>From the Times: "The usual response is to introduce a raft of new laws and regulations designed to prevent the crisis from repeating itself. In the months ahead, the world will reverberate to the sound of stable doors being shut long after the horses have bolted, and history suggests that many of the new measures will do more harm than good."
Perhaps laws would prevent financial crises, perhaps nnot, but there will never be a test of that proposition. It has to do with the impossibility of learning from mistakes in history. (It's probably possible in games such as chess, poker, and bridge.) When the "next time" comes along those laws will be repealed or amended because "everyone" will recognize that while they would have been good in 2005, the world has after all changed, and those laws now are not needed. In politics, for example, there is no possible way to learn from the experience of the Russian Revolution. The next Stalin, if one comes along in some nation, will look quite different from the first Stalin. History is not a board game, economics is a sub-division of politics, which is not a board game, and there is no way to set up rules to protect against the same mistakes being repeated. Conditions will be so different the "next" time that probably worrying about past mistakes will merely guarantee that new and horrible mistakes will be made. One can learn, if very cautious, and if one abstrcts carefully, from the successes of the past, but never from the failures of the past. Let me give an example. (No one will learn from this.) The mistakes of the Weather faction of SDS flowed from replacing politics with moral outrage. That moral outrage was fueled by despair of building apolitical force to confront U.S. imperialism. Today most of the posters on lbo-talk, marxism, and pen-l seem to spend most of their time analyzing moral depravity among current u.s. capitalists, politicians, and capitalist stooges. Lou's crusade against Diamond is one example. This thread on Pen-L is another example. The endless rants about Chaney are another example. These are all expressions of moral outrage. And that moral outrage, though no one will admit this, is fueled by despair at building a political force to oppose u.s. capitalism. In short, Lou's posts on Diamond, various posts on the Bush Administration, Doug's exposes of financial idiocy, are all the 2009 equivalent of the Weatherman idiocy of 1958, grounded in the same kind of political despair. I said no one will learn from this. They will instead rant and rave aboaut how different the situation is and how different hunting rascals is from throwing bomgs. It isn't different, but it seems different enough (and dthis is always the case) that there is no possibility of learning from past mistakes. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
