The Lessons of Greed
by Thomas Fleming
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I am not an economist. I do not want to be an economist, because I do not believe there is a science of economics, and from all I can gather there is no kind of economics being practiced today, at least in high official circles, except “voodoo economics.” If I were wrong, then there would have been a consensus of economic experts on what would happen if, say, Congress deregulated the mortgage industry and encouraged lenders to issue mortgages for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who might not be able to buy a cheap used car from Sleazeball Joe’s No-Money-Down used car lot.
In my youth I was foolish enough to take an Econ 101 course, in which I learned very little that was useful or true from Paul Samuelson’s textbook, and as a young college teacher I took part in a year-long interdisciplinary postdoc group that studied macroeconomic theory with Jack Tawil, a disciple of Armen Alchian who taught me to think, for a time, in economic terms. Though we disagreed profoundly on such issues as the forced relocation of Southern textile companies, I learned most of what I know of economics from Jack and the economists he turned me toward–Alchian, North, Friedman–and my spotty education was filled in in later years by Murray Rothbard and his best disciples. Now that I have established my amazing credentials as the new genius Stein–Ben, not Ein or Franken–let me share with the world my completely uninformed and unreliable opinion on why, as Christopher Buckley recently put it, I no longer have a 401(k) but only a 1(k) future.
We have all by now learned a few things from this mess. The clearest message is, I repeat, that there is no science of economics, and there may not even be an art. If economics were a science like biology and medicine, there would be agreement among experts on the fundamentals and some reasonable expectation that policy A would produce results B. The same rules would apply to all nations in all periods of history. If it were an art or craft, like poetry or carpentry, we could expect an expert in the art to be to do good work predictably and consistently. But when has any of this ever been true of economics? As Sir Moses Finley demonstrated brilliantly in his Sather lectures, Greeks and Romans did not act economically as they should have but made decisions on other grounds. Yes, a philosophical economist can take account of these differences by referring to subjective values, though this only trivializes the question, because a principle that can explain everything explains nothing. And, yes, by and large, liberal economists have a vastly superior understanding of how markets work, but their policies fail to take into account the all-important human factors–love, desire, hate, envy, greed, and ambition–that can distort or torpedo their wisest initiatives.
Look at all the economic geniuses hired by the White House and the Congress. How many of them warned their masters against, for example, the credit derivatives that have been plausibly described (in a recent 60 Minutes segment) as side-bets on the mortgage market, a form of reckless gambling legalized by the Clinton administration? Some of the “experts” did predict recession and a market pullback, but the only man I know who told me to get out of the market was Rockford Institute board chairman and retired banker David Hartman. Dave has told me over and over that there is no such things as economics, only economic history, and his successes in business–and as economic prophet–are enough to convince this ignoramus that he almost always knows what he is talking about. When bright boys criticize his judgments, I ask them to show me their bank balances.
I may not know much about economics, but I know a thing or two things that Allan Greenspan does not know. It turns out that his inability to speak clearly is a reflection of his inability to think at all. He apparently believed his own free market rhetoric about open competition, and it is equally apparent that he did not read the the unabridged version of The Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith explains that capitalists always seek to form, by fair means or foul, monopolies and cartels. In terms of gross market efficiency, greed may be as good as Gordon Gekko insisted it was–and I think he was right, by the way–but anyone who praises greed as the root of free market competition should as a consequence be on guard against the looters. Greenspan (like his successor) turned a blind eye to moral reality What did we expect from Ayn Rand’s beloved disciple, a cult member who has never repudiated his silly and ignorant leader’s gospel of selfishness? Turning over the Fed to a Randian is like turning over Health and Human Services to a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy.
Here is this question in a nutshell. If the government’s leading economic advisers knew what was going on and allowed it to happen, they are criminals who should be locked up for a long time and have their possessions distributed among their victims; if they did not know, they are incompetent and should be fired and have their possessions distributed among their victims. But is good old Hank Paulson out on the street selling apples to unemployed money managers? No, he is too busy hiring his croneys from Goldman Sachs and giving them the power to cartelize the entire US economy as a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs–or, rather, Government Sachs, as the firm is beginning to be called. Is he stupid or a criminal? Fortunately, that is a question to which the answer may be: “Both.”
Small wonder that so many people are pinning their hopes on the Democrats–who, unfortunately, were neither more prescient nor less corrupt than the Republicans. When Senator Obama blames John McCain for the crash, he proves what a liar he is. Is even George Bush responsible for a world-wide credit-crunch caused by corrupt and greedy lenders on several continents?
So that is the first lesson of greed, that while greed may be good as an incentive to hard work and investment, it is also morally corrosive to the plutocrats. But there is another lesson of greed. If the Big-Money boys were out on a speculation binge, their clients were doing the same thing. Yes, I have heard about all the poor widows and orphans being evicted from the family farm, but what is not mentioned so often is the number of defaulters who are real estate speculators. One estimate is that 30% of the defaults are the result of ill-advised speculation. But that is the mentality of today’s American home buyer who wants to double his money every five years. We no longer buy houses in the expectation of living and dying in them and passing them on to our children. They are nothing more significant than investment vehicles, like 1000 shares of Microsoft. In more recent years, home mortgages have turned the whole industry into something more like the options market. Small wonder, then, that local governments have so little hesitation in exercising the tyrannical power of eminent domain. It is not as if there were real homes at stake–the entire concept of the home has been outmoded by no-fault divorce, working mothers, and the emblematic candidacy of Sarah Palin that has put the “Christian” seal of approval on the feminist movement.
This is, as they like to say in this land of the Almighty Dollar, the bottom line. There is nothing real in these United Socialist States of America. Our currency consists of pieces of paper we are ordered on pain of death to treat as money; our marriages do not last as long as shack-ups in Sweden; and our homes are nothing but investment vehicles, no more stable than a house-trailer on a rented lot on which state, federal, and local government have a permanent lien through the tax codes.
Well, then, what is to be done? As subjects of a vast socialist state that controls our lives, we can do nothing except vote for column A or column b. In the USSA, the right to vote, as I used to say some 20 years ago, is little more than the right to collaborate with your oppressors. You get to choose the nicer concentration camp guard who does not really like torturing and murdering people, but, shucks, we all have to make a living somehow, and, besides, we’re really voting for Sarah. This time, as Rush Limbaugh puts it, “We have the hot babe.” (Question: which hot babe have the Democrats run? Gerry Ferraro? Nancy Pelosi? Hilary Clinton?) I have more sympathy for the wiseguy who came up with: VOTE FOR CHUTHULU. WHY VOTE FOR THE LESSER EVIL?
As human beings, however, we have the power in our hands not to live the way they tell us to. Nobody forces a woman to conceive children out of wedlock and then either kill them or cash them in for welfare checks; nobody forces us to change houses and jobs; and nobody forces us to buy houses we cannot afford in the expectation of making enough money to afford wall-to-wall high definition TV. Accepting the moral responsibility for the way we live is our first step toward freedom, and if morally responsible property-owning citizens were ever to add up to a third of the population, we could begin to think about taking our country back.
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1 Comment by George on 27 October 2008:
Tom,
Respectfully I think you are overestimating Greenspan’s Randian love of markets as Fed Chairman. The concept of a Randian Fed Chairman is much like a Communist CEO, its contradictory. Sure he may have been Randian in the past but he tucked that neatly behind him. He was very much part of the Wilsonian neocon-neolib social democrat central planning cabal. If there was no central planning of the money supply the world would’ve been a much better place. I’m with the libertarians on this one.
Too bad Pat never got to smash that clock, eh?
2 Comment by robert on 27 October 2008:
Good to have you back, Dr. Fleming. I was starting to feel the darkness of the gathering gloom without the light of humor. But, “Heigh, Ho the holly, this life is most jolly !!” We can always count on you to “grace” us with your honest wit and good cheer. Thanks.
3 Comment by Bruce on 27 October 2008:
I want to see my kids eat, but I’ve often thought that a serious reduction in our standard of living might be a good thing for us.
4 Comment by Dave Hardy on 27 October 2008:
When the middle- and working-class folks start suffering real pain and the SafeWay and Walmart shelves are empty and there is no heating oil available and the power goes out regularly, things are going to get really ugly. I recommend getting out of the cities as soon as possible and learning to grow one’s own food and live in a barter economy, where here, in northern Vermont, one has just started.
We have already been at a lower standard of living in our household: we had to sell our house, get rid of two of our three vehicles, and we get much of our clothing at goodwill shops, thrift shops and yes, even one of the local dumps (the one in rich-as-Croeses ski town, Stowe, where the wealthy folks not-from-around-here drop off pristine leather jackets they don’t want anymore and Pendleton flannel shirts). And I am, as they say, currently ‘between engagements’ and my wife works on an independent contract basis and has to travel all over the country.
We’re also beginning to grow more and more of our own produce and soon, chickens, goats and sheep. Plus we’re in a small town located in a snowy-winters-state. We have five seasons here: Fall, Winter, Mud Season, Spring, and Summer (July 4th).
5 Comment by TJF on 27 October 2008:
George may well be right in his assessment of Greenspan, but if I had been a member of an oddball cult, I would repudiate it formally, that is, assuming I had changed my mind. The trouble with being an ex-Randian is that it is like being an ex-Moonie: You have to wonder how could a sane person, even as a kid, get mixed up in such self-promoting nonsense. I used to know a number of Randians and they all struck me as very off-balance. By the way, Greenspan’s convoluted way of talking is not untypical of an academic community that fears truth and takes refuge in obfuscation.
I thank Robert for his kind words. I have been out on the road raising money for Chronicles. Because of the crash, this always difficult task has become more difficult–another reason to curse Bush and his advisors. I have not wanted to post political pieces, lately, because every discussion gets bogged down in this awful election.
Dave and Bruce obviously do not need my advice to begin taking charge of their lives.
6 Comment by Robert Bruce on 27 October 2008:
“if morally responsible property owning citizens were ever to add up to a third of the population….”
I agree, but with the way things are going now and probably will go once the #$%^ hits the fan, you will be lucky to find one sixth of the property owning populace as being morally responsible, much less being property owners. Personally, I am thinking about heading off to Uruguay or China. I just see things getting really ugly here in the good ole USSA. The have nots will go nuts and the targets of their frustration will be the middle class that is not insulated from the inner city as much as the upper class. Crime is going to skyrocket, etc. Folks in the former Soviet Union, China, etc, are used to a totalitarian system and can adjust much better. We in the states have no concept of totalitarianism since we have been stuck in a “matrix” of largely our own making.
7 Comment by Edward on 27 October 2008:
A most excellent piece. Both common sense and wisdom have never been simultaneously so well articulated.
I am currently taking a class entitled ‘The Politics of the Global Economy,’ where we are taught to think like liberals, mercantilists, Marxists, but never as ordinary human beings. I just finished a short paper for my teacher on why, despite the orgasmic excitement of modern economists (which she seems to be one), most normal people do not want to be faceless and interchangeable cogs within a global machine.
As for Rand, her politics are appealing to many, I think, because at first they strongly resemble modern conservatism/libertarianism. She is also sometimes linked with anti-communism because of her personal history. It is only when her philosophy is analyzed that she is exposed as an inhuman scoundrel.
8 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 27 October 2008:
Free enterprise is a marvellous thing. If we could only get capitalists to practice it!
9 Comment by Leo on 27 October 2008:
Dr.Fleming ,Mr. Hartman’s insight on the value of economic history would be well memorized by all of us.But then we argue about the application and interpretation of that history anyway.I happen to think this “market” is more hysteria than reality and consequently we are contrarily buying and expanding.In a few months or so,the “bank balance” will indicate whether we read history right.One of my favorite history publications is the Daily Racing Form;if our financial publications were as thorough and honest as the DRF in detailing past performances we would have a wiser and wealthier investing public.Finally, as to this “bail-out” or buy-out,I have to repeat a very unpopular truth.Wealthy Americans pay most of the taxes and have bought most of the politicians.It is basically their money and their government that they are expecting to function for them.Are some people faking indignation or do they simply not get it?Funny,how the New Deal and the progressive income tax came to this?Not really.Roosevelt nationalized patronage and power and started us off on one long political circus parade that needed money,money,money.Joe Kennedy,Sr.(the only interesting Kennedy)figured this one out early.And the “progressive” income tax simply mobilized the wealthy to buy “liberals” as well as “conservatives”.Ohh…you buy the liberals to spend the money back on you,in case you were wondering.Gentlemen,when your revolution comes sign me up!I am not that attracted to money,just gambling and you should know we’ll all be gambling then.
10 Comment by Miles Gloriosus on 27 October 2008:
“I may not know much about economics, but I know a thing or two things that Allan Greenspan does not know…Adam Smith explains that capitalists always seek to form, by fair means or foul, monopolies and cartels. ”
Mr. Greenspan would have done well to reread Genesis or any later work positing the existence of original sin. One wonders how someone as “bright” as Mr. Greenspan could be so abysmally naive to assume that without regulation people wouldn’t eventually stoop to perfidy and corruption. Miss Marple herself would have fully understood Wall Street’s (and humanity’s) propensity for greed simply from St. Mary Meade C of E church organist, Miss Robertson, having pilfered the poor box.
11 Comment by Horace Grady on 27 October 2008:
Alternatives to free-market/neoclassical economics,read Robert Pollin,Joseph Stiglitz and the writings of the post-autistic economics.
Also read Adam Smith. Read what Smith has to say about free markets. Smith did not worship free markets.
Ravi Batra has some intetestng things to say about free trade. So does Herman Daly.
12 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 27 October 2008:
As subjects of a vast socialist state …
Tom, I prefer to think of the USSA as a Fascist state, at least for now. Businesses today are privately owned, but are so heavily burdened with regulations from Federal, state and local authorities — all of which demand a piece of the action — that the free market is a hallucination at best and a nightmare at worst.
For a Business Law 401 final exam back in 1984 the final exam consisted of finding out all of the regulations a business would have imposed on it. I had to stop typing after 30 double spaced pages, which is 5 pages longer than Michele Obama’s thesis. It was almost discouraging, except that small-scale entrepreneurs don’t let such hoo-hah get in the way of reality.
13 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 27 October 2008:
I meant to add, if you don’t believe me about the fascist state, then come to Washington DC and I’ll take you on a tour to show you the twin symbols of the Roman Empire — eagles and faggots — that decorate every corner of the “Capitol of the Free World.”
14 Comment by george on 27 October 2008:
The problem with aspects of the US economic system in recent years is that it has went overboard in that it privatises everything Britain has done the same starting in the 80’s especially when it uses private mercenaries like Blackwater goons in Iraq although there to maintain a peace they make more money from an upsurge in violence the longer there required to stay there hence reports of Blackwater forces firing on civilian vehicles, etc.
Another Pentagon sub-contractor MPRI has help train mercenary forces in the Balkans, Georgia, Azerbaijan and probably the African continent.
The way things are going up will end up like the scenario in Metal Gear Solid 4.
15 Comment by Alex on 27 October 2008:
Mr Fleming is perhaps too quick to criticize research economists. Theirs is a difficult discipline, in which experiments cannot be repeated, and can scarcely be measured. Much of their work is useless, but witness, at least, the letter, signed by many distinguished economists and a few Nobelists, begging the House not to pass the bailout bill! Washington’s problem is that its preferred economic masterminds are from Wall Street, and carry their former habits and friendships to their new careers.
On an unrelated note, some of the recent work in economic psychology (psychological economics?) is among the most fundamental in any discipline. See particularly the papers of Kahnemann and Tversky.
16 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 27 October 2008:
#4
“I want to see my kids eat, but I’ve often thought that a serious reduction in our standard of living might be a good thing for us.”
Please explain why this would be ‘good’ for us.
This is my mine gripe about ‘paleocons’. Some seem to support destructive social engineering if it suits their ends. I can recall on another ‘Paleo’ website, the hosannas they gave over the high gas prices. It would end the ‘car culture’, they said.
17 Comment by Steve Berg on 27 October 2008:
I agree with Dr. Fleming on the lack of real science in economics. I initially tried to get an undergraduate double major in political science and economics. Finally, a savvy professor informed me that while I understood the basic ideas well, I obviously had some impairment that prevented me from readily extracting information from charts and graphs. He was right, and I dropped the economics courses. But I still learned a great deal. I figured out that most of what they did was based on shallow and only partially true notions of human nature dressed up with complex mathematics so as to mimic physics. I once asked where they got the data for the axes of all of those nice neat graphs showing behavior of markets, and only got a withering glare from the professor of the course. But. their greatest error is to elevate greed or avarice to the lofty heights of being the main factor in human choices and relations. In this, they are in agreement with the Randians as I understand them. There is no room for virtue in their view, only self seeking. At best it might be enlightened self interest. They thusly have no room for anything approaching sainthood, the highest estate that we mortals can achieve. Avarice is not just corrosive to the plutocrats, but as Dr. Fleming points out, it has come to infect much of the less well off, but still greedy populace. Greed has no physical limitation, nor can one in its clutches ever be truly satisfied. Those so enthralled are inevitably miserable, even if surrounded by luxuries. It is also unsustainable due to the flagrant waste of resources. It quickly overwhelms stewardship. One can only hope that the ongoing privation helps to free more people from the hell imposed by slavery to Madison Avenue and consumer capitalism.
18 Comment by Josh Cooney on 27 October 2008:
Mr. Maxwell,
We cannot continue to survive if we remain an economy based on production and consumption. We will, first of all, exhaust our natural resources; and we will also lose all the expressions of humanity such as art, literature, music, craftsmanship, worship, etc. In other words, we will cease to be human. Whether we destroy God’s creation first, or simply devolve into some kind of beastly anthropoid is, should we continue down this path, only a matter of timing.
I suppose we could debate exactly what a “serious reduction” in our standard of living would mean, but as conservatives it is time to practice that word in our daily lives. We should return to thrift, creativity, and sacrifice. Also, the cultivation of an intellectual and spiritual life would probably be the first step in such a recovery.
19 Comment by athanasius on 27 October 2008:
The question for me is where do we go in the future? Even with all the bailouts, you can not run a linear system in a finite world indefinitely. There is an omega point which sooner or later will mark a real end, particularly as wealth becomes less and less tangible.
The solution to that has already been determined, namely by the reintroduction of slavery. People have already accepted it, simply by another name.
When you pop the question to people, if the economy collapsed and basic food and services were gone, and you were offered a chance to work for JP Morgan or one of the Walton or Crock heirs, you would receive no money but you would be given a house and food, most people think that would be a great idea. “I wouldn’t even have to worry about rent” one person said when I posed this point.
It is more or less as Hillaire Belloc put it in one of his later essays “One day a wealthy capitalist will be able to go to the employment office and say ‘I picked up a lifer today’”, as in lifetime employment.” It sounds so much better than what it truly is, slavery.
20 Comment by george on 27 October 2008:
“I do not believe there is a science of economics”
There is a science of economics of fundamentals to economic stability and growth one of the LaRouche video presentations on the Weimar era of Germany and the reparations imposed on it by international bankers described how it was impossible for Germany to get out of it’s debt.
21 Comment by John Willson on 27 October 2008:
TJF @ #5: “I used to know a number of Randians and they all struck me as very off-balanced.”
Right, Tom. I have taught quite a number of Randians and ex-Randians and recovering Randians in over four decades, and I can say without hesitation that all of them were wacko, at least during the Randian phase, and usually thereafter as well. I really can understand how Atlas Shrugged can grab a pimply-faced dweeb at the age of sixteen and turn him into John Gault. I never have understood how he becomes seventeen and doesn’t realize what he has purchased.
When hiring economists I always had a stock question: “How do you explain the free market to a man who has worked hard all his life to support his family when the company decides to shut down the plant and move it to Timbuktoo?” Want to guess what answers I got? Or what answers got them hired? I’ll bet you get it right away.
22 Comment by polemicscat on 27 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming has written a very interesting piece. I especially like his pointing out how economists fail “to take into account the all-important human factors–love, desire, hate, envy, greed, and ambition–that can distort or torpedo their wisest initiatives.”
But in defense of Greenspan it should be noted that in 2004 he advised against the subprime lending that precipitated the mortgage bubble. And notice that Senator Shelby identified the problem as government interference which was creating artificial market forces:
* * *
Senate Banking Committee, Feb. 24-25, 2004:
Sen. Thomas Carper (D., Del.): What is the wrong that we’re trying to right here? What is the potential harm that we’re trying to avert?
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: Well, I think that that is a very good question, senator. What we’re trying to avert is we have in our financial system right now two very large and growing financial institutions [Fannie and Freddie] which are very effective and are essentially capable of gaining market shares in a very major market to a large extent as a consequence of what is perceived to be a subsidy that prevents the markets from adjusting appropriately, prevents competition and the normal
adjustment processes that we see on a day-by-day basis from functioning in a way that creates stability. . . . And so what we have is a structure here in which a very rapidly growing organization, holding assets and financing them by subsidized debt, is growing in a manner which really does not in and of itself
contribute to either home ownership or necessarily liquidity or other aspects of the financial markets. . . .
Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.): [T]he federal government has [an] ambiguous relationship with the GSEs. And how do we actually get rid of that ambiguity is a complicated, tricky thing. I don’t know how we do it. I mean, you’ve alluded to it a little bit, but how do we define the relationship? It’s important, is it not?
Mr. Greenspan: Yes. Of all the issues that have been discussed today, I think that is the most difficult one. Because you cannot have, in a rational government or a rational society, two fundamentally different views as to what will happen under a certain event. Because it invites crisis, and it invites
instability. . .
23 Comment by Daniel on 27 October 2008:
“Turning over the Fed to a Randian is like turning over Health and Human Services to a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy.”
Actually, I would much rather have Mary Baker Eddy running our healthcare system than the current cartels called the American Medical Association & Big Pharma!
Most people are not aware of it but at the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve, our wonderful bankers funded something called the Flexner Report. This document essentially pushed out all the homeopathic, naturopathic, osteopathic teachings in medical schools and pushed the “allopathic only” approach to health care. Our current medical system is the result.
Ever wonder why a doctor has no more than 90 seconds to talk with a patient and they don’t actually touch a patient anymore unless it is with a knife and he/she is under anesthetic? Well, it is because our medical system is run by the same group that produced Greenspan and our current economic system.
The difference is that there is an exact “economic science” to it. If you are dead, you are of no value. If you are alive and well, you are of no value. However, if you are alive and sick as can be, well, we will do everything in our medical power to keep you exactly that way. Welcome to modern medicine.
Say what you want about Mark Baker Eddy as I have no real opinion of her, however, in the 20 years I have been in the medical field, I have seen faith authentically heal (not just delay the inevitable and generate profit) more cancer patients than chemotherapy and radiation combined. And it did not cost the patient anything.
24 Comment by Martin on 28 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming,
Economics is not a science, but a religion.
25 Comment by Chuck Hicks on 28 October 2008:
The immense tragedy is that since Hamilton we have never known a genuine free market economy.
Take away subsidies, tax incentives, privilege (e.g., re-zoning, infrastructure concessions), government contracts, managed trade agreements, and above all, central banking, and we would see the end of monopoly, cartels and financial irresponsibility. Wall Street would have never been a factor apart from that big bag of corporate candy. And Wal-Mart would actually have to compete.
26 Comment by MAP on 28 October 2008:
Daniel Maxwell @ 14. Many generations are called forth to duty. When the soviet state fell, the Russian people were forced to endure the financial collapse of totalitarianism. Hopefully, the price they paid will assure a better life for their grandchildren. Some things transcend (or should transcend) luxury, comfort, and pleasures: liberty, honor, and principles, for example. Read the founders’ vision for this country and compare it to the socialist tyranny in which we live. How can we achieve the founders’ vision? And can it be done without paying the price? I believe that the true greatness of a nation is directly proportional to the strength of its people. Bread and circus is for a nation of slaves.
27 Comment by Lou Pandano on 28 October 2008:
The most influential economic theorists since the 1970s are the Chicago Boys and their cult leader, Milton Friedman, not Ayn Rand. The coup d’état in Chili in 1973 inaugurated the era of deregulation of the Means of Production and the radical Free Market in South America.
The very wealthy want both the Free Market and Socialism for the Rich: They cry “Free Market” whenever governments want to tax or nationalize their industries, however, when the wealthy are hit with hard times (for example: when government had to bail out the aviation industry in the aftermath of 911), they have no shame accepting government handouts – i.e. income from taxes paid by the heavily taxed lower classes.
28 Comment by Lee on 28 October 2008:
I couldn’t agree more. The only way to combine the words “science” and “economics” is to note that economics is properly designated the “dismal science” analogous to “modern art” not being art at all, but merely “modern art”. Also, although I never took economics, I read Samuelson’s tome and was struck by the fact that it seemed to be a treatise on how to direct the behaviour of the American people by tweaking the tax code.
29 Comment by JD Salyer on 28 October 2008:
Fantastic, as well as laugh-out-loud funny. Hey, don’t blame me, I voted for the Old Ones…
“We no longer buy houses in the expectation of living and dying in them and passing them on to our children. They are nothing more significant than investment vehicles, like 1000 shares of Microsoft.”
This is what we gloss over when we get carried away talking about the evil of wealthy elites.
The problem isn’t some sinister, behind-the-scenes cabal trying to impose a bloodthirsty, corrupt, centralized leviathan on an unwitting populace.
The problem is that many — if not the overwhelming majority of — Americans would explicitly endorse such a cabal if given the chance… so long as they were rewarded with a spot at the trough.
30 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
A few brief responses. I thank Leo for the comparison with the DRF–spot on–and for reminding us of both the contribution made by the wealthy and the degree to which Wall Street scripted the New Deal: Wall Street lawyers, in fact, helped to draft the NRA.
Are the US socialist or fascist? Fascism, of course, does include socialist elements, such as systematic economic planning, but unlike international socialism, fascism is directed toward national revival and success, plays upon themes of tradition and hierarchy, and, though its leaders are rarely Christian themselves, instrumentalizes the Church. The Middling classes who believed in public order could find fascism in its Italian and Spanish forms acceptable and reassuring. FDR does appear to have borrowed some elements from Italian fascism–its corporatist planning, its strident nationalism–for the New Deal, but the more positive aspects of fascism have long since been eliminated. Our brand of national-socialism–mixed heavily with the international variety–has little respect for the citizenry, exploits the middling classes, and makes war on our traditions and religions. I remember once calling FDR a fascist in front of an audience of Alleanza Nazionale members. They were so appalled it was difficult for me to finish my speech without assuring them I meant no disrespect to the Duce.
Slavery, pace Augustine, is part of the natural human condition. As James Henry Hamnond of SC retorted when a northern senator boasted that northern states had abolished slavery: “Yes, sir, the name but not the thing.” This is not place to define political liberty but it certainly includes economic independence, a condition enjoyed only by the rich in our society. The most abject slaves in our country are welfare dependents. Those who are descended from slaves might well envy the comparative affluence, decency, and peacefulness of their ancestors
Finally, to Daniel Maxwell I would suggest that he/we abandon shallow concepts like conservative and paleoconservative. What this or that person says on a website is not germane to any serious discussion, even one so frivolous as the one I have begun. Living large, as they say on commercials, or learning to live with less is more a moral decision than a political one. If buying lots of stuff and flaunting a bumper sticker saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” makes someone think he is happy, fine, but he can have no complaint about Bruce and Dave making different decisions. The moral question is the same one posed by Aristotle and Plato: What sort of life is conducive to human happiness? I stipulate from the beginning that happiness is primarily an objective not a subjective term. Those who advocate getting and spending as the best life, the ancients would say, are stuck on the lowest level of moral evolution and will end up treating even the beautiful, the true, and the beloved as commodities to be bought and sold. I am far from suggesting that Mr. Maxwell advocates this position, but I do say that consumerism–as opposed to economic independence and wealth–is per se a moral evil. And without wishing anyone the curse of poverty or wanting to limit him to owning only two cars, I cannot say that I am particularly disturbed at the prospect of Americans being forced to come to grips with moral reality
31 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
That should be, “I am not particularly disturbed…”
32 Comment by MAP on 28 October 2008:
As ususal, a great reply Dr. Fleminig.
33 Comment by MAP on 28 October 2008:
It’s an interesting turn of events that a nation which once – in my lifetime – supplied TVs, washers, refrigerators, and autos to the world, now produces only billionaires. How and in what form it will exist without the middle class that produced these things is a frightening thought. Add the third world invasion to it and the future looks dismal indeed. A total collapse now would be preferable, if it unseated those intent upon our destruction.
As an aside, I believe the shallowness of materialism is evident in the shallowness of artistic expression.
34 Comment by Tom Piatak on 28 October 2008:
An excellent piece.
35 Comment by robert m. peters on 28 October 2008:
I am neither a meteorologist nor an economist; yet, my powers of observation and analysis bring me to the conclusion that both the weather and economics, because they are intricately interrelated systems with a legion of variables, are beyond our current level of science to understand and to control, particularly since the “science” which we in both instances apply is fraught with political bias. Yet, our “science,” as we vainly attempt to apply it to weather and economics, does itself become a variable in the systems and changes or distorts them in ways which we cannot anticipate. Controlling the weather and controlling economics remains a pipe dream; however, the allegation on the part of politicians and ideologues that it can and must be done is a stalking horse which will lead to the deaths of no few ducks which do not, in their disregard of or naive affinity to the horse, see the armed hunter lurking just behind the horse.
36 Comment by CM Collins on 28 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming, Any thoughts on how our age compares to the mid-Hellenistic age as described by Peter Green in his “The Hellenistic Age; A Short History,” recently reviewed in the magazine? I am thinking of pages 75-79. Mercenaries, royal dynasts, disruption of agriculture, falling birthrate, increasing use of slaves, worsening treatment of slaves, the governing classes developing a widespread fear of insurrection, urbanization, a shift from public collectivism to personal relationships, and more. I’ve been mulling it for a few days and can’t help but think Mr. Green is on to something in making the comparison between that age and ours.
37 Comment by MAP on 28 October 2008:
I place economics in the same category as psychology, a pseudo-science where human responses are viewed as something as mechanical as a chemical reaction. Absurd foundations lead to absurd conclusions.
38 Comment by M.J.Harrington on 28 October 2008:
Dr Fleming.
Thank you for one of your most thought provoking pieces. I think Dr Johnson said that men need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed, and this is certainly true every time there is a financial panic.
The trouble with Greenspan and other free market fundamentalists is that they are Utopians. They believe that in a free market ,with people acting in their “rational self interest” we shall achieve perfection, or “the optimum allocation of resources.” They cannot accommodate the self destructive factor in human beings that turns gardens into rubbish dumps and ponds into cesspools.
I was a Randian once, and what attracted me,for a time, was her sheer brutality, and her eagerness to shock and upset respectable opinion. She never had the remotest interest in individual liberty, and in fact there is strong circumstanced evidence that she was a determinist.
39 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
To Alex, I would say in my defense that I did not dismiss economics as a legitimate field of study but declared it not a science in the sense that mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology are sciences. Mr. Peters does a good job of explaining the difference. The argument goes back to Aristotle, who declared the logical demonstrative method inappropriate for ethical questions, that is, questions of morals, politics, and the arts where human motives and wills had to be taken into consideration. If economics cannot be, as I am arguing, an exact science, then an even more dangerous step into folly would be an economic psychology that compounds the absurdity. Yes, the study of human motivation and behavior should play a part in a rational understanding of why and how many people make the economic choices they do, but in creating an academic subdiscipline out of what should be common sense and motivation, these people will only deceive themselves. I’ll take a look at their work, though, when I have a moment. I spent some years trying to figure out a recent hot wave in psychology–Cognitive Psychology–only to conclude that where they were right, philosophers had mostly beaten them to the punch centuries ago, but in adopting the goobledygook of Chomsky and his disciples they had mostly muddied the waters. Anytime you hear “scholars” talking about breakthroughs and new paradigms, it is time to chuck the book or article into the trash. Academic historians are full of this pseudo-scientific trash. But the good thing about fashions is that once they are “in” they are already behind the times.
40 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
To Mr. Collins, yes, there is a valid basis for comparing Hellinistic Greece with our own age, though Prof. Green, as a leftist, is too eager to attack the GOP. When republics perish in building empires, energy is transferred from the broad nexus of family and little community to a tiny elite that governs vast stretches of territory. All the old traditions are endangered and as people lose their political and economic independence, there is nothing left but, as Marx and Engels would say, the cash nexus. There is also a rise in brutality and vulgarity in these ages. Artists withdraw into their own private and arcane sphere, though they often adopt a lower style. Feeling replaces reason, and many people withdraw, like the Epicureans, into private life.
But, here is the difference. Hellenistic Greece was still a dynamic culture, reinterpreting the Greek legacy in a metropolitan atmosphere. Those who could afford to lead comfortable lives could enjoy the fruits of a creative civilization. Alas, there is nothing good to say about American culture in this new Millennium. The best we can do is to house artifacts in museums and go to plays and operas that no one can write today. Aristoxenus, the student of Aristotle, makes a similar complaint about late 4th century music, but his lifetime overlapped with those of Lysippus, Callimachus and Apollonius, Zeno and Epicurus. Not exactly a dark age.
41 Comment by CM Collins on 28 October 2008:
Thank you.
42 Comment by Sean Scallon on 28 October 2008:
“and the emblematic candidacy of Sarah Palin that has put the “Christian” seal of approval on the feminist movement.
That’s a one heck of a line. You can also say she’s put the Christian seal of approval on out-of-wedlock child birth and teen pregnancy as well (for Whites that is. Everyone else is still considered to be on welfare).
Although, if this true, then it goes to show that White Christian are starting to become concerned about White population decline without really saying so or subconcious way. How else would you describe the “quiver” movement of Christians having large families?
43 Comment by John Seiler on 28 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming:
I’ll provide an example that may prove your point.
In my many years writing editorials — most recently, 1987-2006 at The Orange County Register — I always opposed tax increases and favored tax cuts. I still do. It’s always worthwhile to get a little money back from the robbers. The Bob Dole-style “root canal Republicanism” is wrong and a loser’s policy, earning him the moniker “Tax Collector for the Welfare State.”
So I backed Bush’s tax cuts, especially the 2003 tax cut, which helped the economy and cut my taxes modestly.
The problem was the Iraq War and its immense expense, from $1,000,000,000,000.00 to $5,000,000,000,000.00, depending on who’s doing the calculating. Plus 5,000 dead Americans and up to 1,000,000 dead Iraqis.
Bush chose to pay for the war through inflating the dollar 200% (increasing the price of gold from $300 an ounce to $1,000; although currently it’s around $725); and through vast borrowing, doubling the national debt to above $9,000,000,000,000.00. He also bought domestic support for the war with LBJ-level domestic spending increases.
Bush’s actions meant that Americans really didn’t “pay” for the war, hardly noticing it except for the computer-games-style war broadcasts on FAUX News. My neighbor lost a son to an IED in April 2006. But how many Americans know someone who lost a son, brother, or father? Or knew one of the 109 American servicewomen killed so far in Iraq? (It’s shameful that the chickenhawks now send girls to fight and die.)
It would have been better to pay for the war with tax increases. That way everyone would have “paid” for the war in a tangible way. Perhaps a 10% surtax like LBJ’s in 1968 would have sufficed.
But such a surtax, as the Supply Sliders correctly would note, would have caused a recession in 2003-2004, just as LBJ’s surtax did in 1968-69. A recession in 04 would have gotten Bush kicked out, just as Nixon beat Humphrey in 68. No way Rove and Cheney were going to let that happen.
The war’s cost was postponed, but not avoided. The war’s price tag — inflation, deficits, debt, and wild domestic spending associated with the war – finally crashed the economy in 08, appropriately just before Bush’s term was ending. The housing crash was caused, as you pointed out, by the bad choices of the Clinton years. But such a crash would have been a minor problem without the inflation and the immense national debt. And compounding the problem, possibly bringing on a depression, have been the numerous “bailouts” and takeovers of industry in recent weeks.
Although Bush beat Kerry in 2004, now America will get Obama, full-blown socialized medicine, higher taxes, and horrors as yet unimagined.
So what we are faced with is a series of contradictions and paradoxes that cannot be answered by economics. What’s needed is “the politics of prudence,” as my old teacher and friend Russell Kirk used to say. But we haven’t had much of that in a long, long time.
44 Comment by John Seiler on 28 October 2008:
P.S. I don’t mean that only economics mattered in these elections, especially 1968. But war, tax increases, and recession usually lead to defeat for the incumbent party. And perpetrating these follies, over and over, shows there’s deep moral rot.
45 Comment by Filmer on 28 October 2008:
There are generally true economic principles, but there are no economic laws. The marketplace, while generally the most efficient way to distribute scarce resources, does not cure all ills. This is where our friends the Austrians go wrong. Praxeology is the absurd extreme of this. As Dr. Fleming said, “a principle that can explain everything explains nothing.”
Over time I have become more sensitive of this. Did anyone see the Nader/Baldwin debate? Nader called Baldwin a “free market fundamentalist” on health care, and indeed he did sound like one.
Conservatives, as opposed to libertarians, need to be careful about sounding like free market fundamentalists. Instead they need to speak in terms of what responsibilities are authorized and at what level.
The Austrians seem to both presuppose (greed) and ignore (lack of coercion, etc.) the fallen state of man. Such convenient assumptions are good work if you can get it, I suppose, but will always have limited utility in explaining reality.
46 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
Thanks, John, for the excellent comment. If we had a budget for online contributors, I’d happily send you a check. The best I can offer is our continued interest in getting pieces from you for the magazine, where we do pay, albeit a pittance. I know we don’t always agree on everything, but a magazine should not be a symphony orchestra under the dictatorial direction of the editor. It is more of a jazz ensemble with lots of musicians taking solos, playing around and even against each other. The effect does not always work, especially when musicians–or writers–have little experience in working together, but it is the only way I know how to play at editor. I suppose the word is collegiality. We should also have a link to your very good good, which I have been looking at since you started sending in your welcome comments.–Tom
47 Comment by robert alpert on 28 October 2008:
As usual Dr. Fleming is on the mark–though as a born again leftist I must question his use of the word ” socialist” –would not the term “whig” (I mean as the word was used in the 18th century) be more appropriate. Our present masters have the same blood lust and idolatry of money that so enraged Dean Swift?
48 Comment by John Seiler on 28 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming:
Thank you for your kind words. We agree on more than you think. A few years ago I realized you were right on immigration. Reading Chronicles for more than 20 years will do that to you. So will living in California for 21 years.
State-level Republicans out here are a lot better than the national-level ones. We even joke that, when an assemblyman becomes a congressman, he loses whatever sense he once had.
Whatever the defects of the GOP, Republicans have provided some checks on the state-level Democratic leftists. But immigrants vote 70% Democratic, even though the immigrants abhor, say, same-sex “marriage.”
More immigrants means more socialism. It’s a simple equation.
The question then is: What to do about it? I still despise the U.S. government. And federal workplace invasions are unconstitutional. That leaves a wall on the border, which has had some success and should be completed, and cutting welfare, which just isn’t going to happen.
It’s a problem to which I don’t have a good answer.
49 Comment by Steve Berg on 28 October 2008:
There is a sort of economics that is of great use. It is the art of household management as first discussed by Xenophon in his Oeconomicus. What is truly useful for most of us is a skill in acquiring enough material wealth that we can support ourselves in our quest for the good life. In his book, Xenophon gives us some good pointers in this effort. Aristotle also understood that there is a certain minimal level of prosperity necessary to happiness. Locke took one of Xenophon’s points and put it into the Second Treatise. If you practice agriculture effectively, you can increase the productivity of wilderness property a hundred fold. Xenophon advocated buying up poorly maintained farmland and through knowledge and effort improving it to the same proportion of productivity. I suspect that much of the wrong turn in economics has come about from its misuse as a predictive medium for big business. I once wondered why increased wages and salaries for the middle and lower class were generally viewed by economists as being inflationary, and hence, bad when increases in executive salaries, bonuses, and corporate profits never seemed to contribute to Demon Inflation and were always a good thing. So, the lower classes were left with at best stagnating compensation, and their betters became fabulously wealthy. He who pays the piper calls the tune. This sort of thing existed in the Clinton administration, too. Then, economists were happy when unemployment went up as this would reduce the chance of wage-push inflation. I suspect that if the frequently dismal state of most household’s management were to be suitably improved, we would be much less concerned about macroeconomics. And, we would have a much greater and more sustainable level of prosperity in the country.
50 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
Our American elite-system is a complex inheritance, owing something to the Whigs, something to Lincolnians, but a great deal to socialism. No completely socialist state has ever existed, but the basic principles of socialism have certainly been adopted by our ruling class in both wings: 1) Equality–legal, social, and economic–of the inhabitants. (Naturally this does not apply to the elite.) 2) The elimination of all barriers–religious, social, familial–between the helpless individual and the all-important state. 3) The assumption that the state is the ultimate owner of the land and the means of production. (In the US this takes the form of vast regulatory powers as well as the incredible exercise of eminent domain and retain of federal ownership in Western states.) 4) a Revolutionary/Jacobin attitude toward custom, tradition, morality, and culture. In some respects we lag behind Marxist states like the old USSR and democratic-socialist states like Sweden–though as I pointed out in the piece, Swedish cohabitations are more enduring than US marriages–but in others we are in or near the vanguard. Compared with the national and international socialism advocated and implemented by our ruling class, the greed and imperialism of the Whigs seems positively benign.
I should add that one key element in state socialism is the insistence on applying to all what might more easily be applied only to a small minority. The obvious example is national healthcare. Systems that apply especially to the poor and permit the rich to opt out are only imperfectly socialist, unlike the Canadian system or the Hilary Clinton plan. But the principle is now universally applied in the zaniest manner. A few Muslim men from the Middle East commit a crime, but every American citizen has to endure the indignities imposed by lower class TSA employees who take out their envy of the Middle class by humiliating them. Do welfare dependents abuse their children? Well, then, the state assumes ultimate control of all children under the banner of “the best interests of the child.” My little book on Socialism, written for high school and college students, forced me to examine matters I had taken largely for granted and allowed me to see the RichNation/Poor Nation wealth transfer scam as nothing less than an expression of the goal of the Communist Manifesto. In sum, we need to distinguish between state welfare and the virus of Marxist socialism that has infected both American parties.
51 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
PS. Which socialism, Soviet or American, has been more destructive to the arts and education. Here is a hint at the answer. Compare Soviet-era composers and writers with American, compare the level of humane education in communist countries with our own. We have truly achieved the socialist ideal of making nearly everyone ignorant and stupid, and this did not happen by accident.
52 Comment by Simonida on 28 October 2008:
What goes around comes around. So many times we saw freedom of the small destroyed in arteficial wars, fueled by CNN embedid journalists – bombing of Serbia for genocide that was not, attacking Iraq for WMD that were not,Afganistan etc. Our current Nobel Price winner and member of the International Crisis Group (just like Albright, Clark, Soros, etc) – Mr Ahtisaari states – “It really doesn’t matter if Paraguay hasn’t recognised (Kosovo),” Ahtisaari said. “Well over 65% of the wealth of the world has recognised. That matters.” There is something inherently wrong with ‘democracy’ today if people that consider that oppinion of the small guy does not matter. This is what we build on our society, economy and no wonder that its comming back to bite us, badly. And there is more to come.
53 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 28 October 2008:
Dr Fleming @30
“I am far from suggesting that Mr. Maxwell advocates this position, but I do say that consumerism–as opposed to economic independence and wealth–is per se a moral evil. And without wishing anyone the curse of poverty or wanting to limit him to owning only two cars, I cannot say that I am particularly disturbed at the prospect of Americans being forced to come to grips with moral reality”
Actually, I was not advocating anything. I do believe you’re correct in wanting an end to labels – paleo this, neo that. I merely used one in this instance for easier identification with a common theme among some ‘rightists’. The theme being it is better for me to toil under the hot Virginia sun, plowing crops as my ancestors did in the 18th and 19th centuries than have the option to get a TV dinner instead. It is a not-to-uncommon theme, so I apologize for grouping you with this group if you do not indeed share such views.
One can maintain a high standard of living without stooping to the level of consumerism. Yes, the ‘market’ allows us to choose.
But I suppose I thought this discussion was going to get into the wishing poverty upon people, to cause a massive upheaval to end consumerism. To my pleasure, it has not.
54 Comment by Edward on 28 October 2008:
“I should add that one key element in state socialism is the insistence on applying to all what might more easily be applied only to a small minority.”
It seems as if egalitarianism can only be defeated by common sense. Then again, when have modern Americans ever displayed that? It is now perfectly acceptable to disparage the Founders as despicable, racist slave holders and to extol the virtuous government for reorganizing society according to its liberal orthodoxy during the civil rights era. I am actually surprised that American colleges and universities still allow Aristotle or Aquinas, both of whose political philosophies are based on societal distinctions, to be studied anymore.
55 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
I’ve tried hard labor and don’t like it, though I strongly believe that it is the answer to welfare-slavery. If the punks and thugs were working 12 hours a day, six days a week just to stay alive, they would have little time for gang-banging.
The problem with egalitarianism is that it insists on treating unequals as if they were equal. Typically, the advocates are elite-class rabble rousers who use equality as a means of gaining the support of the masses.
56 Comment by John Seiler on 28 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming @50. The Soviet composer comparison may not be apt. The Soviets inherited the rich Russian tradition of classical composing, something America never had; nobody listens to 19th Century American composers. Hence, Shostakovich and Prokofiev are much better than Copeland and Gershwin. Since Shostakovich’s death in 1975, there haven’t been any composers anywhere near his level anywhere in the world. Another factor was that Stalin prevented any of the nonsense perpetrated by John Cage or the exiled, atonal Stravinsky, the only good act of the monstrous dictator’s misrule.
57 Comment by Chuck Hicks on 28 October 2008:
Mr. Seiler (#54) — your comments on D. Shostakovich are much appreciated. In my opinion the paranoia in Stalin’s USSR inspired his best work, especially the 4th Symphony.
Returning to economics, I would like to get Mr. Fleming’s opinion of Rothbard’s thought.
58 Comment by TJF on 28 October 2008:
I agree with you on the significance of the Russian tradition in producing the prominent composers of the Soviet era–as well as the performers–but that partly makes my point that it is not a political economic system alone that makes a culture, important as it is. The comrades insured a much higher level of traditional learning in countries like the USSR, the GDR, and the former Yugoslavia. Stalin appears to have had some taste in music and literature and supposedly wept when he sent a poet, was it Mandelstam?, to his death. The comrades also nipped in the bud the sexual liberation and feminism preached by Alexandra Kollontai, who was packed off to Sweden, where she belonged. Djilas in his memoirs also indicates how puritanical the Yugo communists were typically–they murdered a comrade for too much womanizing. Naturally, everything gets worse under socialism and by the Brezhnev era, they had destroyed or corrupted much of the capital they had inherited. Solzhenitsyn was born during the Revolution, though, and Yugo writers like Ivo Andric and even reformed Commies like Djilas and my friend Dobrica Cosic were producing a literature as good as and typically better than this vast continental empire. I do not say any of this to extenuate Communism but only to say that our own Deweyite revolution was at least as subversive.
59 Comment by C on 28 October 2008:
In relation to our current politcal-economy, I have been very interested in this passage from 1 Samuel 8. Samuel knew what a King would do to the people. The Lord told him to warn the people but to listen to them and give them a King in any case.
1 Samuel 8: 4 – 22
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint a king to lead [a] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. 7 And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle [b] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.”
19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. 20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
21 When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the LORD. 22 The LORD answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
Then Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Everyone go back to his town.”
60 Comment by John Seiler on 28 October 2008:
Good points. The Soviets brought Dewey over but, after seeing he would destroy the education system, shunned him. Stalin wanted engineers to build bombs and planes, not “look-say” illiterates. Too bad they didn’t dump Dewey in the Gulag, instead letting him go back to Amerika. Or maybe the NKVD realized he’d, as you say, subvert America even more than communism.
61 Comment by Robert Bruce on 28 October 2008:
Sean Scallion #42,
Well I suspect the “redneck” crowd is who McCain was trying to pander to in the red states Sean. The white trashing of America was well underway in the 90’s, tattoos, piercings, white rappers, crystal meth, unwed kids, and all. You also have to remember that the red states are actually more on the dole than the blue ones, so the Palin nod also makes a lot of sense in that regard. She isn’t pandering to feminists per say, but to the white trash that unfortunately dominates the GOP base anymore, especially in the South.
62 Comment by Sean Scallon on 28 October 2008:
I’ll let someone else comment about “white trash” although suffice to say many whites rural poverty pockets saw themselves not as “crackers” or “white trash” which was considered bad by the culutre at large but identified with ghetto culture from the inner cities which has celebrated by popular culture at large. We’ll see if this was just a fad or if they are truly Obama’s children and the new reality in many places across the country.
63 Comment by Чекмарёв on 29 October 2008:
Мне нравятся Ваши посты, заставляет задуматься…
64 Comment by John Médaille on 29 October 2008:
It would be rather strange is there was no such thing as “economic science,” that is, no organized and reliable body of knowledge about economics. If this were true, it would be the greatest argument in favor of atheism; it would be the surest sign that God, if he did exist, didn’t know what he was doing.
It would be true to say, however, that there is no scientific knowledge among economists. Of the major schools of thought, the neoclassicists treat economics as an empirical, physical science, and the Austrians as a purely speculative science. But economics is neither; it is a practical, humane science, one that deals with a particular class of human relationships aimed at the material provisioning of society. As a humane science, it terminates not in physical laws as in neoclassicism, nor on naturalistic axioms as in Austrianism. Rather, it is governed, as are all proper human relations, by justice, and with justice there can be no economic science. Justice is not an abstract moral concern, but a practical and even technical measure.
65 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
I thank John Médaille for his very apt comment. I know it is tedious to read through all the comments and responses–I find it so myself sometimes– but, if he had, Mr. Médaille would have seen that I distinguished between abstract and hard sciences, such as math, physics, etc., and what Aristotle calls ethical sciences because they deal with human behavior and must rely on approximate and probable arguments rather than scientific demonstration. We, thus, do not disagree on the basic issue. When economics was being developed, it bore the more accurate name of political economy, because it was viewed as an aspect of political ethics, that is, the sort of study that Aristotle made in the Ethics and Politics, which, to be understood, must be read together. I hope anyone interested will read carefully Aristotle’s discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics I (1094b). I would say, though, that the word “technical”, when applied to justice, could be misinterpreted, though I assume what you mean is that the pursuit of justice is a techne or art that requires prudential judgment.
Let me also thank Steve Berg for mentioning a very important work, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, that is, the household manager. Xenophon, compared with Plato, is sort of a bonehead Socratic, but he was a practical man of affairs–military and political–whose common-sense approach to human questions is closer to Greek popular wisdom–and thus Aristotle–than it is to Plato’s. Any interest in a brief booklog discussion on this not very long book, which I have been mining for my book on the family and the state? Gibbon, by the way, thought his Anabasis was the most entertaining work of history ever written. I am inclined to divide the prize between Xenophon and Herodotus.
66 Comment by Robert on 29 October 2008:
“Any interest in a brief booklog discussion on this not very long book, which I have been mining for my book on the family and the state?”
Yes, this would be excellent. You will no doubt recall that St. Augustine”s Press, South Bend, Indiana published Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse along with Leo Strauss’ interpretation of the Oeconomicus. I have read the discourse but never the Straussian interpretation, and would much prefer to read the book with Dr. Fleming.
67 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
Thanks for the encouragement, though it was distressing to read the names St. Augustine and Leo Strauss in the same sentence. The worthy bishop of Hippo would be rolling in his grave, were he not a saint.
68 Comment by R. McCabe on 29 October 2008:
The discussion of the ancients is way over my head. Aristotle, Socrates and Plato all blend together to me and to my own fault. But I am familiar with many of the works of Kahneman and Tversky. I think they have done some very interesting work and do not hold against that work the many zany interpretations of it and applications to the populous by many in the academic community. Clearly, the distinction must be held between what they do, what economists do, and science. As one commenter pointed out, experiments in economics are impossible to repeat, which is the only proof you need that they are not really experiments, and economics is not really a science.
The economics I learned in college was Keynesian. And it was really just the study of and development of models. People often mistake the mathematical descriptions of these dynamics as being the underlying causes of them, which is frustrating. I recall meeting an acquaintance who told me he was going back to school to get a masters degree in math. I said that sounded great. He replied importantly that it’s what makes the world turn. I told him that it certainly did not but that it might describe it pretty well and good luck.
Conversations like these always bring to mind the beautiful model of my grandfather’s P-47 that my own father has on his desk. It looks just like the real one, down to the cartoon woodpecker painted on the “driver’s side” near the nose. But if you threw this model off the roof, it would not fly.
The general term of “science” these days I think would be better called “research”. Certainly, there is much good that can come from research, even if it is not hard science. Much of the psychology experiments carried out over the years have been bolstered by related “experiments”. And as our technology and understanding has sharpened, most of the things now known about the brain were simply re-applied psychology phenomona to neuron-level experiments. Now there is some science to it. Of course one must wade through gobs of research cellulose to find real contributions. Peer review is a funny animal.
I also claim there is much art and music being created these days if people are willing to go find it (and suffer through the 90% of crap art being produced and commercialized). It is happening mostly in rural small towns throughout the midwest (and I’m sure beyond) as well as in neighborhoods on the verge of gentrification in major cities. Perhaps our culture has been stunted at the classical music level or the art-elite level, but their is plenty of great stuff out there to suit many tastes.
69 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
Mr. McCabe makes several claims–e.g. about Kahneman and Tversky as well as about art and music–but provides no examples or proofs. The statement, “Perhaps our culture has been stunted at the classical music level or the art-elite level, but their is plenty of great stuff out there to suit many tastes” sounds an awful lot like aesthetic relativism, which is just as bad as moral relativism. The fact that I may like good country music along with a class or Bourbon does not blind me to the fact that the best country music songwriter is not fit, musically speaking, to spit-shine Haydn’s shoes. Standards of excellence in the arts are not a question of “you say tomayto, I say tomahto” any more than moral standards are a question of I like my wife wife and you like my sons. So let us have a little specificity here. What have the psychological economists contributed either to the theory of economics or to practical application and what is some of the “great stuff” being touted?
70 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
excuse me, a glass or two of Bourbon.
71 Comment by jack bailey on 29 October 2008:
Remarks about the study of economics are dead-on and experienced by many in graduate schools. The subject of economics can be valid if viewed as speculative, when hardly anything in the theory is inshrined in stone. This is the Austrian view. For this reason, the subordinate field of economic history is perhaps the strongest and most valuable aspect of the studies. BUt that’s not where the money is, so the profession is not interested in this part. Instead, they concentrate on building econometric models by using arcane formulas and complex math, matrix functions etc., while coating the results with scientistic language. These studies basically predict whatever they are ordered to do. The desired consequence for the practitioners in the field is to create a cult like status for themselves. The value of this cult is best exemplified in Greenspan’s case. For the fifteen years it all seemed to have worked and he was regarded as superhuman. So were many other pundits and the consulting money kept rolling into the profession. However, it will be interesting to see what happens now, with all these prediction failures by the econometric model builders.
72 Comment by Frank on 29 October 2008:
I like this idea.
—
Regarding US debt, what do the economists say will happen if the US opts to not pay rather than inflate the currency?
A ruined US credit rating could be a good thing.
—
Hartman is brilliant (or so I gather from his writing), but his border adjusted VAT suggestion has been criticised for leading to bureaucracy. I’d love to read another article by him on it, perhaps in defense against the criticism of it leading to bureaucracy.
73 Comment by Frank on 29 October 2008:
Oh, I see he has new articles up. I should read these first before asking for another.
74 Comment by Josh Cooney on 29 October 2008:
I second the motion for Dr. Fleming to lead a book discussion of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. As a student, I always appreciate the book discussions as they introduce me to a world of knowledge I never knew existed. I wish Chronicles had one every week. All the talk of elections and markets only turns me into a melancholy old man before my time.
75 Comment by Jeff Anderson on 29 October 2008:
Virtually everything in our education system has been buried under the practice of quantification. Measurements of human behavior, forms of teaching, applications of science…all have been molded into a statistical end game. When this happens, those number driven concepts which belong either to the technical sciences (as Dr. Fleming has mentioned) or are derived from them suddenly become treated as if they were part of the quantified humanities curriculum. Therefore, “economics.” It is hard to know how to view such a concept. It definitely involves numbers, but it also is manipulated by human emotion and perception, basic bartering and corporate backstabbing…plus supply and demand. No matter…all of it, in the end, is compared to T-scores and Z-scores. This makes me an expert.
When people become experts in chaos and those experts are viewed with respect, it seems like we need to find a better way to measure value and make a living.
76 Comment by R. McCabe on 29 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming, I admit I missed your point about standards in art vs. the creation or appreciation of art. I do understand what you say about Haydn as opposed to, say, Hank (Williams), but my point was in a different light. Clearly, standards are needed. But there is a range to usefulness of applied standards. On one end, the lack of them limits our abilities to create anything at all, but the same could be true of the other end, when standards become exceedingly complex or exclusive. Slang may lack the power to express lots of important stuff, but overly properfied English becomes brittle and inaccessible. So within the range of simple standards and complex standards is a fine form of relative aesthetics for me, though I do not dispute the ascending order within that range.
I just learned in church last Sunday that the Jews of Jesus’ time were expected to comply with 213 moral laws. Jesus essentially boiled them down to two. I wouldn’t say that was a loss of anything important. And although I acknowledge that an orchid possesses a certain innate complexity and concomitant beauty not found in a dandelion, I would not argue with someone who prefers to look at dandelions. Of course I would laugh at someone who preferred to look at mud or slush. And so when I say our culture is still producing great stuff, I mean that even if we are incapable currently of providing an environment for orchids to grow, there are lots of great dandelions to look at and bourbons to drink.
As for the economic psychologists… yes, a lot of what they do is bunk pseudoscience. And none of it is science. As for the specificity you seek, Tversky and Gilovich wrote a paper called the Hot Hand in Basketball which investigated the perception that players ‘heat up’ in a way that is above and beyond their capabilities. The analysis showed that the hot streaks players produced were actually predictable (not when they will occur) or part of their average performance based on their overall shooting rates. If my memory is correct, much of Kahneman and Tversky’s work went about showing consistencies in people’s preferences, for example, when do people seek risk and when do they avoid it. When do people inappropriately estimate the probability of something happening and when do they get it right. These types of insights are not infallible and are often perverted by many, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting and useful as well. Gigerenzer and others have argued that people are actually excellent at figuring out probabilities if they’re stated in “heuristic” form (e.g., most people know what 4 out of 10 people means, but do not necessarily grasp a 40% liklihood that a person will have a heart attck). Such things might, for example, help doctors communicate more effectively with their patients.
I have been very frustrated by many academics’ attempts to reduce people or free will to probabilistic math statements. However, I have learned to live with that dissatisfaction or distrust, learn as much as I can from the imperfect and perverted, and strive to improve myself, the people, system and culture I’m stuck with while enjoying as many aspects of it that I can along the way.
I hope you enjoy your bourbon as much as I enjoy my Irish whiskey.
77 Comment by Sempronius on 29 October 2008:
“I second the motion for Dr. Fleming to lead a book discussion of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.”
I’ve got a better idea,how ’bout a discussion of Aeschylus’ ORISTEIA,with an emphasis on THE AGAMEMNON?A lot juicier,and alot more instructive about households, without the mundane aspects of their management.
“…sounds an awful lot like aesthetic relativism, which is just as bad as moral relativism”- Possibly worse,and isnt Free Market economics simply “economic relativism”? Where are Allan Bloom and Billy Bennett when you need them?
78 Comment by Steve Berg on 29 October 2008:
I would also like a discussion of the Oeconomicus. Coming from a hotbed of Straussian Xenophonia, it would be nice to get a less hermeneutic treatment of this too often overlooked Socratic. Count me in.
79 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
In reverse order, we can do a brief discussion of Xenophon before going on to the Oresteia. To be honest, I have done many lectures on Aeschylus and wrote my dissertation on the ancient and Medieval evidence for understanding the meters of his choral lyrics. Thanks to an EU grant given to an Italian group and a Dutch publisher, it is now in print. Some day someone will say I am a flunky for the EU, even though I did not know how the project was being financed.
McCabe has surprised me a little bit by the subtlety and thoughtfulness of his answer. (I was expecting a libertarian relativist response.) On the general question of aesthetic relativism, I think one can say that dandelions and orchids (I would prefer to use roses) represent different types and levels of beauty, it should be possible to arrange them in a hierarchy of value–which would include complexity and form and shading among other qualities. I like and admire Hank Williams, who performs a different function from, say, Haydn or even Dowling, but one that was necessary to his time and perhaps also to ours. On the other hand, we can only say that the formal perfection of Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms is richer and nobler than anything in popular music. If this is elitism, then I propose to make the most of it. By the way, I concur absolutely with Sempronius about economic relativism but never put it in quite those terms. I intend to rip him off immediately.
On Tversky et al., the stuff sounds quite interesting and I shall follow up. I would suggest, though, at the outset that there are problems. The most obvious one is that human motivations are somewhat variable, depending on cultural tradition and ethnic background. Asians, for example, are much less prone to hair-trigger aggression than other races, while even among similar ethnic groups some cultures favor restraint, others recklessness. Second, these are matters that may be better explained by endocrinologists and neurophysiologists.
On the question of Jesus and Judaism, He did not say he had come to destroy the law–on the contrary–though clearly he was cavalier about superstitions and kosher laws. But it is not true to say that He reduced all morality to two laws, and it is quite a serious mistake to say He did. Love of neighbor can be treated as a sort of Kantian imperative that tells us to imagine, if we were in the other fellow’s shoes, how we would want to be treated. But it is difficult to see how this can be applied to unequal or disproportionate relationships, unless we are willing to make a stretch. For example, we might stretch–though the exercise is somewhat perverse–the commandment to honor our parents by saying that is how we shall want to be treated if and when we become parents, but how do we treat Jesus’ strictures against divorce or mistreatment of the poor? It was the Enlightenment’s mistake to claim, with Jefferson, that Christ’s message could be reduced to a few basic principles once we have stripped away what Jefferson called “the wretched depravity of particular duties.” Then, of course, we should also make a mistake in trying to separate a primitive Christian message from the teachings of the apostles who tell slaves to obey masters, wives to obey husbands, husbands to love wives, men not to have sexual relations with men, etc. etc. In aesthetic terms, then, I would apply this to any attempt to reduce poetry and music to our perception and enjoyment else we end up in the trap of saying a Junkie enjoying Parker is the same as Haydn enjoying Mozart.
Let me just say, though, that I learned things from your response, which was very helpful in clarifying the argument. Does anyone need a recommendation on how to find the Oeconomicus online or in print? How long should we wait before beginning? This Friday? Finally, I expect more comments and discussion than previous book discussions have received. It is a bit discouraging to spend a few hours on a piece and then receive a handful of responses.
80 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2008:
PS In saying that all the law and the prophets hang from/depend upon His two Great Commandments, he was not saying that an ordinary mortal could logically deduce the laws but that they were rooted in love of God and love of neighbor, without which love/charity the laws mean nothing–as Paul makes clear.
81 Comment by Robert on 29 October 2008:
“How long should we wait before beginning? This Friday? Finally, I expect more comments and discussion than previous book discussions have received. It is a bit discouraging to spend a few hours on a piece and then receive a handful of responses.”
Yes, Friday is good. Let us all order our lives accordingly !! I wouldn’t worry too much about the responses, Dr. Fleming, sometimes it is good to simply admire and truth be told, the numbers are always against a man of your talent. The best teachers I had (back in the day) would begin with a hundred students in the Fall and find themselves teaching twenty five students a year later because they required attendance and wouldn’t let you sleep or read the newspaper in class.
At least whatever teaching you do here is with willing students –and the happy few.
82 Comment by Josh Cooney on 29 October 2008:
Friday will work. I’ve got a Loeb translation and I’ll be ready. I concur with Robert’s thoughts. Dr. Fleming’s time on these discussions is not spent in vain.
83 Comment by Dave Hardy on 29 October 2008:
Thank you, Dr. Fleming for your encouragement upthread. I forgot to add that we no longer own a house in this country; we sold the one we had several years due mainly to confiscatory and punitive Federal, state and local taxes and the paucity of actual neighbors who would so much as deign to acknowledge our existence. So now we rent at 33% per month than we were paying on our mortgage. It’s an 1806 farmhouse on about six acres and we’ve been laying our raised beds in for fall and spring planting. And we are organizing with our neighbors here to provide assistance to anyone who needs it this coming winter.
We do have a smaller house about 1,200 miles north of here near where the Baie de Chaleur runs into the north Atlantic, oceanside. During the season, no fresher fish or shellfish to be had anywhere, direct to the dock.
As for self-defense during the coming debacle, or just in general, even today, everyone must make up his or her own mind on how far they wish to go. Suffice to say that I had eight years doing dirty jobs for Uncle in foreign parts, plus another twelve years as a street cop in some of New England’s grittiest urban hell-holes.
We are ready.
I recommend the late Mel Tappan’s books on this subject, along with the hoard of useful information to be found on the web, particularly any involving the advice of the late Colonel Jeff Cooper.
Also: http://www.backwoodshome.com/
84 Comment by Dave Hardy on 29 October 2008:
And that should be “33% LESS per month than we were paying on our mortgage, PLUS, we do not pay the property taxes here.
Put that down to fat fingers going too fast (51 WPM) on a too-small keyboard.
85 Comment by Sempronius on 29 October 2008:
“By the way, I concur absolutely with Sempronius about economic relativism but never put it in quite those terms. I intend to rip him off immediately.”
Totally shameless,you are a Lehman Bros. capitalist after all!I demand something of equal or greater value in return.
p.s. please forgive my misspelling of “ORESTEIA” I cant type to save my life.
86 Comment by Frank on 29 October 2008:
This is good enough: Xenophon. Economics.?
87 Comment by Steve Berg on 29 October 2008:
I have my Loeb addition handy and look forward to re-reading it before Friday.
88 Comment by Dave Hardy on 29 October 2008:
Loeb generally rocks. Better than the alternative of having nothing at all, praise be to those Irish monks and reference librarians of days of yore.
Praise be also to Dr. Fleming (and others) for prodding some of us back into study of Classics, despite, at least in my own case, advancing age and limited self-study access.
I like most of the Loebs, but also check out:
http://www.bolchazy.com/
There are other resources, of course, at Audio-Forum, The Teaching Company, etc., etc. and, naturally, one hopes, at nearby colleges and universities, where some of us geezers are allowed to at least audit courses.
Carpe diem!
89 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 29 October 2008:
@59 C
Another scripture that refers to our current state of un-civilization is Deuteronomy 28, about the blessings and curses of a people who fail to remember God during the good times. It is not preached much — at least not yet — for fear of scaring away the tithers from the megachurch that provides daycare for the new Christian family’s 1.8 children.
90 Comment by JE on 29 October 2008:
A few scattershot thoughts:
Aristotle’s (NE 1094b and elsewhere) ‘treatise on economics’ makes the interesting point that treating money as per-se desideratum leads to straight-up greed (pleonexia), owing to the ‘denaturing’ of money, its uncoupling from the scientific foundation for subjective-utility judgments (namely, objectively determined need (khreia)). These pleonexia-sufficient conditions are also necessary for usury (the much-mocked Aristotelian ‘tokos’), and in conjunction with greed (which always obtains under these conditions, since they’re sufficient for pleonexia) paint a rather familiar picture of ‘making much from nothing’. But as far as I know the only serious Aristotelian economists today are fundamentalist Muslim intellectuals of a particular sort, with their Aristotelianism embedded in a generally gnostic theology.
But as to the ’subjective utility’ concept — it can be saved if and only if subjectivity is rightly, post-Kantianly, pre-Cartesianly, understood — as proper to the ’second actors’, the ‘forma in formam’ substances. The neat thing about these substances is that they’re *sentient* — which is to say, ‘actually sense real things’, and the blindness to ‘[sensible] things’ is the whole problem with ‘denatured’ subjective-utility theories of value, the source of the ‘economic relativism’ Sempronius and TJF mentioned above. The marginal-theory Austrians are Kantians; the Rothbardians are, I think, tacit Cartesians, though I will gladly concede this if anyone can show otherwise. Heideggerized Husserlians are on the right track, but they have no scientific metaphysics, and hence are more or less useless in legitimate dialectic; and haven’t seen a neo-Thomist answer to Scotus on passive intellection (only to Heidegger, who is rather duller than the Dunce). The philosophical problem runs as deep as can be. And in spite of some nice movements in post-nominalist American-British philosophy, it’s depressing how much we are (still) all Kantians now.
Xenophon can’t solve *this* problem, because, unlike Aristotle, he really is just plain ‘commonsensical’. But the Oeconomicus (unlike implicitly Keynesian management-theory) is mostly fine as long as good science of (human and other) nature is plugged into the Xenophontic major premises. And that’s not really a problem..except insofar as Kantians actually just don’t open their eyes. (Though of course they can’t without Trinitarian grace.)
(Irrelevantly, I can’t help find the Anabasis more entertaining than Herodotus, if only because I’m professionally required to take Herodotus seriously..and I’m still able to grin at Xenophon without any revolting academic pseudo-irony.)
91 Comment by Allen Wilson on 29 October 2008:
I am on for Oeconomicos. Project Gutenberg has a version available, though I dont know if Dr Fleming would approve of it (he’s the expert). It’s the Henry Graham Dakyns translation.
Dr Fleming, I have noticed the small number of responses to your book discussions. I post less in them because I find myself at a loss for anything worthwhile to say or add to the discussion. Aside from that, I cant guarantee that I can find time to read the work being discussed. So if you wish to make a demand for more responses from me, then beware, for you are asking for a lot of witless posts from someone who doesn’t know enough about what he’s saying to make it worth anyone’s time to read or respond to. Seriously, I wish I could do better in those discussions.
By the way, even though I’m not suggesting that we read or discuss it now, I remember that, back several months ago, when all of us were discussing choices for a book to read and discuss, Digenes Akrites was mentioned. I said that I couldn’t find it anywhere in print or online. You said that you found a copy that was something like $500 or so. Well, believe it or not, out of the blue, there are some Greek – English copies available now on Amazon. This is the OUP edition by Mavrogordato. This may or may not be a good translation, but it beats nothing.
92 Comment by Hermes on 30 October 2008:
The story of Digenes Akritas is still part of well known folk songs in Cyprus, Crete and Macedonia (the real one). The book by Mavrogordato is fantastic but the story is even better when heard to be sung in Hellenic. There is even an Akritic Cycle of songs. The word Akrites is still commonly used in modern Greek to signify a guardian of Helleno-Roman Christianity. Hope you enjoy the book.
93 Comment by Edward on 30 October 2008:
“Dr Fleming, I have noticed the small number of responses to your book discussions. I post less in them because I find myself at a loss for anything worthwhile to say or add to the discussion. Aside from that, I cant guarantee that I can find time to read the work being discussed. So if you wish to make a demand for more responses from me, then beware, for you are asking for a lot of witless posts from someone who doesn’t know enough about what he’s saying to make it worth anyone’s time to read or respond to. Seriously, I wish I could do better in those discussions.”
Agreed. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
94 Comment by MAP on 30 October 2008:
Dr. Fleming, the topic has drifted into something that I have wanted to ask, though it has little to do with the original topic. In the latest issue of Chronicles you state that Alexander the Great was little more than a thug. For many years I was deeply interested (while not an authority) in ancient history, mostly Greek. I lost my library to misfortune and can’t give the authors of any of the works from which I studied. But if someone was to ask me about Alexander, all that I would have said would have been based on what I had read in these various books. And that would have differed greatly from what you reported in Chronicles. The point is that we often accept what others have written without thinking that it might be nothing more than mere opinion. School texts are not exempt in this.
In the September issue of Chronicles, while discussing history, you made a rather derogatory opinion of the Durants’ history. This rather surprised me as I have used their works for reference for decades. I had never heard any criticism of them and assumed that their work was widely accepted as accurate. So much of what I think of as history came from them. Can you expand on your disapproval of them?
95 Comment by Lee on 30 October 2008:
I am also on for Oeconomicus, and like Allen Wilson, I learn more from the discussion than I am able to contribute to the discussion.
Also, regarding previous book recommendations, I have read the first volume so far of Scott’s “Life of Napoleon”, a copy of which resides in a Springfield library. It is very interesting, well written and contains many thought provoking ideas.
Finally, I couldn’t quit without adding that economists for the most part, like many of their other academic colleagues, seem to have, as have most professional historians, reduced themselves to house organs for an international elite. Like our best modern (ie 20th century not especially recent) historians, our best economists seem to have been talented journalists like Hazlitt.
96 Comment by TJF on 30 October 2008:
Thanks to all for the good comments.
I hope JE, who (I believe) is a graduate student in classics, will take an active part in the discussion. (Don’t worry: Your secret is safe with us.) I know Xenophon reasonably well and have taught the Anabasis to second year Greek students and used the Oeconomicus for my interest in the history of the family, but I am not an expert, far from it. The point of the discussion will not be a scholarly investigation nor will it really be possible, as JE points out, to use Xenophon as an economic theorist. What I want people to learn from the text is how an intelligent, though far from brilliant Greek, looked at wealth, marriage, etc.
As for non-response, what I expect are more questions. I am going to try to keep my posts fairly short and then let the discussion develop through answering questions. What I did before, when, for example, we slogged through the Politics, required rather as as much work as if I were teaching an undergraduate course. I did not mean to denigrate the Durants as worthless but only to suggest that they were more cheerleaders for Western Civ than scholars. In any work of their kind, it is necessary to rely heavily, almost exclusively on secondary sources. But how does a non-scholar discriminate among good scholarship and bad? The same can be said even of quite brilliant writers like McNeill, whose work on Venice, for example, is seriously limited by his comparative ignorance of Italian history and literature. There is an important role to be played by vulgarizers, but the ignorance of someone like Lord Norwich, who has written on both Venice and Byzantium, is dangerous, though I feel sure he is a nice man. He has to be to get the laudatory reviews. This past Summer I ran into someone reading his memoirs, and asked her if they were friends. When she said yes, I asked if he was a nice man, and she enthusiastically said yes.
I am not a Hellenistic historian; indeed that period is one of my weakest in ancient history. But it seems to me rather difficult to justify Alexander, either his bloody and destructive conquests, his subjugation of the Greeks, his personal tyranny and homicides, his alcoholism, or his foolish notion of amalgamating the Greeks and Persians–however serious he might have been. Yes, much good came out of the spread of Hellenism–but it is interesting how we resort to an -ism to explain the spread and thus the thinning out of Greek civilization.
97 Comment by MAP on 30 October 2008:
Thanks for replying Dr. Fleming. I wasn’t accusing you of any inaccuracy. As I said I’m no authority. And I trust your knowledge and integrity. So much of our positions are shaped by the thoughts of others. It is important to know how accurate and unbiased those are. I was, rather, questioning the scholarship of those I had read. Does anyone know of a website or organization that critiques books from a non-leftist, non-establishment perspective?
98 Comment by TJF on 30 October 2008:
I never dreamed you were doing anything other than asking a polite question. The trouble with your question about a website is that it raises again the question of who is to judge the judges? For example, there are several conservative organizations, well-intentioned no doubt, that have published college guides, but the people compiling the guides are not in a position to make the necessary evaluation. In the case of books, one could take the examples of certain Marxist historians–M.I. Finley and Eugene Genovese–who have made valuable contributions to their fields. Yes, one has to be on guard against ideology, but that will be true even among “conservative” historians, whoever they might be. The point, I think, is to develop a wholesome point of view by reading and studying good books in company with people of sound minds who are averse to lying. That is our goal here. In my review of Peter Green, for example, I praised his book and yet drew attention to his tendency to slip into propaganda. Ideology almost always has the effect of making its adherents stupid, and this is true of Christianity when it is adopted as an ideology. Ideological Christians. even good ones, all too often fall, like Montanus and Tertullian, into heresy.
99 Comment by Robert on 30 October 2008:
The most difficult things to understand are often simple concepts such as:
“Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”
(A poet describing first principles)
“It is not possible to formulate a “theory” of this kind of life or to express in words its essence: it is too simple. “To love,” “to live in naked reality” – that is all that we can say with human words.”
(A Carthusian monk describing the contemplative life)
“The point, I think, is to develop a wholesome point of view by reading and studying good books in company with people of sound minds who are averse to lying.”
(Tom Fleming on Education)
100 Comment by JE on 30 October 2008:
Re. Xenophon the non-theorist: I do think that ‘avoiding theoretical drivel’ is more in order these days than ever before — if only because of modernity’s self-satisfied worship of meaninglessness, which makes all its ‘theories’ roughly Platonist, but (unlike Plato himself) unromantic. This may be the end result of Petrarch’s subjugation of philosophy to politics (esse to operatio!); but if this is the political-rhetorical error, the philosophical errors run much deeper, and into distant antiquity. Pray pardon a digressive rant against today’s gnostic theorizers, or if not, then quite reasonably ignore the following:
The problem is, in short, Not Paying Attention to Things. Ideologizing is the political-rhetorical manifestation of platonizing abstracts: abstracts are really just that, ab-stract, having no real being except in (first) substances. The moderate realism on the problem of the universals, more or less agreed upon by the (pre-nominalist) Scholastics — whatever profound gulf divides the fully-fleshed Thomistic and Scotistic metaphysics of the univerals — strongly affirms this, as Aristotle had begun to insist against Plato. Analytic philosophers today are rushing in this direction too, through the slightly odd but perfectly sensible medium of (modal) logic. I suspect this is culturally motivated, at least within the ’science’-worshipping academic culture, by the raw primacy of sense-observation inexorably required by post-Newtonian physics.
But the trouble is that, whatever a few (and in many other respects quite foolish) philosophers claim to think, virtually *everybody* today thinks ideologically, or rather Ideally, at more or less every verbal moment of their lives. We worship ‘Mere Words as Such’ — when they don’t really stand for Real Things at all; we don’t distinguish meaning and reference, or imagination and abstraction, because we don’t know the difference between Bodies and Bugaboos. As if a finite being could imagine abstracts! (Abelard was the first, I think, to note that, if this were true, then humans could create ex nihilo; which puts a saliently luciferan spin on this sort of Idealism.)
This so far might be merely carelessness, the slothful man’s unwitting slouch toward satan — but the really loathsome gnostic violation committed by the Idealists (and ultimately Plato) was the blindness to bodies that this hypostasization entails. But just the contrary to this ‘blindness to bodies’ is the historical fact that lies at the heart, or rather mystically *is* the Heart, of Christianity. No body-hater can love the Incarnate; all ideologues are political-rhetorical body-haters; so every ideologue is politically-rhetorically denying the Incarnation. (But the physicality of the political-rhetorical denial is the actual crucifixion of the Body of the Incarnate.)
At least the practical non-theorist, who simply knows How to Get Things Done in the World — and Xenophon knows this masterfully — precisely in his practicality, is not blind to bodies!
101 Comment by TJF on 30 October 2008:
I wonder if JE’s argument applies to the apparent inability of politicians and their dupes to distinguish between what a candidate says and what he has done or is likely to do? Someone today told me of an infomercial giant who was asked to comment on Obama’s performance last night. He pointed out that when he promises to send you a knife that can cut a tomato can in two and then slice the tomato, he delivers the knife, but when Obama promises the moon–peace, prosperity, etc.–he cannot possibly deliver the product. This is parallel, in a way, to Tom Wolfe’s witty beginning of The Painted Word, where he cites Hiilton Kramer as saying that he could not appreciate a painter unless he had read the theory behind his work, and, yes, this is the same Hilton Kramer who founded The New Criterion.
Underlying these aberrations is a detachment from “things as they are.” A poem I grappled with in youth and then gave up on at least addresses the subject:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
I can never remember quite what conclusions I came to so long ago about what Stevens was driving at, but he raises the question, at any rate. The causes of this dissociation are many and varied, though I would not think Petrarch played much of a part, one way or the other. My old bugbear Ficino and his friends, though, may be guiltier than I suspected when I spent a dreadful year, as a firstyear graduate student at Chapel Hill, wrestling with Renaissance Latin under the benign, though severe, tutelage of Douglas Thompson. Ficino is not always (not ever?) completely candid, but the Neoplatonists and Hermetics he adored at the peril of his soul did speak of the mastery of the elements to be gained by men who held the right ideas and knew the right words to speak to the archons who rule the planetary spheres. I wonder if this is related to the fact that much of Renaissance science–ethical as well as natural–aims at power rather than knowledge per se or Machiavelli’s power-based analysis of politics? I fear JE’s comments have led me into territory where a humble philologist and moralist should not have strayed.
102 Comment by Robert on 30 October 2008:
JE @100 “(Abelard was the first, I think, to note that, if this were true, then humans could create ex nihilo; which puts a saliently luciferan spin on this sort of Idealism.)
I quite agree. Its more popular and modern manifestation is the neo-con’s penchant for using contradiction of terms such as their favorite: “creative destruction.” The taking of innocent life so that one might have life in abundance. The obliteration of bad governments so to add chaos to the lives of those suffering from its ill effects. As one english historian of the West put it, ” Our old enemies had guts and could think like the devil who inspired them. But the modernists are inspired by a little minor he-devil, with one eye and a slammer, and the result is very poor.”
103 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 30 October 2008:
Allen Wilson @91:
Apparently the Project Gutenberg version is not acceptable. I posted a link to it, but it has been removed.
Dr. Fleming @98:
Are you referring to the ISI college guides?
104 Comment by Allen Wilson on 30 October 2008:
I wonder how what JE says would relate to some things I have read in the past about how most people are so totally lost in thought that they dont really see the world around them. Their lives are spent in thought, which in it’s essence (correctly me if I’m wrong) is a form of abstraction since the thought is not the thing.
In other words, people are so lost in thought that they walk into walls or run stoplights before they realize it. They weren’t in the car driving, they were examining reddish rocks on Mars or arguing with someone who’s been dead for years. Have you ever wondered why people cut their fingers of with saws?
There is a big difference between that and being silently aware of yourself and your surroundings at the present moment. It is the present moment that is reality. It is what must be understood and dealt with. There is nothing else, all else is thought inside your own head and therefore abstract and not real. That’s not to say that thought or intellectual endeavours are useless, but they shouldn’t be allowed to take over and turn us into people so lost in abstraction that we become ideologues or run stoplights and kill people.
Applying this to economics, if people would just get their households into order by dealing with their present needs and plan for future ones, and stop letting those thoughts tell them that they need this expensive dress or that bass boat, there would be little or no need for such abstract ’sciences’ as microeconomics or macroeconomics, whatever those phantoms are supposed to be.
105 Comment by MAP on 31 October 2008:
I believe JE @ 100 brings us back to the earlier topic of models in economics, but is true of all models in general. These are created to explain observed phenomena and are used to predict other phenomena. The model itself, however, does not really exist in nature. It is like the Platonic realm of perfect forms, but the realm resides only in the human mind. Since it is a tool for prediction it serves as a tool for technology and exploitation of the natural world. Many have the mistaken belief that nature is explained through models, but this is untrue because models don’t exist outside of the human mind which creates them. This is why models are constantly being adjusted to meet new data. Newton’s view of the world was two dimensional, Einstein’s was three; yet each attempts to explain certain sets of data. Math in general (in contradiction to Plato) exists only in the human mind. It was this conclusion (with his proof that there is no set of all sets) that caused Bertrand Russell to sell his math books and pursue philosophy.
106 Comment by MAP on 31 October 2008:
I should add that I believe Spengler predicted that the collapse of models would lead to the collapse of our world view and, consequently, our culture. He believed that physics was already crumbling in his day. A review of the nonsense known as string theory leads one to believe he may have been correct.
107 Comment by TJF on 31 October 2008:
The Dakyns version on Gutenberg is fine, and I shall use it to quote from except where I have a point to make about the Greek text. I don’t know how it got removed. A Halloween prank?
108 Comment by Tom Flinn on 3 November 2008:
Asking the major parties to “fix” the economy is like asking the Mafia to “fix” the crime problem. I guarantee it will be “fixed.” I see the economic situation today as a golden opportunity for Catholic spokesmen to shout from the rooftops the social doctrine of the Church as expounded in the papal encyclicals, the distributists like Belloc, Chesterton and others, and Catholic economists like Heinrich Pesch. Unfortunately, all I hear are the Sounds of Silence. Dr. Fleming is correct about the American attitude toward homes today. Houses are like stocks and bonds. I can remember growing up in Southern Indiana, my father always talking about making the monthly “place payment.” I never once heard him refer to it as a “house payment.” The difference? He had a traditional view of property ownership. It gave him and his family a “place” in the world, not just a temporary stopoff point until he could profit from the next jump in housing prices.