One short comment stimulated by Louis' quote from Jim O'Connor -- whose The Fiscal Crisis of the State was a mainstay of my Public Finance courses in the 1970s -- even before it was out in book form ---
Noam Chomsky (not an economist of course but pretty good at critiquing most so-called social sciences) has always argued that markets in general UNDERPRICE risk --- this may in part be based on the idea that capitalists have that they (as individuals) can always use their power to shift the costs of "bad guesses" onto someone (weaker) else .... As businesses get so big they can rely on government to help them out (this is the theme of Gabriel Kolko's THE TRIUMPH OF CONSERVATISM about the so-called Progressive Era in the US) they actually have ways of using government to make them whole if they make bad decisions -- Spending a lot of government money to build up an infrastructure to protect capitalism from its own follies is another great way the rest of us pay the capitalists to clean up the mess they've made of the world. It's a great system (country) ain't it!
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