One point of contention that I have is the reasoning why many organizations bureaucratize. Many chalk it up to laziness but it's often the fear of legal action even more. USG is usually happy to look the other way when it comes to startups as to encourage growth. But the larger they get the more attention the USG pays to them. Forcing them to hire armies of human resources, lawyers, accountants, risk management teams, regulatory compliance, and so on.
Great stuff. A point of elaboration: It's not so much aggregate economic growth that the managerial class aims for but attempts at growth. Meaning that instead of either investing excess cash in securities or paying dividends, management steers it into projects, that, while of dubious net present value, increase the scope of their responsibilities, pad their resume, and raise their salaries. This is a strong argument for dividends because they impose "cash discipline" on management. Imposition of such discipline requires greater coordination among shareholders. I think that as the economy returns to sound money like privacy crypto and inflation is no longer something the middle class needs to chase, fragmentation of corporate shareholdings will diminish, the power of asset managing middlemen like mutual fund companies will recede, and coordinated shareholder activism will become easier for this reason.
Good point. The quantity of asinine projects that get stood up and go nowhere in corporate America is mind-boggling. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens as de-dollarization accelerates.
Enhanced dividends will help. I also think that cryptocurrency can serve a major role here. Not merely as a method of eliminating inflation, but it can also increase economic friction. Increasing economic friction will scale-limit massive global conglomerates and move the owner class back into their factory and out of the private jet.
«Therefore the managerial elite will naturally favor ideological outlooks that focus on cultural homogenization, cosmopolitanism, and collectivism.»
True. But the first thing they did was favor nationalism. Before German unification, there was a far greater variety of language and distinct cultural identities in the various states, free cities and kingdoms. Then with unification came homodemo, where language converged closer and closer to High German. Most German dialects are either extinct or niche these days. And now with homoglobo you can't expect people to even speak German, anymore. Getting German citizenship requires B1, which is a complete joke.
«If you buy them now, the company will grow, they will then be worth more later, and you can sell them to realize your profit. This is speculation, by the way, not investment.»
At the risk of being a horrible nitpick...
If you did get a large dividend payout, you'd hold a position in a currency instead. That's also speculation. I get your point, but I think by your definition, nothing is investment. Except maybe a cow, whose milk you drink?
As far as investment strategies go, I differentiate based on whether you retain control of the initial asset. For example, if you buy a house and rent it out, I would consider that an investment property, because you still own the original asset (the house) while continuously generating additional assets (the rent money). So similar to your cow analogy - hence the term "cash cow"
But if you buy a house with the plan of flipping it in two years because "housing prices always go up", your bet may pay off but you are exchanging one asset (the house) for a different asset (fiat currency), and benefitting from arbitrage. If you were doing it with two different currencies we would call it currency speculation, but if you do it with a house or stocks we pretend its an investment.
Nationalism was the first step toward global homogenization: national homogenization. To stand against it we need to radically focus on cultural and economic localization at the expense of the global economic system... i.e. things will get more expensive.
Nah, if you want to succeed, you've gotta provide value for those around you. Not trying to make them embrace hardship. (unless you run a men's fitness group)
Reducing dependency on market commodities and services by building high trust social networks that provide them internally... is hard to do and won't be immediately as efficient. But as it grows, you (and yours) are actively making life far less expensive.
Wrote a 500 word wall of text with more concrete examples, but I'm trying to be more concise.
The point of adding friction is to limit scale. So the goal is definitely the creation of less-efficient systems. Hyper-efficient systems reduce the human spirit to only what can be described by an easily accessible spreadsheet and the lowest common denominator of culture. Providing value to the local community is a lot more fulfilling than "providing value" to the global economy by becoming a voiceless soulless cog in the machine of global consoomerism.
I say we extricate ourselves as much as possible from global industry, one path to doing so is by dramatically increasing economic friction.
If you want to view value, profit and wealth as something that can only be expressed in GDP, income tax statements and the ability to purchase baubles, then I can see why you don't like the idea of economics or running an economy. But one of the core tenets of economics is, that value is subjective.
If you became a millionaire selling your youth, then realize you wanted children instead and now it's too late... economic theory correctly states that you're one poor motherfucker.
«I say we extricate ourselves as much as possible from global industry,»
That part I get and I find it actionable.
«one path to doing so is by dramatically increasing economic friction.»
Not sure, how that is a productive approach however. I don't understand what action this specifically implies, that is actually profitable (getting me the things that I value).
Feel like we're talking past each other... I haven't written a specific article on economic friction yet, but I've got one that highlights the primary points.
That was a high quality article-- the kind of thing I really love seeing from the right. It gives a new perspective on how odd things are right now. Before we went our separate ways, my former business partner for Out of Lockstep kept insisting that lockdowns were ONLY a government thing, an assertion that I found *ludicrously* inaccurate. It was just as much if not more big business, big pharma, big tech, and MSM as it was the government that caused lockdowns. If Fauci was just on the TV and not on Facebook algorithms, my friends and I wouldn't have even known he existed.
Ya, covid is a perfect example. The Supreme Court actually blocked a bunch of the vax mandates the govt was trying to implement, but the big corps gladly picked up the mantle and enforced them themselves.
It's actually weird listening to people who were in South Dakota the entire time talk about COVID stuff because the popular narrative is "they never locked down" and "they're the only state that stayed open."
That's true on a *state government* level-- Kristi Noem did listen to Steve Haugaard and never passed any state mandates to close businesses, schools, or churches. I have so much respect and admiration for both of them for making that happen, at least!
However, in Sioux Falls, people will still talk about how the schools were closed for months, colleges were remote, "Wal-Mart used to be 24 hours and now it isn't!", they needed vaccines for their jobs in some cases, some businesses enforced mask rules and there's people who still won't go back to those ones. What's *really really strange* is how much all of this contrasts with the thing that I and everyone around me also sees here-- Downtown Sioux Falls went from being a sleepy small town vibe to being insanely popular and feeling like the Lower East Side of Manhattan ever since 2020 because it stayed open. So the clubs, bars, restaurants, boutiques, etc here did really amazing business, but I still have 20-something co-workers who talk about how "I became a husk of my former self during 2020". I've even had one person here try to argue that lockdowns began in *2019* because that's when her job here went remote, so she remembers 2019 being the beginning, which is just bizarre to hear when I remember late 2019 in NYC being a time of constant mass gatherings.
Saying it was a government thing is so insanely innaccurate. It went much, much deeper than that. I think that's also why I don't take things too seriously when it comes to electoral politics-- even having the only governor to never personally close anything couldn't save my friend from "becoming a husk of her former self".
Why is it that basically everyone and anyone I find who tries to critique corporatism misunderstands it? To be fair, we might as well be talking about different things. I'm not critiquing the point of this article, which is to point out that "all corporations are extremely degenerate these days and by design are optimized to support woke culture". That is a salient point and the blind worship of corporations is a betrayal that the person cares more about the economy than their people and culture.
Now, I don't want to do the whole leftist language game, but corporatism historically didn't mean "the hegemony of corporations over the economy". Corporatism has very little to do with the belief that "corporations are good/should have power". It doesn't even require the corporation as an entity to exist.
Of course, of course, we ARE talking about different things. Your understanding of corporatism is widespread and I'll acknowledge it as such. No one's even really misunderstanding anything, just using one word in two different ways.
But my understanding of corporatism is the historically and technically correct one. It's what corporatism originally meant when it was first conceived. Corporatism, based off of it's original understanding, is precisely WHAT we need, by the very logic of this article. Here's a link to a you-tube video explaining "corporatism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwU_OR854hs
Tldr; corporatism historically meant the economic policy of treating the economy like a "corpus" a body. All parts of the body matter, the arms and the feet and the brain, and you must respect each of them and pay them their dues. Corporatism was branded as the solution to class conflict, as you need both a worker and a boss to make a car. The fascists of the 20th century were in large part corporatist. National Socialism in particular certainly disbanded all unions, as lefties are quick to point out... and then replaced them with a "Arbeitsfront". While in some ways this policy did represent workers less than it should, I do believe this is a policy that should be replicated and learned from. All parts of the economy are important! The worker as well as the boss! This is not at all unlike the feudal idea that the king has a duty to the people and the people a duty to their king. Furthermore it's a very sober response to the inevitability of hierarchy.
This is a critical article for our time. One point I would add is that managerialism is even more prominent in monopolies, such as railroads or telecommunications firms. There are several ways to combat managerialism, perhaps the easiest is to cancel your businesses Microsoft Office subscription and switch to Linux. I am currently working on developing an alternative to the managerial system, If you would like to know more, read these articles:
“in order to make more sales, the corporation’s product (whatever it may be), needs to appeal to as large a population as possible. Therefore the managerial elite will naturally favor ideological outlooks that focus on cultural homogenization, cosmopolitanism, and collectivism. The ideal “worker-consumer” is an interchangeable cog, with no roots in its community”
Reminds me of a thinker I read a bit of in college, Joseph Schumpeter on the topic of “creative destruction” It seems so patently obvious that capitalism is one of the most powerful forces against many of the dearest values of social conservatives, why is this? Is it just a holdover from the ideological battles of the Cold War?
Schumpeter did not mean it as the destruction of creativity and cultural identity. But the process of creative, more productive new ways of doing things, "destroying" old, sclerotic wasteful ways and the associated institutions, by outcompeting them. Think of the idealized economic competition in Atlas Shrugged, that creates massive societal value. Like consider where Hank flirts with Dagny about him trying to "destroy" her business with his invention by making part of her railroad services redundant and her instantly finding ten more useful things, she can leverage her railroad network for, using his Rearden metal.
If you point out, that it doesn't work like that in practice, well.... REAL FREE MARKETS HAVE NEVER BEEN TRIED BEFORE!* I like the idea of creative destruction. It's very romantic. That's why I think social conservatives like it. Ayn Rand and her glorification of the (admittedly, partly awesome) robber baron era.
“The conception is therefore a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against the materialistic positivism of the 19th century.” – Benito Mussolini
What we have *is* capitalism. The interests of the owners of the resources of production take precedence over the interests of any other group. The 'managerial class' is just the 'face' of the owners of the resources of production. While I respect Burnham and Francis and their analysis of the 'managerial revolution', it's still a revolution *within* the capitalist system. The idea that the owners of the resources of production *cannot stop* their managers is what lies at the foundation of the idea that 'managerialism' is somehow not capitalism. But it is. And they can. They owners just don't want to. The Right has a problem with thinking that 'old capitalists' were people who would side with them if they could. But this is obviously not the case. The reason why things the Right doesn't like exists is *precisely* because the owners betrayed 'right-wing institutions'.
On a side-note: The term 'corporatism' also refers to a different economic system from either capitalism or socialism.
Excellently written. I often say that "we live in a mixed economy" which is effectively true. Between the revolving bureaucratic corporate-public door and the fact that the money-printers now get to determine economic winners and losers it's obvious that raw capital no longer drives innovation. What I find more interesting is your speculation that there needs to be a fix to the managerial class.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support the elimination of managerial micro-management of all of human life. Methods for accomplishing that get tricky though. I think that ultimately the problem is a lack of informational and economic friction:
Information friction is easy to imagine. A factory-owner can't get real time market data so he has to guess how much the market wants of his product and attempt to produce in-line with those guesses. He also has the resultant role of making that decision himself as a steward of the company. Now a thousand consultant firms are stumbling over themselves to give him access to data... data that requires managers to collate and disperse and organize. As information friction goes down, the advantage of having good information goes up. The result is a spiraling increase in the bureaucratic/managerial class as digital access becomes universalized.
Economic friction is a little more esoteric but equally important. Just-in-time shipping doesn't work in a world with significant esoteric friction. Wars, shortages, and losses were common which required the localization of production. While that made production more expensive and non-standardized, it also forced the owners of these companies to actually live in the communities that were economically productive. With modern managerialism, the company can go global quite easily. Information and economic forces transfer across time zones and currencies near instantly. The owner does not need to be present, instead sitting in a private jet on his private island. So treating the individuals of the local community as mere numbers in a spreadsheet is easier. Managerial types like it too because they hate dealing with the unique behavior of individuals. Easier to use a spreadsheet.
Ultimately the problem is a lack of friction. AI might (MIGHT!) be able to fix some of this by replacing the managerial class. More likely it'll be used as a tool to even further micro-manage human life until the very creative soul of humanity can be categorized, sanitized, and destroyed as a potential inefficient factor in civilization.
My proposal for solution is to radically alter governance by re-introducing friction. One method of doing so is by adjusting governance from a managerial form of governance to a land-based feudal form of governance. International economics gets a lot harder when you have to transport goods across 7 different duchies each with unique customs and legal codes. Simultaneously, the revolving door can be reduced if the nobility don't need a legalistic framework to govern, instead acting on their own intuitive basis. It'll be less efficient and accurate, but that's the idea: increase economic and informational friction.
National Socialism, which is diametrically opposed to marxist socialism; believed in private businesses and corporations, just with a lid on them, insisting they must always do and produce that which is in the best interests of the country, the people as a whole, and always treat the workers well. We could use such restraints today to rein in entities like Blackrock and others
It's even dubious whether shareholders actually can be said to own the corporation, which in itself is nothing but a reified construct i.e. a "legal person", although this is naturally an area of strong ideological contention, e.g. the doctrine of "shareholder supremacy" associated with Milton Friedman and the "neoliberals". There are certainly high ranking American legal theorists that would disagree with this view, although i cba finding the links right now, although they would in turn typically align with some notion of "stakeholder capitalism".
The modern business corporation is at any rate, as you say, certainly a different beast from the more classically liberal and capitalist sole proprietorship, which makes contemporary critiques (or praises) of "muh capitalism" quite redundant, if not to say historically illiterate. The political scientist David Ciepley has even argued that the modern business corporation is essentially a form of socialized property. Thus Marx was right when he predicted socialized property would be more efficient than the merely disjointed and duplicated bourgeois property, although the means of production were socialized not at the state, but at the level of the firm. See also Martin J. Sklar's corporate reconstruction of American capitalism.
I read a piece where the writer contends that some of the seeds were sown in a 1916 ruling against Henry Ford:
'In 1916, Henry Ford announced a cessation of special dividends, opting instead to reinvest future profits into expanding the company, lowering car prices, and providing more jobs. The Dodge brothers objected to this new policy, arguing that it was their right as shareholders to receive these dividends and that Ford’s new direction was not in the best interest of the shareholders.'
One related point is that even the nominal "makers" of the product (engineers, machinists, etc) are eventually pushed aside by the financiers and salesmen, who see all corporations simply as engines that generate salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Hence the push for offshoring production and destroying the "assholes" that still attempt to make good products (e.g. Boeing).
Dividends aren't taken from the value of your shares, they are your share of the profits generated by the company. Some funds (like QYLD) do actually give some percentage of your own money back to you as Return of Capital but that is very rare, and ROC is not taxed for this reason, its not gains.
You pay taxes on dividends because they represent actual gains. If you sell your shares for more than you paid for them, you will pay capital gains taxes on the difference as well.
In an inflationary environment, I wouldn't trade an appreciating asset (like SPY) for a depreciating one (fiat currency) so I would have to agree with Warren Buffet that the proper length of time to hold your shares is: Forever. Fortunately, SPY does pay dividends, but its only like 1.2% so you need to own an absolute shit-ton in order to have any kind of income. Which is kind of my point, I'm sure the fund manager is making millions, but you as the owner just get to watch "line go up".
As far as shorting, I'm not smart enough to time the market, that's why I hedge by growing potatoes and hoarding ammo. If S&P goes to zero, we are all fucked anyway so buckle up :)
Can't retire as the partial owner of a company if you can't get a share of the profit... that's basically what dividends are. Profit-sharing with share-holders. It used to be the main reason people would own stonks... before the dark times... before the speculative markets.
One point of contention that I have is the reasoning why many organizations bureaucratize. Many chalk it up to laziness but it's often the fear of legal action even more. USG is usually happy to look the other way when it comes to startups as to encourage growth. But the larger they get the more attention the USG pays to them. Forcing them to hire armies of human resources, lawyers, accountants, risk management teams, regulatory compliance, and so on.
Great stuff. A point of elaboration: It's not so much aggregate economic growth that the managerial class aims for but attempts at growth. Meaning that instead of either investing excess cash in securities or paying dividends, management steers it into projects, that, while of dubious net present value, increase the scope of their responsibilities, pad their resume, and raise their salaries. This is a strong argument for dividends because they impose "cash discipline" on management. Imposition of such discipline requires greater coordination among shareholders. I think that as the economy returns to sound money like privacy crypto and inflation is no longer something the middle class needs to chase, fragmentation of corporate shareholdings will diminish, the power of asset managing middlemen like mutual fund companies will recede, and coordinated shareholder activism will become easier for this reason.
Good point. The quantity of asinine projects that get stood up and go nowhere in corporate America is mind-boggling. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens as de-dollarization accelerates.
Enhanced dividends will help. I also think that cryptocurrency can serve a major role here. Not merely as a method of eliminating inflation, but it can also increase economic friction. Increasing economic friction will scale-limit massive global conglomerates and move the owner class back into their factory and out of the private jet.
«Therefore the managerial elite will naturally favor ideological outlooks that focus on cultural homogenization, cosmopolitanism, and collectivism.»
True. But the first thing they did was favor nationalism. Before German unification, there was a far greater variety of language and distinct cultural identities in the various states, free cities and kingdoms. Then with unification came homodemo, where language converged closer and closer to High German. Most German dialects are either extinct or niche these days. And now with homoglobo you can't expect people to even speak German, anymore. Getting German citizenship requires B1, which is a complete joke.
«If you buy them now, the company will grow, they will then be worth more later, and you can sell them to realize your profit. This is speculation, by the way, not investment.»
At the risk of being a horrible nitpick...
If you did get a large dividend payout, you'd hold a position in a currency instead. That's also speculation. I get your point, but I think by your definition, nothing is investment. Except maybe a cow, whose milk you drink?
Two good points here.
As far as investment strategies go, I differentiate based on whether you retain control of the initial asset. For example, if you buy a house and rent it out, I would consider that an investment property, because you still own the original asset (the house) while continuously generating additional assets (the rent money). So similar to your cow analogy - hence the term "cash cow"
But if you buy a house with the plan of flipping it in two years because "housing prices always go up", your bet may pay off but you are exchanging one asset (the house) for a different asset (fiat currency), and benefitting from arbitrage. If you were doing it with two different currencies we would call it currency speculation, but if you do it with a house or stocks we pretend its an investment.
Never heard someone distinguish these two terms like that before. But these are pleasing definitions to work with.
Nationalism was the first step toward global homogenization: national homogenization. To stand against it we need to radically focus on cultural and economic localization at the expense of the global economic system... i.e. things will get more expensive.
Nah, if you want to succeed, you've gotta provide value for those around you. Not trying to make them embrace hardship. (unless you run a men's fitness group)
Reducing dependency on market commodities and services by building high trust social networks that provide them internally... is hard to do and won't be immediately as efficient. But as it grows, you (and yours) are actively making life far less expensive.
Wrote a 500 word wall of text with more concrete examples, but I'm trying to be more concise.
The point of adding friction is to limit scale. So the goal is definitely the creation of less-efficient systems. Hyper-efficient systems reduce the human spirit to only what can be described by an easily accessible spreadsheet and the lowest common denominator of culture. Providing value to the local community is a lot more fulfilling than "providing value" to the global economy by becoming a voiceless soulless cog in the machine of global consoomerism.
I say we extricate ourselves as much as possible from global industry, one path to doing so is by dramatically increasing economic friction.
If you want to view value, profit and wealth as something that can only be expressed in GDP, income tax statements and the ability to purchase baubles, then I can see why you don't like the idea of economics or running an economy. But one of the core tenets of economics is, that value is subjective.
If you became a millionaire selling your youth, then realize you wanted children instead and now it's too late... economic theory correctly states that you're one poor motherfucker.
«I say we extricate ourselves as much as possible from global industry,»
That part I get and I find it actionable.
«one path to doing so is by dramatically increasing economic friction.»
Not sure, how that is a productive approach however. I don't understand what action this specifically implies, that is actually profitable (getting me the things that I value).
Feel like we're talking past each other... I haven't written a specific article on economic friction yet, but I've got one that highlights the primary points.
https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/a-reasoned-case-for-monarchy-return
Give that a read and then drop a comment on the economics. I'm interested to see what you think.
That was a high quality article-- the kind of thing I really love seeing from the right. It gives a new perspective on how odd things are right now. Before we went our separate ways, my former business partner for Out of Lockstep kept insisting that lockdowns were ONLY a government thing, an assertion that I found *ludicrously* inaccurate. It was just as much if not more big business, big pharma, big tech, and MSM as it was the government that caused lockdowns. If Fauci was just on the TV and not on Facebook algorithms, my friends and I wouldn't have even known he existed.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
Ya, covid is a perfect example. The Supreme Court actually blocked a bunch of the vax mandates the govt was trying to implement, but the big corps gladly picked up the mantle and enforced them themselves.
It's actually weird listening to people who were in South Dakota the entire time talk about COVID stuff because the popular narrative is "they never locked down" and "they're the only state that stayed open."
That's true on a *state government* level-- Kristi Noem did listen to Steve Haugaard and never passed any state mandates to close businesses, schools, or churches. I have so much respect and admiration for both of them for making that happen, at least!
However, in Sioux Falls, people will still talk about how the schools were closed for months, colleges were remote, "Wal-Mart used to be 24 hours and now it isn't!", they needed vaccines for their jobs in some cases, some businesses enforced mask rules and there's people who still won't go back to those ones. What's *really really strange* is how much all of this contrasts with the thing that I and everyone around me also sees here-- Downtown Sioux Falls went from being a sleepy small town vibe to being insanely popular and feeling like the Lower East Side of Manhattan ever since 2020 because it stayed open. So the clubs, bars, restaurants, boutiques, etc here did really amazing business, but I still have 20-something co-workers who talk about how "I became a husk of my former self during 2020". I've even had one person here try to argue that lockdowns began in *2019* because that's when her job here went remote, so she remembers 2019 being the beginning, which is just bizarre to hear when I remember late 2019 in NYC being a time of constant mass gatherings.
Saying it was a government thing is so insanely innaccurate. It went much, much deeper than that. I think that's also why I don't take things too seriously when it comes to electoral politics-- even having the only governor to never personally close anything couldn't save my friend from "becoming a husk of her former self".
Why is it that basically everyone and anyone I find who tries to critique corporatism misunderstands it? To be fair, we might as well be talking about different things. I'm not critiquing the point of this article, which is to point out that "all corporations are extremely degenerate these days and by design are optimized to support woke culture". That is a salient point and the blind worship of corporations is a betrayal that the person cares more about the economy than their people and culture.
Now, I don't want to do the whole leftist language game, but corporatism historically didn't mean "the hegemony of corporations over the economy". Corporatism has very little to do with the belief that "corporations are good/should have power". It doesn't even require the corporation as an entity to exist.
Of course, of course, we ARE talking about different things. Your understanding of corporatism is widespread and I'll acknowledge it as such. No one's even really misunderstanding anything, just using one word in two different ways.
But my understanding of corporatism is the historically and technically correct one. It's what corporatism originally meant when it was first conceived. Corporatism, based off of it's original understanding, is precisely WHAT we need, by the very logic of this article. Here's a link to a you-tube video explaining "corporatism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwU_OR854hs
Tldr; corporatism historically meant the economic policy of treating the economy like a "corpus" a body. All parts of the body matter, the arms and the feet and the brain, and you must respect each of them and pay them their dues. Corporatism was branded as the solution to class conflict, as you need both a worker and a boss to make a car. The fascists of the 20th century were in large part corporatist. National Socialism in particular certainly disbanded all unions, as lefties are quick to point out... and then replaced them with a "Arbeitsfront". While in some ways this policy did represent workers less than it should, I do believe this is a policy that should be replicated and learned from. All parts of the economy are important! The worker as well as the boss! This is not at all unlike the feudal idea that the king has a duty to the people and the people a duty to their king. Furthermore it's a very sober response to the inevitability of hierarchy.
This is a critical article for our time. One point I would add is that managerialism is even more prominent in monopolies, such as railroads or telecommunications firms. There are several ways to combat managerialism, perhaps the easiest is to cancel your businesses Microsoft Office subscription and switch to Linux. I am currently working on developing an alternative to the managerial system, If you would like to know more, read these articles:
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/live-free-with-linux
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/digital-involution
Great point here:
“in order to make more sales, the corporation’s product (whatever it may be), needs to appeal to as large a population as possible. Therefore the managerial elite will naturally favor ideological outlooks that focus on cultural homogenization, cosmopolitanism, and collectivism. The ideal “worker-consumer” is an interchangeable cog, with no roots in its community”
Reminds me of a thinker I read a bit of in college, Joseph Schumpeter on the topic of “creative destruction” It seems so patently obvious that capitalism is one of the most powerful forces against many of the dearest values of social conservatives, why is this? Is it just a holdover from the ideological battles of the Cold War?
Schumpeter did not mean it as the destruction of creativity and cultural identity. But the process of creative, more productive new ways of doing things, "destroying" old, sclerotic wasteful ways and the associated institutions, by outcompeting them. Think of the idealized economic competition in Atlas Shrugged, that creates massive societal value. Like consider where Hank flirts with Dagny about him trying to "destroy" her business with his invention by making part of her railroad services redundant and her instantly finding ten more useful things, she can leverage her railroad network for, using his Rearden metal.
If you point out, that it doesn't work like that in practice, well.... REAL FREE MARKETS HAVE NEVER BEEN TRIED BEFORE!* I like the idea of creative destruction. It's very romantic. That's why I think social conservatives like it. Ayn Rand and her glorification of the (admittedly, partly awesome) robber baron era.
*cope
A solution was conceived over 100 years ago:
“The conception is therefore a spiritual one, arising from the general reaction of the century against the materialistic positivism of the 19th century.” – Benito Mussolini
What we have *is* capitalism. The interests of the owners of the resources of production take precedence over the interests of any other group. The 'managerial class' is just the 'face' of the owners of the resources of production. While I respect Burnham and Francis and their analysis of the 'managerial revolution', it's still a revolution *within* the capitalist system. The idea that the owners of the resources of production *cannot stop* their managers is what lies at the foundation of the idea that 'managerialism' is somehow not capitalism. But it is. And they can. They owners just don't want to. The Right has a problem with thinking that 'old capitalists' were people who would side with them if they could. But this is obviously not the case. The reason why things the Right doesn't like exists is *precisely* because the owners betrayed 'right-wing institutions'.
On a side-note: The term 'corporatism' also refers to a different economic system from either capitalism or socialism.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecirculationofelites/p/introduction-to-the-series-on-guild?r=7ckks&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Excellently written. I often say that "we live in a mixed economy" which is effectively true. Between the revolving bureaucratic corporate-public door and the fact that the money-printers now get to determine economic winners and losers it's obvious that raw capital no longer drives innovation. What I find more interesting is your speculation that there needs to be a fix to the managerial class.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support the elimination of managerial micro-management of all of human life. Methods for accomplishing that get tricky though. I think that ultimately the problem is a lack of informational and economic friction:
Information friction is easy to imagine. A factory-owner can't get real time market data so he has to guess how much the market wants of his product and attempt to produce in-line with those guesses. He also has the resultant role of making that decision himself as a steward of the company. Now a thousand consultant firms are stumbling over themselves to give him access to data... data that requires managers to collate and disperse and organize. As information friction goes down, the advantage of having good information goes up. The result is a spiraling increase in the bureaucratic/managerial class as digital access becomes universalized.
Economic friction is a little more esoteric but equally important. Just-in-time shipping doesn't work in a world with significant esoteric friction. Wars, shortages, and losses were common which required the localization of production. While that made production more expensive and non-standardized, it also forced the owners of these companies to actually live in the communities that were economically productive. With modern managerialism, the company can go global quite easily. Information and economic forces transfer across time zones and currencies near instantly. The owner does not need to be present, instead sitting in a private jet on his private island. So treating the individuals of the local community as mere numbers in a spreadsheet is easier. Managerial types like it too because they hate dealing with the unique behavior of individuals. Easier to use a spreadsheet.
Ultimately the problem is a lack of friction. AI might (MIGHT!) be able to fix some of this by replacing the managerial class. More likely it'll be used as a tool to even further micro-manage human life until the very creative soul of humanity can be categorized, sanitized, and destroyed as a potential inefficient factor in civilization.
My proposal for solution is to radically alter governance by re-introducing friction. One method of doing so is by adjusting governance from a managerial form of governance to a land-based feudal form of governance. International economics gets a lot harder when you have to transport goods across 7 different duchies each with unique customs and legal codes. Simultaneously, the revolving door can be reduced if the nobility don't need a legalistic framework to govern, instead acting on their own intuitive basis. It'll be less efficient and accurate, but that's the idea: increase economic and informational friction.
Article on the subject if you're interested: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/a-reasoned-case-for-monarchy-return
National Socialism, which is diametrically opposed to marxist socialism; believed in private businesses and corporations, just with a lid on them, insisting they must always do and produce that which is in the best interests of the country, the people as a whole, and always treat the workers well. We could use such restraints today to rein in entities like Blackrock and others
It's even dubious whether shareholders actually can be said to own the corporation, which in itself is nothing but a reified construct i.e. a "legal person", although this is naturally an area of strong ideological contention, e.g. the doctrine of "shareholder supremacy" associated with Milton Friedman and the "neoliberals". There are certainly high ranking American legal theorists that would disagree with this view, although i cba finding the links right now, although they would in turn typically align with some notion of "stakeholder capitalism".
The modern business corporation is at any rate, as you say, certainly a different beast from the more classically liberal and capitalist sole proprietorship, which makes contemporary critiques (or praises) of "muh capitalism" quite redundant, if not to say historically illiterate. The political scientist David Ciepley has even argued that the modern business corporation is essentially a form of socialized property. Thus Marx was right when he predicted socialized property would be more efficient than the merely disjointed and duplicated bourgeois property, although the means of production were socialized not at the state, but at the level of the firm. See also Martin J. Sklar's corporate reconstruction of American capitalism.
I read a piece where the writer contends that some of the seeds were sown in a 1916 ruling against Henry Ford:
'In 1916, Henry Ford announced a cessation of special dividends, opting instead to reinvest future profits into expanding the company, lowering car prices, and providing more jobs. The Dodge brothers objected to this new policy, arguing that it was their right as shareholders to receive these dividends and that Ford’s new direction was not in the best interest of the shareholders.'
Don't forget to include what ethnic group the Dodge brothers belong to for this story.
Really? No way...is that what tipped Henry over to write about them later in life?
One related point is that even the nominal "makers" of the product (engineers, machinists, etc) are eventually pushed aside by the financiers and salesmen, who see all corporations simply as engines that generate salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Hence the push for offshoring production and destroying the "assholes" that still attempt to make good products (e.g. Boeing).
Boeing is a victim of its own bureaucratization. Boeing destroyed itself.
But dividends artificially suck because they are basically substrates from your stock shares and given to you as income which is taxed?
Also the absolutely most important question: when am I supposed to sell my sp500 shares and when should I short it?
Dividends aren't taken from the value of your shares, they are your share of the profits generated by the company. Some funds (like QYLD) do actually give some percentage of your own money back to you as Return of Capital but that is very rare, and ROC is not taxed for this reason, its not gains.
You pay taxes on dividends because they represent actual gains. If you sell your shares for more than you paid for them, you will pay capital gains taxes on the difference as well.
In an inflationary environment, I wouldn't trade an appreciating asset (like SPY) for a depreciating one (fiat currency) so I would have to agree with Warren Buffet that the proper length of time to hold your shares is: Forever. Fortunately, SPY does pay dividends, but its only like 1.2% so you need to own an absolute shit-ton in order to have any kind of income. Which is kind of my point, I'm sure the fund manager is making millions, but you as the owner just get to watch "line go up".
As far as shorting, I'm not smart enough to time the market, that's why I hedge by growing potatoes and hoarding ammo. If S&P goes to zero, we are all fucked anyway so buckle up :)
Can't retire as the partial owner of a company if you can't get a share of the profit... that's basically what dividends are. Profit-sharing with share-holders. It used to be the main reason people would own stonks... before the dark times... before the speculative markets.