John Kenneth GalbraithIf you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.
Galbraith is a font of bitchin' quotes. Anyone who read Piketty through to the end got to the part where he said the evidence thus far indicates that people are better off in a market system run by socialists: you need the incentives of being able to make money, but you need the protections of not being able to destroy people in the process. Unfortunately nobody in the United States read Piketty through to the end, or if they did it was hate-reading. We had that. It was called Glass-Steagall. We killed it in '99. That quote was Galbraith talking smack about trickle-down economics. That it is a fecal reference is not accidental.IIRC commercial banking has to be totally separated from insurance, and key executives made smart decisions in not betting the farm on risky financial instruments.
Piketty is a 700 page powerpoint but if you're into data, he brings the receipts. He says some useful stuff and he does it really clearly. The three biggest insights I got out of it were 1) The black market economy is fucking huge - to the tune of 50% of the regular economy - and it's entirely untaxed. The only country in the world that has realized that storming these seas like Blackbeard is ultra-fucking-lucrative is the United States which, under Obama, authorized the Treasury and Secret Service to basically privateer the fuck out of the black market and extract what cash they could. He calculated that it fucking increased the budget of the USA by 20 fucking percent. That, more than anything, is probably why numbered Swiss accounts cease to exist: Treasury basically threatened them with unlimited economic warfare if they didn't bend the knee. 2) America is the first country to create the CEO class, where you have these schlubs that don't come from a wealthy-ass family and don't do anything but push paper around but holy fuck do they make money for pushing paper around and that it may or may not have something to do with rabid amounts of post-war American innovation. A non-landed non-gentry oligarchy is something truly new under the sun. 3) Capitalism reverts to feudalism eventually unless you stand in front of it like a socialist and that every civilization on the earth exists on the spectrum between feudalism and collectivism and capitalism and socialism are just closer to the middle. This book, which was the first of the hundred or so I have since read on history or economics in order to understand the world after the press collectively held up their hands and said "who knew?" about the Great Financial Crisis, had an insight that I have kept with me: Lanchester argued that WWII ended with two economic systems locked in mortal combat across the entire planet and that while most people think that Communism lost, there's ample reason to argue that it simply lost first. He further pointed out that the demise of Communism pretty much allowed Capitalism to run rampant all over the rest of the world, crushing it under heel and that while countries that sheltered their populaces from Capitalism may not have experienced all the rapid growth, they also experienced a lot less fallout when the money stopped flowing. I love Canada. I ain't gonna say a single bad word about it. I've come to love poutine (well, I've come to crave it sometimes, while also feeling a little ashamed) and I've even gotten to the point where I could understand the argument for a Caesar. There was a time when I hit Vancouver every weekend and it wasn't a Sunday morning without watching extremely intent people chase a giant rock around the ice with brooms.