re: ruminations

Hi, Glenn-  Enjoying your several related emails.  Yes, corporations are a big issue, but Teddy Roosevelt showed the way with his trust-busting, esp. when he took on J.P. Morgan as to who was running the country and saw to it that the government prevailed.  There is also something of a movement to strip corporations of their legal personality, which is an interesting approach, though I don't think it will get very far.   And the bail-outs of a few years back showed that corporations are more reliant  on government than ever to the the savior-of-last-resort. 

Hobbes is great reading, and powerful political theory, but he needs to be read in conjunction with Locke; the two nicely bracket the spectrum, either one alone gets a bit one-sided.  I agree that Marx's analysis is powerful, but not all-powerful; i.e., it provides one helpful tool among others.  Max Weber nicely balances him out, arguing that social status and status-interest determines as much as class; class being how you get your money, status how you spend it; in other words, sociology vs. economics.  Both are helpful, neither gives the whole picture.  For instance, I have long thought the race question in the US was really one of class, not skin color per se; but in the US we are class-blind (as opposed to the UK, for instance, which is very sensitive to class, but more colorblind, or at least so it would like to think).  Where Marx went wrong was to think that industrial workers would be the revolutionary class.  Mao based his revolution on the peasantry, whom Marx despised and despaired of.  In fact of course it's the middle class who are generally the bearers of revolution, and not when things are getting worse & worse, but when they are getting better & better and people feel the present regime is what stands in the way of even further improvement.  You did not see a lot of peasants in Liberation Square in Cairo, but you did  see a lot of students and college graduates.  (The worst element. . . )

I have also thought that if I were a Republican I should be very suspicious of privatizing Social Security, for the best of Republican reasons.  If  everyone's retirement is tied to the market, and the market crashes, as it inevitably must at least once or twice over a thirty year period, everyone would then demand a government bail-out and the government would have to re-take over the system, under emergency conditions & panic, and would do a worse job of it that the present carefully thought-out and from-time-to-time tweaked Social Security system.  In other words, privatization might temporarily reduce the role of government until that point, but would in the long run mean an even worse "government take-over," if that's what you dread the most. 

Love, Dad