Quote of the Day

George Will on the Obama administration: "The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption."

True.

Your daily dose of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy...

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary.  Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner.  It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.  Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change.  Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.  Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

(italics in the original)

And then this bit from later in the same paragraph:

Possibilities of gains to be reaped by producing new things or by producing old things more cheaply are constantly materializing and calling for new investments.  These new products and new methods compete with the old products and old methods not on equal terms but at a decisive advantage that may mean death to the latter.  This is how "progress" comes about in capitalist society.

It might be dangerous to say it this early in the book, but from my (admittedly cursory) knowledge of the work, this is the nut graph.

Holiday Reading

So over my little Christmas break, I'm reading Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the seminal economic classic by Joseph Schumpeter.

Now, as everybody no doubt already knows, the thumbnail takeaway of this book is "creative destruction" which is Schumpeter's description of how capitalism progresses: the old and less efficient is swept aside by the new and more efficient.  This can be an unpleasant process for those being swept away but ultimately benefits everyone with a better use of inputs and thus increased prosperity.  (fn1)

At any rate, I figured it would behoove me as an economic dilettante to at least take the measure of those classics that I have not read and decided that Schumpeter was as good a place to start as any.

All of this is by way of saying that I'm on vacation and so posting will be light.  And what little posting there is will most likely be observations of and from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

In his (unnecessarily long, in retrospect) discussion of Marx, I've found my lines of the day:

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited.  But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.

True.

fn1 One of the earliest examples of this unpleasantness was the luddite uprisings against the new mechanized weaving industry at the very dawn of the industrial revolution.

Line of the Day

George Will today:

The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.

True.