Better prescription

Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone correctly diagnoses the current Machiavellian monstrosity in US/UK/EU. His proposed solution is wrong.

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A perfect storm of crises has been building. It comes from still bubbling rage with governments for their single-minded obsession with Covid and the lasting damage caused by lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates, with the media for amplifying government fear porn and social media platforms for collusion with innovative techniques of censorship, to the cost of living pressures, Ukraine war, and the crimes, housing crisis, cultural decay, and social dislocations of mass immigration.

People have come to hold politicians to be dishonest, incompetent, and lacking courage and integrity. Being unheard and vilified has broken public trust in the underpinning institutions of democracy. In the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, less than half the people in high-income developed countries trust their government, media, business, and NGOs.

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He then worries about the “coup” that replaced Biden by Harris. Nope, it wasn’t a coup. It was just a party selecting a different candidate. Before 1968 parties always chose candidates without the pretense of an “election”. This is NORMAL. The pretense was abnormal and fake.

Thakur spends the rest of the article campaigning for Trump, THE MAN WHO GAVE US 2020. Repeating the problem is NOT a solution.

Elections can’t solve problems, because elections are designed and operated by the tyrants.

Problems get solved when rich and important people want to solve problems.

The slavery of sweatshops was emphatically NOT solved by Lincoln’s genocide. Lincoln simply eliminated the older more responsible version of slavery, so the sweatshops had no visible competition. He was working for the railroad barons.

Sweatshops went away when rich and powerful men realized they could make more profit by treating workers decently. Social Economics started with NCR in Dayton, then spread among other high-tech and high-skilled firms like Weston Instruments and Elgin Clocks. When Henry Ford picked it up around 1910 it gained force fast.

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Polistra lionizes Henry Ford for his eminently sane approach to industry and labor.

Turns out, though, Henry didn’t originate the trend. Around 1901 there was a lively movement within industry and … AMAZINGLY … also among academic economists!!!! … to restore the human element to work and business.

I bumped into this accidentally while looking for some detailed pictures of 1901-ish electrical instruments as sources for digital models.

Looking for Weston galvanometers, ran across ‘Social Economics of the Weston Instrument Co.’ This little 1905 pamphlet described the plant and working conditions of the Weston Co, toward this purpose:

Caught my attention. Looked further, and found quite a few similar industrial statements and a whole branch of economics that bloomed around 1900, then apparently died.

Gunton’s Principles of Social Economics laid out the principles of the movement in 1891.

From the preface:

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Nature is intensely democratic. She will only work cheaply when she is serving a large number.

Kings and aristocracies may command the unpaid service of slaves, but natural forces will work efficiently only for the million. Millionaires could not travel by steam or communicate by electricity if millions of workmen did not use the same methods.

In short, the success of all machine-using industries now primarily depends on the extent to which their products are consumed by the masses.

Therefore the prosperity of the community in general and capitalists in particular depends upon increasing the wants and elevating the social life and character of the laboring classes.

Considered from this standpoint, the whole subject of economics assumes a new and altogether more rational and humane aspect . It ceases to be a mere science of wealth, subordinating producers to the product, and becomes a science of human welfare, making the social life of the producers the end to which the creation of commodities is the great means.

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Later, Gunton begins to lay the foundation for an employer’s regard for his workers:

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Those familiar with the laws of sanitation and hygiene know that cleanliness, fresh air, good drainage, and wholesome food are of vital importance to physical health, and therefore are of the highest interest to the laborer.

So too the employing classes, while more enlightened upon questions of science, literature, and art, exhibit scarcely less ignorance in regard to their economic interests. Take, for instance, their attitude towards the social condition of the laborer. They have assumed and have acted almost uniformly upon the assumption that high wages are inimical to their own interests, and consequently that to resist the rise of wages and social improvement of the laboring classes is to promote theirown prosperity; whereas, had they known their true economic relation to the laborer, they would have seen that every limitation of his social and material progress reacts injuriously upon the permanence and extent of their own prosperity .

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Henry’s assembly line workers came from the poorest and least skilled segments of the population, and his Sociology Department trained the workers and their wives in those basic notions of hygiene. Now, of course, Die-Versity prohibits us from assuming that poor people need training, and Capitalism prohibits us from spending any money to improve their lot. So the poor have returned to the condition described by Gunton. The only difference is that TV and McDonalds make it much easier to avoid fresh air, sunlight, exercise and wholesome food.

Social Economics marked the end of Gilded Age 1.0. The application of Social Economics by Ford, E.W. Marland, and many others led to America’s true Golden Age, the period when an ordinary man could support an ordinary family in a civilized way, the period when both employers and workers were trying to advance the interests of the working man in order to maintain prosperity and stability for all.

After 1980 we abandoned Gunton and Ford, and suicidally returned to the Gilded Age principles that had so dramatically failed before. Now a few lonely economists (eg John Médaille, Yves Smith) are attempting to rebuild a more humane view of labor and capital.

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And then in 2020 Trump turned public health upside down and SPECIFICALLY BANNED all of those preconditions for prosperity and health!

How do we persuade the modern equivalents of Ford to begin working in Gunton’s direction? I don’t have the answer.