Re: Red Baiting Labor Studies
Jurriaan Bendien writes, among other things: When you survey these right-wing think-tanks, you are struck by how shoddy, banale, vulgar, and unscholarly their arguments and so-called research mostly are. It is a veritable psychopathology of projection, whereby you whinge that your opponents are whingers, you bleat that your opponents are bleaters, you assert with hatred that your opponents hate humanity, you falsely impute values and motives to your opponent, while hiding your own real motives and real values; you complain about hidden financial motives on the part of your opponents, while you are the beneficiary of generous helpings from the wealthy yourself. The real reason that most of these right-wing think-tanks exist at all, is because if they were to spout their decrepit and deformed ideologies in the company of genuine scholars and genuine scientists, they would be made mincemeat of. What sustains these right-wing think-tanks, in other words, is not genuine intellectual credit, but rather lots of money from rich donors, who, unable to think for themselves, seek arguments and evidences manufactured on demand by their generously paid servants, to suit their purpose or whim, and which permits their researchers to probe and fish around at leisure in popular gripes, dissatisfactions and social diseases, in order to rake up some dirt on whomever they want to discredit. How pathetic ! What a horrible, deceitful culture ! The strength of the Left resides precisely in the fact that our intellectual culture is not dependent on copious financial injections. Sure, we need to earn a living, we appreciate donations, but those donations do not shape our intellect to please a master, they fund our own intellectual work and activism, for which we have freely chosen. Our intellectual expression takes shape through rigorous, critical and self-critical inquiry and dialogue, not influenced in its content by any financial considerations or intellectual whoring. Indeed we champion the revolt of sexworkers against a rotting capitalist culture, which denies them a decent life, and makes people suffer sexual persecution, psychic injuries and moral straightjackets. Our books are for sale, but our thought is not. We express our thought, even if we aren't paid of it, and even if our thought is expropriated and plagiarised. We may run out of money, but we never run out of ideas, because the corrupt and dehumanising realities of capitalism and the revolts against it, provide an inexhaustible source of ideas. Our discipline is, ultimately, not an academic dicipline, but a discipline forged by a real concern with, and a real engagement with, the forms of social oppression and exploitation under capitalism such as they have manifested themselves in our own lived experience. And this is why, ultimately, these rightwing thinktanks, although their employees may fly around the world for important meetings, have no argument beyond dirt digging, allusions to conspiracies, and scratching around with sly insinuations, a dastardly consultancy business which assumes no responsibility for the policy consequences of its advice. Yet, in making their petty attacks, they reveal their own personal and moral decrepitude, the slow but steady rotting and corruption of the bourgeois class, who, in its perpetual bid to reduce the social problems of capitalist society to the personal problems of individuals, is increasingly blinkered to the real issues affecting ordinary folks and the forms that they take... issues in which they are only interested ever so briefly, in order to glean some selective anecdotal evidence to prove the correctness of their rightwing prejudices in some media chat. Hey, you got us conservatives all wrong. We are not ignorant projecting immoral suckups. According to a recent scientific study conducted by a real social scientist at a real university, conservatives are instead defined by: (1) fear and aggression, (2) dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (3) uncertainty avoidance, (4) need for cognitive closure, and (5) terror management. http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml Therefore, before you speculate about conservatives, please review the scientific literature. David Shemano
Re: Of Coase
Max Sawicky writes: Coase is unradical in the sense of recognizing hierarchy but not power. There is an efficiency rationale for the size or scope of a firm -- economizing on a bundle of transactions -- but this does not answer the question, who gets to be 'coordinator'? Coase takes expertise out of it, debunking Frank Knight's dichotomy between the employer, who is inclined to take risk and knows howw to handle it, and workers who are the opposite. Coase says the firm can always hire an advisor to foresee the uncertain. All that's left is the coordinating function. (Financial risk is a different matter not treated in this lit.) Power explains who is assigned (or self-assigned) the task of coordinator. Power derives from ownership of capital. Capital permits the owner, perhaps thru an agent, to engage workers without capital into implicit contracts reflecting the bargaining power of the owner. Workers might do better with individual, specific contracts (lacking a union mechanism) than with the employee relationship, but lacking capital obliges them to work for someone else. The firm needs a coordinator, but Coase fails to explain why (s)he isn't hired by the workers. A couple of thoughts/questions: 1. You state that the employee must work for someone else because of the lack of capital, but Coase suggests (demonstrates?) that the firm (employer-employee relationship) exists because of transaction costs. Therefore, even if every worker starts with his own capital and is not compelled to be an employee, firms would still be formed because they would be more profitable (including for the salaried worker). 2. You state that the firm needs a coordinator, but Coase fails to explain why the coordinator is not hired by the workers. Isn't that because the firm, by definition, always precedes the workers? For instance, every corporation is created by a person that incorporates the corporation, initially finances the corporation and establish its purposes. Once the purpose of the firm is established, then that person determines what labor is required to achieve the purpose, taking into consideration the firm's resources and other factors. Comparatively, is it possible to imagine certain workers combining themselves without any specific purpose, and then hiring a coordinator to provide them with purpose? How would that work? I think this points to the necessary role of the entrepeneur in the equation. David Shemano
Re: Bankruptcy
Michael Perelman writes: Exactly. Why is it the responsibility of the rate payers to bail out the share holders? Are the corps. willing to lower rates when profits are flush? We discussed this two years ago. The responsibility of the rate payers was to pay a sufficient amount for electricity to allow the electric companies to realize a reasonable rate of return. However, when the wholesale price skyrocketed, the State of California refused to permit retail prices to correspondingly increase, thereby bankrupting the electric companies, thereby making a lot of California bankruptcy attorneys, including yours truly, very happy. In effect, the State of California simply took assets from the shareholders and gave it to the retail customers. As a further consequence, the State of California was forced to buy electricity at the high wholesale rate and then sell to at retail at the controlled price. As a result, the California budget surplus was wiped out, and taxpayers for the forseeable future will be paying interest on the bonds floated to finance the State's buy high, sell low strategy. Therefore, the State of California has transferred assets ! from California's present and future taxpayers to the retail customers. Under these circumstances, I see no reason why the retail customers are more symphathetic than the taxpayers or even the shareholders. In fact, as many people are retail customers, taxpayers and shareholders, I would submit that only one group of people came out ahead -- the bankruptcy lawyers. David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Michael Perelman writes: Do lawyers really limit transactions costs. I thought that they maximized billable hours. If we didn't add value, why would we be hired? David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Justin asks: This isn't to say that the incentive Michael talks about doesn't exist. Btw, David, are you a litigator or a transactional lawyer? I am a corporate bankruptcy lawyer, which is primarily transactional, but involves litigation in the sense that Bankruptcy Court approval is required for various transactions. David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Justin writes: This isn't to say that the incentive Michael talks about doesn't exist. Btw, David, are you a litigator or a transactional lawyer? I am corporate bankruptcy attorney, which is primarily transactional but involves litigation in that Bankruptcy Court approval is required for various transactions, and various constituencies attempt to protect rights. David Shemano
Re: Bankruptcy
Michael Perelman writes: One question that intrigues me is the class nature of bankruptcy. PGE seems to be coming out of bankruptcy smelling like a rose. WorldCom and Enron seem to get quite lenient rulings lately. I confess that I am not an expert and would like to see such companies get spanked. The fundamental philosophical problem is, who is PGE, Worldcom, Enron? If the company is insolvent, the shareholders are out of the money and the company is now owned by the creditors. Therefore, if you spank the corporation (and not individuals who committed wrongdoing), you are effectively punishing the creditors, who are presumably innocent of any wrongdoing. Creditor, like the famous employees of Enron who could not dump their stock, don't seem to get much sympathy from the courts. Banks do. Banks are creditors, as are bondholders, trade vendors, employees, landlords, and tort creditors, and the law generally treats them pari passu. Generally, employees do receive symphathy from courts compared to banks and other institutional creditors. For instance, it is routine for unpaid wage claims to be paid very early in the case before other creditors. While it is justified as an attempt to maintain morale and retain the employees during the reorganization process, it does a reflect a general sense that the employees shouldn't get screwed while the big boys fight it out. There is a general conflict between secured creditors (usually banks) and unsecured creditors. The bank will often have a lien on all of the assets, so the unsecured creditors will attack the validity of the security interest in order to obtain repayment. The conflict manifests itself at a theoretical in the drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code, which was recently revised in a way that makes it much more easy to obtain and protect a security interest, to the consternation of unsecured creditors, David Shemano
Re: Bankruptcy
Jim Devine writes: weren't the bankers consciously taking a risk by lending to Enron? if they're automatically bailed out, doesn't that encourage moral hazard, i.e., a willingness to lend to similar miscreants? You are being loose in your language. Who is arguing that they should be bailed out? The risk the bankers took was that they would not get repaid.They simply want the value of Enron to be maximized so their repayment is maximized. It is a fundamental premise of the bankruptcy world that the going concern value of the corporation exceeds its liquidation value. Therefore, if Enron is permitted to stay in business, there is more value available to repay the debts owed to the banks and all other creditors. To the extent that the bankers knew about and facilitated the wrongdoing, they are being sued and their claims may be equitably subordinated under the Bankruptcy Code. I am sure they are arguing that they had no idea of the wrongdoing, etc. To minimize the risk of nonpayment, some of the banks insisted upon collateral. The argument has been made that secured lending does increase moral hazard by reducing oversight. However, collecting a debt through the collateral is expensive, frustrating and risky, and the existence of collateral, in my experience, rarely justifies or creates a care-free attitude to the loan. What secured lending does do is make lending available to higher credit risks, which is a different issue. David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Kenneth Campbell writes: But, more respectfully, what is the value you provide outside the parametres for business collection upon failure (and how is that different than Repo Men)? Aren't bankruptcy lawyers merely administrators in a system? That is, no productive value? Merely moving money around, like a bank teller? Generally, commercial lawyers add value in the following way: 1. I have an expertise in the Bankruptcy Code. Therefore, if you are engaged in a transaction affected by the Bankruptcy Code, hiring me is like hiring an accountant to do your taxes -- you can try and do it yourself, but the system is so complex that it is worth paying me X to ensure that you do not lose more than X. 2. Lawyers do stuff people do not want to do for various reasons. For instance, carefully drafting and reviewing documents. Therefore, hiring me is like hiring a gardener. You like your garden and nothing prevents you from doing your own gardening, but maybe you would rather spend your time doing something else. This is especially true for corporations, where the time of the decision makers, the people who negotiate the deal points, are too valuable to be involved in the mere documentation of agreements. 3. I have skills in negotiation and conflict resolution. A corporate reorganization has lots of moving parts and competing constituencies in situtations were time really is money. Bankruptcy lawyers are experienced in knowing when to settle and when to fight, and generally how to move things along. Therefore, hiring me is like putting oil in your car -- the oil does not mechanically contribute to the movement of the car, but it makes the process go smoother. In summary, we are productive in that we facilitate various ends: agreements, reorganization and liquidation of business entities, reallocation of resources, etc. To the extent those ends are good things to have, I guess we are productive, and to the extent they are not good things, I suppose we are not productive. David Shemano
Lawyers
One more thought on the value of lawyers. The following is from the Reason magazine interview of Coase: Reason: People are very excited that transactions are taking place much more efficiently than ever before through new electronic means and better communication systems. Are you excited about these trends? Coase: Yes, because I don't understand them. People talk about increases in improvements in technology, but just as important are improvements in the way in which people make contracts and deals. If you can lower the costs there, you can have more specialization and greater production. So that's what I'm interested in now. By improving the way the market works, you can produce immense benefits, not because it invents new technologies, but because it enables new technologies to be used. Without the ability to make efficient contracts, you can't use these new means. And a lot of effort is going, at the moment, into devising new ways of handling the problems, mainly by the lawyers. Reason: Some people would say that it's just paper transactions, that all the efforts of the lawyers are a waste, a mess, a scourge on society. You have a slightly different view. Coase: Lawyers do a lot of harm, but they also do an immense amount of good. And the good is that they are expert negotiators, and they know what is necessary in the law to enable deals to be made. Their activities are designed, in fact, to lower transaction costs. Some of them, we know, raise transaction costs. But by and large, they are engaged in lowering transaction costs. People talk about the information age and how large numbers of people are engaged in information activities. Well, gathering information is one of the difficulties when you're in a market. What is being produced, what are the prices of what is being offered? You've got to learn all these things. You can learn them now a good deal more easily than you could have done before; you don't have to search. If you've ever tried to buy anything, you know how much time goes into finding out what's available and all the alternatives. David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Max Sawicky writes: Coincidently I'm reading Oliver Williamson at the moment, whose existence and inspired lit debunks your assertion. Transactions costs can make hierarchy (the firm) more economical than market exchange. I am not sure I understand the significance of this. If I want to acquire a widget, what difference does it make at a theoretical level whether I acquire the widget by contracting pursuant to a purchase agreement (market exchange) or employment agreement (hierarchical firm)? I understand why transaction costs would influence how I acquired the widget, but what is the significance for neoclassical economics (or a critique of neclassical economics)? David Shemano
Re: Back to slavery
Jim Devine writes: I don't think it suggests a critique of NC economics (except maybe for the fact that it took so long for NC economics to accept the idea of transactions costs). The significance for NC economics is that it means that there are many places where the pure market exchange relation -- the ideal that NC prefers -- doesn't prevail. If the transactions costs involved buying a widget exceed the benefits of (presumed) greater productive efficiency of countracting out vis-a-vis having it produced in-house, then using a hierarchy to organize in-house production will be preferred by profit-maximizers over using exchange and producing out-house. The key distinction is between production costs (actually making a widget) and transactions costs (costs of making deals, transferring property). (BTW, the latter corresponds to one kind of what Marx called unproductive labor.) This stuff isn't radical. It was developed by Coase, who's very much part of the Chicago school of laissez-faire economics. I guess I am asking a much more naive question. Why is this an issue at all to anybody? I mean, is there anybody who disputes that transaction costs matter? I am a commercial lawyer, and commercial lawyers only exist because of transaction costs, so the existence of transaction costs is pretty obvious to me. Is there somebody out there who denies this, or used to deny this, other than for some cetis paribus mind game? David Shemano
Re: property rights
Michael Perelman writes: very interesting, but this sort of crap did not interest the right wing when Blacks were moved out. Give me a break. It wasn't the right-wing that supported urban renewal in the post-WWII era. A staple of conservative book lists used to be The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal 1949-62, written in 1964 by Martin Anderson, who was later one of Reagan's domestic policy advisors. The Institute for Justice is a great organization -- I know several of the attorneys personally and have given serious consideration to working for/with them. They are the primary litigators on behalf of school choice. Interestingly, most of their clients are Black, whether in eminent domain cases, occupational licensing cases, etc., presumably because they are more symphathetic plaintiffs and it makes it harder for the defendants to demonize. One of their more famous cases involved a Black property owner who Atlantic City wanted to boot so Donald Trump could build a parking lot. David Shemano
Re: property rights
Michael Perelman writes: David, I don't know what sort of break you want. I doubt that anyone here supported the old Urban Renewal programs. I always heard them referred to as Negro Removal. If you mean that they were Great Society programs they were, but I think that all of us viewed them [those programs] with contempt. To paraphrase, you stated that the right wing did not care about the use of eminent domain to replace homes with commercial development when it was the homes of Blacks that were being taken, as opposed to now, when it is apparently the homes of Whites that are being taken. I am simply pointing out that there is no evidence that the opinion of the right wing, taken as a whole, is/was racially motivated, and the right has been consistent on the policy for over 40 years. David Shemano
Re: 'Straussians' in the news; the world trembles (II)
In addition to this list, I receivethe Strauss list, which is maintained at Yahoo Groups. I have also read quite a bit of Strauss. Strauss took Marx very seriously as a philosopher. One of his books, On Tyranny, contains an exchange of letters with Alexandre Kojeve regarding, among other things,the progression of history (Fukuyama's End of History is in many ways a popularization of this exchange). The Marx chapter in the Strauss edited History of Political Philosophy is also very respectful. Strauss's major accomplishment, to me at least,was to successfully argue that ancient philosophy had more than historical relevance. In other words, Strauss attacked the historicist notion that there is no point to studying the ancients for the truth of their arguments because we come after them and, therefore, know more than them, or that because they lived in an ancient slave society, they could not possible have anything important to say to us living in a technologically advanced capitalist society. Therefore, if a serious Straussian questions political democracy, it is not pop-Nietzche, but following the ancients in asking "Who Should Rule?" as a fundamental question of political philosophy, and the ancients had very critical things to say about political democracy. This is not to say that(all) Straussians necessarily agree with those criticisms, but that Straussians believe those criticisms must be taken seriously and cannot be dismissed a priori, because there is the possibility that those criticisms are correct. As the Straussian conspiracy apparently controls the White House, I would encourage anyone interested to join the Strauss list to know thine enemyand bring a Marxist perspective to the various topics discussed. David Shemano
Re: 'Straussians' in the news; the world trembles (II)
In addition to this list, I receivethe Strauss list, which is maintained at Yahoo Groups. I have also read quite a bit of Strauss. Strauss took Marx very seriously as a philosopher. One of his books, On Tyranny, contains an exchange of letters with Alexandre Kojeve regarding, among other things,the progression of history (Fukuyama's End of History is in many ways a popularization of this exchange). The Marx chapter in the Strauss edited History of Political Philosophy is also very respectful. Strauss's major accomplishment, to me at least,was to successfully argue that ancient philosophy had more than historical relevance. In other words, Strauss attacked the historicist notion that there is no point to studying the ancients for the truth of their arguments because we come after them and, therefore, know more than them, or that because they lived in an ancient slave society, they could not possible have anything important to say to us living in a technologically advanced capitalist society. Therefore, if a serious Straussian questions political democracy, it is not pop-Nietzche, but following the ancients in asking "Who Should Rule?" as a fundamental question of political philosophy, and the ancients had very critical things to say about political democracy. This is not to say that(all) Straussians necessarily agree with those criticisms, but that Straussians believe those criticisms must be taken seriously and cannot be dismissed a priori, because there is the possibility that those criticisms are correct. As the Straussian conspiracy apparently controls the White House, I would encourage anyone interested to join the Strauss list to know thine enemyand bring a Marxist perspective to the various topics discussed. David Shemano
Re: 'Straussians' in the news; the world trembles (II)
A couple of random responses: 1. The difference between Strauss and Straussians is a major topic of discussion on the Strauss list. 2. I am not claiming that Straussians have a monopoly of interest in the contemporary relevance of the ancients. However, I think a fair review of the intellectual history supports the notion that Strauss, who began writing on the topic in the 1930s, was as responsible, if not more responsible, than anybody else for the revival of interest in the contemporary relevance of the ancients. Strauss was taking dead aim at historicism, and the predominance of historicism in academia and serious intellectual circleswhen he began writing is hard to overstate. I think Jim Devine's reference to Jesuit institutions supports the point -- until Strauss the relevance of the ancients was, generally, confined to Catholic institutions (you can't take St. Thomas seriously without taking Aristotle seriously), but Strauss, a German Jew, expanded the interest. BTW, Strauss taught at St. John's College in Annapolis for several years. 3. I have no personal knowledge whether Straussians are secretive or elitist, although that is their public reputation. It is certainly true that Strauss argued that philosophers historically wrote "between the lines." Strauss argued that the philosopher, who searches for truth, is both a danger to his community (by upsetting traditions) and is in turn threatened by the community (see Socrates). Therefore, in order for the philosopher to safely philosophize, public philosophy requires esoteric writing, while naked philosophizing takes place in person among fellow philosophers. This thinking obviously lends itself to all kinds of abuse and caricature (one can imagine Straussian initiates huddling in a corner whispering that god really is dead). Strauss' fundamental personal exoteric/esoteric problem is that he was fundamentally critical of bourgeois liberalism/capitalism from a philosophical perspective (it leads to Nietzche's Last Man and the end of philosophy), but believed the American system was the best of available alternatives compared to fascism, Stalinism, etc. Therefore, he had to walk a fine line. 4. As far asStraussian networking, as far as I am aware, they are the only conservatively inclined network in academia. Why would it be surprising they provide resources for a conservative administration? David Shemano
Re: Straussians
Title: RE: [PEN-L] Straussians BTW, I should have mentioned that though the vast majority of pen-l would agree with Jahn's manifesto, David Shemano would not. ;-) I would definitely get rid of Puerto Rico. I would keep the Virgin Islands, Samoaand Guam. Everybody knows the moon landing was a hoax, so that is a non-issue. David Shemano
