(sparked by a bit in the Adam Curtis piece I posted yesterday)
"The Invisible Hand" has become the catch-all shield for anybody arguing for austerity and privatization, etc; or against Gubmint and social welfare or whatever evil rotten thing they find moldering in their fevered skulls.
The Invisible Hand (per Wikipedia):
Maybe "The Invisible Hand" is invisible because it isn't fucking there. Not as a prospectively guiding force anyway. My main problem with "market-based self-regulation" is that the regulatory function is always retroactive; it's remedial instead of preventative; and so any solutions or corrections always come after the fact, which means the whole mess is way more costly than it'd be if we'd had good regulations in place that were aimed at heading off problems before they become problems.
Looking at it thru the "Fuck Your Buddy" filter, the picture clears up a bit more.
BTW: "Conservatives" adhering to the (increasingly debunked) theories of Milton Friedman and John Nash and Friedrich von Hayek seem to be insisting that all the bad shit that seems always to happen with unregulated capitalism hasn't actually happened. And that's all part of the revisionist bullshit theme that runs very strong in "Conservative" politics - start with your desired outcome, and then do whatever is necessary to fix the facts around that outcome. (see Downing Street Memo for an excellent example)
Friedman's shock therapy gets applied in Chile and Argentina and Iraq and Greece and and and - and it's mostly pretty much all fucked up.
Nash's Game Theory gets played out with the secretaries at Rand Corp, and what happens? The subjects insisted on cooperating with each other instead of fucking each other over all the time, so the experiment was a complete flop. And of course, it wasn't because there were serious problems with the theory - it had to be because those stupid secretaries weren't behaving in the "appropriately rational manner". So the theory didn't fail, those idiot biddies failed the theory. Sound familiar?
Here's a little experiment we can try: whenever you hear somebody use the phrase "The Invisible Hand", substitute "the will of god", or "god's mysterious plan". Now tell me if anything else that person says makes any real sense from the standpoint of what a "fully rational, pragmatic adult" might say - about economics or politics or actual human-type people.
If it's bullshit, then you're not being rude when you call it bullshit.
"The Invisible Hand" has become the catch-all shield for anybody arguing for austerity and privatization, etc; or against Gubmint and social welfare or whatever evil rotten thing they find moldering in their fevered skulls.
The Invisible Hand (per Wikipedia):
In economics, the invisible hand of the market is a metaphor conceived by Adam Smith to describe the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace.[1] The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his important claim that individuals' efforts to maximize their own gains in a free market benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions. Smith came up with the two meanings of the phrase from Richard Cantillon who developed both economic applications in his model of the isolated estate.[2]From just a quick look at our own relatively brief history, I'm sure we could all come up with some good examples of bad results whenever The Invisible Hand was allowed to rule - the Slave Trade in America comes to my mind. But maybe what we really need to consider is something a bit more ethereal, even tho' in a weird way it's right there in front of us.
Maybe "The Invisible Hand" is invisible because it isn't fucking there. Not as a prospectively guiding force anyway. My main problem with "market-based self-regulation" is that the regulatory function is always retroactive; it's remedial instead of preventative; and so any solutions or corrections always come after the fact, which means the whole mess is way more costly than it'd be if we'd had good regulations in place that were aimed at heading off problems before they become problems.
Looking at it thru the "Fuck Your Buddy" filter, the picture clears up a bit more.
BTW: "Conservatives" adhering to the (increasingly debunked) theories of Milton Friedman and John Nash and Friedrich von Hayek seem to be insisting that all the bad shit that seems always to happen with unregulated capitalism hasn't actually happened. And that's all part of the revisionist bullshit theme that runs very strong in "Conservative" politics - start with your desired outcome, and then do whatever is necessary to fix the facts around that outcome. (see Downing Street Memo for an excellent example)
Friedman's shock therapy gets applied in Chile and Argentina and Iraq and Greece and and and - and it's mostly pretty much all fucked up.
Nash's Game Theory gets played out with the secretaries at Rand Corp, and what happens? The subjects insisted on cooperating with each other instead of fucking each other over all the time, so the experiment was a complete flop. And of course, it wasn't because there were serious problems with the theory - it had to be because those stupid secretaries weren't behaving in the "appropriately rational manner". So the theory didn't fail, those idiot biddies failed the theory. Sound familiar?
Here's a little experiment we can try: whenever you hear somebody use the phrase "The Invisible Hand", substitute "the will of god", or "god's mysterious plan". Now tell me if anything else that person says makes any real sense from the standpoint of what a "fully rational, pragmatic adult" might say - about economics or politics or actual human-type people.
If it's bullshit, then you're not being rude when you call it bullshit.
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