the harm principle. 

Think also of the church, post V II. Where once it contained/marked-out one's entire life, from birth to death, and one lived one's entire life within a Catholic community (ghetto), the reformers envisage a church as chosen community, a community of individuals, a political project within the world. The sacramental church is the church as authority. Per Benedict, V II meant that the church would tolerate democracy--even demand it--as a political system, but not within the church itself. Thus he believes there is a convergence of religion and philosophy. JP2 just thought he was destined by prophecy to end communism.

Marx is opposing the emergence of economics itself, the de-moralized science of society. Hegel thought capitalism was part of the differentiation of society by which it took command of itself. Marx saw that it was dehumanizing, the loss of the anthropocentric and ultimately nihilistic. To change history means to become fully human. Perhaps communism should be understood as the attempt to make equality a physical, rather than a metaphysical, reality (cf. Bernard Williams). For Marx the emergence of economy is the concealment of politics; the hidden politics of economics is only revealed in class; you realize your situation is political when you see you are part of a class; that private is public property (the king's) in disguise. If the workers are not excluded as a class, then there is no political dimension to the economic.

So from the other perspective, the emergence of economics is the emergence of the science of society, the selling of labor is the travelling, unhoused multitude, the mass, the mob. Their only benefit is the distortion of the economy that land can create as rents. England has history with mass movements: the peasants' revolt, the pilgrimage of grace. There is also the story of the crown's growing dependence on parliament and parliament's growing independence of the crown. Trade probably didn't get the respect of land until Albert took over for Victoria (Strachey is interesting on the sexual component of this); thus the strangeness of the Albert memorial (it is really indescribable). Before that, England lost and gained an empire (America and India) with Burke objecting to both (but what can you expect from an Irishman, and probably a Catholic). Note also Strachey's decrying that political  power changed hands under Cromwell at the barrell of a gun, which is a little rich. Politics was never without power, even if in the name of property.

Note the promise of economics, the creation of wealth. The wealth of nations is really about de-nationalizing wealth: it is no longer connected with land, and inhibited by protectionism. Note also the strange way we think of the economy as not us, yet controlling us. An environment in which we live, subject to variations in season and weather like any agrarian society. Note also that the science of economics ignores property: the forgotten past.

The economic as politics is tautological: the economic dictates economics. It doesn't say anything about equality, or even persons. It may be that the technological outpaced the metaphysical, leaving behind both philosophy and religion, but the question of being remains. The question is the existence of dasein: of the individual.

the god that failed

Is economics the Hegelian science: a theory of human interaction based on reasonable calculation? But not Hegelian because even though the invisible hand could be spirit, it lacks a telos; it creates purposiveness, but never determines a (group) purpose, just money, which is acceptable in the place of a group purpose because convertible into individual purposes. Likewise, there is no synchrony of nature and man, no natural history: just exploitation, technological submission. Economics promises Hegel, but turns out to be Kant's aesthetic, creating luxury upon luxury, a simulacra of life in which multiplying comforts preclude or mitigate the discomforts to which flesh is heir (artefact = artifice).

is there an economist in the house?

Reagan believed in infinity, that capitalist wealth creation made poverty, and hence government, obsolete. This is more optimistic than a Randian/Nozickian libertarianism. For Reagan there was always a frontier, whether to the west, or in space. American seques into mankind. (Channelling Frances Fitzgerald here.)

What interests me is the question of whether economics is so complete. Not per Romer, which is beyond me (not that that has ever stopped me), excluding exogamous variables; not per Friedman, who was happy to commoditize everything. But taking off from Friedman: why is there a choice between full employment and inflation? Why is economics fundamentally at odds with itself?

The answer must be money; that money itself behaves like a commodity. Inflation is too much money, so its value goes down. Friedman's solution was to tightly control the money supply, which is to address the symptom, but not the disease. Is money debt: and is there a possibility of private money, ie a creditor of not unlimited resources? Interest on debt reflects inflation. Money always was understood to be a commodity; thus a gold standard; but the gold standard was also understood to be a hedge against inflation (paper money). Capitalism (investment = debt) requires an abstracted form of money, but money keeps behaving like a commodity.Ie, capitalism requires an initial debt it cannot acknowledge, a push on the wheel of the perpetual motion machine.