by Summary:
It should not be surprising that modern financial elites are behaving in the way that Ibn Khaldun described decadent dynasties: with anti-social selfishness. The drive for money turns men into homo economicus, the self-seeking “libertarian” individuals idealized by the Austrian and Chicago Schools, unconstrained by feelings of the “group identity” that Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyah, Ferguson called “fellow feeling” and the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid.Most philosophers anticipated that wealth would breed selfishness and hubris, but none were so cynical as to anticipate that elites would rewrite history to depict their gain-seeking and luxury not as a decline of civilization lapsing back into savagery, but as a rise or even as the eternal state of society, a timeless
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It should not be surprising that modern financial elites are behaving in the way that Ibn Khaldun described decadent dynasties: with anti-social selfishness. The drive for money turns men into homo economicus, the self-seeking “libertarian” individuals idealized by the Austrian and Chicago Schools, unconstrained by feelings of the “group identity” that Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyah, Ferguson called “fellow feeling” and the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid.Most philosophers anticipated that wealth would breed selfishness and hubris, but none were so cynical as to anticipate that elites would rewrite history to depict their gain-seeking and luxury not as a decline of civilization lapsing back into savagery, but as a rise or even as the eternal state of society, a timeless
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It should not be surprising that modern financial elites are behaving in the way that Ibn Khaldun described decadent dynasties: with anti-social selfishness. The drive for money turns men into homo economicus, the self-seeking “libertarian” individuals idealized by the Austrian and Chicago Schools, unconstrained by feelings of the “group identity” that Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyah, Ferguson called “fellow feeling” and the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid.Most philosophers anticipated that wealth would breed selfishness and hubris, but none were so cynical as to anticipate that elites would rewrite history to depict their gain-seeking and luxury not as a decline of civilization lapsing back into savagery, but as a rise or even as the eternal state of society, a timeless and constant human nature. The public-spirited moral checks that used to be viewed as consolidating social solidarity are now denigrated as a detour from the “natural” spirit of self-seeking.…
Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
War and Debt to Rule
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University
War and Debt to Rule
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University
See also
Keynes agreed,
Some of the most important work of Alfred Marshall-to take one instance-was directed to the elucidation of the leading cases in which private interest and social interest are not harmonious. Nevertheless, the guarded and undogmatic attitude of the best economists has not prevailed against the general opinion that an individualistic laissez-faire is both what they ought to teach and what in fact they do teach….
It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately....
John Maynard Keynes
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
John Maynard Keynes, 1930
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Section II
John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 358-373