| Tuesday, March
17, 2009
St. Patrick's Day
The wrath against the bonuses continues.
In
today's LA Times Jonah Goldberg argues strongly against this. There are
contracts, there is a rules of law; we bought the company contracts and all,
and we are obligated to honor those contracts now that we own AIG, no matter
how bitter a taste that may leave.
The situation confirms my view -- it is getting to be stronger than a
view -- that if a company becomes too large to fail, it should be broken up;
it should not be allowed to exist. We had something like that in the old
trust-busting activities. As I have observed before, David McCord Wright, an
economist I have high regard for, has said that anti-trust is a major reason
why Marx's prediction that capitalism would concentrate more and more wealth
into fewer and fewer hands did not come true -- although when one sees
monsters like AIG and the Super Banks, one wonders. Whatever else Karl Marx
was, he was not a fool. We do see enormous concentrations of wealth as
companies accumulate capital in order to buy out the opposition.
Of course Marx was concerned about ownership of "the means of
production". It's not clear to me what he would have made of AIG and its
financial products group, which bet the company on its own smarts in
packaging credit asset swaps and other strange derivatives no one really
understands. The financial products made enormous "profits" for a while, but
whether those were "means of production" is arguable.
Clearly there are economies of scale in having ever larger companies; but
if one factors in the possibility of enormous bailouts to keep these huge
enterprises from failing, I doubt we benefit much from those economies of
scale. I suspect we'd be better off with smaller companies, somewhat higher
prices, and the freedom to let them go bankrupt if they are poorly managed.
Instead we are sending hundreds of billions of (borrowed, we hope) taxpayer
dollars into AIG, some of which will be paid as contracted bonuses to the
financial products group who brought down the company that was too big to
fail.
I do not think we should allow companies to become too big to fail.
==============
Cut, copy, and paste; Landscape mode in most applications;
peer to peer connectivity, allowing printing from the iPhone: these are said
to be the new features of the upcoming iPhone software. Interesting.
====
There's
a LOT of mail.
============
Joseph Sobran on becoming an anarchist.
An
interesting essay on his personal philosophical journey. One that many of us
have taken, though he is more eloquent than most of us aspire to be.
http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml
James
I had a brief correspondence with Murray Rothbard when I was Science
Editor of Galaxy and writing A Step Farther Out.
Sobran says "Murray’s view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state
was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in
general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this
conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government."
Those were the days of the Cold War. I was also friends with Karl
Wittfogel, and my fear was the establishment of Oriental Despotism
throughout Western society; the end of the West.
Sobran also says "Somewhere, at the rainbow’s end, America would return
to her founding principles. The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws
would be few, taxes minimal. That was what I thought. Hoped, anyway. "
That was pretty much my thought during the Cold War. I also believed that
a great increase in human resources, and the opening of a new frontier --
the space frontier -- would change the world.
Sobran's apologia is
worth your time. More discussion another time.
=================
You will find this amusing:
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/03/04/books/04google.html?_r=4 as Google literally goes to the ends
of the Earth...
And I have recently had occasion to read my essay on
How
To Get To Space. It's still worth reading.
Thanks to all who recently subscribed or renewed their subscriptions.
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