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To pick up a few billion in exports, we’re now willing to sell anything to anyone. We’re willing to become a tax haven, to have oligarchs and multinationals paying less in taxes than the middle and working classes, to ally with rather unprogressive oil emirates just to get a few crumbs for our football teams. [...]
this is savage
(on France selling arms to Russia)
The saddest thing about the European crisis is the determination of today’s leaders to present their policies as the only ones possible, and the fear they feel when any political shock looks likely to disturb this happy equilibrium.
great opening sentence
Partly due to intensified competition between countries, national governments have focused more and more on the most mobile taxpayers (highly skilled and globalized workers, owners of capital) at the expense of groups perceived as captive (the working and middle classes). This pertains to a whole set of social policies and public services: investing in high-speed rail rather than commuter trains, elite educational institutions rather than ordinary public schools and universities, and so on. And of course it also pertains to how it’s all financed. Since the 1980s, the progressivity of tax systems has been sharply reduced: rates that apply to the highest incomes were massively lowered, while indirect taxes hitting those of the most modest means were gradually increased.
A particularly interesting case is that of Germany and France, which in 1945 found themselves with public debts of around two years’ worth (200 percent) of GDP, levels even higher than Greece or Italy today. By the early 1950s those debts had fallen to less than 30 percent of GDP. Obviously, such a swift reduction wouldn’t have been possible through accumulating budget surpluses. On the contrary, the two countries used the whole panoply of fast methods. Inflation, which was very high on both sides of the Rhine between 1945 and 1950, played the central role. At the time of the Liberation, France also instituted an exceptional tax on private capital, reaching 25 percent on the largest wealth holdings and even 100 percent on the biggest accumulations that had taken place between 1940 and 1945. Both countries also used various forms of “debt restructuring,” the technical term used by financiers for simply canceling all or part of a debt (the more prosaic term haircut is also used). As, for example, in the famous London Accords of 1953, where the bulk of Germany’s foreign debt was canceled. It was these fast methods of debt reduction—especially inflation—that allowed France and Germany to launch into reconstruction and postwar growth without the burden of debt. That’s also how the two countries were able to invest in public infrastructure, education, and development in the 1950s and ’60s. And it’s those same two countries that are now explaining to southern Europe that public debts must always be repaid, down to the last euro, without inflation and without exceptional measures.
[...] Africa doesn't need aid; it simply needs an international legal system that can protect it from permanent pillage.
[...] Austerity is what led to the rise of national selfishness and tensions around national identity. Social development with equity is how hatred will be defeated.
[...] there’s a very interesting discourse that I quote in my book in chapter 13 by the founder of Sciences Po, and so that was right after the expanse of the commune, which was very traumatic at least for the elite, a very traumatic experience of redistribution in France. And so he has a very clear way to explain, well okay, now that we have universal suffrage, there’s a risk that basically the poor and the majority of the population will try to expropriate us, the elite. We have to display merits and our own standings so that it will be a completely crazy idea to get rid of us. So in a way it’s as if the meritocracy, the modern meritocracy discourse is invented as a way to protect the elite from democracy basically, from the universal suffrage. And he has a way to put it, which is very interesting, because at the same time Sciences Po is a private institution with very high tuition fees where it’s difficult to access if you’re not from the elite. So in the end this is the same elite in the sense that if you don’t come from a high income group it’s very difficult to access this elite, so — , but in terms of discourse it tries to present itself as based on merit.
[...] In the United States in recent years, one frequently has heard this type of justification for the stratospheric pay of supermanagers (50– 100 times average income, if not more). Proponents of such high pay argued that without it, only the heirs of large fortunes would be able to achieve true wealth, which would be unfair. In the end, therefore, the millions or tens of millions of dollars a year paid to supermanagers contribute to greater social justice. This kind of argument could well lay the groundwork for greater and more violent inequality in the future. The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted).
Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and
rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither.
The problem posed by this use of the word “rent” is very simple: the fact
that capital yields income, which in accordance with the original meaning of
the word we refer to in this book as “annual rent produced by capital,” has
absolutely nothing to do with the problem of imperfect competition or monopoly. If capital plays a useful role in the process of production, it is natural
that it should be paid. When growth is slow, it is almost inevitable that this
return on capital is significantly higher than the growth rate, which automatically bestows outsized importance on inequalities of wealth accumulated
in the past. This logical contradiction cannot be resolved by a dose of additional competition. Rent is not an imperfection in the market: it is rather the
consequence of a “pure and perfect” market for capital, as economists understand it: a capital market in which each owner of capital, including the least
capable of heirs, can obtain the highest possible yield on the most diversified
portfolio that can be assembled in the national or global economy. To be sure,
there is something astonishing about the notion that capital yields rent, or
income that the owner of capital obtains without working. Th ere is some-
thing in this notion that is an affront to common sense and that has in fact
perturbed any number of civilizations, which have responded in various ways, not always benign, ranging from the prohibition of usury to Sovie-style com-
munism. Nevertheless, rent is a reality in any market economy where capital is
privately owned. The fact that landed capital became industrial and financial
capital and real estate left this deeper reality unchanged. Some people think
that the logic of economic development has been to undermine the distinction
between labor and capital. In fact, it is just the opposite: the growing sophisti-
cation of capital markets and financial intermediation tends to separate owners
from managers more and more and thus to sharpen the distinction between pure
capital income and labor income. Economic and technological rationality at
times has nothing to do with democratic rationality. The former stems from
the Enlightenment, and people have all too commonly assumed that the latter
would somehow naturally derive from it, as if by magic. But real democracy
and social justice require specific institutions of their own, not just those of
the market, and not just parliaments and other formal democratic institutions.
If we are to make progress on these issues in the future, it would be good to begin by working toward greater transparency than exists today. In the United States, France, and most other countries, talk about the virtues of the national meritocratic model is seldom based on close examination of the facts. Often the purpose is to justify existing inequalities while ignoring the sometimes patent failures of the current system. In 1872, Emile Boutmy created Sciences Po with a clear mission in mind: “obliged to submit to the rule of the majority, the classes that call themselves the upper classes can preserve their political hegemony only by invoking the rights of the most capable. As traditional upper-class prerogatives crumble, the wave of democracy will encounter a second rampart, built on eminently useful talents, superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.” If we take this incredible statement seriously, what it clearly means is that the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned. One can of course chalk this up to the political context: the Paris Commune had just been put down, and universal male suffrage had just been reestablished. Yet Boutmy’s statement has the virtue of reminding us of an essential truth: defining the meaning of inequality and justifying the position of the winners is a matter of vital importance, and one can expect to see all sorts of misrepresentations of the facts in service of the cause.
great quote that ties in nicely with http://bookmarker.dellsystem.me/note/2102