It’s official: the market is an end in itself Monday, 22 September, 2008
Posted by alexcabuz in Uncategorized.Tags: bailout plan, economic theory, market fundamentalism, markets, politics
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Market fundamentalism holds that market failures result from misguided or excessive regulation. Deregulation, that is, leaving markets unencumbered by government intervention leads to the best and most efficient allocation of resources.
The criticism of bureaucratic meddling in the economy is based on the argument that even though bureaucracies are created to serve the public, they tend to increase their power beyond their mandate. They take on a life of their own, and start defending their own interests instead of the interests of the public, leading to inefficient allocation of resources. The result is that rather than the bureaucracy working to serve the citizen, it is the citizen who ends up working to serve the bureaucracy.
The first (and classic) criticism that may be brought against this view is that deregulation does not necessarily lead to what market fundamentalists call a “free market”. In order for a market to function a set of rules must be enforced, such as the rule that once committed to the rules of a contract, one must respect them. Markets are not known to exist in any environment without a strong central authority guaranteeing a set of basic rules. Examples are lawless tribal areas in several regions of the world, as well as historical circumstances such as pre-Columbian North America. It is hardly tenable to claim that the economic system of pre-Columbian North America, which lacked any kind of government, was an optimal allocation of the resources of the continent. Thus when market fundamentalists talk about deregulation, that’s not what they really mean. What they mean is this: “we want the kind of regulation that allows us to make as much money as possible”. However, they never specify the details of the regulation they require. Thus the debate continues, and the only two real arguments a market fundamentalist has ever had are
A. “this particular piece of regulation is bad because in this particular instance it prevented me from making this amount of money”
and
B. “communism failed so government regulation is bad”.
The first argument is too narrow in time, taking into account only conditions in a very specific set of circumstances, and the second argument is far too broad, since even the most overzealous government bureaucrat in the Western world today would never dream of seriously proposing a communist economic reform.
But perhaps an even more important, second criticism of market fundamentalism is that markets are just as capable as bureaucracies of falling into self-serving spirals. Markets also may become ends rather than means, where rather than serving the consumer, it is the consumer that ends up serving the market.
An excellent example of this extreme situation is the massive bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration this weekend. This plan basically requires American consumers to hand over a blank check of over 1.2 trillion dollars (700 billion, plus the 500 billion already committed) in order to keep the market alive. The circle is complete. The consumer now officially serves the financial system (i.e. the market), rather than the financial system being in the service of the consumer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2008.
Ontology, truth and politics Friday, 19 September, 2008
Posted by alexcabuz in Uncategorized.Tags: ontology, political philosophy, politics, relationalism, truth
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The branch of philosophy known as ontology is the fundamental, defining delusion of western civilization. In this sense Parmenides may be said to be the founding father of western civilization.
An ontology may be defined as a state of mind whereby one is in denial of time, or change. Parmenides is famous for having argued that time is an illusion. The remarkable longevity and power of this untenable and almost childish notion can be ascribed to the very strong appeal it has to any thinker who seeks to have an impact on the external world (i.e. the world outside his thoughts).
Any thinker considering the possibility of translating his ideas into action will find that ontology is uniquely suited to his purposes. Ontology opens the door to a correspondence theory of truth, allowing him to claim that his views “are true”, that they reflect the fundamental “reality”, rendering his chosen course of action not only desirable but inevitable. Any other course of action would be inconsistent with “reality”. When words such as “right”, “just”, “fair”, “moral”, “true”, “progress”, “evil”, “God’s will”, are used to justify an action, it is an instance of ontology being put to work.
Thus ontology is the perfect, fundamental feature of a culture that makes history. It has been used by men and women of action around the world to create turbulence in the otherwise laminar flow of time. As a consequence it has led to both great acts of creation and of destruction. The stereotypical example is the meteoric trajectory of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The main drawback of ontological thinking is that, while making history, it inevitably uses human beings as laboratory mice in the great social, political, military, economic or other experiments conducted by powerful people of action. Of course, this has been until now unavoidable, due to our very limited understanding of the dynamics of complex systems such as the human body, the human mind, and the biosphere in general, which includes human society, economy, politics, and science. The only alternative to action was paralysis, leading to destruction and death at the hands of other people of action. Refraining from action would only lead, ineluctably, to becoming a mouse in someone else’s experiment.
Strictly speaking, this approach is no different from how the animal world functions: humans, while partially protected from the caprices of the environment by their mastery of technology, have remained subject to the arbitrary yet self-inflicted caprices of their own views and ideas, which have often proven to be at least as unpredictable and destructive as the environment had been centuries previously. Among the most recent, widely known, and also I believe, last representatives of this ontology-centered paradigm are the neo-conservative followers of Leo Strauss.
The first serious challenge to ontology was brought by Charles Darwin. However this has not been recognized for what it was due to the fact that it was concerned with the natural world, rather than with the world of ideas.
The second, more direct attack was undertaken by Karl Popper. He was the first to adopt a non-ontologic view of truth, but rather an evolutionary view. By its explicit recognition of the role of time and change, his work can truly be seen as a turning point in the evolution of Western civilization. The great cycle which started with Parmenides is finally closing. Time is slowly coming back into its rights.
But the work of Popper was only the beginning. Most of his notions are still beholden to the old ontological conceptions of truth and reality. The next step was a reformulation of logic to remove “truth” and replace it with “belief”, which has been achieved with the theory of probability as logic, espoused most notably by Edwin T. Jaynes.
The groundwork has now been laid for a true paradigm shift in modern science and philosophy. The new paradigm will be associated with words such as “complex”, “relational”, “information”, “evolution”, “emergence”, “open”. The catalysts of the next phase of this shift will undoubtedly be, in science, the failure of the LHC to find the Higgs boson, and in politics the end of a -polar world (uni, bi…) leading to an “à la carte” age of world politics.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2008.
Modern political philosophy 101 Tuesday, 9 September, 2008
Posted by alexcabuz in Uncategorized.Tags: political philosophy, politics
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American conservative: “Speak softly but carry a big stick.”
American neo-conservative: “Words are wasted. Let the stick speak.”
American liberal: “Sticks and stones will break our bones.”
European left: “Speak softly. Grown-ups don’t play with sticks.”
European right: “OK, but let’s get a bigger stick, just in case.”
